So what is affiliate marketing? It's one of easiest ways to make money online: basically, it means you don't need to have a product to sell, as you can just promote other people’s products and get commissions each time someone purchases them. It is also one of the easiest ways to monetize your websites.
The most important thing is to drive traffic to the merchant's site and wait for your earnings! Of course, you need to look for a good affiliate program and you definitely must build up traffic, in order to see results.
There are lots of opportunities here, because there are always new products coming out each day and affiliates are needed everywhere! Just think about it: the merchant wants to sell the products and has to drive traffic to the website. Having affiliates means there are thousands of other people driving traffic and buyers to the same site. And yes, it also means that the other affiliates are your competitors, so you'll have to do your best to be better than them.
If you want to learn more about affiliate marketing, you can download this FREE ebook from SBI. It is 152 pages long and it teaches you what you need to know in order to become a successfull afiliate. Click here to download it!
I remember it was eye opening for me, when I read it. Right now it is one of the ways I use to monetize my sites. No, I don't earn a full-time living from affiliate programs, because I only work on my sites in my spare time, they are not a full-time business (but I surely hope to get there sometime!)
If you want a more elaborate introduction to this, visit this page from SiteSell: What Is Affiliate Marketing? Make sure to read it carefully and take notes. You will see that in the second part of the page they advertise their product, SBI, but the nice thing is that you can apply the info from the article to any site, even if it is not an SBI site.
In some cases, you don’t even need a domain name or a website - but this is not recommended, because you leave a better impression when you have your own site and you also control the space - you can put whatever links you want, wherever you want. If you use free blogs, some of them won't allow you to insert affiliate links or they'll put their own ads on your page.