The Affiliate Marketing industry has four core players at its heart: the Merchant, the Network, the Publisher and the Consumer. The market has grown sufficiently in complexity to warrant a secondary tier of players, including Affiliate Management Agencies, Super-Affiliates and Specialized Third Parties vendors.

It's not rocket science, but you have to stick with it and not give up too easily, or be lazy. That's the problem most people have. Affiliate marketing still works, and some guys are still getting wealthy doing it. But the techniques have changed. It's not as easy as it used to be.

There are two schools of affiliate marketing:

SEO Marketing: SEO stands for "Search Engine Optimization". The idea is to get your website or blog to rank at the top of search engine results for certain keywords related to a specific niche (golf, weight loss, etc..). That requires quality content and lots of links. Once your website is ranking well, you place affiliate links for related products on the website.

PPC Marketing: PPC stands for "Pay Per Click". This method can generate a profit much faster than SEO marketing. It has greater earning potential, but greater risk. For this method you buy clicks from search engines and websites. This guarantees instant traffic. However your website must convince people to click your affiliate links and take action, or you will quickly lose money paying for clicks.

Beware of ebooks and "courses" that promise you will "get rich" or make larges sums of money. These "gurus" will offer little support, and continuously try to upsell you the missing pieces of the puzzle.

After wasting a bunch of time, I subscribed at PPC-Coach. It's a no nonsense members only community of affiliate marketers. You get all the tools you need to get started and direct support when you get stuck. It saves you from scouring the internet for hours trying to put it all together.

Affiliate marketing overlaps with other Internet marketing methods to some degree, because affiliates often use regular advertising methods. Those methods include organic search engine optimization, paid search engine marketing, e-mail marketing, and in some sense display advertising. On the other hand, affiliates sometimes use less orthodox techniques, such as publishing reviews of products or services offered by a partner. Affiliate marketing—using one website to drive traffic to another—is a form of online marketing, which is frequently overlooked by advertisers. While search engines, e-mail, and website syndication capture much of the attention of online retailers, affiliate marketing carries a much lower profile. Still, affiliates continue to play a significant role in e-retailers' marketing strategies.