This is partly a continuation to my last post. Basically I spoke about the initial conceptual steps of making money online; finding that one idea that you’ll run with and follow through with until it succeeds.

Depending on your idea, you can probably use the help of an Affiliate Network.

Here’s a great definition of Affiliate Network defined by my  best-friend Wikipedia

An affiliate network acts as an intermediary between publishers (affiliates) and (merchant) affiliate programs. It allows publishers to find affiliate programs, which are suitable for their website and it helps websites offering affiliate programs reach its target audience.^[1]

For merchants, services can include providing tracking technology, reporting tools, payment processing, and access to a large base of publishers. For affiliates, services can include providing one-click application to new merchants, reporting tools, and payment aggregation.

If, let’s say, your idea was to make commisions off of selling televisions online, an Affiliate Network can help you tap into tons of merchants that provide many TV’s, each merchant giving you a percentage of the sale. Some merchants will not only give you a commission for one purchase, but they may also reward you, normally with a lower percentage, with a commission on all purchases that the user you referred makes in his/her lifetime, regardless if the rest of the purchases were made from your affiliate links or not. You plant the seed and watch it grow. Although not always the case, it’s a good idea to look for “Recurring Commissions/Sales”

Another great thing about Affiliate Networks is that they help you manage many merchants that you are affiliated with under one big view. So you are not only able to see the sales you made with one store, but all stores. Depending on the Affiliate Network you choose you’ll have a large range of statistics about your commissions, merchants and performance.

Our Affiliate Networks section has a few different networks listed. More will be added over time, along with tips, tricks and advice for using each specific network.

The alternative to an Affiliate Network is a single Affiliate Program offered directly by a merchant. If all you need to promote is the products of one merchant than that’s great, but I guarantee you that over some time you will be dealing with many affiliate programs and you’ll soon see that they become quite a handful to manage. It is inevitable though, even with Affiliate Networks, you may be forced to manage multiple Affiliate Programs because not all merchants join these networks. There are many great affilliate programs out there that have solid products that you won’t find in any affiliate network and they’re quite worth the management. We will be opening up a category listing Affiliate Programs, reviews on them, tips and strategies using them and much more soon.

Stay tuned and of course feedback is always welcome!

Alright, this post is for those fairly new to affiliate marketing. I think it’s almost everyone’s dream to work from home, not to serve clients, but to be able to work on their own projects, which in all hopes will create sustainable automatic income with little effort so that they can ENJOY life!

The good news is it is very possible to live this dream. The bad news… well… it won’t happen over night! More good news though, I will be doing my best to inform you and give you all the advice I can give in one helpful site.

So let’s get down to this situation; You want to live your dream, but you’re aware it won’t happen instantly and without effort and you’re prepared and psyched to get started. Your mind is racing with excitement, you may already have a slew of thoughts of what you want to do to make money online. What you want to do and what you DO are two different things. The fact is, there’s so many ways to make money online with affiliate marketing that it can be so daunting of a task to just choose one idea and run with it.

First things first, before I go on to giving you tips on how to choose that right idea that you so hope will bring you success, let me give you a good definition of what affiliate marketing is, as defined by wikipedia:

Affiliate marketing is an Internet-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.

Affiliate marketing is also the name of the industry where a number of different types of companies and individuals are performing this form of Internet marketing, including affiliate networks, affiliate management companies, and in-house affiliate managers, specialized third party vendors, and various types of affiliates/publishers who promote the products and services of their partners.

So basically with affiliate marketing YOU are the affiliate, the middle man between the customer and the seller, and as such you will be rewarded for promoting the sellers’ products and services to the end user. I’m saying promoting and not selling specifically because there are cases where you can get paid to promote. Such an example would be getting paid to have links on your website.

Back on track now, where do you start? There are many ways to make money onlne, but for this post I will focus on getting commission from sales as I believe it is one of the easiest ways to begin. Now that that’s settled, what exactly do you want to sell?

You can get commission from selling a slew of products and services. Here are some examples:

• Web Hosting, Web Services such as Online Image Storaging, Financial Reporting Tools, Contact Managers, etc…
• Selling of e-books, screencasts, get rich quick ideas, marketing tips etc… (yes people charge for the basic information I and many others hand out for free on the web)
• And of course the most popular, products. If you can feel and touch it chances are someone is selling it and willing to give you money to get people to buy it. This can range from skates, keys, tea, movie tickets, cd’s, movies to blow up dolls! It’s really that vast!

There’s so much to choose from but here are few pointers in making your decision:

• Choose something that you’ll like to work on; an industry that interests you. Don’t try to sell skates if you hate them!
• Choose something that has a good sized market
• Check the latest trends, what’s selling like hot cakes nowadays?
• Balance! If you love the products you’d like to sell and there’s a huge market for it and it’s still trendy, then heck go for it! Unfortunately that’s not always the case so I would suggest finding a good balance between the last 3 points.
• Get specific! Depending if there’s already alot of competition in what you are selling I would highly suggest you be as specific and niched as possible. For example, there are tons of sports stores out there, but a sports store can be split down to many sports such as Tennis, Hockey, Golf, etc… So why not focus on Tennis Products or Hockey Product, or even more specific such as focusing on selling the best hiking shoes, or hockey skates, etc… Doing this will help narrow your market down and will make marketing in the future a whole lot easier.
• Make sure you can even sell the product and get commissions. You need to make sure at least one affiliate program exists for the product you want to sell. For example if Canadian Stamps is your main interest, there is a pretty good possibility there aren’t any affiliate programs that will give you commission on selling stamps.

Those are the main things to take into consideration.

If you don’t want to sell a product, but would rather make money off of ads on your very own websites, the above tips will still work in making a decision in what industry your site will evolve around.

I may have missed a few points, but please do not hesitate to ask me a question in the comments section below.You may have different dilemmas or ideas that may not directly relate to my examples, but I assure you if it has anything to do with online products and services, even personal services, i can sure give you some sound advice!

Stay tuned for posts about affiliate programs and networks. There are tons to choose from, some better than others. I’ll be going through and reviewing as many as possible in the near future so keep an eye on this site.

Much appreciated!