This is of course the primary, or at least at first source of income.
How it works
So, you have gone through the process of setting up your website. Let’s say for example your website is about cooking and within it you do a review about a certain make of cooking knives. Now you create a link from the cooking knives to the manufacturer’s affiliate site.
In simple terms when someone visits your site and clicks on this link and subsequently buys a knife from the 
manufacturer you earn a commission from that sale.
Probably the best example is Amazon. You can become an Amazon affiliate by visiting the Amazon website and search for “affiliate member”. More on Amazon later..
Affiliate Programs
You would be surprised at how many companies have affiliate programs. Some manage their own programs, like Amazon, but most use a specialist “Affiliate Network” company. These companies “manage” affiliate programs for many companies actually referred to as merchants. Examples of these are Commission Junction, Shareable and Clickbank
So, once you have set up your website focusing on a niche market it is probably best to join at least one of these Network Affiliate organizations. You do need to have your website up and running before you do because most of them will look at your website for suitability before letting you join. It’s worth learning a bit more about each affiliate network to find one(or two or three) who specialist in your particular focus.
Content
However, the indisputable fact is that if you don’t get any traffic to your site then it is impossible to get any commission because there is nobody there to “press the button” So we are back to the absolute bottom line – first must come content – good content.
To a lot of people writing good content doesn’t come easily. My firm belief is to at least write something and then fine tune it later. There is nothing worse than staring at a blank piece of paper. No matter what might be said not much inspiration will come from a blank piece of paper!!
So let’s look at the basics. Wealthy Affiliate will tell you that on average a page of content should be about 1,000 words long. If you are like me that appears to be a monumental task. So how can we ease the pain? Think about what the physical structure of the page will look like. It will contain sub-headings and paragraphs and of course sentences within each paragraph.
First off you should try to identify the sub-headings and a good number for a 1,000 word page would be about 8. Then actually put a name to each heading. Then target to write two or three paragraphs for each heading. Now, if you break that down you have say eight headings each with two paragraphs which means that each paragraph has just over 60 words – that’s doable. Look at this paragraph for example, it has nearly eighty words!!
Good Content
OK, there is content and good content. You obviously will need good content to get ranked by Google. My philosophy is that some content is better than no content, so at least make a start by getting some content written down. Then at least you can fine tune it and improve it as time goes on.
If you are “one finger” typist like me you may find that your thinking rate gets ahead of your typing rate and then you lose the flow . One suggestion to get over this is to use something like Google docs and use the dictation function. That at least encourages the flow of the subject. If you are like me you will have to go over it with a tooth comb afterwards as it will be full of spelling mistakes and the grammar will be all haywire.
Pictures
Of course your page is going to look a lot better if you put in the odd picture.
However, the picture better be relevant to the subject matter. Funnily enough people are far more likely to look at a page which contains diagrams or pictures than they are to just a string of plain text.
There are literally millions of pictures available for website use, just be careful that they are available for use i.e. just make sure that it is not copywrited. If you use a website like “Pixabay” they identify which pictures are copywrited and which are not.
Keywords
In order to get ranked by Google or any other search engine for that matter you have to have significant keywords. In simple terms you are looking for a group of words or a phrase which when someone puts those words into Google your website comes out on page one of the results. It is in fact rather more complicated than that, but Wealthy Affiliate covers that aspect in great detail and also provides many tools to identify good keywords.
Don’t let the complication of keywords slow you down, help is there if you need it. Kyle, at Wealthy Affiliate keeps reminding you that with now over three and a half billion(3,500,000,000!!) people with access to the Internet there is still a huge market available.
Summary
Having a home based business to make money is well withing the grasp of anyone interested in learning how to do it. You have to find a niche, set up a website and then write about it. You will then be able to set up links the network affiliates and as a result make money as people buy stuff through your website. All you have to do do is learn how to do it.
That’s where Wealthy Affiliate comes in. Within Wealthy Affiliate you have all the tools and many many other things too to be able to start a very successful home base business. Don’t be under the impression that it is easy. However, it does require commitment and perseverance and success will prevail.
One last thing, Wealthy Affiliate is a community with thousands of members all of which help each other out. So every thing you need, and a whole lot more is available
Good luck.
