How To Make Money Online With Affiliate Marketing

There are many ways to make money online, but one of the better known ways is with affiliate marketing.

So what exactly is affiliate marketing?

Affiliate marketing is promoting someone’s product, service or company and getting paid commission on a sale.

How does this work?

The affiliate marketer places an ad or link on their website to advertise the product, service or company, and if someone places an order the advertiser receives a commission. A lot of companies advertise their affiliate products on affiliate networks like Commission Junction and Share A Sale.

What do I need to get started?

First of all you will need a website – most affiliate programs will not accept new affiliates without one. A simple WordPress blog should suffice in most cases.

It is also best to focus on a particular niche – preferable one that you have a genuine interest in, because you maybe spending a lot of time writing articles in your chosen niche and you have more chance of succeeding if you’re writing about something that you have a genuine interest.

To find out more about affiliate marketing there is a very good guide written by Nick Reese called Traffic and Trust, which is currently selling at $97.

$97 sounds like a lot of money, but believe me you can spend a lot of money learning about affiliate marketing and end up spending money on products that will get you nowhere.

Traffic and Trust is a very clear and concise guide on how to go start affiliate marketing. It also gives advice on creating a brand, content development, site promotion and there is a handy step by step planning guide at the end to get your affiliate marketing  plan up and running.

This book is good for beginners, but is also good for experienced affiliate marketers – there is some really good advice in the book and I would definately not recommend it otherwise.

At the end of the book there is a very good list of resources with links to some of the best known affiliate resources available on the internet – resources that will help with building your website, branding identity, analytics tools, affiliate networks, keyword analysis, search engine optimization, WordPress plugins, cloaking affiliate links and much more.

There are some really good videos as well on how to install some of the plugins mentioned in the book such as how to make a sitemap and submit it to Google Webmaster Tools and how to set up your robot.txt file.

You can buy Traffic and Trust here