Being an affiliate means you simply are marketing a product or service for a company and only get paid if your efforts result in a sale. Affiliate marketing has been around for decades and is nothing new but it was until Internet Mogul Amazon made it more realistic and practical for anybody and everyone to participate.

Regardless of whether you are a part of Amazon's affiliate team or any other company; you must be able to sell whatever it is they want you to sell if you plan on making actual money.

One big mistake many affiliate marketers make is not knowing anything about the product or service they are selling. Imagine for a moment if you walked into electronic superstore Best Buy and asked the associate there to tell you a little bit about the fancy new LED/LCD television sets. Now imagine if the sales associate knew nothing about the product, would you buy from them? Probably not. You would more than likely find someone who knew about the TV set or you wouldn't buy anything at all. Affiliate marketing is no different.

Your first step in being able to sell something, is getting to know whatever it is you are trying to sell. This entails reading everything about the item that you can possibly find all the way up to buying the product yourself and actually using it to see if it will do what the company selling the product says it will do.

Once you find a product or service that you truly believe in, the sales and marketing process will become so much easier.

You can start by emailing your friends, relatives and anyone else in your email address book. If you like whatever it is you are selling, chances are someone you know will like the product or service as well. Emailing your friends is free so take advantage of it. Spamming, the process of sending unsolicited emails, is illegal. NEVER engage in this type of activity.

Use social media outlets like Facebook, Twitter, MySpace and LinkedIN (to name a few), to your advantage. Start talking about the product or service on your wall or personal space. Ask those on your friends list to talk about it if they have tried it. Don't worry about any criticism. Even the best products on the planet have critics. Explain to those critics why you like it. Utilizing social media is a great way to create marketing "buzz".

Blogging is a great way to get information out there about your product or service, but how about you use other people's get the word out. Blogging website Technorati lists over a million blogs. Many of these blogs allow readers to post comments to their blog articles, complete with a link, name and so on. Imagine finding blogs pertaining to whatever it is you are selling and being able to post a comment to the blogger's article complete with a link back to your product or service. So as long as the comment you leave is not considered spam and actually contributes to the overall feel of the blog post, many bloggers will approve your comment.

These are just a few of the many ways you can make money with your affiliate account. As a wise man once said there are 10 ways to accomplish a goal. Here are a few to get you started.
Become an affiliate with Mike the Gardener Enterprises, LLC and earn 10% commission for the life of the customer for selling their Seeds of the Month Club subscription.