I am frequently asked, "How does affiliate marketing work?" Never has so much opportunity been in the hands of so many.

Imagine the power you have:

• You choose whatever theme of business you want.
• There is no charge for access to the greatest market that has ever existed.
• The affiliate business allows you to start an online business that is totally safe and risk free.
• You are encouraged to build a business around something you love.
• Later, if you want to risk a few dollars, there are ways on the internet to do so.

How does affiliate marketing work? The bottom line is that you are like a commission salesperson for any number of companies you want.

1. People go to the internet for solutions to issues or problems.
2. A smart site owner will have lots of free and highly relevant information and highly valuable solutions offerred through companies he is an affiliate for.
3. If the visitor is convinced of the solution offerred, they will make the purchase and the site owner gets a commission.

Here is an excellent, real life example.

A lady in Canada is a hair stylist. She was tired of driving to work, paying high rentals on the chairs she used and so on. She has little kids and hated being away from them in their years before going to school.

She decided to have a go at an internet business. She loves to do hair, is very good at it and has loads of experience so she learned about how affiliate marketing works, how to create a successful web site and started working on her site in her spare time, a little every night after her babies were in bed and hubby was watching the news.

She had nothing to sell so she started sniffing around and asking how does affiliate marketing work. She learned those lessons found how easy and fool proof it was and signed up with half a dozen companies.

This is how all this comes together.

A grandmother in Brazil has problems getting her hair straightened. Hair coloring seems to make it worse and her daughter's wedding is coming up. She goes on the internet and does a search on "wavy hair color problems".

The search engines find that the Canadian lady's site is the best suited to answer the querry so her site is in the top 10 results on the search results page. Mrs. Brazil finds the information interesting and, above all, she finds a questions box. She asks her question as accurately as she can and presses "send".

The Candian lady has worked a great deal with frizzy hair and she answers quickly. Her information is accurate, friendly and profesional. Several things are required for the lady's hair problems to be fixed. There is a special solution that she is an affiliate for based out of New York. She knows it will do its job well. There is a special little tool that is made in Germany that she should have and she has written an ebook that she sells for $19.95 that is the benchmark book on older frizzy hair.

The lady in Brazil, impressed with the knowledge and friendliness of the site owner orders all of the recommendations securely online. By that night, all her hard goods are on their way by express shipment and she immediately downloaded the ebook so she can read it while the other items come in a few days.

How does affiliate marketing work? It matches a visitor with a problem with the best possible solution and the solution is usually somewhere else and the expert site owner matches the problem to the seller and makes a commission.

The site owner had learned her lessons well in how the internet works and what to do to succeed on it.