I know it is not a new concept, Amazon.com first popularised the modern affiliate scheme, but it is still one of the most powerful methods around. Invaluable both to merchants who get free traffic and only pay on results, and invaluable to marketers who get to sell products and make money without any of the hassle of shipping goods and providing customer service.

There can be problems with affiliate marketing – if you join up to single programs then there is no guarantee that the company will pay you, which can be annoying when you spent time and money to get people to their site. It is unbelievable that they would treat people this way who are making them money and who will obviously stop making them money when they realise what is going on! It is much safer to join a network which manages a group of sites and deals with all the payments to you and deals with any problems. Clickbank is a leading network that you can join up to in minutes and start promoting products.

Clickbank will pay you by cheque every 2 weeks if you have made money. Some people do not like to wait for that cheque (if they are outside the USA for instance) in which case you may want to check out paydotcom.com which pays its affiliates by Paypal.

When you have organized an affiliate account, you can then begin looking for products to offer. The ClickBank site has a marketplace full of information products that can be sold automatically. Choose products based on how many copies have already sold (the marketplace gives you the statistics) so you know that the product and the customer service are tested and reliable and that it will sell well.

Of course the number of sales the product and site are making are not the only thing you need to take into account. If the site is making a lot of sales, but is also having huge returns, then all of your commissions are going to be taken off you again, wasting your time. Take the time to investigate what people online are saying about the website to get a feel for how it is performing.

Other more mainstream sites like Amazon.com allow you to set up affiliate accounts also. You can choose products to sell depending on how useful the products are. For instance, around SuperBowl time, HD TVs will be very popular and sell well. People are buying these things all day long so you might as well make some money by being the person to refer them to the site!

Affiliate marketing is a numbers game, if you can get more people through that link then you will make more money (usually). This means you need to always be working at getting traffic to your sites and links so that people get over to the merchant’s site to make you commissions. There are so many ways to get traffic but I recommend you stick to one and master it before incorporating more into your arsenal.

To make good money as an affiliate marketer online you are going to have devote the time to learn how to do it effectively, visit forums on the subject, buy some material, but more importantly, take action and learn as you go along! If you put the effort into this then the potential is huge as you increase the number of sites and promotions you have, but before you get your first million you need to get your first dollar… so get out there and give it a try.

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