What is Affiliate Marketing?

Many people these days want to figure out the best way to make money online. Usually, they all take the same path, which eventually leads them to affiliate marketing.

Affiliate Marketing is a great way to make huge amounts of money using the Internet, however it takes some time to build up that income.

Affiliate marketing is the process of selling someone else’s product online and making a commission on that sale. For example, if you wanted to market women’s handbags, you would sign up with vendors who were willing to pay you a commission on each sale.

There are outside third party affiliate programs that most marketers use. These companies (such as Commission Junction and Amazon) have hundreds of vendors who work in partnership with them. You sign up with the affiliate program and then you are able to sign up for individual vendors. These companies manage the affiliate program for the actual vendor.

Once you have signed up to sell for a particular company, you can begin writing articles and building websites to sell their products.

For instance, if you sign up to sell women’s scarves for the “Widget Scarf Company”, you will be given a special code to use on your sites. Any time someone clicks on your link with that code in it, a “cookie” (tracking code) is put on that computer for a specified period of time (this varies depending on the vendor). Now, if your “cookie” is good for 30 days and that person goes back to the site directly to buy a scarf 7 days later, you will still get a commission!

Making money using affiliate marketing is a great way to catapult your new business. If you get a 10% commission on those scarves, for instance, and they cost $20 each, you would make $2 for each sale. While that does not seem like a lot, you can scale up your efforts to sell as many scarves as you desire each month.

If your website is getting 1000 hits per month and you sell 300 scarves that is $600!

Now, scale that up to owning 10 websites selling various products. If you only made $2 each on those (which is very low by industry standards), then you are looking at $6,000 per month.

Affiliate marketing has no limits, so you are only governed by your ability to build sites and write articles efficiently.