The Insider Secret on Making Money Online With Affiliate Marketing Uncovered

In my last article I talked about the 5 proven strategies for making money working online and how to work out which one you should chose to pursue, taking into account your resources and personal strengths.

I promised I would share with you my own successes and failures in pursuing each of the 5 strategies. Of course it's important to understand how success is achieved, but most of the gurus in time have confirmed that they learnt more from making mistakes. It was in correcting the mistakes that they found success, so it follows that getting out there and taking action, any action, may not lead to immediate success but will almost certainly lead to a mistake or learning experience that will propel you forward to success if you persevere.

I'd just like to point out that these are my personal experiences and may not be the same for you. Thankfully there is usually more than one pathway that leads to success - you just need to find the best way to make money online for you.

Affiliate Marketing

This is where you basically get paid for promoting somebody else's product. It can be a book, service or goods, and you get part of the sale proceeds and part goes to the original retailer/writer. This really can be one of the best ways to make money online fast. The secret is research to find your target market with sufficient willing buyers for the right product. Then set up a simple one page website or review blog to tell people about the product - often give them some info for free. Then set up a Pay Per Click campaign to attract interested prospects to send along via a link to the sales page of the person promoting the product. Any sales are then linked back to you so you get your commission. No handling money, customer queries or stock.

As you can see, this is relatively simple and something that you can turn on or off and leave pretty much on autopilot once you have your adwords campaigns working well. There are of course other ways to attract traffic for free including article marketing, blogging, social bookmarking etc but pay per click allows you to turn on the traffic almost instantly - if you know what you are doing.

And here we have one of the two major issues with affiliate marketing. If you don't know what you are doing with pay per click then it can be very, very time consuming and very expensive to constantly monitor, test and tweak your campaigns. It is an amazing traffic tool but I personally found that whilst the basics are relatively easy to follow, to be successful at it is a really steep learning curve. It is also a very competitive arena and the methodology is constantly updating. For me I found that whilst I really wanted to master it as I love technology, it was just too time consuming and I did not have the luxury of time as I was on a mission to replace my income by finding the best way to make money online fast.

The potential way around this of course is to find someone who is an expert in pay per click and outsource the task to them. We won't go into that now but suffice to say that as with any service providers there are good and bad ones so always try to go by recommendation if you can. Elance is a good online site to find IT people you can source tasks to. Personally I found someone skilled I could trust and traded my skills and services with theirs to achieve win-win for us both.

The other issue with affiliate marketing of course is finding the right product that is going to make money online. Again this is a topic in its own right and is where I failed in not doing sufficient research on keywords and market share to ensure there was a sufficient pool of willing buyers out there to target.

Affiliate marketing is a superb strategy that works and the beauty of it is that it can be set up to be fully automated to make money online fast and hands free.

In future articles I will share my experiences of advertising, ecommerce, participation, and subscription.