Terms such as Affiliate Marketing, Search Engine Optimisation, Pay Per Click – they make the Internet and all its jargon seem like a members-only club; if you don’t have any technical expertise or knowledge you’re not allowed to join the party. It can make earning money online, or simply running a website, seem a bit intimidating but it doesn’t have to be.

People, regardless of their background, are making money, and in some cases lots of it, by becoming affiliate marketers. You don’t need any previous knowledge or experience of web design or marketing and you can even do it from the comfort of your own home or simply boost your income from your day job.

What Is Affiliate Marketing?
The concept is straightforward enough too. In a nutshell, affiliate marketing is when you take a service or product that’s available on the Internet and you promote it to someone else using a special trackable link. As an affiliate marketeer (also called an affiliate publisher — or simply affiliate) you put a link on your site or sell a product on behalf of another company (a merchant) and receive a share of the products. Or, as a merchant, you get other sites to include links to your products and then you give them a share of any revenue you make as a result of the traffic sent through their links to you.

The most common method is Pay Per Sale (PPS) or revenue sharing. In practise this means if your website features an article on fitness DVDs, for example, you can sign up to an affiliate program that sells them. You can then include a special link, with a URL specific to your account from your review to the product. Every time one of your users clicks through and buys the product you get a percentage of the sale.

Less commonly, some affiliate programs also offer Pay Per Click (PPC) so will give you commission for every visitor they receive, or Pay Per Lead (PPL) where the merchant will give you commission for every contact detail they get from a visitor who found them through your site.

Now, it’s not quite as simple as that in practise but it certainly isn’t as difficult as the acronyms and jargon would suggest. The fact that people from all walks of life: butchers, HGV drivers, call centre staff and ex-civil servants (present company included) are getting involved with it means it’s not just for a select group to reap all the rewards.

There’s a wealth of information throughout this site on learning all about affiliate marketing. Every day someone brings out an affiliate marketing book full of so called ’secrets’ that promise you the world yet charges you the earth but its pretty easy for you to teach yourself. All you need is a bit of patience and a lot of passion. Oh, and an Internet connection.

Getting Started
First and foremost if you’re starting from scratch you need to decide what you want your blog or website to be about. You can set up a blog pretty easily, websites take a little bit more work but both are relatively straightforward. If you buy web space and a domain name for a reliable host they can offer support all the way through and most web design programs that you’ll use will have prompts throughout to help you. And if you have a bit of capital you can even get someone to design and build your site for you.

If you’ve already established your site and you want to get started with affiliate marketing check out the affiliate marketing networks that are out there and see if any of them and the merchant programmes they offer are a good fit for you. The benefits of signing up to a network include access to many more merchants than you’d be able to find on your own and they provide support and helpful advertising material, tips and even vouchers and offers, some of which are exclusive to a particular network. Some of the most popular UK networks include Affiliate Window, TradeDoubler, Commission Junction (CJ), DGM, Affiliate Future, Paid on Results and Webgains.

The best way to teach yourself about affiliate marketing is to do research, research . . .and more research. Don’t just take the advice of one source, get a full picture of the successes and more importantly, the failures other affiliate marketers have had. It is a lucrative way of making money online but it can also be easy to fail at it if you don’t do properly or you’re not willing to have a bit of patience and put in the hard graft in the early days.

There is a wealth of information on various search engine optimisation techniques including content writing and link building here at Lammo.net. We also cover paid search marketing (PPC) and explore various affiliate programmes and networks in greater detail. You should also be able to find everything you need online for free – just try searching for any of these areas in Google and you will find a range of helpful sites and forums.

In addition to this make sure you ask lots of questions. There are loads of affiliate marketing social networking sites and message boards that offer advice and support. The benefit of this is you’ll get honest advice (sometimes brutally so — but better to be a little battered than to waste months going down a blind alley) from people in the same boat as you. Believe me there are thousands of people sailing alongside you, all hoping to get a slice of the affiliate marketing pie.

Finally, don’t be deterred by the current gloom and doom with regard to the UK and global economy. In many senses, this is accelerating online spend as people move away from the high street and look to low cost online providers of goods and services. Whilst there is little doubt that growth rates will slow, the forecast in the affiliate marketing industry is generally buoyant.

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