Affiliate marketing is one of those terms that has come to symbolize the enterprise culture of the internet, along with terms like internet marketeer etc. Essentially, an affiliate is a sales agent who takes a commission on sales or referrals that they make to you as a customer. If you walk into a store and buy a product, there is a good chance that the sales person will receive a commission as part of their remuneration. You as a customer don't really think about that, you're just thinking about the product, price, service etc. The company thinks its prudent to offer a commission to motivate their staff and that's how the system works. Online there is one important difference.
A lot of affiliate marketing depends on trust. It depends on you believing that the product review on a website really is a review, and that recommendations really are just that. It depends on you believing that when someone recommends a product, and declares it is an affiliate link it really is being recommended because of the product, not because the website owner gets a commission. This goes to the heart of the problem.
In theory it works like this. A website owner/publisher will have a link to a store on his site and if you click thru and buy a product, the website owner gets a commission. Experience has shown that people are more likely to click thru if they don't think its an affiliate link, and there is a personal recommendation from the website owner. Both these issues make trust a circle that is very difficult to square. The flip side is that affiliate commissions are normally very generous and often recurring, so if you can get people to sign up, and retain your own integrity at the same time, the you could be onto a winner.
Often when people want to do affiliate marketing they feel like they have got to become great salesman in order to convince a reader that they need to buy that particular product in order to make the sale and thereby get their commission. In fact , nothing could really be the further from the truth.
Most people are put off by heavy sales pitches, and online people have the freedom to click away from you start right away and not get followed out of the shop! What tends to work much better is trust. If people tend to trust you, then they will follow your lead. Focus on building trust by being authentic and real, and giving genuine good advice that makes sense to people.

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