For those of you who want to work at home without having to run a business or get clients, without having to hold any stocks, or answer customer queries, affiliate marketing is a great career to move into.

Put simply, an affiliate marketer is like an old fashioned ‘commission salesman’. Before the Internet this was a profession that many people turned to to make a full-time living. A commission salesman (they were typically male for hundreds of years) would find a product they liked/could sell – and they’d then set out to reach a target market and sell the item. This used to be done by carrying a small box of samples and an order book. Well, the Internet is no different and the modern ‘commission sales’ has now morphed into Affiliate Marketing.

What an affiliate marketing person does is finds products to promote – and promotes them online. If a sale is made, they get a commission. Commissions are typically paid via Paypal, or even directly into your bank. A few smaller companies will pay by check, or certainly a check for the first payment as their ‘evidence’ that you are a real person.

The products you promote could be anything from physical items, such as books on Amazon, through to digital ebooks for download to PCs, or even music, holidays, cars …. once you get started you’ll soon find out what you like promoting and what works for you and your personal style.

Paid to Give Away Free Stuff

There’s now a thriving industry and niche for some affiliate marketers, who specialise in giving away free things to people. This is known as “Pay Per Lead” and it’s still early days, so you might have to go hunting around a little to get a good selection of free things you can give away that earn you money. The rate of pay for this is quite low, but it can work well alongside the other affiliate marketing income models of a Pay Per Sale.

Anybody Can Start a Career in Affiliate Marketing

It’s true, anybody can start a career in affiliate marketing – and it’s a zero cost, and low-cost way to earn good money, a full-time income, working entirely online. However, you will have to learn the industry at least to a basic level in order to be successful.

Learning affiliate marketing is straight forward – and there are many free resources. Once you’ve learnt how to do it, you just have to find products to promote and places to promote them.

Beyond this, there are systems, methods, tools, etc that you might decide will help to save you time. Going back a couple of years it might have taken you a whole day to do some keyword research, for example, now you can do this in under 10 minutes with free tools. There are plenty of free ways to advertise the products you’re promoting too – free classified ads websites are one method, Facebook marketing is another – but there are many more ways.

Ideally, you’ll need a website. If you’re promoting products, then it’s better for you to bring traffic to your website, then to send them off to the relevant website where they can buy the goods… but you can get a free website that enables you to do this.

In the first instance, if you want a work at home career in affiliate marketing, then you should look into:

  • Getting a website, whether free or your own
  • Learning affiliate marketing, there are plenty of courses out there
  • Where you’ll find the products to promote, this is zero cost as nobody charges you to promote their products.

Once you’ve got that lot cracked, you can then look into more advanced tools and techniques. Most affiliate marketing people have their own website, that they own – they’ll keep the free ones going though still. You might want more advanced keyword research tools. You might decide to create your own online/digital products and promote your products as well as those of other people.

Affiliate marketers use Internet Marketing as their way of generating traffic to their adverts/website – and then to forward that on to the companies they are promoting products and services for.

With affiliate marketing, and using internet marketing, the sky’s the limit. Below are some resources that you can see or read to find out if it’s something you think you’re attracted to. There’s a lot to learn, but you don’t have to learn it all on day one; sometimes some ways will be out of your reach, but that’s the same with anything in life. In the same way that if you wanted to set up a minicab driving business tomorrow you’d not be able to do it with a Rolls Royce or Ferrari … but work hard and it might be possible in the future!

My one golden rule with Internet Marketing and Affiliate Marketing would be: If you don’t understand what something is – and have no idea how you could USE it – no matter how many millions the guy tells you you can make, you’re NOT ready to buy that product yet. It’s perfectly possible to build up to a full-time income in just 3-6 months using freebies (it’s just a little more work).

Rosalind Gardner’s Super Affiliates Handbook

One top book I can recommend – I’ve had a copy for a few years now and it’s still inspiring me when I dip into it – is the Super Affiliates Handbook by Rosalind Gardner. This is pretty much like a Dummies Guide, but Rosalind talks from experience. Since the original version came out, there have been several updates. You can pick up a copy cheapest online. The Super Affiliates Handbook is available as a hardback book, or as an ebook, whichever you prefer.

You can pick up a copy through Amazon, and you will occasionally find a copy on ebay. It’s not cheap, but it is detailed.

Last updated January 2017