Do you understand affiliate marketing? Many internet marketers do and many more join programs as an affiliate and never make any money. They would have to be classified as people who do not understand what it is. Let's run through the ABC's of affiliate marketing and what you must have to make money doing it.

Affiliate marketing is a way for merchants to sell their products. As an affiliate you get paid to sell stuff for them. Mostly it is done online, but you could use the internet to complement your offline sales as well. The products that are sold include advertising clicks, leads, physical products, information products, services, memberships, and almost anything a person would want to buy. Companies will let you sign up as an affiliate to sell their products. When you make a sale you earn a commission. It could be a set rate or a percentage as explained in the affiliate agreement.

We are talking about being able to make some pretty serious money. There are people who earn 6 figure income and quit their jobs just by selling other people's products. This can be done via a blog, email marketing, your website, newsletters, business cards, classified and solo ads, and so on. Driving traffic to a blog or website is the most common. One problem many people make is that they use the company provided replicated website and try to make sales using it. The problem with that is your site looks just like several thousand other affiliates. It is to your advantage to get your own website or blog and use it whenever you can.

Many times a person decides to become an affiliate, but they do not know what to sell. This is understandable as there are millions of products to choose from. My advice is to start with a product or niche market that you enjoy or know something about. The most successful affiliates brand themselves as experts on what they sell. You can do that too and it is going to be easier to become an expert on something you already are familiar with. Along those same lines the best affiliate marketers own the products they sell. Think how much more convincing it is to sell something you can give a first hand testimonial on.

Here is another basic step that many affiliate miss. Get your own domain name. Many affiliate urls are long and bulky and do not look professional. You can buy a domain name for one year for about $10. When you pick one try and get some of the keywords your product is about in the name. If you are selling baseball bats choose something like best-baseball-bats-around or something like that. The dot com version of a domain name is still the best way to go if you can, but if you want a certain word and it is available in dot net, dot biz, or others then go ahead and buy it.

Hosting for your website or blog is the next step in getting ready to make money as an affiliate. This is not an area to save a few pennies. Your income depends on your website being live and ready when someone wants to see it. Hosting that is down a lot is bad for your business. Take your time and get a few references here. Do it right one time and your business will thank you later. Do you know how to build a website? Most people do not and for that reason you may want to hire someone to do it for you. Another popular thing is to start a blog and use it as your website. This is great because they are easy to set up and all you have to do is be able to type and click on buttons to create a web page with your blog post. Blogger.com can be hosted by Google for you, or a good platform kike WordPress can be hosted by you and set up for less than $50 by a quality blog builder.

Getting traffic to your site is the last step and you will want to research as many free or nearly free advertising methods you can. This would include blogging, article writing, social networking, and others.

This is the ABC's of affiliate marketing. It will take some time to put what you learn into practice, but the key is to get started and learn as you go.