The dream of working from home is hard to resists for almost everyone. Being able to set up your own hours, your own schedule and your own your speed is an extremely attractive way of living to most people.

But when we get down to it most of us are scared away by the apparent difficulty of getting started. The thought of setting up your own web-based business can be a massive turn off. You have to have a web design, find or make a product and then you have to sell and ship it and handle every kind of customer.

Wouldn't it be great if there was a better option?

The good news is that there is not one better option but two.


One such easier way to work from home and run a web-based business is called affiliate marketing. Wich simply means that what you promote other people actual sell, ship and deal with the customers for. You simply collect a commision payment each month.

The other method is reselling. One such great reseller program even provides the site, hosting and what not for you.

But if you are not ready for that level of control then affiliate marketing is for you.

Setting up a site that works as an affiliate marketing site isn’t really that hard. There are many different web-page building programs out there that walk you through every step of the process. Or if that is too much hassle some free blog hosts will act as a good sand box while you get used to things. You will never make the big bucks on a free host but everyone has to start somewhere.

Once you are ready to move on to a real site the first thing you will realise it that the entry level price is very, very low. In fact picking a good dot com could be the hardest task you face. (Insider's tip choose dot com over anything else).

After you have set up a functional site (see this article for help with that), you need to come up with a list of companies that will pay you to link to them (for example moreniche.com are very good). Most of the bigger websites have an affiliate program of some kind that is free to join and then you get paid for simply linking to their website, products or special landing pages. Some programs allow you to make a "shop" from thier products where they do all the hard work.

If you really want to cash in then you must understand that you should never build a webpage with just a list of links on it. This is a common "newbie" error but as something of an insider I'm going to switch you onto that before you start. Such pages may earn you a penny or two over a year, but when jonny surfer stumbles on to these kinds of pages he tends to get frustrated and think very rude thoughts about you before he leaves.

The best route for you to go is to provide interesting web content that relates to the company you’re linking to. For this a blog is the ideal tool. (More Information on Great Blogging).

A good platform for blogging is NucleusCMS which has fantastic support, some realy nice developers and a great community spirit. Also the code is nice and stable with security updates released very fast.

If you can’t write interesting web content yourself, there are many companies that will do it for you for a very reasonable price, also some bloggers such as Lord Matt may be willing to guest blog for you. Mix this up with a small percentage of Article Directory content (no more than 20%) and you have a good base of information.

You will want about 120 realy good articles for the first quater - don't worry that's not a lot once you get on a roll (especially with 24 to 30 being free articles from a directory). Once you have this (or even the first 7) you can weave your links throughout it, side bars and keywords in text are good places to put links.

People will find your web page on search engines like Google, Yahoo and Ask.com and when they see the well-written content, they will hang around and read what’s on your site. They will, in most cases, click on the links provided and you’ll be counting the cash before you know it.

But there is a lag to this and it requires a little dedication to get through it. Search engines can be very lazy about picking up new websites and you should expect to spend a week just making sure the site has good links, looks nice and works perfectly for visitors. (log out of your CMS, blog or whatever and surf as a guest).

You should expect about 3 months of lag when you first start and you should, at all costs, get your best content published in that time. You can cheat to start with and back date a week or two of artcles (7 to 14) with the earliest being a fine item detailing what the blog or site is about. This becomes your "about" page and should contain keywords in the body ext that match with what you are doing. Three days to write this is not unheard of although a basic one can be done inside of an hour.

Also during this lag take the time to publish every day. This sounds impossible but as you have arround 8 working hours to put into your articles every day (less other work and families) that's plenty of time to find something. Also every third day must be a "full sized" article but some days can be made of "ditties" - 50 to 150 words that simply introduce and recomend something. They don't even have to sell anything (it's true readers want just to read sometimes and will come back only if you fullfill a need).

Once a week (in addition to or instead of an article) you could post a topical but ammusing youtube.com video, a funny joke or an amusing image.

Links to sites on the same topic are also good. check here for regular tips from a good blogger.

While there is no guarantee that affiliate marketing will turn into a "cash cow", with sufficient hard work, the odds are in your favor. When you combine a cool site design with quality content and a good mix of interesting links, you are bound to get a good number of hits that will quickly translate into dollars for you. Give it a try, you might be surprised at how well it works!