Affiliate marketing is a web-based practice in which a business rewards one or more affiliates for each visitor or customer brought about by the affiliate's marketing efforts.
Basically this means that you are getting paid to sell products that other people own. Sales are typically tracked through “tracking cookies” which are pieces of data stored on your computer that can be accessed by websites. This data will be stored on the consumer's computer after clicking on an affiliate link and it allows sales to be tracked up to 60 days after the link has been clicked. This is a powerful tool because you don't even need to sell the product at that moment, you can get a sale months later after a customer has more money or has been exposed to a product for longer. As I was writing this paragraph I got a sales email with a $150 commission as a customer bought multiple products, this customer came to my website a little over a month ago.
Affiliate marketing is considered an open frontier, as it has no managing assembly or oversight, and it consists 99.9% of individuals. I'm currently a 19 year old freshman computer science/ business management student (which effectively means that I have no work experience and I only have a high school diploma) yet I am making a good income with methods that I have learned from others and modified for my own needs. I make more in 10 hours a week from my couch than most of the world would make in a strenuous 60 hour work week which is why so many people are initially attracted to it.