Affiliate Marketing

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Time Commitment: Medium
Money Potential: Medium
Risk: Low
Guaranteed

Affiliate marketing means getting paid to direct traffic to online merchants.  Actually accomplishing this, I am learning, is quite complex. 

For example, this website, Blogger.com, allows its bloggers to earn money by directing traffic to websites like Amazon.  As you can tell, throughout my articles are various images that are links to Amazon products.  Like this one:















If you click these images, I get rewarded.  Just so you know I have no affiliation with any of the Amazon images that I paste in my blog posts (other than the rewards I get if you click them.) 

The three major affiliate programs I am enrolled with are Google AdSense, Amazon, and Yahoo!

Google and Amazon affiliate programs can be added directly from the designer section of blogger but Yahoo!'s affiliate program must be copied and pasted from their website.

That is the basics of it.  You encourage, trick, or elicit people to click on links that earn you money. There are many ways and theories on how to do this and as I gain more knowledge in this area I will update this page.

In the meantime, here is a spreadsheet that shows my current affiliate marketing earnings:
https://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=txQksJBgalYdkdJluaFZJsA&hl=en#gid=0

Action: Start a blog on Blogger that will draw an audience.  Use Blogger's built in affiliate programs to earn money every time your reader's click on your ad's. 

Next, go to Yahoo.com and do a search on Yahoo! Affiliate Program.  Once you have provided all the relevant information and registered with the program, find an advertiser that you think will fit your blog.  Once you have chosen, there are a few ways to add it to your blog or website.  The way that I have added the Yahoo! Affiliate Program on this blog is through copying the html code from the Commission Junction (Yahoo!'s 3rd party affiliate website) from the advertisements that I like and pasting the code in the gadgets of the designer section of this blog. 

You can see the Yahoo! advertisement that I added in the section at the bottom of this webpage.
Thanks and check back soon!

Mr. Poor