Starting Your Affiliate Marketing Home Business

Affiliate marketing is an excellent business model for anyone looking to start a home-based business. Since an affiliate marketing business requires little or no start-up costs, you won’t need a business loan or investors to get started. You also won’t need to maintain stock or handle customer support, so you can easily begin your business as a one person operation without the need for hiring employees.

Affiliate marketing allows you to sell a merchant’s products or services for a percentage of the profits for any sales you refer. Basically you become freelance advertiser for the merchant, working on a commission basis laid out in their affiliate agreement. Some affiliate programs pay for a percentage of each sale, some pay a fixed amount per sale, per lead, or even per visitor.

Here’s what you will need to do to begin making money as an affiliate:

1. Find and join an affiliate program.

2. Obtain your affiliate link from the merchant. This is a unique link to the product you wish to advertise, which contains your affiliate ID number in order to track any sales you refer.

3. Find a traffic source to promote the product. This can be any form of advertising from free blogging to paid advertising.

Finding an affiliate product to promote is simple. Many well known companies such as Amazon and eBay have affiliate programs which pay a relatively small percentage based commission (usually 3%-8%) for any purchases made by new customers you refer. The smaller commissions mean you’ll need to refer a large volume of buyers in order to generate a significant income, so these programs are not ideal for beginners.

More profitable affiliate programs are offered by lesser known merchants which pay their affiliates 50% or more of each sale. The Clickbank affiliate program is the most popular for first-time affiliates since it offers a one-stop market place for a wide variety of products in many different niches, all of which pay a hefty commission for every sale.

Once you have found the affiliate product you want to promote, you will need to obtain your affiliate link. This is the unique URL provided to you by the merchant in order to track any customers you send their way.

Finding online traffic sources will be the remaining 95% of your business. You are, after all, a freelance marketer so the majority of your time spent will be finding an audience for the products you promote.

A traffic source is any website frequented by visitors in your target demographic. There are countless ways to reach these visitors ranging from creating your own websites to advertising on other websites or placing pay-per-click sponsored ads directly through the major search engines.

Most new affiliates begin with free advertising since the risk is low; you’re only investing your spare time, and not your life savings. Creating content such as blogs, articles and videos which your target audience is likely to find via the search engines will generate free traffic. More experienced marketers will then expand into paid advertising platforms such as pay-per-click and banner advertising where the risk and potential rewards are much higher.

Don’t let the ease of starting an affiliate marketing business fool you. The fact that the barrier to entry is so low means there will be plenty of competition. However, as long as you treat your business like a business and not a hobby, find one traffic source and master it without dabbling too much and spreading yourself too thin, you will outlast the majority of your competition who lack the focus and dedication.