Can You Really Make Money With Affiliate Marketing?
Where Do You Start?

Affiliate Marketing In A Nutshell
Affiliate marketing is where you receive a commission, payment or fee for referring an individual to a another web site. In order for you to receive a commission the individual generally must perform a specific action such as:

Purchase a product
Sign up for a membership
Sign up for a free trial

The referral is tracked via what is know as an affiliate link. This affiliate link identifies the web site or individual who referred that particular individual to another web site. No doubt you would have unknowingly clicked on an affiliate link if you have surfed the internet . These links are similar to those web surfers click on every day however they have a tracking cookie (a form of code) that identifies these links to the web sites or individuals who made the referral.   

The are several simple ways that affiliate marketers generate there income:

Use and existing website or set up your own web site that can refer visitors to other sites
Advertise with Search Engine Marketing such as Google and Yahoo
Email Marketing
Article Marketing

The great thing is that all of the above ways to generate income require an investment under $20 to start and little or no experience is required.

As you can see, Affiliate marketing is a great home based business opportunity as it allows people with virtually no start up cash to start making money immediately. Furthermore it is flexible as you simply making money from referrals and are not tied down with selling specific products and dealing directly with the end customer. Successful affiliate marketers can make up to $50,000 a week by simply providing referrals to other sites. It has become more competitive over recent years but there is still plenty of room to make money given you have a potential market of 6 Billion People and over 2 Billion searches on google alone each day.


So Where Do You Start?
Type in affiliate marketing in a search engines and you get over 2 million listings. Each one will recommend a particular book or site. Why? Mainly because they have affiliate links and receive commissions from any referrals they make. Knowing this it makes it hard to read any review, testimonial or simple information on the internet these days without being sceptical.

Personally I purchased a number of affiliate marketing E-Books to gain a greater understanding of how I could make money on the internet. Some were great while others were a waste of time. Ultimately  you  do need to have the right resources and support in order to learn the finer points of affiliate marketing. There are some great forums out there to jump onto to have chat as well as affiliate membership sites that offer ongoing courses, eBooks, live forums, software support and more importantly one on one support.