Many affiliate marketing sites and guides assume you already know a lot about affiliate marketing, the terminology, and how to do it. It is pretty hard to find a decent program that can take someone with little or no knowledge of affiliate marketing and make a successful affiliate marketer out of them.

Affiliate marketing is when you promote someone else's products or services and earn commissions from any sales that are made as a result of your efforts. When you sign up for an affiliate program you are given a special unique link called an affiliate link. This allows the merchant to track all the visitors you send to their site back to you. Whenever one of those visitors buys something, the merchant pays you a percentage of the sale.

One of my favorite merchants is Amazon.com. They are one of the leading online retailers, and they have an affiliate program. They also have nearly any product someone would want to buy online, so there are almost unlimited products to choose from. Let's say you want to promote cell phones that are sold at Amazon. There are many ways you could go about this, but one way would be to set up a blog about cell phones. You could review different cell phones and talk about which ones you think are best and why.

On your blog you would have links back to Amazon and these links would contain your affiliate link. Anyone who clicks your link to Amazon and buys a cell phone will earn you a commission of $50. If they buy anything on the site that day you earn 4-7% of whatever they buy. That is how affiliate marketing works.

It is pretty easy to sign up to become an affiliate marketer, but it is more difficult to make money at it. You need to learn things like how to set up a blog or website to promote your affiliate links. You need to learn how to get visitors to your site. You need to learn how to get them to click your links and how to find people who are ready to buy what you are offering. It is also helpful to know affiliate marketing terminology. What are SEO, PPC, CPA, Article Marketing, niche research, backlinking, RSS feeds, and the dozens of other terms related to affiliate marketing? How do these things help you make money?

There is a free online course for beginners called the MAD Marketing Method. MAD stands for Motivation, Action, and Dedication. It teaches affilate marketing for beginners to get you started on the road to making money online.