By Brad Hodges

Did you know that Affiliate Marketing is one of the best and fastest ways to make money on the Internet?

You would be surprised and perhaps shocked to learn that some of the biggest names in the business world use affiliate marketing and affiliates to promote their products and services. Household names like Sears, Dell, QVC, Allstate, Verizon, Yahoo, HP, The Wall Street Journal, USA Today, Amazon.com, The Home Depot, American Express, Delta Airlines, the Sierra Club and thousands more ALL use affiliate marketing and ALL are willing to pay approved affiliates money in the way of commissions per sale or per lead and for bringing them business.

Affiliate marketing has been going on for decades, long before the Internet, by companies like The Fuller Brush Company, Avon, Amway and Kitchen Craft “Waterless Cooker.”

As you can see from the major companies that have affiliate programs it is here to stay and a lot of money can be made selling other peoples goods and services.

At the beginning of this article notice I said that; “Affiliate Marketing is one of the best and fastest ways to make money on the Internet?” “Best and fastest” however does not equate to “Easy”. Affiliate marketing is by no means a “get rich quick scheme”.

Affiliate Marketing is an art and just like anything worth having or becoming an expert about, you have to work for it as well as learn as much as you possibly can about it in order to be successful.

Make no mistake however, that their are thousands of individuals who have become millionaires by selling affiliate products and using affiliate business websites to accomplish this.

Think about it for a moment. One of the most difficult tasks in becoming self-employed and making a full time living is coming up with a product or service to sell. Unless you have a PhD in computer science or engineering or are a gifted inventor, how many people have the ability to envision, create, manufacture and market a new product from scratch…Exactly…

With affiliate marketing you don’t have to worry about all this because you have thousands and thousands of products to choose from and sell that people want to buy! In addition you can market these products with simple affiliate business websites that are easy to set up and maintain.

The trick, the art and the key however to being successful at affiliate marketing is to learn how to pick the right products to sell that people are able and willing to fork out their hard earned cash for and more importantly how to market the products to these people.

There are hundreds of online “courses” created exactly for learning how to do affiliate marketing efficiently and lucratively. Some are excellent and some are a waste of your hard earned money. A key is to look for courses that help you learn how to set up affiliate business websites, as well as how to market them in order to drive targeted buyers of your affiliate products or services or “traffic” to the websites.

Educating yourself is the first step and I hope to provide an ongoing resource to point you in the right directions to become successful at affiliate marketing.

A good place to start, especially if you are a “newbie” at affiliate marketing is at a web site called Affiliate Business Website at http://AffiliateBusinessWebsite.com

I have found this site to be an excellent place to get an overview of affiliate marketing and to help you determine if it is right for you. The site has dozens of pages and links to help you get started. Even if you have done some affiliate marketing but feel you could learn some more it is a good resource.

All in all affiliate marketing is a great way to earn some part time or supplemental income and once you get your feet wet and learn about the “art” you can progress to making a full time income as a self employed Internet Marketer. Who knows maybe you will become the next affiliate marketing millionaire.

I don’t know about you but I’m just an average guy trying to make a living on the Internet marketing good, honest  products and services.  I’m not a “Guru” and to be completely honest even when I get to the level I could claim “Guru” status I will pass thank you very much.

You see you do not have to be a Guru to make a decent living on the Internet.  In fact I personally am very weary of the designated Guru’s and their products. Sure I have purchased many of them and many of them are good, worthy products.  But did you ever notice how they are like a pack of hunting dogs in the way they all stick together?  It is always the same group hunting the same game; you and I.

It would be one thing if they stuck to creating new and innovative products on an ongoing basis and offered them at affordable prices, which to be honest, I have noticed prices dropping significantly despite the all too often heard quote of Guru’s that “You can make more money than God in any kind of economy.” They have finally realized they cannot con us into believing this any longer.

What gets me more than anything else is when one so called Guru comes up with a “new” or “rehashed” product you suddenly get the offer from 20 of their cronies and more often than not it is the EXACT same email!  It seems to me that desperate times create desperate Guru’s.

I recently received an offer from one of “The Group.”  Now I usually read the offers because I feel compelled, or maybe I am just an Internet Guru Voyeur, I don’t know, to see what they come up with and how often it is duplicated.  In this offer the unnamed Guru had several “testimonials” on the squeeze page. The amazing part of it is that I happen to know who the support personnel are for this person as well as who some of their cronies are, and they actually had testimonials from these individuals!  Talk about not being objective or for that matter even honest!  Now the average consumer/Internet Guru wannabe, stumbling across this product would have no way of knowing this and therefore would be taking an “inside” testimonial as face value and perhaps relying on it to purchase the product.  Of course how many of any of the testimonials you see are real and true anyway?  If you have been on top of the news recently you will have seen a crack down on the use of phony or illegal testimonials especially in the case of products such as Acai Berry and the use of celebrity names.

I don’t do business like that. Many of these Guru’s are honest, straight forward people. You would recognize many of their names in a flash but come on guys STOP flooding us with the same offers from your buddies over and over. Stick with developing good products at reasonable prices because, as you so often state; “I was once where you are, broke, living in a trailer, living out of my car, going through <name the tragic story here>, and I am now offering my great <name the product here> to you so you can be successful too” if you truly were there and truly were broke and truly are now a millionaire, you would truly price products to help, as you say you want to, and stop pitching everyone Else’s products over and over. It makes you look desperate and makes you look like you have run out of innovative products and ideas (and maybe YOU HAVE).

I prefer to make money quietly in the background as many, many excellent and if they chose to be such, folks who could call themselves Guru’s, are doing and have been doing for years. This term has lost its luster to be sure and it is a rusting, meaningless designation.

American entrepreneurship, ingenuity and success were built by those who can stand on their own with innovation, dignity and integrity.  Let’s now allow the world of Internet Marketing to get the same black eyes as the world of Mortgage’s, Investments, Bad Real Estate and many other once honorable career paths now have.  We need to police ourselves and stop being snake oil sales people in the methods and marketing we use or who knows we may be the NEXT government takeover!