Starting a home-based business is now easier than ever. Don’t be fooled however by many of the pyramid schemes and high cost start-up businesses. As long as you have a computer and an Internet connection you can start a viable, revenue producing business from home in no time. I searched for years for the right home based business and got on so many email lists it began to overwhelm and annoy me. It wasn’t until I discovered a system that a friend of mine had introduced me to that I felt really excited about the prospect of actually starting a business. This system is affiliate marketing.
Affiliate marketing has grown in popularity as of late with many home based entrepreneurs cashing in. The basic concept is best described as a commission program. These commissions are paid to “affiliates” when a sale is made by a customer referred to a website by you, the affiliate. This referral is done in several ways that I will explain in detail below. Some of the biggest and most popular affiliate programs can be found at sites like Amazon.com and Overstock.com, etc. You’ll begin to notice that just about every website that sells anything will offer an affiliate program. Let’s look at how to begin:
Start by visiting any of your favorite shopping sites, Amazon is a good start. Look toward the bottom of the page and you will notice a link for Amazon Associates. Each site will have a little different name for their program, but most will have a small link at the very bottom of the site listed as “affiliates”. By clicking this link you will be walked through the process of setting up your affiliate account. Most of them are quick and easy. Once your affiliate account is set up you will then have access to all the links, banners and images needed to begin promoting products. These links, banners, text and pictures will be used as your referral tools.
So now we are set up as an affiliate and it is time to start referring customers to the website (Amazon, etc.) to start collecting commissions. So how do we refer potential customers to our partner sites? Good question. This is where the work comes in. There are several ways to refer potential customers to websites. The first place to start is by writing articles. This is the easiest way to start your business as you will not have to set up your own website or web store. You can begin by writing product reviews or informative articles on a product or a group of products. We can then add the affiliate links mentioned above to the articles. So when someone reads your article then clicks on the link, then buys something.. Bingo! Commission!
Where and how do I write and publish articles or reviews? There are several sites where you can quickly set up accounts and begin publishing articles. These articles will then be searchable via any search engine. A couple of the more popular article sites are EzineArticles.com and Articlesbase.com. It is very quick and easy to set up accounts at both. This is the easiest and best way to start your business.
From here you can look at growing your business and implementing your own websites and web stores. By building your own websites you can add numerous links to a variety of websites for added potential commissions. Building your own website is not as hard as you would think. With WordPress and Blogspot it is easier and more user friendly than ever before. There is no need to hire a web developer, it can all be quickly learned and implemented by visiting these sites and taking some tutorials.
