What exactly is Affiliate Marketing?

In a sentence, it's all about promoting and recommending someone else's products in exchange for a commission, typically whenever someone actually ends up buying the product after consuming your content.

There's a good chance that you've already interacted with content online where the creators of said content use affiliate marketing as a way to monetise their work.

If they link to a product in their video description, offer a unique discount code to use at checkout, or link to products on Amazon on their blog posts, there's a good chance that they're using affiliate marketing to receive a commission from anyone who makes a purchase.

Amazon's Affiliate Marketing program is one of the largest out there, and one that you've almost certainly been exposed to one way or another when browsing the web.

Here is an example of a site that uses the Amazon affiliate program to generate revenue for their site:

Case Study: Best Roof Box

This is a content site entirely focused on roof storage solutions for cars. As you can see, it looks just like any other informational site you would come across to find detailed information on a specific niche (in this case of course, roof boxes for cars). Also note the complete lack of banner advertising anywhere on the site.

However as you'll find in the posts, you'll see that there are Amazon links embedded to products that are referenced. For example this article was discussing the various different ways you could store a cargo box when you're not using it, with one option being to use a ceiling storage system. Low and behold, look at what's been linked below: an Amazon affiliate link to the exact product on Amazon!

As we'll discover shortly, this approach of linking readers to products actually being discussed in the post is not only far less of a nuisance than random banner ads you'd typically see, but incredibly useful to the reader, who in all likelihood is actually looking to purchase one (I mean, not many people are going to read about something as boring as this unless they're trying to solve a real problem in their lives!)