Part 1: Affiliate Marketer Tips and Tricks For BIGGER Check$ (a small collection of advice, learned from experience)

Wikipedia defines Affiliate Marketing as:

"A web-based marketing practice in which a business rewards one or more affiliates for each visitor or customer brought about by the affiliate's marketing efforts."

Sounds weird, huh?

To put it simply:

Bob has a product he wants lots of people to buy. Because if lots of people buy his product he knows he will make lots of money. But he has no real way of reaching enough people. So he starts selling his product through an affiliate program. This is where you come in. You join Bob's affiliate program, and YOU promote his product for him (along with lots of other people just like you), and for every sale you generate you get a cut of the profit.

So you get to profit from selling a product that somebody else created.

And that is a simple explanation of what affiliate marketing is, and how you make money.

P.S. you can sell almost everything as an affiliate. So choose what you want to promote, and make a profit doing it.

Because affiliate marketing is something even Paris Hilton could understand, you won't be surprised to learn that there are SO MANY different types of people making money online selling other people's products.

Housewives are earning more part-time online than their husbands earn full time in their jobs.

Students are earning more part time than their lecturers earn full time.

But every affiliate marketer has one thing in common. And it is this:

When they first started out, they didn't have a clue either!

And now thousands (millions?) of people worldwide make enough money online to pay their mortgage, all from affiliate marketing.

So as we all had to start learning somewhere, this is where YOU can start.

This is your "getting started" affiliate marketing checklist. A really short one, that will take you about an hour to set up. And won't cost you a penny.

I will also post some links at the bottom to further learning and resources.

Here are the basics:

1. An idea for what niche (topic) you want to profit from
2. An account at Clickbank.com.
3. An account at Squidoo.com.

I shall explain each of these 3 steps now...

When you're thinking about what you want to promote, you really can think of almost anything.

But what you're really looking for as you first begin your affiliate marketing career is something you know a bit about. A topic you feel comfortable with.

So get thinking. What books do you like to read? What are your hobbies? What's your job?

Your affiliate marketing career really is all about doing what you want to do. So don't ever feel constrained to a particular topic (even if focus is a virtue in affiliate marketing).

Nearly any topic can be your 'niche', provided there is a market of people willing to spend money on it. Just do your niche research, and start brainstorming.

Examples of some niches that could be profitable range from dog training to cooking recipes, and everything in between.

Get thinking, and use your ideas to explore the clickbank marketplace in step 2 :)

ClickBank.com is a website that makes affiliate marketing online really really easy. They have made it as easy as possible for you to get started in less than an hour. It is also free.

ClickBank is an affiliate network. If a man called Bob wanted affiliates to sell his product, he could have put it up on Clickbank for affiliate marketers like you to see.

Here is a play by play of what would happen between you and clickbank:

You go to ClickBank looking for products about Ferret Care to promote. You go to the 'marketplace', search for ferret care, up pop the results, you choose which one you want to promote, you click 'hoplink', put your clickbank username in the box, and clickbank gives you your link.

And that is the link you use to promote the ferret care book.

So if anyone buys the ferret care book through your link, you get 51% of the sale price. So that would make you $17.57 profit.

If you want to see it working right now, click the words 'ferret care' above and you will see that you can buy the book online. If you clicked that link above and bought the book, I would make $17.57.

Cool or what?!

Squidoo is the website you are looking at right now.

With Squidoo you can make as many free webpages as you like. And they are found by lots of people. So as a beginner affiliate marketer, this is a great place to start your promotions.

First, create your free Squidoo account, then create your first lens (page).

Squidoo is unique because you build a good looking page without having to know any special code like you normally would when building a webpage. So for a beginner, it is perfect.

Once you have joined Squidoo (by clicking here), press play below. It is a video made by Tiffany Dow which guides you through the process of setting up your first lens. Experiment, play around, and have some FUN!

Squidoo is free, you can make as many lenses (pages) as you like, and you can make money by putting your clickbank links in the right places on your lens.

You now have in your brain an easy system to start earning money online, starting right now.

And everything I have just laid out is also free.

So explore the links, and get started tonight!

Social Marketing on Squidoo

"If you haven't yet heard of Web 2.0 Tactics, then you're already behind on what is shaping up to be the next major evolution of how you reach out and grab the attention of your customers.

In a nutshell, Web 2.0 is centered around socialization on the 'net, but as you probably already know, the biggest social giant site to date (MySpace), bans the practice of marketing, leaving entrepreneurs scrambling to play hide and seek with their customers without the risk of getting banned."

Click here to read the book now.