How to Make Money From Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate Marketing is an Internet-based marketing practice in which a business rewards one or more affiliates for each visitor or customer brought about by the affiliate's marketing efforts. It is an application of crowdsourcing. The Affiliate Marketing industry has four core players at its heart: the Merchant (also known informally as 'Retailer' or 'Brand'), the Network, the Publisher (also known informally as 'the Affiliate') and the Customer. The market has grown sufficiently in complexity to warrant a secondary tier of players, including Affiliate Management Agencies, Super-Affiliates and Specialized Third Parties vendors.

Marketing and selling someone else's product through a link is affiliate marketing. The seller, called the affiliate, signs up with a company such as eBay, Amazon or and of the thousands of companies and individuals that have affiliate marketing networks in place. The affiliate is then given links to sell the product and may be given banner ads and other promotional items that will help them to make sales. Each time someone clicks through the links or banner ads that were placed by the affiliate, goes to the seller's site and then buys the product, the affiliate earns a commission. A commission is usually a percentage of the sale price, but it may be a flat rate instead. 
How to Place Affiliate Links: Many Internet marketers use article directories to place useful information that's geared toward people who will be interested in the product that's being advertised. There are some article directories that allow affiliate ads, but some, such as Ezine Articles, don't allow affiliate links at all. To use article directories for affiliate marketing, concentrate on article directories that have high page rank and that allow affiliate links. These include Article Dashboard and Article Pool. Other sites that allow affiliate links include eHow, Bukisa and Xomba. The affiliate links added to eHow and Bukisa must pertain to the general topic of the article submitted to the site. With Xomba, the link itself can be bookmarked.