38 Affiliates A NOTHER ISSUE WITH transparency, one that the FTC has recently caused a huge stir about, is affiliate links--using affiliates for your business and being an affiliate for someone else's business. There are many benefits to having and/or being an affiliate, but there are also pitfalls. An affiliate is somebody who acts as almost an inde- pendent sales rep for your product or service. Affiliates became popular online when websites started to use cookies. A cookie is something that is placed on your computer that recognizes who sent you there in the first place. Here is how it works: A vendor or business owner sets up a form on the shopping cart of the website where you can sign up to become an affiliate. From the information on the form, a unique affiliate link for you is generated that allows you to send people to the page. In turn, when you promote that person's business, and send traffic to their site, the link logs the fact that you were the one who sent them there. This means that if a person buys some- thing immediately or even in the future, 106 you get credit for the 106 The cookie can be set for a defined period of time, for example, the next 30 days. 141