… Well, you don’t need money to make money! There are several ways to make money through the internet, and one of them is through affiliate programs. Best of all, it costs nothing to sign up!

“What are affiliate programs? Isn’t it just another get-rich quick plot or some hocus-pocus that’s all a scam?”

Affiliate programs (also known as referral/associate programs) are legitimate and not get-rich-quick scams. It’s a simple concept: Earn commission for each sale you make. As a matter of fact, even big guys like Amazon.com launched affiliate programs to fuel their sales and to increase their brand, hence that further proves my point that affiliate programs aren’t scams.

How Affiliate Programs Work…

Using Amazon.com as an example, here’s an illustration on how affiliate programs work…

An affiliate (let’s call her ‘Lily’) owns a website about movie-making, so she chose a few books related to her website including the best-seller “How to Write a Hollywood Movie Script in 5 minutes!”

Lily then puts unique links to each of these books on her website that enables Amazon to identify the visitor she sends. One of Lily’s visitors was so impressed by Lily’s review on the book “How to Write a Hollywood Movie Script in 5 minutes!” that she wanted to buy it immediately, the visitor then saw “Buy it now on Amazon.com!”…. CLICK!

The visitor enters the Amazon site, Amazon identifies this visitor is from Lily. The visitor then checks out with the book and pays using credit card. Lily is paid a commission on that sale!

Affiliate Programs vs. Selling Your Own Products on the Web

Sure enough as a web merchant, you get 100% of the profits made. But you will have to fuss with start-up costs, advertising, marketing, shipping, credit-card processing, products/ services to maintain, customer services, customer complaints, web hosting, accounting, staff training…

Phew! That’s a lot work! But…

As an affiliate, you don’t need your own products to sell; you don’t need to incur the costs: Your start-up cost is zero; and you don’t have to deal with the customers’ orders or accounting or all the above because the merchant will handle all these for you. In some affiliate programs, you can also recruit and train sub-affiliates under you. Your training pays off when your sub-affiliate gets a sale, because you earn ‘training commission’ too. I’ll get more in-depth about this later in the article.

“But I’m not a computer or internet-savvy person! I don’t have a website too!”

Don’t worry! An effective affiliate finds thousands of ideas to sell online, or offline! You can advertise locally in newspapers, in articles you write, recommend it to friends, notice boards, etc… There are no limits.

“Great! How do I start?”

As easy as it sounds, I’m sad to say that it’s not a piece of cake if you plan to sit there and wait for the cash to come to you. In the affiliate business, it follows the 80-20 rule – 80% of the benefit is only achieved by 20% of the affiliates. So if you want to get rich quick, affiliate program isn’t for you… but if you want to be one of the 20% affiliates who get 80% of the benefit… read on.

First of all, ask yourself why you want to start an affiliate business on the internet…

“Um… to earn some cash and buy things I want”

No, I want you to be as specific as possible…

For example, “I want to increase my income so that I can afford a sports car and have the ultimate sense of pride when I drive into the yard of my friends who said that I will never succeed in making money on the internet! I want my friends to be envious; I want to prove them wrong!”

When you know what you want and the more specific you get, the stronger your commitment, determination and persistence to succeed will be.

I know it sounds really corny, but it is a simple rule that the 80% affiliates don’t follow!

Secondly, you must…

Choose a Good Affiliate Program

There are many affiliate programs out there but you need to focus on the ones that work for you. I suggest a few good criteria to look for in affiliate programs:

1) High-value products/services

When I said ‘value’, I don’t mean the price tag. Let’s say, you are an affiliate for 2 companies which are in similar industries, both offering 30% commission. One sells its product for $50 and the other for

will pay you $5 for each person you refer to use their free webhosting services. is easier for you to get people to sign up, since they are getting something for free(no obligation to buy) this program is called pay per lead.

secondly if you are an affilite of clickbank, HD, Mylife, google adsense etc, there is a simple automated program that you can use that will be generating money for you in all the networks.by join this network, you will be given an instant $125 and $30 each time to refer other to join for free. so you can see is easier to make money refering people to a free services than selling a product. to join visit

You can set up a free blog and drive traffic to it.

Read my step by step pff tutorial below.

mate I commend you for taking action, but you will have to get of your **** and work a bit.

1) Use PPC adwords preferably.
2) go to forums and in your signature have your blog address
3) write articles about your niche and in your bio leave a short description and blog address.
4) go to blog directories (there are tons of them) and leave your blog adress.

The more you do of this the more sales you will get. You wont see results straight away but if you keep at it you definatly will start smiling big time.

Check out this news story about someone making money with google.

If you are interested to know more, you can visit their site.

Sign up for MoreNIche, and make $175 per sale at