Affilate marketing

The business of affiliate marketing has become very popular and with good reason. It comes very nearly to the ideal or "perfect" business. You usually have no need for employees or overhead or carry any physical inventory. Additionally you don't ever have to deal with customers. Handling customer issues is the job of the merchant you are promoting. It is truly a business where you are your own boss. For those who haven't heard the term before affiliate marketing is basically where you promote someone elses product or services and recieve commissions when you refer someone who makes a purchase. Commissions are usually a percentage of the sale. Some programs will pay affiliates for leads instead of sales. There are some affiliate marketing techniques that are free and some that require a investment of money. Affiliate marketing is in my opinion the best way to make money online. It is also an evolving business which means there are always new ways to advertise and new opportunities that open up.
The first thing you need to do if you want to be an affiliate marketer is to find a affiliate program that you want to promote. There are many individual merchants that offer affiliate programs. Unless the program is a well established site such as amazon I recommend instead signing up with an affiliate network. The largest two networks are commission junction and clickbank. I like promoting clickbank products myself but that is just a preference. Clickbank only has affiliate merchants that sell products that can be delivered digitally such as ebooks. They have over 10,000 merchants to choose from to promote. The other big network commission junction has a wide variety of merchants. Some very well known and prominent merchants are a part of commission junctions network. There are many other affiliate networks such as linkshare, affiliate fuel, commissionexchange and too many others to mention.