It's not hard to learn affiliate marketing.  Many earn well over $250,000 pa and fired their bosses long ago and all they do is promote other people's products or services.  The idea is to find popular, high demand products/services that have relatively low competition. 

This is achieved by keyword/market research.  Sign-up is quick and free, and best of all, if one product isn't selling, just delete and choose another.  And don't confine yourself to just one product - develop a portfolio of them. 

You get your own unique affiliate ID code from each product vendor and commission can be anything up to 75% or more of the product's selling price.

Make money online - your own website

Before you head for the boss's office to tell him where to go, just wait a little - there're a few skills to learn first, like building websites for starters. 

An html editor is best for beginners.  These build websites for you without the need to understand html code.  Just add pages, type in your information and the editor does the rest for you.

There are many html editors on the market - you can even download a free version together with video tutorial from www.myfreewebsitebuilder.com.  Otherwise Dreamweaver is considered the best but you will have to learn how to use it.  There are great video tutorials on the market to help you. 

You can even search the Internet and find free tutorials but these are often limited and you will take longer to learn.  At least the professional ones will take you from the very beginning to the end in proper learning sequence.

You will also need to work with graphics, research niche markets and products, write good sales letters and ads, as well as understand search engine optimization.

Newcomers can start learning these in their spare time.

Do you need to learn HTML? 

Not at first, but eventually it's a good idea.  It's not nearly as hard as it looks and it will greatly expand your ability to make money online using more advanced affiliate marketing tactics such as spying on your competition.  You'll be able to study their source codes and see what it is that's made them so successful.  You can then copy and beat them.

Page generation software

These automatically mass-produce web pages for you - including their content.  It may be tempting but they're better avoided.  Content quality is poor which means your site won't be as popular with visitors, but more important; Google may de-list it. 

Since Google is currently the major search engine that will be responsible for your website's traffic, you don't want to end your affiliate marketing career before it begins.

Page generation software can be used successfully, but you need to heavily edit the page templates.  However content quality will still be poor, so if you are going to learn affiliate marketing, you may as well do it properly and build your site from scratch.

Google backlash!

Page generation software leaves fingerprints.  When Google cross-matches your site's fingerprints with others in its database and finds others that match, your site is identified as being mass generated by software and subsequently penalized.

Starting off

Newcomers often face a series of hurdles.  These include:

• Getting a website up - one page will do.  Once you've got one up, it won't be so hard doing it a second time.  Beginners also get buried with 'information overload', or seize up with 'analysis paralysis' and never move on.  It doesn't matter how bad your site is. You can always come back later and improve it - professional websites are constantly being updated and improved.
  
  
• Learning how to do market/keyword research so that you will know what product will sell well and what sort of content should go into your website.  Otherwise what's the use of having a website with information that nobody's interested in.

To learn affiliate marketing beginners need only worry about getting one website up first so that it's generating profit - no matter how little.  Then you can fine-tune it to improve its performance and finally, repeat the whole process.  The fog gradually clears, and understanding and know-how falls into place.  Before you know it, you start to make money online.