In both cases you try to sell products to other people and you get a commission for each sale, so what’s the difference?
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Affiliate doesn’t require you to buy into the scheme, not does it require you to recruit a downline.
Although both are tedious bores.
Usually with affiliate marketing, you have an audience/network already (streaming, podcast, etc) and you’re upselling for commission
With MLM, you don’t have an independent audience, you’re building a network just for the product marketing.
In a MLM the focus is often on recruiting more poor saps to work under you, contributing part of their commissions to you instead of trying to sell stuff yourself and earn that way. It is sort of the dream of a pyramid scheme being sold, even if the reality is technically just commission sales. Such schemes often require everyone involved buy a certain amount of product from the manufacturer so they always get their profit from what might otherwise be a pyramid scheme structure where no sales occur and no money changes hands (a purely dream pyramid scheme).
Affiliate marketing is just independent people with their own audiences of consumers being paid back for any sales as a result of their referral or advertisement. For example a company could find someone that a lot of people watch play video games and offer a kickback for every sale of headphones made from that person mentioning it to their audience. Nobody is being recruited in tiers like with a pyramid scheme or MLM, no product is required to be bought by the independent person, it is just normal advertising with compensation tied directly to its effectiveness.
Commissions are a very basic means of compensation for sales of all kinds… your question is like asking, “what the difference between being a doctor and a lawyer, they both get paychecks?”
Affiliate marketing is running ads or otherwise linking to products from your website, or partnering with complementary business to earn a commission for a referred sale. The most common form is now online, like if you have a video game review blog and then link over to Amazon or GameStop where somebody can buy the game — the link on your site is set up so that the retailer knows you (a member of their affiliate program) sent the customer to their site, so you get a tiny portion of the sale price (something like 3%). But a similar set-up might be in place in the real world. For example, a local sightseeing company might pay a local hotel for each guest they sign up to go on the tour at the hotel’s concierge desk.
MLM is primarily defined by earning commissions on other sellers sales who were brought into the fold by the earlier sellers. In addition to earning a commission on their own sales, they also get a smaller commission on sales other made. So you are an MLM salesperson and earn 20% commission on the make-up or energy drinks you directly sell. But you also get 5% of sales from your friend who you recruited and also now sells the products. And if that friend recruited somebody, they’d get 5% but you’d even get 2% of that persons sale. So if you recruited a few friends to sell, and they recruited a few friends to sell, you might be earning commissions off 20 people’s sales! That’s the key idea behind MLM — the multiple layers of commissions.
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