What is Affiliate Marketing?

Alright, so I've made this blog to give you the tools and help that you need to become a successful affiliate marketer, and make money online.
However, I realize that many people who come to this site are complete amateurs to making money online, and might have no idea of what affiliate marketing is. So I'm writing this post to give you a basic overview of what exactly affiliate marketing is.

In a nutshell, affiliate marketing is promoting and selling other peoples products online. You become an affiliate to a company's product, and then you promote that product through search engine advertisements (google adwords, yahoo, bing, etc.), websites and blogs that you create, and various other methods.
Now you don't get paid for the advertisements, you get paid for the sales. Every time that somebody buys a product through your affiliate link (which is given to you when you become an affiliate to a product), you get a commission. Commissions can be anywhere from 0-100%, however the commissions I see are usually around 30%-60%.

Think about it for a minute.
If you are promoting a product that sells for $75, and you are getting a 40% commission for every single product that somebody buys through you, you are making $30 per product.
Now if you have a successful advertisement (or however you choose to promote your product), that can get just 10 or 15 people to buy that product per day, you are making $300-$450 per day just for that product.
Imagine if you are successfully promoting hundreds of products. Now get this. According to http://www.internetworldstats.com/, there are close to 7 billion internet users in the world, and every single one of those people is a possible customer. Every single one of them gets on the internet every day to google something such as, "How to lose weight", "How to make money online", "How to grow your hair back", and countless other simple, everyday questions that pop into everybody's minds.
As you can see, if you are successful as an affiliate marketer, well let's just say...you can go places.

I won't feed you the normal bull about how you can make 100 grand to a million during your first year. I'd be a liar if I told you that. Even though a select few have actually managed to accomplish that feat, it's extremely rare.

I hope this was helpful for anybody who is new to affiliate marketing and making money online.