It is a bit of cliche to say that you can make money online with affiliate marketing, but you can. But the question is: ‘Will you?’

That is not meant unkindly, but to make money this way you need to be determined to do so, and to follow a plan. Then you need to find the products or services that will help you do it.

Are you determined enough or desperate enough?

Let’s start with the beginning. How determined are you? Or how desperate are you? If it just seems a good way of getting extra cash for a holiday or something, chances are you won’t stick to a program. If you’ve lost your job, and want to be independent of jobs, bosses and getting fired, your attitude will be different. Also, if you are broke.

If you really want to make money online with affiliate marketing, the first job is to get a piece of paper and write on it why you want to do this. Then write down your goal three years down the road. Then, work backwards, putting down what you need to be earning at the end of the the second year, the end of the first year, and in six months time.

Then work back till you know what you need to do this month. Don’t expect to earn anything in the first month, as there is too much ground work to be done, such as finding out what affiliate marketing is, how you do it, and what you need to be able to do it successfully.

What must I do today to make this work?

At this stage you will not know what you need to do in detail, but you should end up with: ‘What must I do today to make this work?’ Maybe you only have one hour today, so what is the one thing that must be done? It could be to brainstorm what markets you will enter as an affiliate. These need to be markets where there is a lot going on, plenty of products, plenty of buyer. But not much competition, which means it will be a small niche in that market.

That’s the start. One way of doing it would be to go to amazon and look up the latest non-fiction books in the best sellers category to see what they are about. This is a good way of finding a market. Another is to go into town and look at the magazine racks. If there are plenty of magazines on one subject, that’s a market. Note how each one targets a niche in that market.

After that you will want to find some products that really fit into that market. Then, you will be looking at keywords and key phrases to see how to promote these products.

By this time you will need to learn about affiliate marketing. There are plenty of programs and e-books out there, but start out studying some free reports, which will help you see which way to go. But each day remember to say: ‘What must I do today to make this work’?

For free reports and information about the best affiliate marketing tools and programs go to jrhmarketing.wordpress.com, John’s blog.

People sometimes get confused between internet marketing and affiliate marketing. They are not the same thing. You want to make sure you don’t make your affiliate business internet marketing. It is true that when you work as an affiliate, you do market on the internet, but you need to market in a specific way which is not the same as internet marketing.

It is true, though, that a good internet marketer has no difficulty in becoming a good affiliate marketer and vice versa. When you operate as an internet marketer, you set up a website and market it directly to the public. You will also builds a list of customers and your own products.

You are not marketing your own products

With affiliate marketing, you are not marketing your own products, and you need a website only to send people to the merchant’s site. But you need to send the surfer in the right frame of mind. These days you must have a website, whereas until recently it was possible to get away without one. However, that website can be very simple and needs no more than ten pages. Five pages will do if they are all focused on a small niche.

You can use various techniques to drive traffic to your website, from Google Adwords, articles, posting on forums, building a list and so on. You just want to find people who are interested in the type of product you are marketing, or better still are actually looking to buy the product or service.

Do not sell the product on your site

So far so good, and up to this point there is no real difference between your affiliate business and internet marketing. This is where you are on a different tack as an affiliate. You do NOT want to try to sell the product on your site, but the internet marketer does. If you try the hard-sell approach, you will turn off some surfers. Others will be all psyched up on your site, and will not want to read the sales letter on the merchant’s site. So they are likely to click away, which is the last thing they want. You want to pre-sell the product, which is more a case of pre-qualifying the visitor.

Now, if you are marketing a solution to an urgent problem, like an anti-virus tool, you would just provide a link directly to the merchant. The chances are they are desperate and need a solution now!

On the other hand, if it is a product like a dog training manual or car accessories, you just want them to go to the merchant’s site thinking that want to buy it, but not totally convinced. Leave the selling to the merchant. This is the big difference between an affiliate business and internet marketing. Remember: Pre-sell, don’t sell.

For FREE reports and the latest reviews of affiliate marketing products and services go to www.reallyusefulmarketing.com - which is run by John Hartley.

Many people start an online home business because it promises to be low cost or even free. While this is true to a large extent, we very soon get bombarded with emails or advertising that asks us to pay for something, whether it’s advertising, a marketing tool or just upgrading our account. If the purse-strings are a tight, and let’s face it, most of us started this business because we’re short of money, this can be disencouraging to say the least.

What can happen at this point is that you begin to believe that the only way to make your business successful is to throw money at it. If you haven’t got any to throw you might think about giving up at this stage. Alternatively, it’s very easy to start spending money you can’t afford and quickly get into debt.
So, how do you build a business without spending huge amounts of money? Is there such a thing as free affiliate marketing?

Advertising, especially Pay-Per-Click and other paid advertising, such as solo ads, can work out to be very expensive if you want big returns. For many of us, spending money this way is just not an option. We must come up with alternative solutions for low cost internet marketing.

So, before you start splashing out or giving up, let me show you a few steps that will get your business going without breaking the bank.

Step 1 Set a Budget
Work out how much money you can afford on a month by month basis and stick to this. Set yourself a budget and make a commitment not to go over it. Once you have done this, you will look at every opportunity that is presented to you more carefully and you will choose more wisely.

Step 2 Get a website
If you only have enough money to buy one thing then use it to set up your own website. If you are serious about marketing on the internet, this is essential.
There are plenty of low cost hosting companies on the internet. Do some research and choose the one that’s right for you. Or choose an affiliate program that gives you your own website that you can edit and change.

Step 3 Get trained
Most good affiliate marketing programs will give you free marketing training. I recommend that focus on two or three methods of marketing to start with, and keep to the free ones. You will come across many methods that cost money, but you do not have to use these at first. Many people build successful businesses using free affiliate marketing techniques, particularly the ones I suggest below. Learn how to do these and do them daily.

Step 4 Learn about Keywords and SEO
There are many free e-books that will teach you how to use keywords to optimize your website so that you can start getting it ranked on the search engines. If you have a website, it is essential that you do this in order to get targeted traffic.

Step 5 Start a Blog and write articles
If you’ve never done this kind of thing before, it can sound difficult but it is one of the best and most effective ways of getting traffic to your website. Don’t worry, there is a lot of help and advice out there to get you started, even if English is not your strong point! Find a book or mini-course on article writing for the internet. Some ezines will also give you lots of advice on writing your own articles.

Step 6 Use Forums
One of the best things I have discovered about this business is the amount of really friendly and helpful people there are to be found in network marketing forums. Many affiliate programs have their own forum, and I strongly recommend that you use these. If you have any questions or problems (and who doesn’t?) these are the best places to find the answers and get encouragement and support. Furthermore, the more you post in forums (with a signature link to your site), the more backlinks you get to your website which is vitally important!

Step 7 Submit to Directories
There are many directories which will allow you to post your website address for free but it does take some time to find these and submit them one by one. If you can afford it, you can use a directory submitter which will take the hard work out of it.

Step 8 Use Traffic Exchanges
These are sites where you submit your link (this can be a website OR an affiliate link) and then build credits by clicking on other people’s ads. The more credits you have the more your ads get shown.

All of the above, with the exception of getting a website, are free ways of marketing online. Don’t get stopped by believing you have to spend lots of money. Your one investment should be your own website but after that, you can keep your purse strings tightly knotted if you want to!

Ros Bott is a writer and life coach and runs her own home business.

To find more low cost methods, free training, newsletters, e-books and useful marketing tools, go to Financial Freedom.