The greatest part about affiliate marketing is the small amount of money you need to make money with affiliate programming. For the most part most affiliate programs are free or very low cost. If you want to run them on a website then there may be some low costs incurred for web hosting. My personal favourite instead of paying for websites are to use blogs. You can have a free blog up and running in an hour and then all that’s left to do is choose the affiliate program you want to join.

Over the next few months I will be submitting several articles that are sure to help you grow your affiliate marketing career.
1. It can get very confusing in the affiliate marketing world. There are thousands and thousands of affiliate programs. The great thing is that most of them are free to join and participate in. I would still recommend investigating the program a bit by searching it on any of the major search engines with the word scam next to it. While the program may be free you don’t want to waste a great amount of time promoting something that isn’t going to pay.
2. There are some affiliate programs that you have to pay a fee to join. Before joining one of these you really want to investigate the program very carefully. Over the years thousands and thousands of people have been scammed through shady affiliate marketing programs that charge. That’s not to say there are not good ones out there. It’s just important to check the programs very carefully. At the end of the day if you’re not sure then you should stay away from the paid affiliate programs.
3. Affiliate programs have come a long way in the years. There are some fantastic programs out there now, paid or free that actually spend a lot of money to provide you with some of the best training tools available on line today. It is in their best interests to see you succeed so it is worth it for them to provide these services.
4. One last point I would like to make is beware of the tricky affiliate programs. There are a number of affiliate programs out there that tell you the program is free to join which it is but once you join there are some catches. While the program is free they tell you that you have to pay for web hosting. While most of these programs are not scams, there not totally honest. This just reinforces the fact that you have to investigate the programs that you want to join.
Affiliate marketing can be one of the top paying tools in your arsenal of working on line promotions. While most of these programs are indeed free you need to know that you’re not going to make any money by just joining. These programs need to be seen by other people so you will have to work hard to make your affiliate programs successful. But at the end of the day when you get to work from home it doesn’t even seem like work most of the time.

Dale Mazurek

Author's Bio: 

Dale is an expert affiliate marketer who is involved with both paid and free programs. You can check out his most successful program here. http://stcajo.netsalaries.com Dale also runs a couple very successful blogs which you can go have a look at http://affiliatemarketingfornewbies.blogspot.com/ and http://fishingtutor.blogspot.com/