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It’s everyone’s dream: work from home, make money online, quit your day job. It sounds too good to be true—almost like a scam—but it’s not. Affiliate marketing really does work, and the best part is anyone can do it.

With that said, affiliate marketing is not a get rich quick scheme, and it’s not for everyone. If you are unfamiliar with affiliate marketing, you may want to take some marketing courses online to learn more about the basics.

You’ll also have to put in some work generating ideas, building a website, and generating content for your website. As time goes on, you’ll also want to advertise your website, analyze your site metrics to optimize for your audience, and diversify your revenue sources.

Although it won’t cost you much to get started, you also won’t see a significant return for several months, if not years. It takes time to build the audience and internet footprint needed to generate traffic to your website.

Are you still interested? Good, because if you remain patient, affiliate marketing can not only generate a good supplemental income, it can become your primary source of income, and help you achieve your dream of being your own boss. It can all start with just a few marketing courses online at AffiliateMarketerTraining.com.

What Is Affiliate Marketing?

At its core, being an affiliate marketer is not too different from being a commission-based salesman. You place links on your websites to retailers or products, and when one of your readers makes a purchase through the link, the retailer pays you a commission. It really is as simple as that.

Like most things, the devil is in the details. There are now many affiliate networks out there that act as intermediaries between retailers and affiliates. In some cases, the retailers themselves run the affiliate networks. Signing up with these affiliate networks gives you access to hundreds or thousands of products, depending on your website’s niche. Some of the top ranked affiliate networks right now are

• Rakuten Affiliate Network – Rakuten is the parent of many e-commerce sites including Ebates, Kobo, and Rakuten.com (formerly Buy.com).
• Amazon Associates – Amazon.com runs its own affiliate network for the products it sells on its website.
• ShareASale – ShareASale is a rapidly growing affiliate network associates with a wide variety of merchants.
• Avangate – Avangate is one of the top affiliate networks for merchants offering digital downloads.
• eBay Partner Network – One of the original e-commerce sites still has a strong presence and offers a strong affiliate program.

Generating Website Traffic

The other part of the affiliate marketing equation is developing enough website traffic to generate a steady revenue stream. There are several methods you can employ to generate traffic to your website.

The first and most obvious method is to create quality content that naturally generates interest from readers in your niche. People will find their way to quality content. But the internet is a very large place, and even quality content can be get lost amidst the sheer volume of content on the internet.

Two traditional methods used to generate increased traffic are search engine optimization and pay-per-click advertising. Search engine optimization involves a variety of techniques designed to increase your website’s rankings in a search engine. Using keywords in both your content and metadata, as well as obtaining links to your website from other popular websites can positively affect your website’s rankings.

Pay-per-click advertising involves paying a search engine to display links to your website in the advertising banners in the search results. You pay the search engine for each time someone visits your website by clicking on the advertising link.

This is a quick way to generate traffic, but it does cost a significant amount of money upfront, and you need a certain percentage of your visitors to make a purchase to break even on advertising costs.

Learn More About Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing is an increasingly important part of modern commerce, but it is not taught in traditional marketing programs in schools. Whether you want to learn the basics of affiliate marketing, or want to delve deep into the advanced strategies, AffiliateMarketerTraining.com offers marketing courses online to teach you how to build a successful affiliate marketing program.

By taking our marketing courses online, you can learn how to live the dream by working from home, being your own boss, and with enough patience and hard work, quit your day job.