People wanting to get started earning great money online would do well to take a close look at affiliate marketing. Marketing products and services as an affiliate is a simple proposition. First, you need to find a popular product with high demand and a decent payout and sign up as an affiliate with the creator of the product. Information products are perfect as most are available as digital downloads so they require no handling by the author or the affiliate.?

When you sign up as an affiliate you'll either create or be assigned a tag that will identify you. This identifier will be placed into a link that you will promote in various ways ? more on promotion in a bit. The link identifies you as the referring affiliate. If a shopper eventually buys a product after clicking on your link, you receive a commission.

What makes affiliate marketing so attractive is that you don't have to deal directly with customers; the originator of the product takes care of that. Another excellent benefit to being an affiliate is the commissions. Many sellers offer commissions of up to 75 percent of the sale price of their products. You'll find plenty of popular, high-demand products selling at ClickBank.com and it's free to join as an affiliate.

For example, if you decide to promote a product selling for $30 (a popular price point for many digital products) and the commission is 75 percent, you'll earn $22.50 for your efforts. Not bad. Of course, the trick is to position yourself so you can repeat the process again and again. There are several key elements necessary to getting repeat business.

The first item to consider is finding a product with brisk sales. ClickBank and other affiliate programs allows members to search for products in several ways. One of those is by popularity and sales rank. Many people feel that the competition in promoting popular products is too steep. This is a mistake as there is enough demand for virtually any smart affiliate marketer to make serious money.?Again, popular products produce sales.

The next item to consider is how you're going to get the word out on the product you've chosen to promote. Ideally, you'd locate a hot selling item that you had some interest and knowledge in. Then you might create a mini site and offer a product review for the item. Or you might concentrate on a niche were there are several similar products paying nice commissions and offer a page that compares features and benefits of each. Of course, your affiliate link is embedded in each of the product links. This is just one of many ways to promote products.

Once you decide on a marketing strategy you're going to need to drive targeted traffic to your landing page. One excellent method of doing so is with article marketing. The beauty of article marketing is you can receive tons of free traffic by simply offering good information. Of course, the amount of information you can deliver in an article is limited so you'll want to offer a link to your site where the reader can learn more. It's all part of a process that works well if you create a plan and stick to it.

Okay, I've touched on the very basic elements in affiliate marketing. Those are:

Find a hot selling product with a decent commission and sign up as an affiliate.

A simple way to promote the product is by offering informative product reviews on a mini site. Your affiliate link will be available on these pages.

A simple way to drive targeted traffic to your site is to write articles with great content about your niche and product and submit them to the popular directories.

I've presented a simple overview of affiliate marketing. Of course, there are many ways to promote products and drive traffic to your offers. To learn more about affiliate marketing visit: http://www.affiliatemiracles.com