In my last post about finding work at home no fee, I mentioned one of the easiest ways to make money online is via Affiliate Marketing. Companies that make and sell products online offer a commission to anyone who refers a customer to them. Instead of going around harassing all your friends to buy something like you might in the real world, you just post a link to the product somewhere (a blog, twitter, facebook, etc) and when someone clicks on it and eventually buys the product, you get a commission!

So the steps to start selling other people’s products are:

• Find a product to promote
• Sign up to be an affiliate
• Get a special affiliate link containing your affiliate id
• Post the link somewhere

Find a product to promote
It’s best to pick a niche that you’re interested in. This could be one of your hobbies, or a work-related topic. Some examples are learning guitar, carpentry, dog training, building websites, vegetarianism, or car repair. If you’re aware of a product in that niche, go to their website and scroll to the bottom. There will be a link for ‘Affiliates’ or ‘Affiliate Program’. Once you sign up you will get access to an area after you login, where you can get your own text or image links.

Sign up to be an Affiliate
You can either sign up at a specific website for a product you’re interested in selling, or sign up at one of the affiliate networks. An affiliate network is a website that contains thousands of products to sell, so once you have an account you can sell anything within the network. On a specific website, look for a menu item that says ‘Affiliates’ or ‘Affiliate Program’ where you can sign up to be an affiliate. For an affiliate network look for the ‘Register’ link. An example of an affiliate network is Clickbank.

Get your Affiliate Link
Once you have registered at either a product site or affiliate network, you need to login. Once logged in you can usually browse for a text or image link. Just copy the link by highlighting the text and right clicking and selecting ‘Copy’ or use Ctrl-C (on windows machines).

For example an affiliate link might look like http://www.learnguitarfast.com?affid=youraffiliateid, where youraffiliateid is your unique id. When someone clicks this link it is tracked back to you so will get credit. Here’s an example – I typed in ‘diet program affiliate program’ into Google search and got this link.

Post the Link Somewhere
If you don’t have a website or blog, start with your social networks such as Facebook. Be careful not to ‘overspam’ your friends but if you’re providing helpful advice to your friends, there’s nothing wrong with that. So take your affiliate link and post something like ‘How I lost 30 pounds in 2 months – http://www.loseweightnow.com?affid=youraffiliateid’ in your facebook status. Or write a blog on your Myspace profile or post a tweet on Twitter.

Once you make a sale, you can be paid via your Paypal account or you can opt to have them mail you a cheque.

I find it’s always best to promote products indirectly. So you write some articles, blog posts, etc about a topic and provide a link or two in the body of your content that leads to an affiliate product. So we will get into how to do that next with some free websites you can use.

Check out this beginner course on Affiliate Marketing.