On of the ways to make money online is affiliate marketing. This is a marketing practice in which a business rewards you for each visitor or customer you bring to their site through your marketing efforts. You can be rewarded for the completion of an offer, and the referral of others to the site. This reward can be cash – set amount for each referral or a percentage amount. There are also sites that offer gifts or points towards gifts for referring customers to their site.

Affiliate marketing is one of the largest growth industries on the Internet, it is estimated that in 2006 affiliates worldwide earned approximately US$6.5 billion from a variety of sources. Affiliate marketing has become a big business on the internet today, and you can make money online with this method. Affiliate marketing is just using one website to drive traffic to another. This form of online marketing, which is frequently overlooked by advertisers, can play a significant role in e-retailers' marketing strategies.

The concept of revenue sharing—paying commission for referred business has been around for a very long time and predates affiliate marketing and the Internet. The translation of the revenue share principles to mainstream e-commerce has been a mainstay on the Internet for many years. Amazon.com (Amazon) launched its associate program in July 1996. Amazon associates could place banner or text links on their site for individual books, or link directly to the Amazon home page.

Many merchants favor affiliate marketing in most cases it uses a "pay for performance" model, which means that the merchant does not incur any marketing expense. Many businesses owe much of their success to this marketing technique, and one notable example being Amazon.com.

There are an increased number of Internet businesses and an increased number of people that trust the current technology enough to shop and do business online. This allows many more opportunities for affiliate marketing and to generate a considerable amount of profit.

There are three primary ways to locate affiliate programs for a target website:

1. Affiliate program directories

2. Large affiliate networks that provide the platform for dozens or even hundreds of advertisers

3. The target website itself. (Websites that offer an affiliate program often have a link titled "affiliate program", "affiliates", "referral program", or "webmasters"—usually in the footer or "About" section of the website.)

Affiliates marketers starting using the pay per click advertising earlier on in their development. In 2000 Google launched its pay per click service, this alone is responsible for the widespread use and acceptance of pay per click as an advertising channel. An increasing number of merchants engage in pay per click advertising.

There are a number of e-learning sites where you can get a lot of information on working with affiliate marketing. Usually these sites will offer more than one way to make money online, they use training videos, how-to manuals with step by step instructions. Most of the also have a communication hub were you can communicate with people like you who are also trying to make money online. You will have to pay to join one of these sites, but they can be very helpful.