If you are new to the idea of affiliate marketing then you are most likely trying to understand what exactly it is and why affiliate marketing works as a way you can earn a steady income through the internet.

Affiliate marketing is a style of marketing where a business will award an "affiliate" for bringing customers to their store or website by using their own styles and efforts to do so. As to why affiliate marketing works is based upon the amount of effort the affiliate will put forward to become successful at driving customers to buy the products by using his own website to drive the traffic to the merchant site where the customer will most likely make a purchase, providing the affiliate with a commission if done so.

An affiliate will use many techniques to drive traffic to a certain product or website each of which has its own pros and cons depending on the techniques the affiliate specializes in. The three main methods used are Article Marketing, which is writing articles that promote or explain what the product is. PPC or Pay Per Click marketing is the method of strategically placing ads within search engines to attract customers towards a website. Lastly, SEO or Search Engine Optimization which improves the "visibility" of a website within a search engine that helps it rank higher in the search listings thus getting more traffic than ones that are listed further down the results pages. Using one or all of these is exactly why affiliate marketing works and why it can work for you.

Affiliate marketing is not for everyone as it takes a fair amount of time and patience in understanding how the internet works and how success is achieved. You really need to know your stuff to achieve success with affiliate marketing and the different strategies that are used. Some people succeed right away and will start earning money very quickly while others will work at it for a year before earning a single penny. Just knowing why affiliate marketing works should give anyone who has a desire to make money want to try it.

There are many courses, books and websites that will help the newest of internet newbies understand why affiliate marketing works and how to get started on their very own marketing campaigns. If you give yourself a lot of time and are willing to learn why affiliate marketing works and how it works then you will be very successful. Learn many of the millionaire marketing methods that are used today with great success. As with anything there will be failures and success along the way and as long as you learn what went right and where you failed then you will achieve the profits you've always wanted.