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So what exactly is affiliate marketing? A really good and really detailed explanation can be found at Wikipedia, which will give you a basic idea of what is involved in affiliate marketing.

It’s okay if you don’t know what it is or if you don’t know much about the internet at first – that’s one of the great things about affiliate marketing. It’s something you can do with almost no experience (of course it helps if you do) and you can learn as you go. You also don’t need a lot of money to start (of course it helps if you do :o) You can make as little or as much as you want. You may just want to earn an extra $100 a week so you can have Foxtel. You may want to make a decent wage from it or you may want to become a millionaire from it. It’s completely up to you.

The basic idea is that there is a company called “I’m A Big Online Store”. You have a website and you decide to promote “I’m A Big Online Store” on your website. A visitor to your site clicks onto theirs resulting in the visitor making a purchase from “I’m A Big Online Store”. Now this is business they never would have had if it wasn’t for you. So they say, okay we will give you 20% of what that customer spent. The customer spent $200 – you get $40. And you didn’t really do that much. Imagine if you did this for 10 companies – that’s $400. Imagine if you did it for 100 companies………see what I’m saying?

There are a few different forms of affiliate marketing and different ways in which you can make money. You might want to try a few different methods and then you could focus on just one method or you might want to do them all. These are some of the different methods:

PPC – Pay Per Click Marketing.
This is where you find a particular product, rather than a particular company to promote. You set up “ad campaigns” in Google Adwords or Yahoo Search Marketing where you pay each time someone clicks on your ad. Once someone clicks on your ad they are directed to your site or directly to the product and if they make a purchase you receive commission. This method can be very time consuming and takes a lot of understanding of how search engines work in order to get your ad and good ranking. This method can also make you a lot of money quickly.

Affiliate Website.
You may decide you want to set up your own website and promote other peoples products through being an affiliate. This method can take a little bit longer to start producing high amounts of income but once you start it’s great. The great thing about this method is you don’t need much, if any at all, experience or money to start. You can virtually build a website yourself for free. There are hundred and thousands of sites out there offering free domain names, free hosting, free content to populate your site with, free traffic. If you want to move things along a little faster though, you can pay for traffic, such as PPC Marketing and purchase clicks from search engines. You can set up a website as an information portal about a particular subject and incorporate your affiliates into your site. You can set up a “review” website of certain products, but only using products from your affiliate program. The options are endless. You just need to be creative.

Online Affiliate Store.
Another option is to set up your own online store using affiliate products. Some affiliates, like Amazon.com and Market Health allow you to set up your own online store using their products as your inventory. Great – extremely low set ups fees! Great – no stock needed! And even better, when someone places an order they take care of everything. They receive the order, the ship it, the take care of any customer enquiries. You just receive the money for promoting the product for them.

It sounds so easy and it is - in a way. It’s easy if you are willing to spend the time, perhaps a bit of money to do this. I’m not promising a “get rich quick” scheme or anything even close to that. But if you are willing to learn, willing to be patient you can make a living (or a million) from this industry. I will go into all methods into more detail later, I just wanted to give you a basic understanding of what affiliate marketing is. To get started there really isn’t much to it but there are no bounds to how deep you want to delve into it.

Also, just a couple of things – there are people out there who trying to sell you e-books on how to do affiliate marketing. They can charge $30 to $100. Do not buy these books. The majority of them are out of date – the internet and affiliate marketing changes rapidly. This information is also free on hundreds of websites, including www.carolineelle.com.au. You can pretty much find anything you want for free on the internet. A couple of really good websites that I like to read regularly are:

Uberafilliate – Only 19 years old, started affiliate marketing 12 months ago and is already making 6 figures per month through PPC. Amazing.

Zac Johnson – Great articles, although he has been around for a while so his info can be for those who are a little more involved and experienced.

Shoemoney – Very similar to Zac Johnson, not for absolute beginners but is great to read about how successful affiliate marketing can be.

5 Star Affiliate Marketing – Full of articles from lots of different affiliate blogs.

Note that all these website are US based. The reason for this website is that I want to translate all the info which is US based and make it work for us Aussies.

To read this article and many more in depth visit Caroline Elle's website at www.carolineelle.com.au

About the Author:
An Austraian making money online through affiliate marketing and would like to share this information with other Australians.