When you learn about affiliate marketing, you’ll discover the potential of how lucrative it can be. Affiliate marketing is the branch of internet marketing where you promote products for a company or business. You advertise the product on the internet and provide a link, which is unique to you, to the company’s website. Each time a visitor follows your link to the main website and makes a purchase, you are paid a commission.

This is a simple and inexpensive way to get started in internet marketing; not only do you not need to create a product, but you don’t have any shipping, returns or complaints to deal with either. All you need to do is promote the product and wait for the commission checks to arrive.

Commissions vary between businesses and products, so in order to make decent money you need to find those products that attract good percentage commissions. Also, if you are promoting a high-profile product that thousands of other affiliate marketers are also promoting, the competition will be very strong. In this case, your likelihood of attracting the attention you need to earn good commissions will also diminish.

Many companies that are looking for affiliates to market their products stress that you don’t need your own website. As an affiliate, you are supplied with a website, which is little more than a single page ad (called a landing page) for the product. The visitor lands on this page from your affiliate link, likes what they see and follows the link to the order page. This is an easy and simple way to learn and start out in affiliate marketing, but remember that there is potentially thousands of that same “website” being used by thousands of other affiliate marketers to attract potential buyers.

Your own website allows you to have more control over what your visitors see and lets you promote more than a single product. This spreads your advertising costs over a broader base, particularly if you choose related products or services to promote on your site. You have the freedom to promote each product in more unique ways.

It doesn’t have to be expensive to set up your own website; there are many website building programs and templates available that are inexpensive or even free. They may not be fancy, but they are certainly a great way to get started. Choosing a domain name is the next step and then finding a web host; hosting is needed to enable visitors to find your site. Start off with a basic hosting package; you can always upgrade as you become more experienced.

When you are deciding on products to promote, look for ones that pay a decent commission but don’t have a huge volume of marketers already promoting them. Often a small part of a popular niche, or subject area, will give you a better return than the more general, large niche with loads of competition. For example: the ‘weight loss’ niche is popular and very crowded, but if you specialized and targeted a small section of the niche, like ‘natural weight loss for teens’, there may be less competition and a greater potential for income.

Once you have your niche, products and website, find a variety of ways to attract ‘traffic’, or visitors, by advertising in several of the free, inexpensive or more expensive traffic methods available on the internet. Affiliate marketing is a learning process. Track your results with each product and advertising method and you are on your way to becoming a successful affiliate marketer.