What is an affiliate? an affiliate marketer is a person or company who promotes someone elses program and gets a commission though sales, usually every month.

For years I had that question in the back of my mind all the time I was an affiliate and didn't really know what one was. So now I am going to explain in this Article for those of you who want to know.

First off let me say I though of click-bank when I was an affiliate, and thought that was the only network out there who paid affiliates boy was I wrong. There are literally hundreds of affiliate networks out there that you can choose from. Some of the popular ones are as follows:

Commission Junction

Amazon

Click-bank

Link-share

Affiliate Window

Share sale

So you join one of these networks get your affilate link and then start driving traffic to your affiliate website or blog.

Advantages

For many of us it is the easiest way to make money from home, that is why you see a lot of affiliate marketers out there today they can make a good living out of it.

If your good at it you can become your own boss and work your own hours.

No need to learn about the product that your selling all you need to know is how to get traffic to your site or blog.

You have a wide variety of products that you can choose from to market not just one product.

You don't have to deal with complaints by the customer when things go wrong the company does that.

Disadvantages

If your new to Affiliate marketing you have to learn how to drive traffic to your website this could take months to learn in some cases.

You could have hijackers stealing your links and getting paid for all your hard work that you have put into it.

Merchants who make promises of high commissions only to lower them when you join their program.

I have been a marketer for a few years now and the first thing that I noticed when I became an affiliate was how hard it was to drive traffic to my blog. I had no idea what I had to do to get the traffic flowing to my site.

Now you should have some idea of what is an affiliate and maybe you can explain to someone else that is new to markeitng on how to get started one day. Remember the more information that you read about this subject the better it will be for you in the future.