Affiliate marketing is essentially a means of marketing in which a business pays affiliates for purchases or visitors to the business’ site that result from the marketing efforts of the affiliates.

For example an affiliate may entice visitors to its sites to make purchases from a business or may direct visitors to a business site from their own site. For each purchase made or site visit made, the business will pay the affiliate an agreed upon amount in cash or via a rewards program.

Affiliate marketing can help drive traffic to your business website, as referrals from popular sites can bring an influx of visitors to yours.

Here’s a few steps to help you get started selling your products through affiliates:

1. Get your company listed on an affiliate networks such as Clickbank, Commission Junction or Google Advertiser.

2. Negotiate a reasonable pay-per-click or pay per sale commission with the network or affiliates you’ll be working with.

3. Help prepare some marketing tools for your affiliates such as product reviews, pictures, sales letters, etc.

4. Monitor your site traffic and sales to see if your affiliate marketing efforts are productive.

The downside of affiliate marketing is that it will cut into your profits. However, if the sales volume created by your affiliates is large, it will more than justify the cost of paying your affiliates.

You may be able to offset some of the costs of affiliate marketing by becoming an affiliate site yourself. By linking to businesses that don’t sell competing products, but may be related to your business, you can rake in some affiliate money of your own.