Marketing is an umbrella terms and refers to any particular set of activities performed to enhance the demand for any given products or services in the market. The central idea of marketing revolves around the concept that people must have a fair experience as what different products and services are and what benefits do they offer. Marketing makes use of different channels of media to disperse the information about product benefits, specifications, their use, price, etc. Some popular media used include radio and television broadcasting, print newspapers and magazines and Internet. In affiliate marketing it is the latter which is utilised.

Affiliate marketing is a relatively new marketing practice which involves the dissemination of useful information and motivational messages on the web. The carriers for information in this case are the websites, blogs, web content, digital mails, etc. The most important and commonly used are the commercial website. The people who make such a thing work are the website publishers or owners. Affiliate marketing as such is online marketing conducted by a website publisher and for any given client; merchant or advertiser. Affiliate marketing, as we have already observed, is a business service. The publishers who have resources to publish web content need revenue to run their business. At the same time the commercial enterprises need to sell the products and services. The duo gets involved in a revenue sharing deal, wherein the publisher promotes the goods and services of the merchant and the merchant shares part of the revenue that comes as profit.