Start a Home Based Business with Affiliate Marketing

Setting up a home business is an ambition of many people. The good things about starting a home based business are you can work on your own hours and enjoy a greater earning potential. Nevertheless, there are many people afraid of starting a business at home. They worry that their money isn’t sufficient for setting up their home business or they fear that if their home business doesn’t perform well, they will lose the financial backing that they use to get from a full-time job.

Starting an affiliate marketing business can be the solution for the above problems. Affiliate marketing is an online business that doesn’t need a lot of money to get started. With a computer, an Internet access and one to two hundreds dollars, you can have an affiliate marketing business launched on the Internet. You will be marketing and selling other companies products when running an affiliate marketing business. Your affiliated companies will keep the products, so you don’t need to prepare a product storage space like most other home businesses do.

Affiliate marketing works in a simple way. You join an affiliate program of a company and promote products or services of the company online. A percentage of sale commission will be credited to your affiliate account every time you referred a customer to your affiliated company. You will focus on several Internet marketing methods for promoting your affiliate products. The purpose is to send as many potential customers as possible to your affiliated company website so that you can make the most from affiliate marketing.

The first step of starting an affiliate marketing home business is to find a profitable niche market. You should choose a niche market that you have an interest in it. For instance, if you are passionate about sport cars, then you may select sport cars as the niche for you affiliate marketing business.

When you have selected your niche market, you will need to conduct research to find out whether there are profits can be made in the niche. One software tool that can help you research your niche market profitability is Hexatrack. By just typing in a common keyword relevant to your niche into Hexatrack, you will get a set of information telling you whether your niche is profitable.

After you have finished researching your niche and found out your niche market profitability, it is time to look for an affiliate program that is related to your niche market. If your niche is about sport cars, then you may search for an affiliate program that sells sport cars magazines or other sport car related products or services. People usually find affiliate program through affiliate networks because affiliate networks generally contain hundreds of affiliate programs divided into different categories. Here are three leading affiliate networks you can join and find a right affiliate program for your affiliate marketing business:

– Commission Junction
– Clickbank.com
– Shareasale.com

I would suggest you start off with 1 or 2 affiliate programs. Joining too many programs at the same time can make you lose focus and end up losing money in affiliate marketing.

Once you have your affiliate marketing business set up and ready for generating affiliate commission, you will start learning and using several marketing techniques and methods to promote your affiliate products. Some of the common marketing methods you should consider using are pay per click advertising, article marketing, social bookmarking and forum posting.

You will be focusing on marketing your affiliate products most of the time. You may not see good result at the beginning, but don’t give up easily. Keep on working and you may soon find a marketing method that works. Stick with the method and you will see your affiliate commission grow gradually.