For many people, the lure of working from home is too strong to resists. If you are interested in starting an affiliate marketing business you should know what affiliate marketing is and what it isn't. The benefits of being able to set your own hours, your own schedule and your own your speed is a very attractive motivator to stating you own work form home business. But just as in any other entrepreneurial business, you get out of affiliate marketing what you put in. If you put you time and resources into a relationship with a company that has a poor affiliate marketing program or is maybe even a scam you will not make money.  So the first order of business is to select the right company or companies to work with. We have a whole review page to help you select a company or companies that will be right for you and help you make money on the Internet.

As in any other business, if you are to make money with affiliate marketing you must avoid the pitfalls of the business. Read " avoiding affiliate scams" and "the biggest mistakes affiliates make" so that you will not fall into one of the pitfalls.

Site Content

If you can’t write interesting web content yourself, there are many companies that will do it for you for a very reasonable price. But you content does not have to be Pulitzer Prize wining pros. It should be interesting enough to keep make the surfer a reader, at least for a bit. But most importantly of all, it should be original. Once you’ve got your content, you can weave your links throughout it. People will find your web page on search engines like Google, Yahoo and Ask.com and when they see the well-written content, they will hang around and read what’s on your site.

They will, in most cases, click on the links provided and you’ll be counting the cash in no time flat.

While there is no guarantee that affiliate marketing will turn into a cash cow, with enough hard work, the odds are in your favor. When you combine a cool site design with quality content and a good mix of interesting links, you are bound to get a good number of hits that will quickly translate into dollars for you. Give it a try, you might be surprised at how well it works!

 

What is affiliate marketing?

To this point we have assumed that you knew what affiliating marketing is and have came to our site to research more about it. If you don't know what affiliate marketing is, here is a quick overview. Affiliate marketing has quickly become one of the most popular and the most effective ways to advertise on the Internet. The premise of affiliate marketing is really very simple.

A company, let’s say eBay, goes to another web site and asks them to place a banner or link to eBay on their site. Every time a user clicks on that eBay banner and visits the site, the owner of the original site gets a commission. It’s as simple as that. Affiliate marketers can be paid by the click, (every time someone clicks the companies link,) by the lead, (some goes to the companies site via you link and does some act determined by the company that qualifies as a lead,) or the sale, (they click through and buy.) Not all companies use all three types and by the sale is the most common.

The history of affiliate marketing goes back to approximately 1994 with the trailblazing music website www.CDNow.com. They were, as far as most people know, the first site to pay other sites for directing Internet traffic to them. Internet giant Amazon.com soon caught on and became the site most associated with affiliate marketing. Today, the practice of affiliate marketing is used by essentially every major web site in the world.

Why affiliate marketing? One of the reasons that affiliate marketing has proven to be so popular is that it is completely based on performance. In most cases, the company doing the advertising doesn’t pay a single penny to the site that is carrying their ad unless there is evidence that Internet traffic has been driven to the advertising site. There are, however, other ways of doing affiliate marketing.

Some advertising sites have paid the site hosting their link based not on the number of times an original IP visits through the link, but on the number of times the banner ad was “seen.” This method presents a whole host of problems since things like hit counts can be forged and there is no way to insure that just because someone visited a web page that had your logo on it that they even saw it or if they did, that they even knew what it was.

Other methods of affiliate marketing include paying only when a link is followed AND some kind of transaction takes place. This can be tough on the site hosting the link because the attention span of the average Internet user isn’t long enough in most cases to follow a link and then either complete a purchase, or fill out a form of some kind. The conventional method simply pays a host a commission for every time an original IP is directed to their site.

In a matter of only a few years, affiliate marketing has become one of the most cost effective ways to drive traffic to a site. Since, in most cases, both the advertiser and the host profit from the set up, there is no reason to believe that affiliate marketing won’t be a dominant advertising method well into the future.