Many people who want to earn money online think that affiliate marketing is very easy and that you can start to earn money without doing anything. Yes, it’s true that affiliate marking is one of the easiest ways to make money online. However, some effort is required before you can start to see your affiliate cheques rolling in!

New online entrepreneurs who get into affiliate marketing with some misconceptions are easily discouraged. This article outlines the realities and facts about affiliate marketing.

§    It is necessary for you to invest some money if you really want to succeed and earn big commissions. You will need to have your own website, an auto responder on your website and also track the performance of your adverts. All these items will require you to spend some money. In order to generate many sales and hence earn huge commission checks, you must drive huge volumes of traffic to your website. Depending one the advertising campaign you will want to use, you will need to pay some money for advertising.
§    You will need to apply some hard work and effort to build your affiliate marketing business. This is particularly important during the early stages of starting your business when you will need to write articles or other reports that you can use to promote your affiliate links. Blogging, participating in forums and writing affiliate product reviews are some of the things you will need to do. Depending on your budget, there are several marketing-related steps you will need to take to advertise your website. If you have money you can outsource some of the services you need. If you have a limited budget, it means you have to do most of the marketing activities yourself.
§    You will need to keep on learning. Internet marketing is very dynamic, and there are various ways of promoting your website which you can use. This means that you must keep on learning to keep yourself in line with the most effective ways for marketing online. You can interact with other affiliate marketers or you can have a very successful marketer as your mentor.
§    You need to have confidence and faith in yourself. This will help you to keep on working on your business until you become successful and earn huge commissions.

These are some of the key facts about affiliate marketing. You must fully understand this before you decide to start an affiliate marketing business.

Online affiliate marketing began as a natural outgrowth of the popularity of “linking” to other sites. To put it simply, online affiliate marketing is a time tested strategy for making money online. It it is a network of online partners who refer business to your website.

It does not matter whether you have a website that sells a product or a website that has nothing to sell. But by adding online affiliate programs, you can not only add value to your website, but also maximize potential revenue.

Affiliate Programs, they say are the ideal way to make your website profitable.

Online affiliate programs began in the mid-1990,s and are currently a popular way to earn money online. In fact, research shows that affiliate marketing is the most cost-effective way to generate online sales. The concept of revenue sharing paying commission for referred business, predates affiliate marketing and the Internet. The translation of the revenue share principles to mainstream e-commerce happened almost four years after the origination of the World Wide Web in November 1994.

The simplest way is to just introduce your visitors to the business opportunities, products and services that they need, and, “make money online” based on commissions from these sales. In fact, online affiliate marketing is a great work from home business available to anyone with a computer and a desire to run their own affiliate business.

However, there is a catch to “affiliate-marketing”. That is to say over 80% of affiliates never get a check over $100, the 15% get the occasional check and it is the remaining 5% who really get monthly checks of any real size from affiliate programs.

To get started in affiliate marketing, you must know the fundamentals. For which you’re going to need an “affiliate marketing guide” to teach you the basics. Once you’ve studied the basics and grasped the “idea”, I don’t think there is any looking back.

Now, there are dozens of books advertised on various websites, making claims of massive earnings that can be achieved easily. Most of these guides are resell rights of other peoples’ ideas which are marketed under the marketers’ name. Now, there will be a time you may be doing the same thing what they are doing now. This is a natural phase most people go through and isn’t that what affiliate marketing is all about!

I am not saying those books are bad. But there are better ones out there. There is The Affiliate Marketers Handbook and the Super Affiliate Handbook. Recently, another book that is drawing much attention, purely because of the number of sales it has generated in such a short time is the Rich Jerk. The name justifies his character. But his ideas seem to work and the book seems to be on top of the charts. Now what more can you say, but to commend on his niche idea.

You can also look for more such good product(s) and which are in high demand from the ClickBank Mall. Just type “affiliate marketing” or affilate marketing guides and you would get instant access to loads to such products. Provide them your credit card details and voila! you can instantly download the book of your choice.

Although most aaffiliate marketing books are good in their own way, what boils down is to how you implement the knowhow you gained from it PRACTICALLY. Although this may take up some some time, it is to be noted that no books nor any marketing courses can come anywhere close to pure practical experience. Some good affiliate guides are given below in the resources section.

Learning to market on the internet as an affiliate is only step one. If you’re serious about online affiliate marketing, then you have to plan and set up a basic affiliate campaign. This is a start to finish campaign to getting started in affiliate marketing. It explains keyword research, finding profitable partners and markets, information on affiliate networks, guides and resources to making money online.

There is relatively an easy way to make a parallel income during the early stages of your online afiliate marketing home business. It can also help you avoid the common mistakes most of us make during that period. I am quoting this from personal experience.

Try and get hold of a FREE Web Page, containing a few successful affiliate programs. You can use it and learn how to run an affiliate campaign, at the same time learning the ropes of affiliate marketing. If you market this well, the chances are you will make money. Your main and only job would be to advertise your FREE website, by submitting it to search engines, e-mail it to friends, colleagues and others. Within a month or so, you shall see some income trickling in.

You also get familiar with search engine marketing, affiliate networks and affiliate directories, and other areas of online affiliate marketing.

Some use the term “digital marketing”, some “online marketing”, and still others — particularly ourselves — “inbound marketing.”

What do you make of these terms? What does inbound marketing mean to you?

We’re just about to launch into conference season and one of our stops will be the MarketingProfs Digital Marketing Mixer in Scottsdale, AZ on October 22-23, 2008. We’re big fans of MarketingProfs and we’re looking forward to meeting up with fellow marketers to discuss new strategies and best practices in email, search, and social media marketing.

Want to join us? They’ve been kind enough to give us one free pass (valued at a whopping $1,295) to join us in sunny Arizona for the event.

So here’s what we’d like to do: Tell us what you make of all these marketing terms, in particular, Inbound Marketing. Post a comment on this blog post and we’ll pick a winner of the free ticket to the MarketingProfs Digital Marketing Mixer. (Sorry, if you already purchased a ticket, you can’t win the free pass.) The best explanations will be illustrated with clear examples.

For BONUS POINTS, write a blog post (feel free to use different kinds of media, including video, images, or anything else) with your answer to: “What is Inbound Marketing?”, link to this blog post, and leave a note in the comments with a link to your full post.

We’ll pick a winner one week from today, October 8, 2008, and post the results here.

For those of you who miss out on the free pass, you can use the discount code ESPNA08 to get $200 off the price of admission, bringing it down to $1095 for the two-day event. And when you get there, be sure to stop by and say hi! We’ll also likely be blogging / tweeting / video recording portions of the event.

Now, tell us: What does Inbound Marketing mean to you?