Revenue sharing started long before the Internet was created. Great about revenue sharing is that it can be done online via what is called affiliate marketing. Affiliate marketing has taken revenue sharing to new heights and turned it into a popular form of advertising and marketing for all types of e-commerce sites and Internet businesses.

Affiliate marketing has become extremely popular, because you can start making money online very quickly and it doesn’t cost you an arm and a leg to start this kind of online business. You don’t need to create your own product and with that you don’t have to worry about payment processing, product handling or costumer service. All this is done by the merchants. The “only” work you have to do is sending traffic to the merchants sales page.

But before you can start making money with affiliate programs you need to decide what kind of product you want to promote and which affiliate network you want to join. I would recommend that you’re starting with the ClickBank affiliate network because they have products on nearly every topic you can think of and it’s really easy to join. You only have to create an account with them and you’re ready to promote a product of your choice or as many products as you wish.

So by now you made your decision on the product you want to promote, you’ve joined an affiliate marketing program and you are ready to start making your first money online. But before you go out to this online world and place your affiliate link on every page you can find, you need to cloak your affiliate link. Why? Because on a lot of places on the internet you’re not allowed any more to show your affiliate link.

How can you cloak an affiliate link?
To shorten your affiliate links you could use one of the free services online. Just Google for shorten your affiliate links and you’ll find many of them. I personally never used such a service. So I can’t give any recommendations.

Another way to shorten or cloak your affiliate links, which I recommend you should do, is to register your own domain name and either redirect this domain to your affiliate link or if you want to use that domain name for more than one product get a hosting account so you can create as many redirect links as you wish. I gonna show you exactly how to do that in another post.

If you don’t want to spend any money on domain names and hosting you can open an account at Google.com for free and start your own blog with blogger.com. On that blog you’re allowed to use your affiliate link. Use this blog to post information about the niche of the product and the product it self of which you’re promoting. A great way to convert the visitors into costumers is to write a review about the product.

I have written a post where I show you exactly how you can cloak an affiliate link easily.

Now how can you start marketing the chosen products?

Here are 5 ways to drive traffic to your blog you just created at blogger.com:

1. The quickest but also most expensive way to get traffic to your blog is using pay per click advertising (PPC). When people click on your ads they’ll be directed to your blog and when these people click on your affiliate link from your blog and purchase a product, you earn the commissions.
2. Go out and search for relevant online groups and forums to participate. When you’re creating your profile on these sites put your blog address as link in your signature. By participating and making posts in forums you automatically advertise your blog within your signature. When now the other forum members click on your link your receive targeted visitors to your blog. Now when these visitors click on your affiliate link and purchase a product, you earn the commissions.
3. Writing articles and publishing them on several different article directories is another yet effective way to drive traffic to your new blog. But you have to be careful with using your link in your articles. Affiliate links are NOT allowed. You have to use your blog address as your link.
4. Go to squidoo.com and hubpages.com and create a free account with them. Write more articles or even better reviews of the product you’re promoting and publish them on these to social media sites. After you’ve published your articles/reviews on this sites go and participate on the social networks of each of these sites. Make friends, visit hubpages or squidoo lenses from other users and leave a comment with a link back to your own lenses/hubpages.
5. Search for other blogs in the same niche using blogsearch.google.com. Read some of theses posts and write a relevant and useful comment with a link back to your own blog.

As you can see, there are many ways to drive traffic to your blog and make money with affiliate programs. But the above ways are far away from complete. There are many, many more ways to drive traffic to your blog or website. I’ll post more traffic generation ideas from time to time. If you would like to jump start your online business and getting the best affiliate marketing training check out the Gunshot Money. In my opinion this is one of the best courses and training you can get for affiliate marketing.

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