What Is Affiliate Marketing?

Have you heard of affiliate marketing or know people who are earning money doing affiliate marketing online? Have you ever wondered exactly what affiliate marketing is?

Here is a simple guide with some resources to help you learn more about this lucrative home business.

What is Affiliate Marketing?

A very simple definition of affiliate marketing:

Affiliate marketing means getting paid to recommend someone else's product. When someone purchases a product that you recommend, you get a commission. You have no worries about order fulfillment, customer service, or inventory. You just get paid.

For example, take a quick look at this site: Lemony Snicket. You'll notice that the webmaster does not sell a product, she recommends products on other sites. For instance, Amazon.com. When someone buys a book from one of her links, she earns a commission from Amazon.

The advantages of affiliate marketing in addition to those mentioned above are:

It's almost always free to join an affiliate program.
> You can join as many as you want.
> You can recommend affiliate products that go along with your current business.

(For instance, if you sell Usborne books online, you could become an affiliate of allposters.com and sell posters related to your book titles.)

> You don't have to have a website
> You don't have to be a genius entrepreneur or anything...affiliate marketing doesn't mean you develop your own product. You just find good products, recommend them and get paid!

Sound good?
Here are some resources I personally recommend to help you do affiliate marketing profitably.

Want To Learn How To Be An Affiliate Marketing Mom? Sign up for this free affiliate marketing ecourse. Enter your name and email address below. Your first lesson will be in your inbox in a moment. I promise never to sell or give away your information!

Recommended affiliate marketing resources:

• Rosalind Gardner is probably the most well known affiliate marketer online. She produced an ebook teaching people exactly how she earns over $400,000 a year with affiliate marketing.
• Subscribe to our newsletter for more free affiliate marketing tips.  
• Affiliate Marketing Tips
• Affiliate Marketing Q & A With Alice Seba
• How to start an affiliate program of your own
• Affiliate Marketing Expensive?
  

These sites list hundreds of affiliate programs. You can search through by categories to see what interests you or your site visitors if you already have a website.

LinkShare
ClixGalore
Commission Junction
Leadhound
Clickbank.com
Shareasale.com
Amazon.com (Amazon commissions are tiny but convert well. Look for info on their associate program)

iDevDirect (for starting an affiliate program of your own)
Paydotcom- also for starting and managing your own affiliate program. Free to sign up!
WahmCart - autoresponder, shopping cart, ecommerce and affiliate management all in one, at a great price too.

Affiliate Marketing Coaching:

Mom Masterminds Business Mentoring -learn affiliate marketing from these money making Moms
Affiliate Marketing Sweetie - how to succeed in affiliate marketing by being a nice person. My favorite affiliate marketing success guide!

Affiliate Marketing Tools:

Easy Site Builder - build a website quickly and easily with no html knowledge to get started with affiliate marketing
Affiliates Alert - a program on your desktop that alerts you to new affiliate programs
XSitePro - total website development package that makes it easy to build multiple niche websites in record time.