Affiliate marketing would have to be one of the easiest ways to get started online if you want to work from home and earn an income. Basically you are promoting somebody else's product and earning a commission. And by promoting somebody else's product you do not need to have a product of your own or need to worry about trying to make a product of your own. This is an ideal setup if you are new to computers, and in particular, new to the Internet.If you look at the words affiliate and marketing, you will see that they say exactly what they do, except in this case most affiliate marketing takes place online. Offline the term is usually agent or representative.An affiliate sells something on behalf of someone else, usually a product creator. The product creator pays the affiliate a portion of the sale as a commission, which can be anywhere from 5% up to 75% of the sale price. Some product creators even give the affiliate the full 100% of the sale price as they are more interested in getting the buyers contact details so they can sell them a much higher priced item.Marketing is how the affiliate gets the buyer to look at the product. There are many ways to do this on the Internet. The affiliate will usually tease the buyer with only a brief glimpse of the product's benefits or they will only supply a small amount of information about the product so the buyer is left wanting to know more details.If the affiliate's marketing efforts have worked, the buyer will make their purchase by clicking through to the product creator's website. This click is tracked to ensure the commission is allocated to that particular affiliate. The affiliate will receive their commission at a later pre-determined time either by the product creator or by a third-party processor.Being an affiliate marketer is an easy way to get started without all of the product creation hassles. And after you've been an affiliate for a while you'll get the hang of things and may even want to start creating your own products.