With affiliate marketing you can promote other products and get paid for every lead or sale you refer to the advertiser. Affiliate marketing advertisers pay mostly a percentage for every sale that comes through you and sometimes even pay a fixed amount for a signup (lead). By promoting these products and services with a website or by email, you could quickly develop a passive income without having to handle any support.
Quick start
To get you quickly started with affiliate marketing just create an account at an affiliate network as a website/content publisher. When you have signed up you can check out what kind of advertisers are connected. Apply to an advertiser one which sells a funny or interesting product for a good price, get the special affiliate link which you need to use to refer people, convert it to a Bitly link and then send a funny email to all your friends that they should check it out and share it. And done. Hopefully somebody buys it and you will receive an X percent commission.
Most popular affiliate marketing networks
The following affiliate networks are the most popular and most used advertisor networks on the internet:
Make a website
The best way to promote products online is through your own website. You can put all the product deep links on your own site and even collect email addresses with a newsletter form on your website. Try to keep your website in a niche market, so if you are going to promote airplane tickets, make sure your website is also showing this.
If you need help making a website, read our blog about making a website.
Grow your email list
After you have spammed all your friends already a thousand times, you need to make sure you spam a thousand people more every week. Start creating interesting newsletters, collect email addresses and start sending out your newsletter/emails to more people.
Special deals
When you start having more impact and you make noticable profits on every email, then you can make special deals with advertisers through the affiliate networks. Ask them that you could do special newsletters about products of their choosing for a higher percentage commission. Or give out an exclusive discount (code) for all subscribers.
Conclusion
Making money through affiliate marketing is one of the simplest thing to do, because you can just sign up at an affiliate network and start promoting products. But for the big money you need some big selling skills and become handy in your marketing techniques.