We know that Internet Marketing is one of the best home based business opportunities. And affiliate marketing is, without a doubt, the easiest and fastest way to make money on the internet. So, in this article, I will explain the concept of affiliate marketing and how you can get started with it within a few hours of reading this article.

Affiliate Marketing is one of the most popular and highest paying Internet Businesses that one can start. Affiliate Marketing refers to an individual or a company marketing a merchant's products online for a commission. This was first started by Amazon.com where they were paying individuals a commission for selling their products online. Now, almost every big Internet retailer has a affiliate program on offer.

So making money from affiliate programs requires you to:

1) Find a good Affiliate Program
2) Market the products of the merchant online
3) Earn your commission

Find your First Affiliate Program

Finding a good affiliate program is not a big deal these days. There are lots of Affiliate Program Providers(APPs), which are third party services bringing merchants and affiliates under one roof (website). The popular ones are cj.com, linkshare.com, shareasale.com, etc. You can sign up at these websites for free. Start off by signing up with cj.com, my personal favorite. CJ has 1000s of merchants across various categories for you to promote. Pick a category which you have knowledge about. Within that category, you have to find a merchant that pays well. CJ has a lot of statistics to help you freeze on your merchant. Look for a merchant which has a high EPC, which is earnings per 100 clicks. This metric tells you how much other affiliates earned with this merchant on an average, for every 100 clicks that they generated.

Also, I always suggest newbies to pick a program which pays per lead. There are lot of companies which pay a fixed amount ($10-15) for a free trial sign up, etc. And these are also the programs with a high EPC.

Market the product/service Online

This is the "make or break" step in affiliate marketing. Most affiliate marketers fail to market the product successfully and give up. Now, there are lot of ways to market affiliate products but most of them can be very technical and cannot be implemented by everyone. For someone just getting started, I always suggest taking the Pay Per Click (PPC) route because it is not technical and does not require you to create a website.

In PPC advertising, you can place your ads in popular search engines like Google, Yahoo and MSN for a cost. PPC gives you the most targeted customers in the Internet space. You will actually be targeting people who are searching for the product you are promoting.

Start off by signing up with the Google Adwords program for free. Once your account is activated, you have to create an ad campaign for the product you are promoting. The first step is to select the keywords that you will bid on. Google places your ad in its search pages according to your bid and relevance of the ad. Your job is to find keywords that are not expensive to buy and at the same time, places you in the top 5 results of Google. There is a very good keyword tool at goodkeywords.com which you can download for free.

After finalizing on your keywords, create a nice ad campaign which will attract users to click on it. Google has a nice tutorial on creating ads. Go through it properly before creating your first ad. One thing to keep in mind is that your affiliate link will go into the destination URL field while creating the ad. So whenever a prospect clicks on your ad and goes to the merchant's website, you are credited with any order he might place.

Earn Commissions

Well, if you do your homework properly then affiliate marketing can make you tons of cash. There are people making hughe six figure incomes with affiliate marketing alone. You might lose some money in the beginning but don't let that disappoint you. There's a learning curve but you can reach the top of it quite fast. Do things right and you can quit your day job really fast. You too can receive fat commission checks from CJ every month.

Copyright 2006 Chris Connors