Affiliate marketing is a suggests of selling a product where the producer of the product shares a portion of the selling price with other people who market the product, but do not literally retain it in stock it or sell it directly. These individuals, called affiliates, simply publicize the product or market it in exchange for part of the profits.

There are actually tens of thousands of products that one can promote as an affiliate. Amazon.com has an affiliate program, and you can promote virtually anything that is for sale at that web site.  Likewise, on the internet auction website eBay in addition has a program that pays individuals to advertise their web site and their auctions. The most heavily marketed affiliate products tend to be information products, and those are the ones that are regularly advertised with the "get rich quick" hype that draws a lot of novices into the world of on the internet sales.

Earnings can be significant selling information products, which more often than not are electronic books, or e-books. Commission rates for affiliates can run as high as 75%, and a lot of individuals who are new to on the internet sales become excited at the prospect of such high commission rates. Anyone considering marketing informational products should examine them carefully, though, in order to make sure that the product they are sales is genuinely useful and informative to prospective buyers.

It appears that more than several informational products sold by affiliates are books about how to make cash through online marketing itself. As such, the sales pitches regularly boil down to this - "Buy my book about how to make money and then make money by sales my book!" The books generally have a brief chapter or two about how affiliate marketing works, with another chapter or two on Website building or promotion and contain simply enough information to qualify as a "how to" book on marketing. The second half of the book usually contains nothing but information about how you can make cash sales the book itself.

This self-propagating scenario leads to new entrepreneurs trying to sell the books to other new marketers. It rarely works, and most of the time, the just person making cash is the person who wrote the book, who can then use his or her experiences in a chapter for their next book on how to create cash selling books.

There are informational products on the market that are really useful, and would-be entrepreneurs could do well to spend some time to research the marketplace to find products to promote that have real valuation. Books that have really useful information are easier to sell, have fewer returns, and lead to happier sellers and customers. Before you jump in to selling informational products as an affiliate, take the time to make certain that the public can actually use the product that you are sales.