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You hear it everywhere. Affiliate marketing. “I can make you earn thousands of dollars a minute!” and all that stuff. Yet what exactly is affiliate marketing and can it work in real life for me?

If you meet a friend on the street and say “Hey, I just had the best candy bar the other day from our local gas station, you really should try it.” That friend then goes to the station and buys that candy bar, then in effect you have become an affiliate marketer. That is it. Forget all the hype and the outrages promises and the complexity that is promoted in order for you to buy somebody’s book on affiliating. Affiliating and affiliate marketing is simply you promoting other peoples products on your website or blog and then getting a commission when a visitor to the merchants site makes a purchase.

So all you need is a website and an idea of what you want to promote. Remember you are not selling the product, you are promoting it. In other words let the merchant do all the hard work and the sales pitch. You just need to get your visitors to their website. Also if you try to hard sell on your site and then they get the same when they visit the product site, you could easily loose buyers. Simply make it friendly and promote the product and let the merchant do the selling.

So let us say that you have a website that you can use for affiliate marketing. You then have two options. Do you sell one product or many? Well with one product you are putting all your promoting efforts into a single project. You can use articles and testimonials and any other tools that the merchant may give you. This is easier in that your entire focus is on this one product or service and you can really push it out there. On the other hand having many products may seem like more work yet you are giving yourself multiple opportunities for income and a little extra reassurance in case one product fall flat or the company falls flat.

So you can see that the two options mentioned above will give you either a themed site based on a product or a multi layer site showcasing many products or services. If you want to try it for yourself then maybe create two sites and see what works for you. The key here is what works for you. Do your own testing and create your own model for success based upon what you know works and not based on another affiliates sales pitch. Of course research and learn from others but personally I am sick and tired of seeing that endless stream of “millionaire” affiliates trying to convince me that their way is the only way and that they have all the secrets.

Actually you know what. I am going to reveal to you, the reader, the great secret of affiliate marketing and it won’t cost you a penny. Ready?

1. Build a website full of interesting content.
2. Choose a product or products that you would like to promote, but not sell, that’s the merchants job.
3. Bring in traffic through linking, search engine directories, forums and anything else you can think of.

That is it. If you have a content rich website with other good quality websites linking to you and you make yourself known on forums or social network sites and your website is search engine friendly and, more importantly, visitor friendly then you will start to get traffic. A great tool is Google Analytics which can report the traffic to your website and even from where the traffic originated. This is a must have tool for any webmaster.

So if you are involved in affiliate marketing or would like to try it out then first follow these simple steps before you waste any more money on “I can make your rich in 20 seconds or less” books.

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