Affiliate marketing gives you the opportunity to supplement your income without having to leave your living room.

The Internet revolutionized how marketing is done and opened a lot of doors for the average person to be part of the gigantic industry that is marketing, sales and advertising.

With just a laptop, internet connection and a little money, you can get paid promoting products you didn’t even create. Basically, affiliate marketing involves the promotion of other people’s products in exchange for a commission when a sale is made.

Since you are paid every time a sale is made, you have a license to write your own ticket. You can make as much money as your skills, intelligence and grit allows you to.

If you want to get started today in affiliate marketing, I would recommend you take any one of these two paths:

1. Creating an Authoritative Website

This involves building an informational website people can trust then recommending relevant affiliate products on the site.

You can create a website in any niche as long as you are adequately informed in the area to write authoritatively on it. People buy from people they trust and no one will trust your advice if they can clearly see that you aren’t any more informed than they are.

A website isn’t any good if it doesn’t have readers. To get readers, you can focus on ranking high on Google for popular relevant search terms. This is called search engine optimization. Alternatively, you can collaborate with other bloggers in your space so that they can refer their readers to you. You can do this through guest blogging, creating content and surveys together and interviewing in podcasts.

Finding affiliate products to promote to an audience isn’t hard at all. Just figure out the products that can solve some of their most pressing needs.

2. Buying Traffic

This is by far the fastest way to gain momentum in affiliate marketing. You can set up things today and start making money in a few hours.

The whole process can be broken down into 5 steps:

1. Create a lead magnet
2. Set up a web page to offer the lead magnet
3. Buy traffic to the page and collect email addresses
4. Email the subscribers valuable content to build trust
5. Offer them something to buy

A lead magnet is basically something you offer people in exchange for their email address. It can be an ebook, a report, a free trial, or anything free that will provide value to the lead given the problem they want solved. Think of it like an ethical ‘bribe’ to convince them to give you their email address.

The reason you want to collect email addresses is because it is far easier to sell to someone once you’ve built some kind of relationship and they trust you.

You build trust by proving that you can actually help them solve their problem. This can be done by sending them a series of valuable emails over a period of at least 3 days. You can automate this process by creating an autoresponder using email services such as Aweber, Mailchimp or GetResponse.

The last email in the series will be an email offering them an affiliate product to buy.