Affiliate Marketing is the "Hands Free" Business Model

By Christopher Stirling

Affiliate marketing is a method by which you can sell other people's products, and you never have to touch the products or deal with the big customer service issues at all. You just pocket a percentage of the sale for leading the customer to the product. This is how affiliate marketing gets the nickname "hands free"

If you are unfamiliar with affiliate marketing, here is hypothetical scenario that will help you understand the basic principle behind it. Let's say a friend of yours is selling off his guitar collection.

He asks for your help in finding people who might be interested in buying his guitars, and tells you that he'll give you 20% of his take for every guitar sold if the buyer mentions your name.

In essence, your friend is paying you for the referral. This is affiliate marketing, which is also sometimes known as "referral marketing", in a nutshell. As an affiliate marketer, you can earn 'commissions' by referring others to all sorts of products and services. There may even be an affiliate program out there for 'used guitars' ;-)

Affiliate marketing encompasses far more, however, than the sale of physical goods.

You can also promote intangible items, like e-books, video or music downloads, software, memberships and online services. What's great about this is that the products are downloadable. The customer you refer receives his product right after the sale.

A focus on this type of 'digital' product is often referred to as information marketing, because it is information that is most often sold in these formats.

If we were being picky about our terms and definitions, we could also call it 'entertainment marketing' in some cases.

The important thing, though, is that people are motivated to purchase these types of products in order to fill one very important need: to find a solution to a problem. When you think about it, even music or other types of entertainment solve a problem, the problem of 'boredom.'

Now, you can start any kind of online business you like, but my recommendation is that you start an affiliate information marketing business. This model is proven to be the easiest, most cost-effective and most profitable for home business newbies to master.

If you still aren't convinced, have a look at this site called Clickbank:

http://www.clickbank.com

Look at the top of your screen for the blue tabs, and click on the one that says "Buy Products.' Now, click on any link in the list from the List of Categories table near the bottom. What you'll see on the next screen is a list of link to products in that category being sold through Clickbank.

The Top 10 products in the 'Health and Fitness' category, for example, include product 'solutions' for things like fat loss, anxiety and panic and even hypnosis. These are hot topics and you can be that there are people online in search of this information.

You might wonder why someone would pay for this information when plenty of web sites offer information on these same subjects for free?

The truth is that not much of the free information online today is truly premium information. Not only that, but you have to spend quite a few hours compiling information from different sites just to get a big picture, and even then you may not discover the solution to your problem.

Most people don't want to pour through medical journal articles to find a 'drug-free' solution to their anxiety problem. They just want to feel better NOW.

Products such as the ones found on Clickbank promise to deliver that premium information quickly and easily. Purchase the product online, download it, and you've got your solution in minutes instead of hours.

Now, imagine yourself marketing those types of solutions. You can build an entire business around marketing those kinds of solutions! Every product in the Clickbank marketplace has an affiliate program associated with it, which means you can earn money promoting them.

Chris Stirling has written several aarticles on Affiliate Marketing and how you can start earning in this "hands Free" Business model which you can read on his blog: http://top-work-from-home.com/blog/category/affiliate-marketing You can also read a report he wrote called "How To Get Rich From Affiliate Marketing"