Lots of people, myself included, make money through affiliate marketing. Its an extremely popular home business for that bit of extra money or even for lots of it. There are endless opportunities with seemingly more and more products becoming available to affiliates constantly.

Its actually not that complicated either, in fact I’d go so far as to say just about anyone can do it. There are offline programs as well as online ones but for the purposes of this post lets just think about the online ones that are genuinely ‘work at home’ opportunities.

To pick an example lets look at say good old Amazon. Now Amazon has huge brand power and is generally trusted so its easy to get people to buy from it, the downside is that as they keep their prices low there is not a lot of room for large affiliate commission margins. Still depending on what type of website traffic you might have Amazon can be a good way to earn some commissions.

Amazon even allows you to integrate their store info into your own sites, take a look at BinocularChoice.com for an example, look around the site and you’ll see it is powered by Amazon and also has some contextual ads. A site like that makes sales on autopilot but takes a little know-how to put together.

Looking to a completely different end of the spectrum there are huge commissions paid on digital products. That is because most of their cost factor is incurred in the development of the product whereas their distribution costs are practically nil as they can just be downloaded over the net.

If you want to try some really simple affiliate marketing sign up for an affiliate account at Clickbank or Paydotcom and take a look at the products they have to offer. You’re bound to find products you are interested in promoting yourself.

There are a number of ways to get traffic to an affiliate link, paid traffic sources like adwords and free traffic from writing for article sites and free website pages like Squidoo or Hubpages.

We’ll take a closer look at some of the traffic generation ideas in the next few posts.