Working from home is something that appeals to many people. To be able to fall out of bed and stumble a few paces to your office sounds pretty cool. Starting out as an Affiliate Marketer is probably one of the best options. For a start, the overheads for setting up, and ongoing, are incredibly low. You don’t have any stock, so you have no storage space concerns. With just a PC and Internet connection, you can easily earn extra cash, and even contemplate making a full-time income from home.

Affiliate marketing is now a well-established and popular business. At a very basic level, you can begin promoting a product, and receive commission payments of between 50% to 75%. Find a decent product that sells for around $ 60, and you can be earning well over $ 30 each time a customer buys through you. You can achieve this even without having your own website. Just a single sale a day soon adds up. Start promoting multiple products, and you can see that this could be well worth the effort.

Not surprisingly, you can’t expect to earn extra cash without a little work first. You’ll need to have identified those markets that people are buying in and, after that, the products that sell well. Most affiliates start by promoting downloadable information products. You could take a look at ClickBank and spend some time reviewing items in their Marketplace. Even products that appear to be less popular can actually be a winner – they may be new or just undiscovered!

Customers won’t just magically buy your product. You have to use some clever tools to point them where you want them to go. One of the best of these is known as ‘article marketing’. You simply write a short piece (400-550 words works well) on your chosen subject. This should be quality content, so if your chosen product is not a subject you know lots about, you’ll need to do some research first, so that your reader gets something out of it.

Believe me, article marketing works – and what’s best is it doesn’t cost a penny. You send them to article directories, and before long your articles start to appear when people search online, in your particular niche. Again, you’ll need to apply some Internet marketing tricks to make this happen. Most notably, this entails identifying the words people enter into their search engines when looking for your type of product. These are known as keywords, and are a crucial part of ongoing success. The Google Keyword Tool is a good starting place for this.

The article itself should give helpful information relating to your product, without actually mentioning the product itself. This can seem quite strange at first, but once you know the rules you soon get used to it. There is a ‘Resource Box’ at the end of each article. This is where you can legitimately mention your product, and add links that will direct your prospects to your affiliate site. Once they get there, if they like what they see, they may purchase, and you’ll begin to earn extra cash.