One of the easiest ways to start making money on the internet, in my opinion, is by affiliate marketing. Now when I say easy, it is by no means a get rich quick scheme. If you don’t know what affiliate marketing is then keep reading because I’m about to tell you.

In it’s simplest definition affiliate marketing is promoting someone else’s products in return for a commission.

How Affiliate Marketing works:-

First off you need to sign up at an affiliate network which is basically a big marketplace where you can find products to promote.

Clickbank and Commission Junction (CJ) are affiliate networks, there are many more but when you’re just starting out these will be the 2 big players you’ll hear people talking about the most.

Clickbank specialises in digital products and CJ deal with both digital and physical items.

Then you find a product to promote, I’ll be talking about this in later posts but just a word of warning if you get this wrong from the start you won’t have much chance of making any money before you even start.

Once you’ve picked your product you’ll be given an affiliate code. This is a unique link that you can place on your website to promote the product.

An affiliate code looks something like this – http://62739ftlq8r87t7fxzo-j5s8u5.hop.clickbank.net/

So lets say you have a blog and you include this code in one of your posts. When a visitor to your blog clicks the link they are redirected to the merchants site. At the same time a tiny file is placed on their computer called a cookie and this tells the merchant that you sent that visitor to them. If the visitor then purchases the product you’re promoting you earn a commission which is paid to you through the affiliate network.

Therefore the more people you send to the merchants site the more chance there is of you earning commissions.

In my opinion affiliate marketing is the easiest entry in making money online because you don’t need a product of your own and you need very little cash to start.
Stay tuned to my blog over the next couple of weeks because I’ll be going in to detail on how you can start to profit from affiliate marketing.

Did you find this post interesting? Tell me what you think by leaving a comment below

Technorati Tags: Affiliate Marketing, make money online