Affiliate marketing can truly set you free. I honestly believe that if ANYONE puts in some time, effort and perseverance they will see results and they can quit their day job.

So where do you start? Firstly you need to know exactly what affiliate marketing is. It is when you are a middle man between a merchant and a customer. A prospect may come across your website where you are subtly promoting a product. You send the customer to the merchant website through an affiliate link and if the customer buys a product, you receive a commission.

You can also get paid per click or per lead, it depends on the deal you have with the merchant. There are companies which gather many merchants into one place for affiliate to choose from. Commission Junction and Shareasale are two of the biggest affiliate management networks and are a great place for beginners to start.

To be successful affiliate marketing you need to be able to plan, build and market your website.

Planning is the most important aspect of the whole process as you need to work out WHAT you are going to promote and HOW you will promote it.

After that comes building the site. This can be outsourced if you are not yet comfortable with building sites. Alternatively you can simple use a site like Blogger.com which generates a site for you which you can easily update.

Marketing your site is an ongoing process and probably the most difficult. You will need to learn how to increase website traffic. You need to consider search engine optimization, pay per click, keywords, articles, autoresponders, article submission etc etc. The list goes on and it’s a good idea to outsource some of your web marketing tasks.

Although this might sound like hard work, don’t be afraid to get stuck into it. You’d be surprised how just 30 minutes per day of work builds up over time and leads you to owning a well established affiliate website which is hopefully earning you some nice extra income.