An Introduction To Your Affiliate Marketing Career

If there is any such thing as a natural career progression when you are involved in making money from your own online business, it probably goes something like this.

When you first come online to make money, you very quickly realize that there are thousands of products for sale that will, in theory, teach you how to be a successful online entrepreneur. It is likely that you will invest some of your hard earned cash in a few of these products.

Some of them will contain information that you can use, while others will inevitably be disappointing. However, while you're buying these products, you will realize that you did so because somebody, somewhere sent you to a sales page where you read about the product, liked the idea, and got your credit card out.

Perhaps you even put two and two together and realized that it was not the product creator themselves who sent you to the sales letter page. In all likelihood, it will have been one of their affiliates, someone who was working on a freelance basis promoting that product in return for a commission paid on every successful sale.

Realizing that there is good money to be made from being an affiliate, you begin to look into the positives and negatives of promoting and selling as an affiliate yourself. When you do so, you will undoubtedly come to the conclusion that there are far more positives to affiliate marketing than there are negatives from the individual affiliate's point of view.

In the first place, you can start marketing as an affiliate within a couple of minutes of finding a product or service that you want to promote. There is no need to carry any kind of inventory, and you do not need to create your own product either.

Especially if you're working with one of the larger network sites, there are no problems with getting your commission payments.

Affiliate marketing is a perfect starting point for anyone who wants to create their own online business.

It is not, however, completely without its downsides. For example, you can spend as much time and money as you like promoting a product as an affiliate, but unless you generate any sales, you will never earn any money in return. You can find yourself seriously out of pocket if you are not particularly successful as an affiliate.

Furthermore, unless you set your affiliate marketing processes and systems up correctly, you will spend your whole life chasing new customers. By doing so, you are building the business of the original product vendor rather than your own.

Nevertheless, despite these disadvantages, it is still true that the vast majority of online marketers probably got their start as an affiliate.

Some people (but only a very small handful) realize that they have a genuine talent for marketing as an affiliate, and continue to do so throughout the rest of their online business career.

These people are often referred to as 'super-affiliates', as they are the people who generate healthy six-figure incomes primarily from their efforts to sell other people's products.

However, even these 'super-affiliates' realize that their online business 'arsenal' is not complete without unique products of their own.

Apart from the 'super-affiliates', the majority of online business owners and internet marketers move in the direction of creating their own products too. At some point during their affiliate marketing days, they begin to feel that they no longer want to make their money by selling for other marketers, as the realization dawns that they want to become a product creator

themselves.