Affiliate Marketing is one of the best ways of making money online through one’s blog or website. Affiliate marketing is nothing but getting rewarded through commissions for promoting or selling products for someone else. Yes, that’s what affiliate marketing is.

In simple terms, an affiliate marketer is like an online property dealer. A property dealer get’s a commission when he sells his client’s property. In a similar way millions of paid products or services are available online to be sold. The product owners look for people to their products and earn a commission in return. Affiliate marketers are usually the one’s who succeed in selling such products through their websites or blogs. So, affiliate marketing is like an online property dealing business, where the property includes online products and services. There are 4 players in the world of affiliate marketing:

• Merchant: A merchant is someone who wants to get his products sold. He wishes to fetch more sales and doesn’t mind giving a commission to the person who get’s his work done.
• Network: A affiliate network is a platform where merchants meet publishers. You may find all the products that are required to be sold online by the merchants. The networks either charge the merchant’s per sale or per posting.
• Publisher: A publisher is someone who works for getting the product of the merchant sold. Like, a publisher posts an affiliate ad on his/her website and if the product get’s sold through his unique link, he get’s a good commission.
• Customer: Customers are god. Customers buy the merchant’s products and help the publishers earn a cut.

Okay, I got that! How can I begin?

There are a number of affiliate marketing websites wherein you would find thousands of listed affiliates. These affiliates are posted by the product/service owners who wish to make their sell through online marketers. The best affiliate marketing websites include Click Back, Amazon Associate, etc. To know about the best affiliate marketing websites, click here.

How do they track the sales that I make?

Once you opt in for an affiliate marketing program, you are given a unique link with a unique affiliate ID. If you succeed in selling the required product through that unique link, you get a commission as high as 75% or even 90% in some cases. Most of the affiliate marketing websites pay you through cheques, account transfers or pay pal transfers.
Now, once the marketer gets his affiliate link, he includes that link on his website by telling about the product a little and linking some text to his unique link.

For example: Earn a good amount of money online by having literally no online marketing knowledge: Click Here! to know the 21 year old man’s story to a million dollars.

I want to get going. Guide me!

Okay, proceed with the following steps to begin:
Make a website/blog. Click here to know about making a complete website/blog for the cheapest price.
Optimize your website for search engines so that you get more traffic. To know more about this click here.
Log on to any of the affiliate marketing websites mentioned here and choose an affiliate to promote.
Paste the given code on your website page.
Wait for someone to buy the product through your affiliate link.

Guidelines for Affiliate Marketing

Affiliates are mostly free. Don’t opt in for paid affiliates. Most of the paid affiliates are scams.

Use only the top 10 Affiliate Marketing Programs. They have a large advertiser base and marketers.

The most important point: Choose affiliates from your niche. If your website is about online marketing, choosing a health product related affiliate makes no sense.

Make sure you work on optimizing you website so that you get more traffic and hence more clicks.