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how to make money with affiliate program

What Is Affiliate Marketing?

Affiliate marketing is when an online retailer pays you a commission for traffic or sales generated from your referrals.

It’s essentially classic advertising in a less intrusive way. Rather than promoting a product on your website with visual advertisements, like this:

You simply embed the product link in your content, like this:

In the image above, the affiliate partner is Bluehost, a company that offers self-hosting services for websites.

So does that mean you can create a website, toss in a bunch of affiliate links, and watch the affiliate commissions roll in? Not quite, but we’ll get to that.

For now, you simply need to know the basics with how affiliate marketing works:

You recommend a product or service to your followers through your website, blog, or email list.
Your followers purchase the product or service using your affiliate link.
You get paid a commission for the sales made using your affiliate link.

Let’s break down this process into more detail to make sure you know exactly how to make a successful affiliate marketing strategy.

But first, let’s quickly look at 2 things you need before starting out with affiliate marketing.

What You Need to Start Affiliate Marketing

There are 2 things you need to get started with affiliate marketing:

Create a website or blog in your niche
Choose affiliate products to promote

Let’s look at each of these in a bit more detail:

1. Create a Website or Blog for Your Niche

To make money with affiliate marketing, the first thing you need is a website.

When it comes to building your website, you have tons of options. But we highly recommend using WordPress.

With WordPress, anyone can quickly build a professional-looking website in minutes.

Plies, WordPress has more tools to help their sites perform at a higher level than other website builders. That means more functionality across your site and a better user experience (UX) for your visitors.

4 easy online way to make money

. Set Up an Online Course

Do you have a skill that you want to share? International Living suggests setting up an online course with written tutorials, PDF downloads and videos. For instance, Rebecca Groskruetz used her talent for furniture painting to create a site where members can go at their own pace. When she soft-launched the business, she sold 33 programs at $127 each. After doing a bigger launch later the same year, she sold 216 programs at $149 each. Her total sales the first year: $36,375. Some online resources for teaching courses include TakeLessons, Udemy and Skillshare.

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2. Tutor

Another way to take advantage of your skills: Become an online tutor. The website Cambly helps you get paid to chat with people from around the world. While you’re doing the tutoring, the site automatically tracks the time you spend, paying $10.20 an hour. While that might not sound like a lot, consider the fact that you can set your own hours, work as little or as much as you want—and if you’re living abroad, $10.20 an hour can go a long way.

Becoming a travel agent is a great way to earn money and travel.

Becoming a travel agent is a great way to earn[+]GETTY

3. Become a Travel Agent

Do you love to share advice on travel? Put your expertise to work and become a travel advisor. You can sign up for courses through a place like The Travel Institute. Or you can pay a fee to a company like Cruise Planners, which recruits and trains advisors to work remotely not only in planning cruises but in all kinds of travel—on land and at sea. The company was started in 1994 by a woman named Michelle Fee, who didn’t take a paycheck for the first three years so that she could invest back into the business. Now in its 25th year, Cruise Planners is the nation’s largest home-based travel agent franchise with more than 2,500 franchisees.

4. Be a Juror

Here’s a case where you won’t dread jury duty. The site eJury has revolutionized the way that lawyers prepare for trial by creating online mock juries and focus groups that help attorneys determine prepare case. You’ll get paid for participating.

What’s on my desk

I spend more and more time at my desk these days, doing everything from preparing the family taxes to working on this blog. Because of this, my workspace is constantly changing. Holding the clutter at bay is challenging, so I prefer to keep nearby only a few quality items that serve multiple purposes over a stockpile of things I might never need.

My daily planner

My planner is one of those simple ring binder journals you can pick up from any stationery supplies store. White paper. No ruled lines to cage my venturesome handwriting and doodling. I’m an obsessive note-taker and fill pages to the margins with to do lists, rough sketches, and ideas for blog posts. I usually go through one planner every month.

Staying Organized

Who me? Organized? My husband might tell you otherwise, but I do find it hard to keep track of our weekly schedule. You know: school, swimming, grocery shopping, tidying up, paying bills, remembering appointments and so on. Fortunately, in our house we all pitch in. No one person does everything. But we do have a little secret that helps our day run more smoothly.

Travel Tips

There are millions of tips out there on how to fly with kids, what to bring on camping vacations, which suitcase to buy, where to go and what to see in just about every corner on Earth. What I want to share today is something a little different – something that we discovered last summer during a family hike in the Appalachians.