The short version: an affiliate marketing program is a deal where a business pays you a commission for sending them a paying customer, tracked through a unique link or code, usually paid out weeks after the sale not the moment it happens. That’s the whole mechanism. Everything else you read about affiliate marketing is just detail on top of that one sentence.
If you want to go deeper on this: What Is Influencer Marketing in Digital Marketing Terms.
What an affiliate program is, without the jargon
Strip away the buzzwords and it’s this: Company A makes something (a course, a tool, a mattress, an ebook). Company A wants more sales but doesn’t want to pay for advertising upfront with no guarantee of return. So Company A says to anyone willing to listen, “promote this thing, and if someone buys because of you, I’ll give you a slice.”
You get a tracking link. That link has your name or a code baked into it, something like lilachbullock.com/?ref=lilach42. When someone clicks it, a small file called a cookie gets dropped on their browser that says “this person came from Lilach.” If they buy within a set window, usually somewhere between 24 hours and 365 days depending on the program, you get credited with the sale even if they didn’t buy on that first visit.
That’s it. No magic. No secret algorithm. Just a link, a cookie, and a payout schedule.
The mechanics, step by step
Here’s what happens in order, using a real example. A few years back I signed up as an affiliate for a project management tool I used with clients. This is the exact sequence:
- I applied through their affiliate page and got approved within two days (some programs approve instantly, some vet you first)
- I was given a unique link and a dashboard showing clicks, trial signups, and paid conversions
- I mentioned the tool in a blog post and in an email to my list, both with my link
- Their cookie window was 90 days, so anyone who clicked had three months to convert before the credit expired
- Eleven people clicked in the first week, one signed up for a free trial, and that trial converted to a paid £39-a-month plan eighteen days later
- I earned 30 percent recurring for as long as that customer stayed subscribed, paid monthly, on the 1st of the following month
- That one customer stayed for fourteen months, so one link and one email earned me roughly £163 total for about twenty minutes of writing
That’s a good outcome. It’s also not typical, and I’ll come back to that.
The three commission models you’ll see
Most programs fall into one of these:
- Pay per sale: a flat percentage or fixed amount when someone buys. Amazon Associates pays between 1 percent and 10 percent depending on category, so a £40 kitchen gadget might earn you £1.60. Fine for volume, useless for one-off promotion.
- Pay per lead: you get paid when someone fills in a form, books a call, or starts a free trial, whether or not they ever pay. Financial services and B2B software lean on this model heavily because a qualified lead is worth something even unconverted.
- Recurring commission: common in SaaS, where you keep earning a cut every month the customer stays subscribed. This is the model worth chasing because it compounds. Ten customers on a 20 percent recurring £99-a-month plan is nearly £200 a month in passive income that keeps arriving as long as they stay.
If you’re trying to work out which structure suits your audience and your content style, it’s worth reading through how to work out which affiliate marketing model is best for you before you commit time to one program over another, because switching later means starting your tracking history from zero.
Do you need a website to do this?
No, and this trips people up constantly. You can run affiliate promotions through a newsletter, a YouTube channel, a TikTok bio link, or a WhatsApp community, plenty of affiliates never build a website at all. I’ve written a full breakdown of running affiliate marketing without owning a website because I get asked this weekly, and the short answer is: the platform matters far less than whether your audience trusts your recommendation. That said, a landing page does help conversion rates once you’re sending real volume, and I cover when it’s worth building one in this piece on landing pages for affiliate marketing.
The bit most guides skip
Here’s the uncomfortable truth: most affiliates earn almost nothing. Not “a modest amount,” nothing. Surveys of affiliate marketers consistently show the median annual affiliate income sits somewhere under £300, while a tiny fraction of top affiliates account for the bulk of the money that gets paid out across a program. The whole industry markets itself on the top 1 percent’s screenshots, the person who made £14,000 in a month from one email. What nobody shows you is the thousand people who signed up for that same program, posted their link twice on Facebook, made zero sales, and quietly gave up.
I’m not saying this to put you off. I’m saying it because the people who do well at affiliate marketing treat it like a proper channel, not a lottery ticket. They pick products they’ve used, they write real comparisons, they build an actual audience first and monetise it second. The people who fail treat it like a get-rich-quick scheme, slap a link on Instagram with no context, and wonder why nobody buys.
There’s also a second uncomfortable truth on the business side of this: most companies that launch an affiliate program abandon it within a year because they recruited 300 affiliates, gave them a banner and a link, and never spoke to them again. If you’re the one setting up the program rather than promoting one, that’s the trap to avoid, and it’s exactly what I unpack in how small businesses can generate more affiliate sales without 300 affiliates who never sell a thing.
How payouts and tracking really work
A few things trip people up here worth knowing before you start:
- Cookie duration varies wildly. Amazon gives you 24 hours. ClickBank often gives 60 days. Some SaaS affiliate programs give a full year. Read this before assuming your link “didn’t work,” it may have simply expired before the customer came back.
- Payment thresholds exist. Most programs won’t pay you until you hit a minimum, commonly £50 to £100, so small early sales sit in your account unpaid until you clear the bar.
- Last-click attribution is standard. If a customer clicks your link, then later clicks a different affiliate’s link before buying, the second affiliate usually gets the credit, not you. This is why “last click wins” frustrates a lot of newer affiliates who did the actual persuading.
- Refunds get clawed back. If your referred customer returns the product or cancels within the refund window, your commission gets reversed, sometimes months later, showing up as a negative on your next statement.
Where to find programs worth joining
Three routes, roughly in order of how much control you get:
- Direct programs run by the company itself, usually found by searching “[brand name] affiliate program” or looking in the footer of their website. Higher commissions, sometimes clunkier tracking dashboards.
- Networks like Awin, ShareASale, or CJ Affiliate, which host thousands of brands under one login and one payment system. Easier to manage several programs at once, though the network usually takes a small cut.
- Marketplaces built for a specific niche, ClickBank for digital products, or Shopify’s Collabs system for ecommerce brands. If you’re running an online shop yourself and want affiliates promoting you rather than the other way round, worth comparing the actual software options in this rundown of Shopify affiliate apps and ecommerce affiliate software.
Running your own program instead of joining one
If you sell a product or service and you’re thinking of building your own affiliate program rather than promoting someone else’s, the maths changes. You’re not chasing a percentage of somebody else’s revenue, you’re giving away a slice of your own, so the terms need to make sense for your margins. A typical structure I’d recommend to a small business client: 15 to 25 percent commission on the first sale, a 30 to 60 day cookie window, monthly payouts with a £50 threshold, and a real onboarding email that tells affiliates exactly what to say rather than leaving them to guess. I’ve laid the full setup out step by step in how to create an affiliate program that pays for itself, including what to budget for tracking software and how to avoid the ghost-affiliate problem where people sign up, grab their link, and never mention you again.
If setting this up feels like more than you have time for on top of everything else, this is exactly the kind of structural work an AI consultant for small business can help you build the first time, tracking, terms, and onboarding included, rather than you rebuilding it in six months once you realise the first version wasn’t set up to convert.
What good looks like
Forget the screenshots of five-figure months. A realistic, solid affiliate income for someone with a modest but engaged audience, a few thousand newsletter subscribers or a niche blog with steady traffic, sits somewhere between £200 and £800 a month once you’ve picked the right products and written useful comparison content rather than thin “best of” listicles. That’s not nothing. It’s also not passive in the way it’s sold. It takes real writing, real testing of the product, and real patience while cookies mature and payment thresholds clear.
Frequently asked questions
What is the difference between affiliate marketing and being an influencer?
Influencer deals typically pay a flat fee upfront regardless of sales, while affiliate marketing only pays when a tracked sale or lead happens, which means affiliate income is performance-based and can be £0 in a month where an influencer fee would still get paid.
How much do affiliate marketers get paid per sale?
It ranges from around 1 percent on physical products through big retailers like Amazon up to 20 to 50 percent recurring commission on SaaS and digital courses, so the same effort promoting a £30 product versus a £99-a-month subscription can produce very different long-term income.
Do I need a large following to make affiliate marketing work?
No, a smaller, trusting audience of a few thousand people who read what you write and act on your recommendations will usually outperform a huge but passive following, because affiliate conversion depends on trust and relevance far more than raw reach.
How long does it take to get paid after an affiliate sale?
Most programs pay 30 to 60 days after the sale to account for the refund window, and many also require you to hit a minimum payout threshold, commonly £50 to £100, before any money is released to you at all.
