Making money with affiliate marketing.

If you are a newbie to making money online and are just starting to research methods to achieve this, you would have definitely heard the term 'affiliate marketing' all over the internet. What exactly is affiliate marketing? Well, maybe you want to start a business of your own selling goods online. But you do not have your own products to sell. No problem, this is where affiliate marketing steps in. Rosalind Gardner, established super affiliate and well known author of 'The Super Affiliate Handbook', defines affiliate marketing as follows- 'affiliate marketing is an arrangement between an online merchant and affiliate (you), in which the affiliate earns a commission for generating sales, leads and/or clicks for the merchant's web site'. So, basically, the affiliate is like a salesperson for the company whose product he is selling. The product can be a physical product like bags, furniture, electronics, books, home decor items and much more, or it can be a digital product like ebooks which the buyer can directly download after purchase.
Affiliate marketing has been around for about a decade now and most companies including big named retail stores and electronic stores also promote their products through affiliate marketing. The most common company with an affiliate program would be Amazon.com. How much commission can an affiliate earn? Well, it depends on the percentage of commission fixed by the company, the price of the product and most importantly, how many products the affiliate is able to sell. There are affiliates who earn a few hundreds, to the super affiliates who earn thousands of dollars each month, just by promoting other's products.
Is it easy to become a super affiliate? Definitely not. Statistics shows that only about 5% to 10% of affiliates are able to gain status of superaffiliates while many get burned out after a year or 2 of affiliate marketing. What is the major difficulty in achieving success? It depends on the product selected, method of promotion and the amount of hard work put in by the affiliate.