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With that said, there are three ways you can earn money through affiliate marketing.
1. Unattached Affiliate Marketing
This is a pay-per-click form of affiliate marketing where all you have to do is put an affiliate link in front of potential customers through Facebook ads, Google AdWords, etc. Then you sit back, twiddle your fingers and hope that they will click on the ads, purchase the product and you get your cut of the sale.
The reason why this type of affiliate marketing is so popular is that you don’t need to have a presence or authority. Building a following and establishing yourself as a trustworthy person on the web takes a long time and many people do not want to invest their time or resources to do that.
However, don’t be fooled into thinking that all you have to do is place an ad out there and people will click on it. It’s much more complicated than that because you have to learn how display advertising works.
It’s also not a great business model because you don’t build relationships with your customers. You are just a behind the scenes middleman.
But it’s still a great income generating model and you can have a lot of success with it if you know what you are doing.
2. Related Affiliate Marketing
This is another form of affiliate marketing where you have some sort of presence online whether through podcast, videos, a blog, etc. and you include affiliate links to products you don’t particularly use or aren’t even remotely interested in.
There was a time when text link ads were a huge deal. Almost every single “make money online” website had a 125 X 125 pixel ad for text link ads.