Get started with Affiliate Marketing

This article will explain why affiliate marketing is profitable, explain what different things are and give you an introduction of how you can get started with affiliate.
Why affiliate marketing is profitable:

There are many different ways that you can make money online, but Affiliate marketing is probably the best one. Especially since you will get paid over and over and over again AFTER you are done with the primal work. The only thing left to do is updating your content sometimes. It´s not that bad to get paid while you are sleeping or while you are creating a new website for your next project. It´s not bad to get paid every month for something you did a couple of years ago.

How to get started:

Before you get started you have to know the basics of the affiliate marketing, I will explain the main things. For you who doesn´t know what an affiliate is, it´s when you get commissions for promoting a product/service for a company. You can do that in different ways, by writing about the products and creating links to them in your website or blog is the most common ways. Then there is social marketing article marketing, e-mail marketing and others.

What is?

Niches: A niche is the category of the product you are promoting. There are many different niches to choose from. Some niches are very competitive and some are more easy to success with.
Affiliate Networks & Programs An affiliate network is a network where different companies can get there products available for affiliate to promote. Examples of affiliate networks are clickbank, Commission Juntion, Google and others

An affiliate program is the program a company has on their website, instead of on an affiliate network.
Commissions: There are different kinds of commissions. Some are better than others. It is good for you to know how you are paid for having the products on you site. 
• Paid Per Click (PPC) - You get paid for every time a visitor clicks on your links.

• Paid per impression (PPI) - affiliates are paid only for the merchant’s ad appearances on the affiliate's site.

• Paid Per Mille (PPM) - You get paid for every visitor that is viewing the ad and they don´t need to click on it.

• Paid Per Sale (PPS) - You get paid for every sale. It can be counted in amounts or percentage.

• Paid per lead (PPL)- You get paid for leads instead of sales.

• EPC - Stands for earnings per hundred clicks.

SEO:
SEO stands for search engine optimization and this decides how well you are ranked in search engines as Google or Yahoo. For you to be as visible as possible online this is the most important thing to do for getting traffic.  

When you are getting started:

1. Make sure you understand how it all works, if you don´t – read more about it. It´s important that you know what you are doing, not having a rush and to do it properly to become a successful affiliate.
2. Decide which niche you want. Make your first niche an easy one. The best thing is if you choose your first niche about something you are interested of and know a little about.
3. Make a neat, simple high quality home page and write about the niche you chose. Have a unique content of the website, put up the text so it becomes easy to read, headings, subheadings, bold text and so on. Make sure it is spelled correctly and as grammatically correct as possible. This is also important for SEO. Search engines want the sites to be of a high quality.
4. Publish the website, choose a good domain name (something.com, something.net or something.org is the best ones, especially for SEO.) Choose a web hosting company that has been around for long (then you know they are here to stay, and not to shut down after they have made some money, as several of them do). There are other advantages to choosing a good web host, such that the server is better. GoDaddy is one of the better. The reason for you to publish website before you apply for membership of the affiliate network is that most of them require you to provide your website address so they can review it first.
5. Find the right products you want to promote. You do that by signing up to some affiliate networks. If you know which company you want to advertise but don´t know if they're with in a network, it's easiest to go to their website, look at the bottom of the page and look for: Affiliate or referral, if you do not see this, you can send an email to the company and ask if they have an affiliate program or referral system.
6. Apply the links on your website when you get them.
7. If you want an extra income from your website, Google Adsens can be a good choice. Google Adsens is a paid per click advertisement, which means you will get paid for everyone clicking on the links in their ads.
8. Start marketing your site so you get traffic and sign up for Google Analytics so you can track the traffic. Do that by connecting the website to your social media accounts. Writing and publish articles (by linking to your website in the Articles allows you to also get back links that are important for traffic to the website and also for SEO). Post comments with your link in forums and blogs.
9. Now you are an affiliate. Work at your website and of getting traffic to it until there is nothing more to do. Then you can start on site number 2. After making a few sites and earning some ​​money from them investment is a good idea to increase revenues even more. My suggestion is to go into elance.com and hire professionals to build more websites for you (or just writing the content). Eventually, you have very good income, month after month, year after year.