One of the best ways to earn extra money from home is by promoting affiliate programs. Virtually anyone can get started immediately and begin to sell products that are profitable and highly in demand. The best part is that this can be done from the comfort of your own home with nothing more than a computer, internet connection and your brain. You sell other people's products to earn extra money from home, so there's no need to create or have your own products.

With affiliate programs, you choose the product that you want to sell (after much research) and get your own link to promote that product. For anyone that clicks on your link, they'll be re-directed to the main sales page. If they buy a product from that page, you'll be credited with that sale and earn yourself a nice commission (anywhere from 25 to 75%).

The big advantage with selling affiliate products is that: you don't need a website (although it's better if you do, more on this shortly); you don't have to stock the product and ship it out to the customer; and you don't have to take orders or handle payments. All of the "behind the scenes" stuff is taken care of by the owner of the product or the affiliate program. You simply promote your affiliate link to drive people to the sales page and receive your payment checks when the sales are made. What a great way to earn extra money from home.

So where do you find these affiliate products? Two of the most popular places are Clickbank.com and Commission Junction.com, where you will find thousands of popular products to promote.

If you're serious about affiliate marketing, you will need your own domain name, hosting and a lead capture page. Otherwise, all the traffic that you send to the product owner's sales page will be lost. You would have no way to follow up with them. But if you have your own page, you can pre-sell the product, capture the lead's name and email, and then follow up to get the sale at a later time. Just have an enticing ebook or report to give to the lead in exchange for their details. Once you get the sale, you can then follow up and promote "back-end" products to maximize the profits from that customer.

The next important step is to drive quality traffic to the sales page (preferably your own page) to convert into customers. Some of the best ways to do this are free. If you have your own landing page, you can optimize it (SEO or search engine optimization) with your main keyword phrase in your domain, title and body of the page. After awhile you will have free traffic coming from the search engines from your keyword phrase.

Then write articles (once again, target your keyword phrases) and submit these articles to some high quality article directories. Make sure you have a link pointing back to your site in the author's resource box. With this method you will gain readers, trust, credibility and people clicking on the link back to your site, which will convert into sales. You'll also increase your back-links which will improve your rankings with the search engines (more traffic).

So, there you have it. Affiliate programs are probably the easiest and quickest way for people to start their own online business and to begin earning extra money from their home. Once you have a step by step system working well for one product, you can then repeat the procedure for multiple products.