All of us have an interest or a hobby. Some people love art, books, music, and movies while others are into sports and travelling. There are also people who love to grow flowers or keep pets. These interests help us to relax and forget our everyday problems and troubles and . But not everyone has a hobby that makes them money unless they can incorporate it into your job.

Having a money making hobby could let you treat your family with the extra cash or you may even be able to quit your current job for one that you enjoy while working at home. That is why many of people go online to start a business; their reasons are either to supplement their income or to gradually replace their offline income from their job. Affiliate marketing can be a great way to start in making money online with not a lot of expenditure in cash. (continues below...)

Affiliate marketing is a revenue sharing partnership between an online merchant and one or more affiliates. The affiliate is paid a commission for referring clicks, leads or (usually) sales to the merchant. An affiliate’s advantage is that he can make money in a business where he doesn’t have the up front costs of creating his own product, or keeping items in stock, and he doesn’t have to worry about e-commerce or customer support as this is the merchant’s responsibility.

Having said that, you may be thinking that you want to be an affiliate marketer with all that benefits an affiliate could get. But, do you have what it takes to be an affiliate marketer? Before you begin your affiliate marketing, you need to decide which area interest you. What products do you know about the most and which products you could do the best job of selling on a web site? For example, do you know a lot about movies (you could promote DVD's, film posters etc) or maybe you are an expert in photography (you could promote camera's, films, memory cards, printing services, printers etc). Once you have decided what you are going to concentrate on, perseverance, patience, determination comes next. These are all the qualities you will need to be a good affiliate marketeer.

You must remember that it will take time to gain a good income from affiliate schemes, they are not "get rich quick" schemes as some people will have you believe. Too many online business prospectors lose out because they become impatient. You also have to know what your strengths are, the things in which you are good at. The most important thing though is that you have to have a strong desire to succeed in affiliate marketing.

To be an affiliate marketer is not going to be an easy job. You have to learn the techniques of marketing your selected product or service. You need to be selective about what you do and not sign up for the latest craze unless you are convinced that it's worthwhile - remember that marketing is all about attracting you to look at this or that particular opportunity. To be a successful affiliate marketer, you should learn how to listen and to be taught because in business, as in life, we need to learn skills to get by.

For an affiliate marketer, you should know how to market your site effectively,this will enable you to get thousands of visitors coming to your site which will convert into more sales. This does not mean that the faster you set up a website, the higher your chances of making money online faster. You should avoid the same mistakes some affiliates make everyday, they build hundreds of pages that take a scattergun approach to affiliate marketing and are really only building a short-term business where they may make a small sale. You should be aiming to build a long-term affiliate business and not just something that makes you a few pounds on one sale.

It is also better to know how to up sell your visitors for expensive services or accessories. This will in turn make you become recognised as an expert in your field and making money will be easier. There are many people that believe that just by having affiliate links on their website it will bring them good profits. This can sometimes be true, but the most successful affiliates still believe that making use of strong marketing campaigns for their affiliate programs is still important. You should remember that affiliate marketers become much more successful when they treat their customers or online visitors as friends. Make a commitment to establish relationships with your customers and especially with visitors to your site. It is very important for an affiliate marketer to have a good business relationship with customers or visitors as it will encourage people to come back to your site time and time again, hopefully earning you money on each visit.

You should also be creative. The real key to being successful with affiliate marketing is to develop a good content based website and weave your affiliate links into all your content, not just having a page of links tucked away on your site somewhere. You have to provide your visitors with good, quality content to keep them coming back to your site.