When I started making money on-line, i’d heard of affiliate marketing and had a vague idea what it was but I didn’t truly understand it, or the real power of it.

The thing I love about affiliate marketing is how easy it is to get started. Even if you have absolutely no experience at all, you can start and learn as you go along.

There’s no limit to the amount you can earn and today I want to share you with you, exactly how it works and how you can make a great income from home by getting involved.

So, let’s break this down and answer your questions…..

Affiliate Marketing is essentially where you promote someone elses product.

So, if you want to make money by selling something and don’t know what to sell, or don’t want to create or buy products to sell, then this is the easy way around it.

By promoting someone elses product (the creator), you earn a cut of the revenue. You do this without holding any stock or having to send anything out to anyone.

You are essentially an Affiliate or sometimes you might also be called a Publisher.

This is where you put your marketing hat on, but don’t panic, you don’t need any experience whatsoever. All you really need is a computer and to either experience or believe in the products you are promoting..

This will give you conviction when you are promoting something.

There are various ways you can promote products.

You can promote products through social media. This can be particularly lucrative if you have a large following.

Do you spend a lot of time talking on social media? Then why not get paid for it!

You can also promote products on your own website or blog. Or maybe you would prefer to use various free and paid for advertising platforms.

• Writing a product review and placing it on your website

• Writing a blog post and including the benefits of the products

• Recording a video for youtube

• Simply writing a sentence and posting an image about the product on social media

• Placing banner ads on your site or through advertising networks

• Sending out e-mails to your e-mail list can also be one of the best ways to make money with affiliate marketing.

Once you’ve decided how you are going to promote your chosen products, you then share links to the products on your chosen platform. It really is that simple.

The links are provided to you by the Affiliate Marketing company and they are tracked so that every time a customer makes a purchase, you are paid a percentage.

The percentage varies for each product and programme.

You can contact companies or small businesses directly to become an affiliate but I find the best places to find products are through affiliate networks as they have databases of lots of companies and products to choose from and are usually fairly easy to sign up with.

Signing up to these is free.

My favourite Affiliate Networks are:

Maxbounty

Awin

Amazon Associates Programme

Amazon is great because people know and trust Amazon and are very likely to make purchases based on their comfort of knowing it’s a reputable company. Awin and Maxbounty allow you to promote some of the largest well known brands across the world too which also make these great affiliate networks to join.

The amount of products you can promote is vast but don’t be tempted to try and promote all of them. It’s very easy to get sucked in by the amount of money you can make here, but try to stick to products and services in your niche.

If you have a health and beauty website, you could promote an antiaging cream or hair products but it wouldn’t make sense for you to promote a book on how to make money because that’s not what your blog is about.

Promote products that you’ve either tried yourself or you know to be good otherwise you will lose credibility with your audience. Creating trust is paramount when promoting other people’s products.

On this blog I only ever promote products or services that I’ve used myself or know to be brilliant products.

For example, I promote Bluehost as this is the company I use to host my blog. I’ve found them helpful, reliable and great when I was a beginner blogger to answer any queries I had. To start your own blog only costs $3.95 per month with them. It’s so cheap and easy to set up, so I feel comfortable promoting them because I use the product myself.

When talking about the product in your promotion, be genuine and sincere and your audience will thank you for it.

You can promote physical products such as household items, toys, beauty products – or digital products, such as on-line courses, e-books, etc.

If there is something you’re passionate about or something you simply use and love it, it’s easy to talk about it genuinely.

I talk about making money from home because that’s what I do. I love talking about it and I love helping people who are interested in doing the same. That makes it easy for me to be genuine.

The sky is literally the limit but that doesn’t mean that you don’t need to work.

Affiliate Marketing is an amazing way to make money from home on-line, working flexible hours and around your family commitments. However, you do need to commit to putting in the effort just like any other work. Whether that’s for an employer or your own business, you never earn money without some effort.

There are plenty of people making six figure incomes from affiliate marketing and have written courses showing you exactly how you can do the same.

I learned my tips and tricks from Emma Drew. She holds nothing back in her course “How to Smash Affiliate Marketing as a UK Blogger” and following her course, helped me to triple my traffic and income.

Emma is the reason I started making money with affiliate marketing….I hope I can be the reason you start making your money.

If you enjoyed this post, please do let me know in the comments.