How To Make Money From Home: Affiliate marketing

What Is Affiliate Marketing?

Affiliate marketing is the selling of other people’s products or services for a commission. It’s just like being a rep for a company and being out on the road all day to get leads, except affiliate marketing is all online which is why it’s such a good way how to make money from home.

You can buy pretty much anything you want online and pretty much all of these things offer affiliate programs. This means you can sign up as an affiliate, get a unique tracking link and start promoting that link to as many people as possible. When you make a sale through your link, you’re automatically credited for that sale.

Is it safe and do you get paid? Many people who have never heard of making money on the internet think that affiliate marketing is a scam and you’ll never get paid. That’s not true at all. Affiliate marketing accurately tracks your visitors and sales, and I’ve never had problems with an affiliate program not paying me the commissions I’m due. I get commission checques sent to my mailbox ever 2 weeks.

Want proof?

The main concept behind successful affiliate marketing is to find a “hungry” niche, a popular product with a good affiliate program to sell to that niche, and then promoting your affiliate link to as many people as possible.

If you’re creative there are endless ways to promote your affiliate links online. You can create websites around your affiliate product and direct visitors from search engines or paid adverts to that website. You can add your affiliate link in your email. You can put your affiliate link in your signature and post on forums, message boards and websites. You can create videos on Youtube and add your affiliate link at the end of the video.

Pros Of Affiliate Marketing

1- Affiliate marketing allows you to work without a boss or employees. If you do need a helping hand, it’s very easy to outsource various tasks to one of the thousands of freelancers looking for odd jobs online.

2- Affiliate marketing allows you to work from anywhere with a computer and internet access. This means you can work at any hour you choose, whether it be midday or midnight, a normal Monday or on Christmas day.

3- With affiliate marketing you don’t have to create products, deal with customer service or do any shipping or packaging. All you do is match the product you’re promoting with someone who needs that product, and you get your commission.

4- Affiliate marketing is scalable and can be automated. It’s scalable because there is no limit to your earnings. The more sites you create and the more people you promote to, the more money you will make. It can be automated because once you have a profitable site set up that’s getting free constant traffic from search engines, the commission you make from sales literally happens automatically. You can then use this money to build more sites or expand, which in turn increases your income, which you can then use to expand further.

5- You don’t need any qualifications for affiliate marketing and it’s something that you can learn very easily.

Cons Of Affiliate Marketing

There are only two downsides to affiliate marketing that you should know about:

1- When someone refunds a purchase, you lose your commission. Usually refund rates are pretty low and negligible but if you promote a low-quality product you could experience much more refunds and thus loss of commissions.

2- The competition is fierce. There is of course always room for hard-working and persistent people to make money with affiliate marketing but you definitely can’t expect to work for a few hours and start making money.

Want To Start making Money From Home With Affiliate Marketing?

Getting started with affiliate marketing is rather easy. Think of a niche where people would be likely to spend money on a solution (e. g. how to lose weight, how to save a relationship, etc.) and type “your niche + affiliate program” into Google search (e. g. how to lose weight affiliate program).

You’ll be given an endless list of products related to your niche with affiliate programs, and you can simply go and sign up to get your unique affiliate link to promote that product and start making sales.

From there it’s just a matter of getting as many targeted people to click on your affiliate link as possible. You do this trough email, websites, social media, videos, articles and whatever other creative ways you can come up with to connect your prospects with the product you’re promoting as an affiliate.

If you want to get started with affiliate marketing as a way how to make money from home, read this article I wrote called affiliate marketing for beginners and check out this course that includes everything you need to know about getting started with affiliate marketing.