With an online business you have an extremely wide marketing area at your convenience. You do not have to create your own products or services in order to get started making money online. The merchants give you the rights to market their products for free in the vast majority of cases.

Affiliate programs have become one of the most popular methods for making money online today. Simply because the products or services have already been created for you. All you need to do is promote, or advertise them in order to earn sales commissions.

In a typical affiliate marketing set up the merchant provides his affiliates with the tools and resources required to sell his product or service. The affiliates use these resources, such as banners, graphics, or text advertising to post on their websites.

They can also be sent out in emails to create sales of the product or service that they are promoting. The affiliate then gets a percentage of the total price of the product when a sale is made, which is usually 25% to 75% of the total price of the product.

Signing up as an affiliate marketer is easy. Just find a company that offers an affiliate program for their product or service and fill in their online form with your personal details.

Most affiliate programs are free to join and most offer valuable instructions to help you get started in selling their products. The merchant stands to gain from your success so it is to their benefit to help you succeed with your affiliate marketing business.

You can also use an alternative method and join what is called an affiliate network. It is a business that hosts a variety of affiliate programs for online merchants at one web site location.

Most affiliate networks are free and easy to join and provide a full range of products for you to promote. Some of the most popular affiliate networks are: Commission Junction, Clickbank, Linkshare, Cash Engines, and VIP Profits.

Affiliate marketing is one of the most rewarding careers that anyone could have. Someone can literally start on a shoestring budget and work into a consistent and very decent salary within a short period of time.

Many people make thousands of dollars each month just selling products from the Clickbank network. Clickbank is actually a great place to start as an affiliate marketer because they have thousands of products and an excellent support system.

Becoming a successful affiliate will not be all that easy because there is a lot of competition online. But, it is important to have a good content based web site. You can then imbed links to the products that you are marketing. The products you promote should be relevant to the content on your site which will take some initial planning.

You can start off with just one site and then build another site and do this over and over again. Before long you would have created a multitude of sites. They would promote different products or services. You could link them to one another and have your own network of websites. This could turn out to be extremely profitable for you over a period of time.