Affiliate Marketing - What Exactly is It?

As you no doubt know there are many ways of making money online. However I'm going to show you what affiliate marketing is and how to get started but first I'll tell you what it isn't!

Affiliate marketing is NOT a get rich scheme. You will NOT earn a six figure income overnight and it DOES require hard work and consistency and for you to have the ability to take action.

Affiliate marketing is where a person who is an affiliate sells a merchants product or service and receives a commission from either the sale or by the merchant receiving a new lead or several other means. So to make money you need to send the customers to the merchant through your affiliate link. In turn you get paid (usually a percentage) for every sale you make through your link.

Now affiliate marketing is a very good way, perhaps even the best way to start an internet business because there are lot of benefits you can get from it, such as;

• Low overhead cost to start. You don't need to pay for an office or hire employees and you definitely don't need to have any inventory or stock.
• Can get started online with no money but only your time and energy if you so wish.
• It can provide you with a good passive income. Once you get a system up in place you can easily set and forget and still make money in months, perhaps even years to come.
• No need to create your own products. You can spend your time and energy promoting other peoples products instead of wasting your time and energy creating a product that might have no buyers.
• You can get started quickly. You can literally start promoting in 5 minutes or less.
• You can test a market to see if it's profitable with other people's products before creating your own.
• No support issues. You let the merchant take care of the customer. Your job is only to bring them in.
• Be your own boss working your own hours doing what you love. There are also some tax benefits in working from home as well.

However as with everything that has benefits there are downsides too which includes;

• You might be targeting a market or promoting a product with no buyers.
• Some merchants can decide to keep your commissions and not credit you for sales they made through you.
• Hijackers can hijack your customer by replacing your cookie with their own so that they will be credited with the sale and not you.

As you can see though the benefits far outweigh the cons and affiliate marketing is an excellent business model for anyone that wants to work from home and have a second income. Quite a lot of successful people are making an excellent living from affiliate marketing. With a bit of determination and action you will be making an income as well.

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