But, what about affiliate marketing...Are the rumors true?

Do people actually make money online consistently from affiliate marketing?

Yes, they do...and so can you...

Affiliate marketing is estimated to be a $6Billion industry now & for people who've been at it for a while, the game gets pretty easy. Once you've got a good strategy, it's all about how many times you can execute it & how fast...

Making money from affiliate programs is kind of like learning how to play basketball- once you learn a solid technique (hopefully from a pro who can give you pointers), you need to then practice until it hurts...running the steps over in your mind both on the court & off the court until the process becomes almost like 2nd nature...

Affiliate marketing at it's most basic level involves 2 parties: merchants (not you) & affiliates(you). The affiliates send merchants traffic- if that traffic converts, the affiliate makes money...

Making money from affiliate programs is kind of like being a broker...After you generate traffic, you broker the traffic to whoever can convert it in exchange for a commission. The more converting traffic you send a merchant, the more money you make...(notice, I said "converting"...)

After doing it for a little while, you start to develop a better feel for which offers convert the best...& which type of traffic to send where. There is a little more to it, but that's the basic principle...

Affiliate marketing is also called "partner marketing". You & the merchant have a partnership...

So, Here are 3 of the steps involved in making money as an affiliate if you plan on driving traffic from a content site to an affiliate offer:

1) You need to have a website from which to send traffic. You can get a free domain or own one yourself...I recommend owning your own domain as it allows you a lot more freedom in choosing what content you can put on your site & it gives your site a lot more legitimacy vs. having your content on a subdomain of another site...though, free hosts can be powerful link building tools...

2) You need to generate very targeted "buyer" traffic for that website which you can, in turn, send to a merchant & hopefully make a commission. The traffic quality is critical. 10,000 people interested in seeing free pictures of giraffes generally won't do much good if you are promoting a skin care product...the traffic you send to a skin care offer should be at least somewhat related to health, beauty, or optimally, buying skin care products...

3) You need to locate merchants that have offers that convert. In other words, if you do send them visitors, the MERCHANT's sales page has to actually turn potential buyers into real buyers...this gets into a little bit of a discussion related to direct response factors, so study some classic marketing books if you want to learn about how to tell whether or not a offer likely converts...

Those are the 3 main concepts...It gets a lot more tricky than that, but those are what affiliate marketing boils down to...

Affiliate marketing is great to learn about & it is quite possible to make money from affiliate programs quickly once you have a profitable format...