My objective of this article is to give you an overview of how to make money with affiliate marketing, so that you can make a better decision on how you want to kick start with affiliate marketing.

Generally, I can categorize the different ways of making money with affiliate marketing into 3 basic ways. Let’s discuss each of them……

1) First Way - Direct Promotion

The first way to make money with affiliate marketing is by promoting the affiliated product directly .

A popular idea that many beginners are taught is to find a good product from Clickbank, create an ad for it and advertise to get traffic and sales.

Or if it’s a business opportunity, one may simply advertise the affiliate link to get traffic and downlines.

This method of making money looks very attractive, especially among the newbies. Some marketers I’ve spoken to said that this is their preferred method because the money is fast and they don’t have to bother about customer service and site maintenance.

This may be the easiest way to start making money with affiliate marketing. But if you ask me for advice, I would suggest that you put in a bit more effort and move beyond this method.

Reason: If you’ve been reading my work, you’ll know that I don’t fancy quick money. My focus is always on ‘building’. For long term success, you need to spend your time building something, either build a list, a network, a website or a community. What I don’t like about this method is you’re sending your hard earned traffic away, without building anything for yourself.

2) Second Way - Build A List

A better alternative to the first approach is to build a list. Instead of sending the traffic directly to your affiliated site, you focus your marketing effort in building a list FIRST, promoting other affiliated products LATER.

There are many variations to this method.

The most common strategy is to create a squeeze page, give away some useful freebies, and entice people to opt-in.

Another smarter strategy is to create a product in your niche, design a big launch around it, get other marketers to promote it for you, and instantly build a huge list that you can use in the future.

It takes a lot more time to set up such a website as compared to the first approach. But you are building yourself a list and reputation in your industry. You can easily build upon any success you have established and earn more in the future.

But there is one important downside to this approach.

Other than your free gift or product, there is nothing much on your website. Once your visitors get what they want, they are not likely to go back to your website again. The only way you can build further relationship with them is probably through a newsletter.

3) Third Way - Build A Useful Website

The third way to make money with affiliate marketing is to build a useful website around your niche.

The easiest form would be a blog. You can build a list and then start a blog to update your list with useful tips, promoting other affiliated products at the same time.

Or you can create a service site that provides useful online tools that people in your niche can use. This will entice them to come back to your website again and again.

One of my personal preference is to create a content website that is full of useful articles in a particular niche. The articles will help me to attract free traffic from the search engines. The website will have several product recommendations from me and these are the products I am affiliated to.

The disadvantage of this approach is of course the time and effort required to create and (for some) to maintain the sites. But the benefit is obvious. Once the initial traffic is built, you are likely to see continuous traffic to your website and hence consistent affiliate commissions to your account.

Although this third way is my preferred way of making money with affiliate marketing, it may not be the best way for you. There are many success stories in each of these approaches. You need to try out the different methods and see which one you are most comfortable with. Hopefully my discussion above can help you kick start with your preferred method right away.