Making money online is easier than people make it out to be. If you’ve been searching for ways to make money online, then you’ve heard the phrase “If it’s so easy, why isn’t everyone doing it?” Although true, but this mentality is applicable to all professions. Just like any profession, being an Internet Marketer requires a certain mindset. The nice part about Internet Marketing is that you don’t have to attend school for a half a decade and spend your first tenure repaying your loans.

Before I start to make affiliate marketing sound like some type of “get rich quick” scheme or some other type of gimmick, let me start off by stating that affiliate marketing requires dedication among other things.

What is required to start?

As for requirements, you will need a reliable Internet connection, a computer, typically Windows is recommended due to software that has been created over the years to help get your campaigns up and running. For most third party Ad networks, you will need a valid phone number and mailing address. You will also need to provide your tax ID to get paid by most larger networks.

It may sound scary, giving out your social security number over the Web, especially with all the scams you hear about. That is why I suggest always researching any networks thoroughly whom you plan to work with before signing up and providing them with any of your personal information.

You can find reviews of networks just by searching for them on Google, Bing, Internet marketing forums, or even Answer sites such as Yahoo Answers or Quora. I will also include feedback at the end of this post on some networks I’m currently using. I’ve worked with dozens of networks in the past and would be happy to answer any questions about a specific network.

When choosing a network, you’ll want to find ones which cater to your monetization needs…

• Are you a blogger looking to earn some side cash promoting products?
• Do you have some type of “premium content” (industry news, software, an ebook, a Web App, etc)?
• Are you looking to promote specific products, or just make money to cover your hosting on your site.

There is an endless number of examples that work well for affiliate / Internet marketing. Knowing what you want to do is the first step in picking a network, it will determine whether you need to a PPC, CPM, or CPA focused network.

What’s PPC, CPM, and CPA?

• PPC – Pay Per Click, you earn money when your users click on an ad (the most popular network offering this is Google’s Adsense program)
• CPM – Cost Per Mille – you earn for Ad impressions ($1 CPM = $1 per 1,000 impressions)
• CPA – Cost Per Action, you earn when your user completes an offer, buys a product, sign up for a service, etc

Integration is usually pretty straight forward. Most networks have a user friendly Admin panel with great documentation on how to get started. Remember, they want you to make money, because it makes them money! Most networks even offer on-going support via an Affiliate Manager who is typically available by email, instant messenger, and sometimes by phone.

Some of you may be wondering if it’s really worth your time, how much can you really make without dedicating a lot of time and effort into learning, practicing, trying, retrying, and finally succeeding. If you fall into this group, keep reading! You may be surprised to find out that your time and effort really can pay off!

Well how much can I actually make?

Let’s say you are promoting a product that pays you $20 on a sale. Imagine only making one sale per day, that’s about $600 a month. Obviously it’s depending on making a sale every single day, which may not occur, but really the “goal” is to make multiple sales per day. How about 2 or 5, or even 10 sales per day? What if you were promoting 25 different products and could successfully sell an average of one a day… now we’re talking some serious cash!

There is definitely a learning curve to overcome, and through trial and error you will find methods that are scalable and require minimum (if any) daily/weekly/monthly maintenance. When I focus on Internet / Affiliate marketing, I look for low cost items which sell themselves.

Once you’ve developed a system that works, repeat it with new products. Continue doing so until you have 10..15..50..100 micro-campaigns setup. There are many marketers who make thousands of dollars per day online using this mentality.

The amount of design and programming skills required are next to none – most of it involves networking and marketing. Pick your products correctly and you’ll be able to promote your new products to your old customers (this is generally useful if you are promoting several products in the same niche.)

Networks I currently use regularly

Affiliate Gateways offers a great widget creation tool that lets you get your gateway up and rolling in less than 5 minutes! Use this to lock premium content or offer a virtual currency on a game or website you run. So far Affiliate Gateways has been an excellent company to work with because of their good communication and their ability to give advice and suggestions on how to increase your leads. The more money you make, the more money they will ultimately make. It’s a win win situation.

Matomy Money have excellent support and your Affiliate Manager is easily reachable on email throughout the day, even outside of “regular business hours” – they provide you with a very easy to implement offer wall that’s a simple copy/paste job.

Context Web provides a CPM based payout system. You earn cash on impressions alone, you do not have to rely on your users clicking an ad to get paid. Context Web doesn’t get me rich, but I can casually place an Ad or 2 off to the side, out of my viewer’s way (as to not to disrupt the user experience on my websites), and still earn enough money to cover a few bills.

A few of my “Internet associates” use Context Web to monetize their large community forum (1000s of active users daily) and earn anywhere from $10 to $20 a day. It may not seem like much, but CPM-based ads are really just icing on the cake. Most people who use Context Web are either doing it just to cover the costs of their domain names + hosting, or have a primary source of income (promoting third party products and services on a commission based earning system or something similar).

Amazon Associates – is owned and operated by non-other than Amazon.com (of course!). Although Amazon only offers a 4% commission on a sale, you can definitely lock in sales easier with Amazon Associates than most other companies, due to the branding and trust that Amazon has created for itself over the years.

Promoting physical items such as TVs, DVDs, video games, and books can be very profitable  – even at 4%. Most successful Amazon affiliates create microsites aimed at a niche, where they provide information and imagery about a product, customer reviewers, and a link to purchase it on Amazon. 

A nice feature with Amazon Associates is the fact that they provide you with a collection of tools and widgets to put on your site, including the ability to import customer reviews, ratings, and products images directly on to your website, which makes locking in leads a heck of a lot easier.

Hopefully you’ve found the information in this post useful. If you are an experienced Marketer, I’d like to hear what recommendations or tips you’d suggest to people new to the industry, and more-so, I’d like to know your thoughts on the best practice for choosing a third party advertisement network.

Affiliate Marketing for Beginners was written by Dan Bochichio is a freelance Internet Specialist with over a decade of experience in web design. I specialize in taking new businesses from a web-zero to a web-hero by creating attractive sites which meet today's standards on the Web.

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