If I were to ask you what is the easiest way to make great income online, what would you say? In my candid opinion, affiliate marketing is probably the easiest and quickest way to make money on the internet. Residual income affiliate programs can offer you a great way to earn money online on a consistent basis. There are many online merchants that offer residual income affiliate programs. All you have to do, is to find them.

Getting into affiliate marketing, and earning a good living from it, is easy if you know what to do. What you need to do first is to find out which online merchants are offering products and services whose affiliate programs appeal to you. Once you have located them, you need to sign up to join those affiliate programs. Most of them are free to join but some, which are usually better in the end, ask you to pay a fee to join.

Before you sign up to any affiliate programs, though, you must understand the difference between regular affiliate programs and residual income affiliate programs. Regular affiliate programs pay you a commission for one-time only when you manage to get a customer or referral for the affiliate product or service you are promoting. On the other hand, residual income affiliate programs are those where you will be paid a commission every week, or usually every month, when you manage to get a customer or referral for the affiliate product or service you are promoting. Obviously, the latter is much better for your long-term financial prosperity. So, when looking for affiliate programs to promote, try to choose those that will pay you residual or recurring commissions.

After selecting the affiliate programs you wish to promote comes the hard part...actually advertising or promoting your chosen affiliate programs to both the online and offline publics. There are several methods you can use to advertise your selected affiliate programs. One is by writing articles and submitting them to article directories like EzineArticles. Another method is by using Google AdWords. Another is advertising offline, such as placing classified adverts in newspapers and magazines. Yet another way is to use email marketing, sending your advert to the opt-in email addresses of persons who have shown some interest in the product or service you are promoting.

Whichever method or methods you want to use, one simple way is for you to construct a simple one-page review website where people who respond to your advertising will visit and read more about the product. Such a simple website is often called a Review Page. What you do is to write the good points about the product or service you are promoting. And, very importantly, you must provide a link which, when visitors click on, will take them straight to the website of the merchant whose product or service you are promoting. If the visitor buys the product or service, then you get a commission. If the affiliate program is one that offers residual commissions, then you'll get paid repeatedly.

When setting up a simple one-page review website for your affiliate program or programs, be careful that you do not place too many affiliate links on the review site. Doing so will confuse the visitors to your site, who might then simply leave the site. The ideal situation, in my opinion, is for you to find two or three affiliate programs in the same niche or category. Then you write a short review about each product or service, and place a link that can take the visitor to the merchant's website. Provide relevant information about each product or service, to enable your website visitor to make an informed choice. In many cases, the visitor will check out the two or three links, visit the merchants' websites, and buy from at least one of them, thereby earning you a commission.

One very important factor you should consider is the fact that it cost you money to attract people to visit your review page. Do you think it is fair on you to, potentially, lose these people for good? I don't think so. You see, when your visitors click on the links on your mini website to visit the merchants' websites, they may not buy the products or services being offered...so you gain nothing (i.e. no commissions) from them. And you have lost them forever!

Therefore, you should try to get the website addresses of the people who visit your review site. What you do is to place a squeeze page or opt-in form on your website and ask them to give you their email address in exchange for a free e-book, a newsletter, etc.

The trick is to contact these people in the near future with similar offers. You'll need an auto-responder for this. Gradually, you can grow your list to several thousand strong, and it can be an additional source of income when you offer more products and services to the people on the list. My advice is that you should read a lot more about this. Once you know how to do this, you can build separate lists in different niches, and make several thousands of dollars a year from them.

The factors mentioned above illustrate that YOU can make repeat, residual income online from affiliate marketing. If you are prepared to work hard, then you can soon reap great results from your efforts by way of more money coming into your pocket.