What is affiliated marketing?

Hey...
I listen lots of thing about affiliated marketing but don't know how it can help me to getting business?
Please help me to get clear about affiliated marketing.

An affiliate marketing is a type of performance-based marketing in which a business rewards one or more affiliates for each visitor or customer brought about by the affiliate's own marketing efforts.

Say you sell toasters on your site. Say you pay $10 for them and sell them for $30. You start a affiliate program, anyone who sells one of your toasters for you, you give them say $10 dollars.

So its like free sales men basically.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affiliate_marketing

Affiliate marketing is powerful ecommerce marketing tool. It is a revenue sharing between online advertisers/merchants and online publishers/salespeople, whereby compensation is based on performance measures, typically in the form of sales, clicks or registrations.
Whereas, general marketing is the process of educating people to the advantages and benefits you offer them and compelling them to choose your products or services over those of your competitors.

I think the core of affiliate marketing is that you sell other people's products