The idea of becoming a millionaire may make you uncomfortable or even unbelievable depending on your circumstances and your mindset at the moment. But just look around on the internet and you will find evidence of people becoming extremely wealthy from their internet businesses.

And a lot of them started from a very humble position if you care to read their autobiography. I mean some were so saddled with debt that they became bankrupt.

But the internet provided them the opportunity to repay their debt and to rebuild their lives to unbelievable levels of prosperity.

For a lot of these people one of the gateways to riches was through affiliate marketing which I discuss below.

What does it mean being an affiliate?

So what is affiliate marketing and what does it mean to become an affiliate? Well, if you imagine the people I referred to previously. They had no products or services of their own to sell to make money. So what they did was to agree to sell other people's goods and services for a commission.

And I don't mean that they went knocking on people's doors like the insurance salesmen in the stone ages. No, they conducted their business from their computer or laptops in the comfort of their own homes.

And the commissions they earned was as much as 50-70 percent or higher. In some cases they earned life-time commissions from a single sale.

This is a great way to make a living and it beats the 9-5 job hands down on every metric you may wish to test.

How much money can you make?

As I mentioned in the opening of this article your income varies according to the effort you put into it in terms of time spent and your knowledge of affiliate marketing.

Your return will be greater according to your knowledge than it will be according to the time you spend on it. So knowledge is the key to unlock the riches in affiliate marketing as it is with most business endeavour.

Therefore, your initial efforts should be channelled into learning as much as you can about affiliate marketing. However, don't spend all your time learning and not implementing the lessons you learn because no one will pay you just for your knowledge.

Can anyone become an affiliate?

Anyone can become an affiliate. And because there are so many affiliate programmes out there for you to join there is no fear of rejection. If you fail to get onto one programme you just apply to another. You will have more programmes you can join than you will be able to handle.

And you don't even have to have your own website to become an affiliate. You can promote an affiliate programme by various methods such as article marketing, Adwords, solo advertising etc, etc.

How do I start?

So how and where do you start? As I said before it is important to first learn about affiliate marketing which will answer these questions. There are various programmes that you can join including Commission Junction, Ebay, Amazon, Clickbank, to name but a few.

If you are launching your career in internet marketing and want to become an affiliate with a choice of digital products to sell then I recommend Clickbank would be a good place to start. And it's free to join.