Affiliate marketing is very popular online, and a lot of people have been talking about it all over the web for a while now. If you haven't heard about it yet, then this post is for you. To put it simply, affiliate marketing is a referral system. You earn money by promoting other people’s products or services for a referral commission. Every time you drive traffic (visitors), leads (email opt-ins), or sales to their website, you earn a commission as your reward.

Businesses have been using similar referral strategies offline for years, well before the internet became popular. Here’s an example: let's say that you move into an apartment and the apartment manager says, “Refer someone to our apartment, and we'll give you $100 when they sign a lease.” This is a typical referral program that brick-and-mortar (offline) businesses would use. Another way that they would use affiliate marketing is by giving people a coupon code to promote on flyers, newspapers, radio, TV, and other offline sources; then anytime someone would buy with their code, they would get a commission. Online businesses saw the potential to do the same but on a much larger scale using the power of the internet. This type of referral program was adapted for the internet, where businesses invite people to become affiliates, drive traffic, leads, or sales to their website, and earn commissions as a reward. And Boom, this is how online affiliate marketing was born!

Today, affiliate marketing is mostly done online since that is where most people are active. Now it is immensely popular around the globe, and many businesses in any niche have affiliate programs. Just go to a website that has the products or services that you want to promote and see if they have an affiliate program. It is usually located at the bottom of the page. Look for words like "affiliate" or "partner with us."

One of the reasons that affiliate marketing is so popular, is because you don't own, create, or store any of the products or services that you promote. Your only job is to promote other people's products and services. Some companies will even pay you just to get people to view their website (pay-per-click) or
get subscribers to their email newsletter (pay-per-lead). With these companies, you don't even need to get sales to get commissions. But of course if you do get sales, then that is even more commissions for you. You can even get recurring commissions; let's say that some you refer bought a monthly or yearly subscription, then you would get a commission monthly or yearly until they cancel! Pretty awesome, right? Another reason why people like affiliate marketing is that you don't have to deal with order fulfillment or customer service. If there is a problem with the product or service, then that is a problem that the product owner has to deal with, not you. But of course it wouldn't be a good idea to promote products or services that have a bad reputation. That can effect your reputation, and people won't trust what you're promoting. You don't want to be known as someone who promotes defective junk.

With affiliate marketing, there is also no cap on your earnings. Some sales jobs have caps on how much you can earn, but not with affiliate marketing! The SKY is the limit! You also won't have to worry about commuting to work, if you don't want to. You can work anywhere you want as long as you have a computer and internet. You can work at home, in a cafe/restaurant, at the park, while camping, on a vacation, or in your office. With mobile wifi, the options are endless. Once you have your marketing system set up to bring in traffic to your offers, you can keep repeating the process to create multiple streams of income. Which will drastically reduce the amount of time that you would need to work. Helping to create time, location, and financial freedom.

There are also many affiliate networks; they create and manage affiliate programs for other businesses. They attract businesses that want to have an affiliate program but don’t want to do it by themselves. These affiliate networks are like the middlemen between the sellers and affiliates. These are immensely popular! A few popular ones are called Warrior Plus, Commission Junction, Clickbank, and JVZoo. There are others, but I will leave that to your own research. When deciding which affiliate products and services you want to promote, this is where you will have to do your own research to find what interests you. The more affiliate products and services you promote, the more opportunities you have to make money.