Quick Definition:
Affiliate marketing is a marketing practice in which a business rewards one or more affiliates or each visitor or customer brought about by the affiliate’s marketing efforts

Basics:
1. There is an A) An affiliate, B) an affiliate network, and then C) a product.
The product goes to the affiliate network, to find affiliates to sell their product. Make sense?

ie: Geico goes to an affiliate network and says find people to collect us car insurance leads.
From here the affiliate network puts up the geico page, and affiliates can take it from there and collect leads. Everything is automatically tracked for you through the affiliate network. You then get paid $10-$15 per lead (for car insurance leads).

So you need to signup for an affiliate network first.
Here you go:
www.Copeac.com

2. You now are signed up to an affiliate network but you need visitors to your site otherwise no one will buy your products or fill out your lead forms. So what you do is you buy traffic from Google, yahoo, msn, etc… (list is below) and then you send them directly to the page you want them to go. (This is called PPC marketing, PPC stands for Pay Per Click)

Traffic Sources:
1. adwords.google.com
2. publisher.yahoo.com
3. facebook.com/ads
4. adcenter.microsoft.com
There are MANY places to buy traffic from. These are some you should start off with. If you follow my blog i post new traffic sources all the time. Some are huge gold mines.

A few notes about everything above.
1. You need to know how to make a website, did i mention that?
2. Most affiliate marketers make something called a landing page, instead of full complete websites (i’ll get into that below)
3. Whats a lead? It’s information such as name, email and address that when collected is called a lead.
4. There are many affiliate networks, Copeac is just one of the largest with a huge variety of products and lead niches.
5. Anything you promote on an affiliate network is called an “offer” and all offers are for different things and have different payouts.
6. None of this is overnight, it’s a learning process and you have to learn one thing at a time. Don’t expect to get rich overnight.

3. What should you promote?
Your now signed up for Copeac and you see everything from the Bowflex to Geico, what should you pick first to promote? That’s up to you. An area your familiar in would be your best call. You also now have an affiliate manager who is their to help you make money, so you can ask them for some ideas on how you can get started.

4. Landing Pages
This is what the page is called that you land on after you click an ad. This page is specifically made to be the followup page from your ad to convert the user. So you don’t need to make a whole website, you just need to know how to make one page.

Example of how a landing page would work:
User A clicks your Geico Ad –> They go to a landing page you made explaining all the benefits of Geico, they then click on a button on your landing page –> which takes them to your offer link (which is provided to you by Copeac, the affiliate network)

Hope that clarifies how a landing page works.

You can also “Direct Link” which simply means instead of using a landing page. Directly link your ad to your offer link (which is provided to you by Copeac, the affiliate network).

Everything above are the super super basics to affiliate marketing. I’ll be writing a much more detailed post on how to get started in a few weeks.