The win-win arrangement between a website owner selling online and an affiliate who gets a cut for making sales or generating leads or even clicks is known as affiliate marketing. The vendor gets additional sales for his or her products and the affiliate gets a decent cut on sales. This is big opportunity for both the merchant and the affiliate. The merchant can reach a wide audience and the affiliate gets paid for driving prospects.

If you are an affiliate or want to get into affiliate marketing, it is one of the best ways to make money online. You don’t need to keep any inventory and you can practically sell anything available online with little effort and time.

On the other hand, if you are an online merchant, you get additional sales from affiliates selling your products, that otherwise would not have taken place. You can gradually build an army of affiliates that do all the selling for you while you focus on creating more products to sell.

The commissions can be fixed or a percentage of the selling price. Special software program installed on the merchants website or third party websites will provide the necessary tracking mechanism so that affiliates who make the sale will get the proper credits.

If you are just starting out, check out ClickBank.com. It is one of the oldest and the biggest affiliate networks online. At clickbank, you can find tens of thousands of products to sell and a very large number of affiliates interested to sell your products, if you are vendor.