I found this picture on Wikipedia, and it said it was under the creative commons license for reuse, so I am taking the liberty of illustrating my post here.

1. Brand or Seller has a product/service/message to deliver. They start an affiliate program. These programs could be in-house, or they could be managed by a network of affiliate programs.

2. An affiliate is usually a website owner. This could be an individual or a company. They join the affilaite program and promote the seller in hopes of making income in the ways that JuliaB described (i.e. pay per click, pay per sale, etc.)

3. Of course, customers are the key asset. Visitors to a website may be interested in the product or service or message being displayed, click through to the actual sales page, and then perform whatever action will make the actual affilate money.

These actions are tracked because each affiliate will get a unique tracking code they use to link to the seller. They will usually have some sort of statistics page they can log into so they can keep track of how well they do.

I think that those of us who do this business every day think this is obvious, but most casual web surfers do not really understand this process at all.

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