One of the easiest, and potentially most lucrative, online business you can get in to is affiliate marketing. If you learn the tricks of the trade and are willing to invest some time to implement what you learn, you can leverage the automation and sheer volume of the internet to make virtually as much money as you want. To help you get started, I’ve compiled a brief overview of the basics. This is by no means the do all end all, but it is enough to get you started. Consider this your affiliate marketing in a nutshell.

The first thing you really have to remember, and I can’t stress this enough, is that even though affiliate marketing is not a difficult online business that doesn’t mean that you won’t need to learn some new skills…you will. It also doesn’t mean that you won’t have to invest any time in your business. One of the most common mistakes people make is that they don’t treat their business as a business. Instead they do a little work here and a little work there and then they wonder why they’re not rich after a month or two. Don’t fall into that trap. Work your business like a business with intensity and consistency and you can be very rich.

1. The first step is to understand that to become an affiliate you need to sign up with a company that offers an affiliate program. It’s free to sign up and you will receive a commission whenever someone buys a product on your website. Most companies will give you a replicated website that will be identical to all the other affiliate websites, the only difference will be your special code in the URL. That will identify you and whenever someone makes a purchase from your site you’ll get a commission.

2. Next you need to know a little bit about internet marketing or IM. This is the process where you drive traffic, visitors, to your website. There are many ways you can do this, some of them are even free. Generally the free methods will take a little longer, but since they are free you don’t have to worry about making any mistakes while you are learning how to do them (they are very easy, but you might still make small mistakes).

The paid methods for driving traffic will usually get traffic more quickly but only after you’ve mastered the techniques which can take quite a bit of time and since you have to pay while you are learning it will also take quite a bit of money. You will definitely have more money going out than coming in at the beginning when you use this method.

3. Convert as many of your visitors into paying customers as you can. There are many elements to this, everything from copywriting to SEO to using an autoresponder. Don’t worry if none of this makes sense, there are plenty of places online where you can learn these skills.

For right now though, you will want to use an autoresponder service. This is a fully automated system that will allow you to pre-program a series of emails. You can add as many emails as you want and you can choose how often they go out. When someone opts into your list (this just means they sign up and give you permission to send them emails) the whole emails series will be sent out automatically.

For example, let’s say that you have 10 emails loaded into your autoresponder and that you’ve got it set up to send out one email every day for 10 days. When someone signs up they will immediately receive the first email. Then every day they will receive another one until they’ve gotten all the way through the series.

When you write your emails make sure that you include valuable information. Don’t make your emails just one sales pitch after another. Instead help them by giving them information that they can use, related to your website topic of course.

I’ve barely scratched the surface with this affiliate marketing in a nutshell report. Just remember that affiliate marketing is easy, don’t let the jargon throw you off. It won’t take you any time to learn all you need to know to be making a lot of money. If you can read and write you can be a very successful affiliate marketer.