What Is Affiliate Marketing? Definition and a Concrete Example

You have probably already clicked a link in a comparison or a blog that took you to an online store. If the author was paid for that purchase, you just took part in affiliate marketing. The principle is old, but it remains the economic engine of many independent sites.

The definition in one sentence

Affiliate marketing is a performance-based marketing method: a company pays a partner site only when it delivers a measurable result, for example a sale, a signup or a subscription. As long as no result is recorded, the company pays nothing. This is what sets it apart from traditional advertising, where you pay for the display or the click, whether or not the visitor buys.

The four players to know

Four roles share the game, and understanding them avoids a lot of confusion.

• The advertiser: the brand that sells the product or service and agrees to pay a commission.
• The publisher, or affiliate: the site, blog, channel or account that recommends the offer to its audience. That is you, if you get started.
• The platform or network: the intermediary that hosts the offers, provides the links, measures clicks and results, then pays the commissions.
• The visitor: the person who reads your content, clicks and, possibly, signs up or buys.

Some advertisers run their own program without an intermediary, but most go through a platform. We compare these options in the article on affiliate platforms.

How the commission is calculated

The commission depends on what the advertiser wants to reward. It can be a fixed amount per signup, a percentage of a sale, or a share of the revenue generated as long as the customer stays active. Each model suits a different type of traffic. We review them in our article on CPA, CPL and revshare.

A concrete example, step by step

Imagine a page of cultural outings in Lyon, run by someone passionate about the Croix-Rousse neighborhood. She writes a guide to the best places to make friends or find romance, and mentions an online dating service whose reliability she appreciates.

1. She signs up as a publisher with a network and gets a personal link.
2. She places this link in her article, with a clear notice stating that it is a partner link.
3. A reader clicks. A small file, called a cookie, or a parameter in the address, keeps track of where she came from.
4. The reader signs up and then takes out a subscription.
5. The network attributes this signup to the publisher's link and credits her a commission, according to the program's rate card.

Nothing extra was charged to the reader: the commission comes out of the advertiser's margin. The reader therefore does not pay more for having gone through an affiliate link.

What actually earns money

Placing a link is not enough. Income comes from the trust an audience places in the person recommending, and from the number of people reading. In practice, three levers matter:

• useful content that answers a real question and ranks in search engines;
• an offer consistent with the topic of the page, because an off-topic recommendation does not convert;
• patience, because a site takes time to gain visibility.

No serious program guarantees earnings. Beware of any promise of quick income; we come back to this in the article on avoiding scams.

Transparency obligations

In many countries, a paid link must be disclosed to your readers. A visible notice, such as "this page contains partner links", is fine. On the technical side, the rel="sponsored" attribute helps search engines understand the nature of the link. If you collect data (statistics, forms), GDPR applies to visitors from the European Union. Finally, for online dating, the target audience must be adult.

Where to start

Start with the most structuring step: choose a theme you enjoy and know, then select a reliable program. Our guide to choosing an affiliate program gives you the list of criteria to check, and the one on the affiliate link explains how tracking works. For an overview, see the complete affiliate marketing guide.

If the online dating niche interests you, discover the Prelinker network, active since 2001, then move on to the getting started page.

The most common beginner mistakes

• Choosing a program for its advertised commission without asking whether the offer really appeals to your audience.
• Filling a site with links before writing content worth reading.
• Neglecting transparency, which damages readers' trust and can cause a legal problem.
• Not measuring: without a tracking ID per page, there is no way to know what works.
• Giving up too early: a site often takes several months to become known to search engines.

A few vocabulary words to know

You will quickly come across abbreviations. A click is a visitor passing through your link. A conversion is the action the advertiser expects (signup, purchase). The conversion rate relates conversions to the number of clicks. The cookie is the small file that remembers where the visitor came from. Finally, the postback is an automatic message sent by the network to your own statistics when a conversion takes place. These words come up in every program, including in how Prelinker works.