In its earliest stages, marketing involved word of mouth and print ads. This transitioned more towards radio and television commercials as these technologies became prevalent. Because of their cost and semi-permanent status, these advertisements require professional teams working closely with the associated companies to design. Since collaboration between the company being advertised and various studios are necessary for this type of advertising, it is a fairly standard nine-to-five job.



With the advent of the Internet and online shopping, however, another type of marketing has become possible. While email and search engines provide the most business traffic, affiliate marketing and its potential for creating legitimate work at home businesses is coming into its own.

The idea of affiliate market is fairly simple. When the visitors of a website click on a link that will take them to another site, that other site will pay the first site for the visit. The payment terms could differ per program, but this is the basics.

Here's an example: Say Joe is interested in baseball cards. He goes online and finds a site designed by Terry with information about popular rookie cards. Rookie cards might be a hobby of Terryas or a site he designed specifically for affiliate marketing; it does not matter because it has information that interests Joe. Joe spends some time reading and looking around, and at some point sees a link to an auction house specializing in rare cards. He clicks on that link.

Because Terryas site is an affiliate of the auction house, Joeas click has been associated with Terryas account. If the customer ends up buying something, Terry will be paid some amount of money for that click. Depending on what type of seller the auction house is and what sort of affiliate program it is running, it is possible that Terry will also receive some sort of bonus if Joe makes a purchase from the auction house site.

It is easy to see how affiliate marketing could easily lead to legitimate work from home businesses. It requires some basic knowledge to begin with; at the very least the ability to build a website (or have one built for you). It also requires recognizing viable products since the only way an affiliate site can make money is to generate traffic to a seller. A website about belly button lint is not likely to get much traffic to redirect and therefore will not make much money.

Online shopping sites love affiliate marketing. It's free advertising for them. In essence, they have a virtual marketing team that could consist of hundreds to thousands of web owners, but they only have to pay when the results are produced. All you have to do is have an interesting website that draws visitors. Then your website and the merchant's website do all the work from there.

With some knowledge of marketing trends and the ability to create interesting websites, legitimate work from home businesses in the field affiliate marketing are available to those who are interested. It can be a good career choice, which, although requiring some work to set up, can allow for flexible schedules while still generating revenue. Something as simple as collecting baseball cards as a hobby and building a website about them can even be used to get started.