If you've educated yourself enough with the information available on the internet, then you should have realized by now that your pursuit of a career in the corporate ladder is futile at best. Basically, the idea is to start as an intern, then a regular employee, then move up to a supervisory and/or managerial position and finally up to the executive levels of the corporate business that you're in. Personally, I have nothing against this kind of aspiration as I too once dreamt of such things myself; however, the toll it takes to get to EXACTLY where you want to be could at least take 30 years; 20 if you're exceptionally good at it.

The problem is we all can't be exceptional and aside from the fierce competition in play, you'll also have to face the insurmountable amount of bureaucracy, racism, favoritism, gender inequalities, and other negative things to literally move up the ladder. The trade-off is not an ideal payoff even from an optimistically assessed standpoint. Therefore I would advise that you start your own business and the cheapest way to do it is by building an affiliate marketing blog or website.

Defining Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing is an easy income-generating business method where you take the role of the promoter and help the manufacturers and sellers connect with the end consumers. It should be clear that whether you take a passive or active role in this business, you are by no means the originator or creator of the products/services you promote. But you will get a small portion of the sales as compensation nevertheless. It's basically a 3-way relationship between you, the seller and the customer.

What Affiliate Marketing is NOT

If you get an unsolicited email inviting you to join an affiliate network and it's asking for an upfront payment, then you definitely have to scrutinize them and find out whether or not they're scam or legit. Go to the Better Business Bureau (BBB) and find out about the company, if you can't find any, then go to affiliate marketing forums and discussion boards. They would know a lot about these scam sites as news spreads fast in social media and forums.

Saving Time when learning

The truth is you can learn basic affiliate marketing skills from top ranking websites and blogs. In fact, they can teach you useful information along with specialized books or programs that other people have created for selling, however is up to you. We live in a modern era where information is everywhere but if you find a program that will cut to the chase and save you time to become an affiliate is also a better way if you can afford it.

Saving money when learning

An organic way to do this would be creating a website blog about affiliate marketing programs or even your own experience in the process and the only thing that will really cost you money is web hosting, which is around $70 - $100 a year for your affiliate marketing blog if you decide to go this route. A few other expenses may include a unique website/blog logo (optional), your electric bill; hire a blog writer (optional because you can write the blogs yourself), and probably paid advertising to promote your website or blog (optional).

You also can just copy and paste your affiliate link in social media and promote the product/s and reach out to people just like you and me.

Types of Affiliate Marketing

What's interesting about affiliate marketing is that you can earn commissions in more ways than most people think. Allow me to explain the 3 different types of affiliate marketing and how you can earn through them.

1. Unattached Affiliate Marketing - This type of affiliate marketing will not require too much work from you, you don't even have to setup an affiliate marketing blog like those for Amazon Affiliate Programs. This is more like a PPC marketing (pay-per-click) where you just show affiliate ads on sites that allow this kind of marketing like Facebook or YouTube and then get a commission for each click through that web users make on the ads.

2. Related Affiliate Marketing - This type of marketing is where you are required to have some level of involvement and this is where you create an affiliate marketing blog or website and always show affiliate links on almost all of your website/blog pages. You also earn a commission for each time a web user clicks through the affiliate links.

3. Involved Affiliate Marketing - This kind of marketing may require you to actually use the products/services before you write a review about them and you should be able to write a more comprehensive and honest review.

You can choose from these 3 types of affiliate marketing methods, but most affiliate marketing programs uses the Type 2 affiliate marketing, which has some level of involvement and online presence from your end.

Putting Everything Together

Now that you have an idea of what affiliate marketing is all about and what its common pitfalls are, you are ready to start your journey to financial freedom and a wealthy lifestyle! Affiliate marketing is just like any other type of business and you'll have to plan a strategy that works best for you before you begin, so I will give you the basic strategy of how to become an affiliate marketer, signing up for affiliate programs, setting up your affiliate marketing blog and all the other important details about it.

Steps to become an affiliate marketer:

1. Decide what niche topic you want to use for your blog or website. It's better to write reviews or general information about products/services that you're passionate about because you will write better articles for them compared to those that you don't like. For instance, if you're mad about crochet or kids bicycles, then that is the niche you should pick for your blog! Affiliate programs have a huge inventory of items for sale and they do include crochets and bicycles for a fact. If you're more of the business-minded individual and you think you can write just about on anything, then by all means pick the niche that's most profitable among the lot.

2. Create your website and purchase a cheap but reliable web hosting. You don't need a web designer to build a website or a blog. You can use WordPress, Weebly, Web.com, Blogger, eHost and others to do that. Using their user-friendly "click & drag" features you can create your blog/website in 5 - 10 minutes!

3. Learn basic SEO and use it on your blog or website. Search engine optimization or SEO is a very good marketing strategy to allow your website to be known throughout the entire internet or at least the majority of it. If your website is easier to find in search engines, then it is more convenient for people to visit it, and more visitors means more money for you.

4. Learn social media marketing to extend your presence online. In reality social media marketing or SMM is also a part of the grand scheme of SEO and without it, your SEO campaign would not be as successful as you'd expect it to be. There are literally billions of people hanging around the web on a daily basis and much of them are in social media sites. It would be a logical choice to get visitors there for your website and increase your income potential.

5. Learn about paid advertising and consider it deeply on whether you need to use it or not. Paid ads help because they target the right kind of people who are already looking for products that you promote. Meaning there is a good chance that they will buy. Wouldn't you want them to buy products through your affiliate links? I would!

6. Start filling up your website with content. In case you plan to write boring and unimpressive blogs and articles, then I'd advise you to no longer continue in your pursuit of creating an affiliate marketing blog, because I promise you people will not want to read your blogs or visit your site. Write articles that will impress you first. This will let you know whether or not people will want to read about what you have to say. If you can find an extremely critical person to judge your writing, then that would be better as it will help you greatly improve on your writing style. Reader engagement is absolute in affiliate marketing. It will determine your income capacity, so do your best in writing content for your site above all else.

How you earn in affiliate marketing:

• The manufacturer/seller signs a partnership deal with the affiliate network or program and in turn, when you sign up with the affiliate network as an affiliate, the partner affiliate network will give you a percentage share on every item you helped sold.

• You'll need to embed or display affiliate links on your website or affiliate marketing blog, you can post it in your Instagram profile, in a Facebook group about the products you're promoting. The purpose of these links is to guide your traffic to the seller's webpage so that they can make purchases of the items they like.

• The percentage commission on each sale range from 1% - 90%. Commonly sites like Amazon range from 1% to like 10% sometimes even more but this is how you generate income. For example, a web user swings by your blog about coffee machines and he/she read your blog review or informative article. The reader was impressed by your blog and decided to click on the affiliate link, then make a purchase of 1 coffee machine worth $350. If the affiliate network allowed 7% of that amount to be your commission, therefore your income for that sale alone will be $24.50.

• You may notice that $24.50 is a small amount and not enough to convince you to become an affiliate; however, if you were able to bring 10,000 visitors to your blog in the span of 30 days and about 4,382 people bought coffee machines for themselves, then your income for that particular month should be $107,359! If you're able to bring as many visitors to your website on a regular basis, then you can bet that your monthly income should be around these numbers. Now you can appreciate the value that SEO and SMM can do for your affiliate marketing business. Do not get discouraged because of the amount of traffic you may need to bring to make substantial profits doing this because this is the power of the internet, you can reach out to millions of customers, not just 10k. Just on Instagram alone, there are profiles that are being followed by 4 million people alone for just one person! so as you can see the possibilities are endless when finding the masses and driving traffic to have your affiliate link to be seen and clicked. This is the true power of affiliate marketing.

Amazon's Affiliate Program;

That being said, many marketers look at Amazon's affiliate marketing program as one of the best. It's possibly the most trustworthy network, and has a large inventory of products to promote and get your commissions.

This offers you a possibility to promote nearly any product in the market, or pick a niche with low competition and you could be earning commissions in less than a week.

If you decide to join Amazon's affiliate program, you could write an informative article on your homepage or blog and include your primary keywords and some secondary keywords throughout the article. You could have the purchasing guidebook, and write your brief opinion of each product you are marketing. Remember that the greater the cost of the product you market, the greater the commission.

Mistakes To Avoid

Now you are aware of the process to becoming a great affiliate marketer with your own website or blog, I want you to also keep in mind some of the most common errors brand new affiliate marketers make.

“Not Providing Any Good Value”

Though we've got covered this item, it's certainly important to remind you if you try to be extreme with your words to pressure the visitors to click on your affiliate link, it's likely being deemed as junk or spam by many websites.

Rather, it's suggested to help these individuals select the right solution determined by their particular needs. This method makes these individuals feel more taken care of, which in return will check out the products you are marketing based on the value in your article.

Product Research

Numerous online marketers will not do proper product research to gain, knowledge on the product they are promoting, instead they are only worried about the amount of commission they will earn per sale regardless whether it will provide value to their visitors. This is an oversight, and will at some point lead to your readers not relying on anything you tell them.

“Tracking Your Links”

When you begin advertising on Amazon or even some other affiliate network, it will be beneficial to track your affiliate links. It can help you find out which website is doing more sales and then you can make your other websites have the same kind of setup.

Final Thoughts;

I would like to say that despite the fact that affiliate marketing can be very fulfilling, it has a steep learning curve to it. You might face disappointment on numerous occasions prior to making a nice amount of money online.

That said, affiliate marketing it's suited simply for individuals who are likely to deal with failures and take them not as a defeat but as something to improve and do better, you will come back with a positive attitude and willing to learn from the mistakes. Remember with the proper research and attitude you can do this and not necessarily have to struggle like someone starting out from scratch.

How Much can you Make?

The straight answer to this question is... there is NO LIMIT to how much you can earn.

At this point I will let you use your imagination as to how much you can earn; or is it how hard you desire to earn. It's entirely up to you. I am confident that this article should help you get started in creating your own affiliate marketing blog or simply post it in social media to help others just like you and earn not just money, but your freedom from the everyday worries of life like the 9-5 everyday job Once you start earning over enough to quite your 9 to 5 job, then you can buy more time to spend it with the people that matter to you most - your family and close friends. I wish you all the best and don't forget to drop a comment below and tell me how affiliate marketing has changed your life like it has changed mine.