Our First Affiliate

Well, we have begun. Today we have become an affiliate of Adsense. Adsense is Google's advertising affiliate program. You basically go to Adsense on Google and sign up. They will review your request and then most likely, as long as you do not violate their rules such as have a porno site, you should get accepted into their program.

What you then do, especially if you have a blog, is to copy and paste some code in which Adsense will provide you with, onto your blog or web page. You get paid when people click on those ads. The people do not have to buy anything. All they have to do is click on the ad and you get paid.

Now of course you will not get paid much on most ads especially if you have a low traffic site. But you can earn from .01 Cents per click (also called PPC or Pay Per Click) up to $10 or more per click.

Obviously certain niches will allow you to earn more per click. But you will not have a choice, in most cases, of what ads Google puts on your blog or page. Google has a system in which they have a "robot" that reviews your site to determine its content and key words then it picks the ads that closely match or compliment the content on your site. This way the people who visit your site will be more likely to click on the ads that are displayed.

This is great because you don't have to do anything. You just past some code that Google provides for you, onto your site and Google does all the rest. You can also get all kinds of reports from Google as it pertains to your site and its advertising on your Adsense account pages.

Google is obviously not the only PPC advertising program out there but it is the biggest. And of course you will not make tons of cash off of one blog or page with Adsense no matter what you might have read from some of the gurus out there. They make tons of cash by having a lot of blogs and pages and diversifying with other affiliate programs besides Adsense by Google.

Some other simple affiliate ad programs are run by MSN and Yahoo. There are others as well. I will discuss the others next time. At this point, if you have not done so, head over to Google Adsense and sign up for an account.

Getting Started

Hi. My name is Rodney and I am here to learn how to earn a living with Free Affiliate Marketing. I am sure you have seen lots of stuff on the web about how to make big money on-line with affiliate marketing, blogs, information selling, etc.

Now I must admit, I have not purchased a single program. Why? Because just about every program that catches my attention, I do extensive research on. By doing that research, I usually find the information I am looking for. What is the program about? What does the program offer? Is the program doable and legit or is it a scam?

If you do a little bit of research you will find others who have already purchased just about any money making offer out there and they are not shy about telling you whats in the program and/or if its a scam or not. What I have found is that most of those programs are a scam in some form or another.

But there are a few that work. The only problem is they tend to be expensive or they tend to give you information you could find for free. They claim they are saving you time and thereby saving you money. After all, time is money and if you can get started today instead of tomorrow, wouldn't you make more money?

There is a problem with that kind of thinking. First of all, from what I have seen, read and witnessed, these programs never give you all the information you need to start and grow an on-line business, but they are always willing to sell you more information at ever increasing prices.

Plus, a lot of those offers are simply information about marketing, how to start marketing and so on. Many of these information brokers make their money by selling information about marketing. They don't run any other businesses. Often, the information they are selling was not even created by them. They bought the information from someone else. They are affiliates.

That got me to thinking about affiliate marketing. I began to read blogs and articles and gather information. I am still learning by reading and now by doing. You cannot really learn anything unless you start doing.

So this blog will be about my journey on building a profitable on-line affiliate marketing business. Affiliate marketing, by the way, is where you sell someone else's product or service. You are sort of like an on-line version of a manufacturers representative. The one thing you must understand is that you should not have to pay to become an affiliate for anyone. You are making them money by selling their product or service.

You are not buying a franchise or a system to run a business. You are just a marketing arm for that company. You are their advertising. Do you have to pay to get advertisements? Of course not. Companies pay to advertise to you. So why should you pay to advertise their products or services.

So what I will focus on is finding, researching and promoting FREE affiliates. You will not find me hawking information products on how to market. This blog, after all will also be about using free and nearly free ways of marketing your products and services.

So feel free to comment on my post, email me or share your information. I will be sharing all that I learn as well as letting you know what I am dong so we will all see what works and what doesn't. Now don't get me wrong here. There will, of course be items marketed on this blog but they will not be for products or services that only sell information about getting rich. At least I will not have any products or services like that.

But, that does not mean that someone else who advertises on this blog won't try to sell you such items. This I do not have total control over. And our first lesson or action? Today I will open an Adsense account in order to have AdWords appear on this blog. Of course I will not stop at Google or Yahoo but it is a basic place for anyone to start.

So until next time.