Why?

The answer is very simple, you sell other people’s products for a commission, and you can get started for free if you wanted to. It’s a business that can be set up in a matter of a few hours and you have very little responsibility. You don’t have to worry about product fulfillment, customer services, or any of the other headaches that comes with selling online.

So How Does it Work

It’s a very simple process. The first thing you have to do is sign up for an affiliate program. That’s very easy to do and is generally free. The most popular and reliable affiliate program on the net is Clickbank.

Clickbank helps digital product creators sell their products online, things like e-books and software. Clickbank handles all the transactions between the customer and the product creator making it very easy for people to sell their stuff online.

Clickbank also has an affiliate program built in to their services, that is free for anyone to join where you can sell these products yourself and get a commission for each sale you make.

This is done thorough what is called an affiliate link. An affiliate link is a unique link that is generated by the affiliate system that is used to track affiliate sales. This is generally done through a cookie that is generate on the merchants page when the affiliate link is clicked and is used to track which affiliate referred the sale.

It sounds more complicated then it is, but all you need to know is that when someone clicks your affiliate link and buys something you get a commission for referring the sale.

The best part about Clickbank products is that the commissions you can get for each sale you make is very generous and usually falls between 50 and 75 percent of the selling price of the product. Items on click bank typically sell for $47 dollars and up so that means at worst you are making about $23 per sale, which is not bad at all.

Now Clickbank is not the only affiliate program out there, there are thousands, many online merchants have there own affiliate programs as well. All you have to do is search Google for “product name” and affiliate and you can find programs for almost any type of product.

Other major affiliate programs are:

• Commission Junction – Deals primarily with large merchants and consists of physical and down loadable products. The biggest drawback about CJ is that there is an approval process that you must go through before you can sell any of their products in their network and the commission rate is typically lower because the profit margins are much lower. The best part about CJ is that they are a large affiliate network with thousands of products to choose from allowing you to find almost any thing you are looking to sell and they have been in business for a long time and always pay out your commissions on time.
• PayDotCom.com – Is very much like clickbank and deals in digital down loadable products meaning their commission rates are pretty high and they have been around for awhile, meaning they have a large affiliate network with plenty of products to choose from.

I am going to put together an affiliate program directory soon so you can have a central place for all the major affiliate networks out there.

That’s pretty much affiliate marketing in a nut shell. I have overly simplified for purposes of making sure you under stand the very basics of the process I am going to go in to much more detail in future articles.