How to Make Money with Affiliate Marketing

What is Affiliate Marketing:

Affiliate marketing involves selling a product, service, lead, etc. to a customer and in turn you get paid a commission for that sale. So you act as a middle man between the customer and the retailer. Nearly every single major company offers an affiliate program because paying a percentage of the sale doesn’t matter when they get guaranteed money from something.

Affiliate Networks:

There are numerous affiliate networks around that you can work with to promote product offers. Here are just a couple that I’ve worked with before:

Market Leverage
Motive Interactive
Commission Junction

In addition to affiliate networks you can also simply choose to work directly with the retailer. The best example of this is Amazon.com’s Associates Program. In fact this was one of my biggest earners in 2009 at over $40,000 in commissions. You could also choose to create your own affiliate program if you really wanted to.

How to Sell Products:

One of the easiest ways to sell products via an affiliate program is to simply link to products on your own blog or website. When a visitor clicks the link and buys the product you earn some money.

Another very common way is to pay for traffic from Google Adwords and drive the traffic to a landing page where you promote an advertisers offer. Of course this is a simplification of the process but all you need to do is pick a niche, build out a mini site with a landing page and send traffic to it via PPC.