The Affiliate Marketing world can seem Uber complex, especially to someone that has never dabbled in it before.
I was one of those people a few months ago, I’d never messed with any sort of an Affiliate Marketing system before but it all intrigued me so much that I’ve kinda dove in head first.

Question: What is Affiliate Marketing?

Simple Answer: Being the middleman, helping people find a product or service that they have an interest in buying…and because you assist in making the purchase (linking the customer to the seller or the sellers goods from a website), you get a percentage of the sale.
More Simply Put: “You get a piece of what people are already buying, because you have an easy website for them to find the products they’re looking for!” That’s it.

It’s a very simple concept and it’s much more beautiful and effective than traditional advertising…why is this? With traditional advertising you pay a company to put your ad, brand, special, discount and/or product in front of people’s eye balls…but these advertisers can NEVER guarantee how many people will see it, or how many of them will actually act on it to buy your product or service. Affiliate Marketing is an advertising system structured more like a high commission sales job; The advertisers get no money upfront (no salary), they only make money when they make a sale for the company…100% commission. This is a beautiful system if you do a good job at promoting other peoples products or services…this is a shitty job if you suck at promoting other peoples stuff…the good thing about it, there’s a system to it!

[Side Note: Think about being a business in the USA and how awesome it would be if you only payed advertisers when they ACTUALLY sell something for you...NO MORE expensive newspaper ads, where their 'advertising strategy' is shooting a shotgun in the air and hoping to hit a bird...that's what I'm talking about! That's Affiliate Marketing!]

The main reasons that I’m falling in love with the Affiliate concept, is because:

1. It’s so easy (using the internet and the right online tools) to build a website that gets visits on a monthly basis and eventually leads to sales.
2. Hundreds of thousands of companies out there are looking to sell something and you just have to find a company that you think is honest, has a good product, and a good reward for you helping them with the sale.
3. You can start small! (Amazon Associates is a great place to start…for free)

You may be thinking “Ok Mister, if it’s soo easy show me the proof!” … Fine, I will.
Take a look the following website that I  just put together less than a month and a half ago: http://www.refurbishedkindle.net. This website’s sole purpose is to link people to the products they want to buy…in this case, ‘refurbished Kindles and their accessories’…I don’t own the Kindles, I don’t have inventory of the accessories, I just link to the actual products on Amazon.com; and if someone buys that product or anything else on Amazon.com within 24 hours of clicking on my link, I will get a percentage of the sale as a reward for sending the potential customer to Amazon.com. This is great for me and great for Amazon!

Over this last month I’ve made $125.74…doing nothing. (check out the photo below)

Let’s clarify what it took to get to the “doing nothing” stage…

• I had to set up my Amazon Associates account (one time, then I can use it forever)
• I had to buy the domain name ‘refurbishedkindle.net‘ ($9.99/year) and then set it up with a free wordpress.org site, on a website storage space (aka. hosting account, for $72/year) = a Total of $81.99/year or less than $7/month.
• I had to choose a ‘theme’ (look and feel for the website…these can be free or purchased) and ‘activate it’ (this is the beauty of wordpress…changing the look & feel of a website takes all of 3 minutes).
• I had to tell the website what products I want to show up on this site…(only products from amazon.com initially)…and set it to auto-publish (automatically add new products from amazon, every product also automatically includes my amazon associates ID, which is what tells Amazon that I sent the person to their site and that’s what gives me a percentage of every sale).
• I do a couple of SEO related things (Search Engine Optimization) to help search engines find my website (this is pretty automated any more…with some free online tools)
• That’s It!
• I check back once every two-three weeks to make sure things are running smoothly.

I’m not saying that someone can (or should) quite their job & jump into this whole ‘Affiliate thing’, making THOUSANDS of dollars in their first couple of weeks or anything like that…I’m just saying that it’s like anything else in life, if you dedicate 5-10 hours a week to it as a side thing, you can make hundreds of dollars in extra income in about a month or two…in a really simple way. If you invest 40+ hours a week to it, you will make more money…go figure! [Main rule to remember: Don't sell something that people aren't buying! It's a giant waste of time!]

I’ve decided to spend more time with this affiliate stuff over the next few months, and who knows…maybe I’ll create a side business that gives people the exact instructions and support they need to learn about how all of this stuff works. I’d love for this affiliate stuff to become my full time job, that just sounds great!

I think the hardest part about anything new in life, is the initial learning curve!…do you think it would be a good idea if we put our entire system of  ’how to make affiliate marketing simple’ into video tutorials?

This is really exciting to me, and I hope to post about more affiliate info as I become more knowledgable…remember, I’ve just been doing this a month or two, I’m a baby in the affiliate world.
Thank you for reading this post and I hope that you have an Awesome Day!  (please let me know if you have any questions)
~Chais Meyer