Anyone can 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.  

You can earn money just by telling your friends about your favorite products.  You can earn even more money by writing about your favorite products. 

This can be anything - your favorite digital camera, computer games etc.  Every time someone buys the product via your link, you get paid commission.

Cost Per Action Commissions (CPA)

Besides being paid for selling physical or digital products, you can also get paid when someone performs a simple "action".  This can be signing up for more information, or simply to subscribe to a free newsletter.  Some of these pay very large commissions - not because you sold a product, but because your visitor simply gave their name and email address.  You can even get Pay Per View commissions.

How to Make a 6 Figure Income ... Step-by-Step Videos

There are networks that focus solely on Cost Per Action programs - a specialized field.  If you are interested in pursuing this, you will need to know which particular companies offer the best deals, and the best way for you to succeed.  If you want volumes of step-by-step instructions for this, plus detailed videos, Affiliate Payload will fill the gap.  It includes:

Step-by-Step videos
How to start with little cash
Cost-per-action commissions
Pay-per-view commissions
Social media profits (Facebook, MySpace etc)
Co-registration secrets

Affiliate Payload dedicates an entire section to low cost start up for those who are short on money. 

Clickbank tips

Clickbank specializes in instantly downloadable digital products. Their marketplace is full of every imaginable product you could possibly want.

To see which products are selling the best, make sure you sort by "popularity".


If the "%refd" value is high, it means that affiliates (and not the owner of the product) are making more of the sales.  This is good news for you.


If a market niche offers a lot of products to sell, it means it's a profitable niche.


The higher the gravity rating - the better the product's sales record for affiliates - more good news for you.

The idea is to find popular, high demand products/services that have relatively low competition.  This is achieved by market and keyword research.  Affiliate 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.

Your own website - to make money online

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  and 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.