Having a website to market your affiliate products is a great way to generate sales, but a website is not required to start making money as an affiliate. Many people make a living online as affiliates without a website. When you are an affiliate you market the product owner’s product and if you generate a sale through your affiliate link you will get a commission.

Many people first starting online as affiliates do not have the knowledge to market products online, they will need to learn how to promote their affiliate link. While having your own website is not strictly required, it is highly recommended to capture visitors email address and market to them again in the future.

If you are new to the world of affiliate marketing, the following steps will help you to market your affiliate link.

1. Copy the affiliate link from the merchant website and place it on a website or notepad. Make sure you name your notepad as it will be easy for people to remember.

2. Open a word processor and copy and paste the link that you copied and paste into it. Make sure you save your notepad as the name of your notepad.

3. You can use free services, such as Google paper, to write your notepad. Make sure you save as “sivingset.word” without the quotes.

4. You will use “URL redirection” later on to mask your affiliate link.

5. Save the notepad and close it.

6. Download “My Link Roof” – a free software fromingsourcing.com(You will also need to sign up as a member to this site)

7. Once the software has installed on your computer, open it up and type the book into the software and select ” Corporate Options” under Management ID. – usually it is better to select Management only under Management ID.

8. Click “Apply” under Surveys & Monitoring, or whatever option you checked on, and then you are done. Your not going to lose any money or get banned from the program for not following the rules.

9. While your not at home yet, you will need to sign up for a couple of email accounts. Marketing through email is very easy and all you need to do is keep a list of those emails and then delete everything else.

10. Create a couple of Squidoo lens sites, also free – you can get tons of traffic from these sites. Economy is not very good in relation to affiliate marketing, so you will not gain much from a site, but it’s a good place to start learning.

11. Begin to write articles about the product you are promoting (very easy to write). You can post articles you have written personally, or you can copy and paste someone else’s article. Make sure the article is very interesting and non promotional. About 1-3 paragraphs is enough.

12. Post your articles on article sites such as EzineArticles, Go Articles, Article Base, Allan Gardyne’s Site Tips and all other article sites. Keep making the articles informative and detailed so that anyone searching for the product you are promoting can find more and more information.

13. Monitor your article statistics as you are using all these article sites. If your article gets traffic, and it should, then you know you are on the right track. If your articles do not get any traffic for weeks, consider changing your article sites. Get proper search engine, social media marketing, and targeted traffic training.

14. Keep looking for other products to promote until you find one that is profitable.

Take this 14 step program and put it into action. You will begin to make money online in no time.