12 Days to Profiting With Affiliate Programs

If you've been looking for a great home business to start with little or no money, you might want to consider affiliate marketing. For those of you who aren't familiar with what affiliate marketing is all about, I'll explain it to you in this article.

The concept of affiliate marketing is very simple, you sign up to become an affiliate for a product or service. It can be a physical product that has to be shipped, or it can be a digital product that can be downloaded instantly. 

When you make a sale, you get a commission.

Many businesses offer affiliate programs and most of them will even give you your own affiliate website. This is a replicated website which means that all of the affiliate websites will look exactly the same. 

The only difference is in the URL people will use to get to your page. That URL will include a code that is specific to you so that when someone makes a purchase from your site, you receive the commission.

This is a great online business model because once you learn how to do it, you can make virtually unlimited amounts of money and much of your work can be done on autopilot.

But there's one word of caution…

While it's true that you can make a lot of money with little effort as an affiliate that will only happen after you've spent the time to build your site and get a steady stream of traffic. So at first, you'll have to work very hard. But once your site is established it won't take much effort at all to keep it going.

Don't ever let someone convince you that you'll be making six figures in a few months especially if you've never done this before. Affiliate marketing isn't a hard business to learn, but you'll still need to take the time to learn it.

The biggest challenge is getting a steady stream of hungry customers to your website. There are many methods you can use to get customers, many of them are completely free and easy to learn, while others can be quite expensive and have a pretty steep learning curve.

Article marketing is a great free way of generating a lot of traffic. This method simply involves you writing, or hiring someone to write for you, articles that will provide valuable information on your product or service. I don't mean something that is one long sales pitch, I mean something that contains truly helpful information.

When you submit your article to an article directory it will be published and when someone does a search using the keywords you used for your article, they will read your article, click on your website link at the bottom of the article and visit your site.

Another way of generating traffic is with Pay Per Click or PPC. While equally effective as article marketing this method has a steep learning curve and since it's not free you'll be spending a lot of money while you're learning. 

With PPC you submit ads to a search engine and target a keyword specific to your website. When someone clicks on your ad you have to pay. The amount you'll pay will vary on the popularity of the keywords you've chosen as well as a quality score and other variables. 

If this sounds a little complicated that's because it is. I wouldn't recommend anyone try PPC until they have the money to take a course and learn how to do it properly. Otherwise you'll spend yourself right out of business.

Affiliate marketing is really a great way to make a lot of money online, but never forget that it's a real business and will take a little time and effort to get off the ground. Treat it like a business and you'll be reaping the rewards for the rest of your life!