Affiliate marketing is basically being paid a commission to promote other people's products or services.
Although affiliate marketing is one of the easiest home businesses to start, it is not necessarily the easiest to make money.
You need a website, good products, tools to promote and a way to collect your commission.
The First Step Before you can do anything you need to find products to promote, two of the largest affiliate marketing mega-stores are ClickBank and Comission Junction ClickBank deals primarily in digital products such as ebooks.
Commission Junction on the other hand offers more tangible products lines.
Go to either of these companies, or go to both, and set up accounts.
The application process is fairly straight forward.
Once you fill out all the information, you will receive an affiliate i.
d.
This is the identification number you place on your web "links" to ensure you get credit for sales.
Choosing Your Products The one thing that most people neglect when starting in affiliate marketing is doing research when choosing products.
Taking the time to research products can mean the difference in how much you money you make.
You want to find markets or products that have less competition while still being something that is in demand.
Some good places to do some research is Google Trends, eBay Pulse and Amazon bestsellers.
Once you have an idea of products to promote, go into your ClickBank or Commission Junction accounts and search through the many product offerings.
Find the ones that relate to the market you found in your research.
When choosing products, look for ones that offer sales tools such as banners, email scripts and pre-written articles.
As a new affiliate, you want all the advantages you can get.
Pick your product and receive your unique affiliate link for the product.
How to Promote There are many ways to promote your affiliate products without costing you any money out of pocket.
Do a search for free online classified.
Place ads on free classified sites with links pointing to your affiliate product.
Get a free website at places such as Google's Blogger or Weebly.
Write an article about your market or products and place links to your affiliate products in the article.
While writing, make other articles to submit to article directories.
Be sure to check out the terms and conditions of the article directories about placing affiliate links in articles.
Getting Paid Keep writing articles and submitting to free classified on a regular basis.
Make yourself a schedule.
Check you ClickBank and Commission Junction member pages to see the progress of your efforts.
Both have easy to understand stats so you can keep track of your affiliate commissions, traffic and what products you are promoting.
This is just a very simple way of getting started making money in affiliate marketing using ClickBank and Commission Junction.
As you grow you will find more methods and better ways of accomplishing the task of promoting products.
But before you can develop any methods, you need to begin.
To make serious money online it takes a little bit more than just putting an affiliate link on a website, you have to realise this or you may get disheartened.