Make Extra Money from Home as an Affiliate Marketer

How to make money online is always a hot subject with search engines. There's a million get rich quick schemes on the internet that leave many people feeling frustrated, and down. While, it may seem like the only people making a buck are the no good scammers there are a good few who make a living in this business!

Affiliate marketing is one of the most effective forms of advertising simply for its success rate for both parties. When a sale is made both parties win. The advertiser gets paid, and so do you. A multitude of business have made their name by creating an army of representatives to sell their products. Take for example Mary Kay Cosmetics who took this plan to the max. They are world famous for recruiting amateur sales people to move their product.

If you told somebody your business plan was to have an army of housewives and single mothers with zero sales experience promote your product people would look at you like you were retarded. But you know what? It worked; on a massive level, and it works for millions of other businesses world wide too!

If cosmetics is not your cup of tea there are plenty of other affiliate programs out there for you to join. Comission Junction, AdBrite, Adsense, and Cafe Press to name a few. Insurance companies are notorious for recruiting door to door representatives too.

Keep in mind that if you plan to make this a full time job it's going to be hard work. It's not like a normal job where in you get a regular salary every week. If your 'employer' does not make money; then neither do you. Your sales are a direct reflection of your paycheck; but those who are good at it can really shine.

Commission junction is one of the (if not the) largest affiliate program managers in the world. They have such high value clients as Ebay, Hewett Packard, Discover, and thousands more companies. You can see my partner links from them to the right. I'm fond of this type of advertising - offering helpful links that don't interfere with the user experience.

Right now, I'm also experimenting with another affiliate marketing campaign from a company called Spreadshirt. They offer customized merchandise that you can sell on your website. I've made a few sales with them, and even ordered a product of my own. You can either upload your own designs or just sell pre-made images or create sayings. Plain text tees are the cheapest to print, and are pretty popular.

You can link to your store or with some fandangling seamlessly integrated it into your existing site with iframes. While frames are not the best you can use tables to lay out information that would be relevant key words to the product such as subject, colors, sizes, organics, ect. Here's an example of using iframes to integrate the store, but using tables to give some content to the page. This site has the products, but it needs more content, and advertising to get visitors.

If you prefer to work locally you could even offer customization services to baseball teams, businesses, clubs, bowling teams, ect. just figure out what the cost per shirt would be - take their order, place the order with spreadshirt, and have the product delievered to either their address or you, and give it to them in person.

The only problem I have with Spreadshirt is that their shipping prices are high for one item I think - especially for international. I recently sold a shirt to a buyer from Australia, and I had to charge them $12.99 in shipping fees when the shirt only cost them $14! Your customers *can* purchase additional merchandise for no shipping cost up to $50 of product though.