Imagine that you could earn commissions on a popular brand-name product just by placing a link on your website or in your email. That, my friends, is “Affiliate Marketing”!

OK… So it’s not quite that simple, but it doesn’t have to be much more complicated either.

Let’s start with a few definitions. An advertiser, or merchant, is the company who is selling a product. An affiliate, sometimes referred to as a publisher or partner, is another person or company who assists in the promotion of the product and earns a commission for doing so. (That could be you!) In between is the account management service that partners the advertisers with the affiliates and keeps track of the sales and commissions.

If you want to become an affiliate, you first need to choose either a product you want to sell, or an account management service. You will end up with both, but the choice of one will determine the choice for the other. If you choose the product first, the advertiser will direct you to the account management service that they already work with. If you choose the account management service first, they will provide you with a list of merchants that they do business with.

Are you ready for the health market explosion that the baby boomers are about to bring onto the internet?

If not there’s, a good chance that you’ll want to get ready for it.

The reason why; In just five years, more than 100 million consumers and your potential customers in North America will be 50 and over. These people have and will continue to drive the market place so your best bet is to be ready for them, and what they’ll be looking for is health information.

So here are 5 Essential No-Cost or Low-Cost Resources for you to start making money in the health and fitness market….

Essential Resource #1:
www.HealthInfoProfits.com

Chances are that you don’t yet have a product to market to the millions of people who are looking for health information every month. So, as you research for your passionate health niche, there’s an amazing way to shortcut this process which is called Private Label Resale Rights Products.

What they are simply, are products already created for you, to use as you wish. Either for people to download with ebooks, for free reports to collect names and email addresses for creating a mailing list, or simply as content on a website or blog to grab a piece of the Google Adsense Phenomenon or affiliate commissions.

The best is that you can pay a small amount for a membership and get products with sales pages written for you each and every month. This cuts down on a ton of research time for you.

One point however is that you’ll most likely want to enhance and change these products so that they become yours and the next resource is so extremely valuable that I almost made it number one.

But first here’s the direct url for private resale rights packages again:
www.HealthInfoProfits.com

Essential Resource #2:

www.WebMD.com

As you enhance your Private Label Products with new and valuable health information the grand daddy of all sources for health information is definitely WebMD.com. They are hugely known as one of the most reliable sources on the web for health information. The reason being that the great majority of their articles are actually written by doctors and/or those within the health care profession.

Now with that being said there’s an even better source within WebMD for doing your product/content research, and this is the discussion forums that focus on just about any health problem that you can think of.

These are immensely valuable for the fact that you can figure out exactly what is on the mind of your potential customers at any given time.

Building and maintaining a high quality list of subscribers is vital to any marketers success. Let’s go over some of the most important steps you need to take to ensure you build a profitable list:

1)First, make sure you put up a good landing page. It should be well-designed and professional looking. If you don’t have any design skills then hire someone to do this for you.

2)Next, put a web form on your landing page and offer your customers the opportunity to opt-in to your mailing list. Give something away free to encourage them to opt in.

If it seems that everybody is making boatloads of money online and you’re missing out, fear not.

There’s plenty of time left for you, and the greatest part about it that it’s not very difficult.

Strategic Tip #1: Plan to work hard.

I know, this goes against everything you hear but deep down you know that nothing worthwhile is easy right?

You also know that getting anything done quickly just takes more work.

Even cleaning out the garage, yeah you could take your time and get it done over a weeks time, or else you could work your butt off and have it finished and be sitting right back down on the couch watching your favorite reruns.

To get things done quicker you just have to put in the extra hard work, but when the checks start rolling in, all your work will be worthwhile.

By the way, if you do things right, one of the beautiful things about the internet is that the work you do today will pay off for months and hopefully years after.

Just like that clean garage you’ll have.

Strategic tip #2: Find one good teacher.

Let me just emphasize “one”. Bouncing around from teacher to teacher, product to product is THE biggest mistake that new hopeful internet marketers make.

However, find a mentor/teacher that’s reputable. You can go to the different marketing forums and ask around, and you’ll get some honest answers. Just beware of anyone trying to sell themselves. The great teachers don’t have to do this in forums.

Once you find them, stick to their strategies and you’ll be way better off than most people who are still playing the bouncy game.

Some marketers I recommend you follow are:

Jimmy D. Brown
Jim Edwards
John Vallaries
Yanik Silver
John Reese

But just pick one, and stick with them.

Strategic Tip #3: Research and target a hungry niche that’s got as little competition as possible.

I’m not going to say a whole lot about this. It’s very basic but not quite easy. Everything will have some competition, which is good. This means there’s money to be made.