Affiliate marketing is a marketing arrangement in which affiliates receive a commission for each visit, signup, or sale they generate for a merchant. An affiliate marketer is someone who promotes another persons or companys products and earns a commission for each sale they make. The affiliate can be either an individual or a company that markets the sellers product in an appealing way to potential consumers. Affiliate marketers may use a variety of methods to generate sales, including organic search engine optimization, paid search engine marketing, e-mail marketing, content marketing, display advertising, organic social media marketing, and more. The primary difference between affiliate marketers and salespeople is that affiliate marketers provide little if any influence on a possible prospect in the conversion process once that prospect is directed to the advertisers website. Merchants favor affiliate marketing because, in most cases, it uses a "pay for performance" model, meaning that the merchant does not incur a marketing expense unless results are accrued. To get started with affiliate marketing, an individual or entity can sign up for an affiliate network, which provides reporting tools and payment processing.