Affiliate marketing is just one of the ways that you can make some cash online, especially if you already have a website or a blog. Affiliate marketers will promote services, websites or products in return for a commission or a percentage of the sales. Take product promotion, for example. Whenever an affiliate link on your website is clicked and takes the visitor to a product on, let’s say Amazon, and they purchase that product, you get a commission from that sale. You are simply providing an outlet for another person or company to sell their services or their products. Sounds easy enough, doesn’t it?

Affiliate marketing is NOT a get-rich-quick scheme and it is NOT an easy way to make money. You can, however, once the initial work is done, make a reasonable amount of money but first, you need to learn how to do it.

How to Get into Affiliate Marketing – Business Models

The first step is your business model and there are two that most affiliates look at and make their choice from – review or resource sites. Which one you go for depends entirely on how familiar you are with what you are going to be advertising.

Review – usually have reviews of services or products that you have personally tried and tested. Each of the reviews has a link or it may have a banner ad, both taking the visitor to the product on the merchant website. The main advantage is that you don’t need to update these very often, just make the odd tweak to ensure that your website stays in the search results.

Resource – these have an affiliate link embedded in the site to the merchant website. The links tend to be embedded in posts or articles, but this kind requires constant updating with new and original content to keep customers coming back.

Create Your Website

To get involved in affiliate marketing, you really need to have a website because you need that platform to advertise and post the links. If you have one already then you are a step ahead but, if not, you need to come up with one. There are three ways to go here:

A blog – free to run, especially if you use WordPress to build it. However, you can get good deals on hosting packages if you shop around and these websites can look somewhat more professional.

Join a marketing company -  a very simple way is to sign up to a company that is involved in online marketing. You will be an independent worker, in the end, and some companies give you a free platform to get started on.

PPC Marketing – on some websites you can get involved in PPC (Pay-Per-Click) marketing without the need to have your own website. Using direct links, you can make some money through ads without needing your own platform to post them on. You could use Facebook or Twitter, for example.

In the next part, you will learn four more ways to get started in affiliate marketing.