You can successfully earn a living making money online promoting products in the weight loss niche as an "affiliate marketer." Yes this is even true in this poor economy. There will always be overweight people looking for a solution to their problem. And they will always be willing to pay money to get that solution.

I recommend getting involved in making money online sooner rather than later. The sooner you get started, the more of a head start you will have over the competition.

The diet niche is such a great one to get involved in because it's big and it doesn't appear to be getting any smaller any time soon. There are literally millions of people looking for weight loss related products online. Yes the competition is fierce but because the market is so huge the upside is much bigger than with products in smaller niches.

I like promoting diet products from Clickbank because the commissions tend to be so high (75% in most cases) and there are a lot of products to choose from.

In case you do not understand what I'm talking about, let me go over the basics of what affiliate marketing is. With affiliate marketing you promote a product and get paid whenever a customer buys the product through your special affiliate link.

You need to set up a landing page first. I prefer to set up landing pages on my own domains (which means getting your own web host) but you can also use free sites such as Squidoo or Blogger to set up your landing pages.

You may be asking, "how much does it cost to become an affiliate?" The answer is nothing. And no, there's no catch. No, this not MLM or any other sort of scam. People who are new to affiliate marketing always assume stuff like that for some reason but nothing could be further from the truth.

The money making process starts with getting people to your "landing page" then you need to get those people excited about buying the product you are promoting so that they click through to the product's "salesletter" (through your affiliate link of course) and buy it so that you earn a commission!

This part of the equation is not necessarily easy.

I don't actually think doing it for free is the best way to go about it though, I recommend signing up with some article submission services so that you can build up links back to your landing page faster.

Why do you want to build up links back to your landing page? Because of "SEO." The more links you get back to your website, the more likely your site will rank in the search engines for important keywords and the more likely you will be able to make sales.

This article only covers the basics because there's only so much you can cover in one article but I am hopeful that you at least know where to start and that you understand that with hard work you can make money online. I recommend starting off in just one niche (the diet niche) promoting just one product. That way you can really learn your market and how to best promote that product. The most successful people are those who can focus on one project at a time and remain dedicated to that one project until they reach their goal.