How can I earn money online? This is a question that simple people ask themselves, ordinary people like you and me; however, millions can never answer it. Well, if you are reading this article right now folks, you have found the answer. You have discovered affiliate marketing.

Now what the heck is affiliate marketing? Let me give you a quick summary, because the concept is really simple. The whole goal is to drive traffic to your blog, articles, or websites, and convert that traffic into sales. I bet you’re interested now, aren’t you? Read on and the methods will be explained.

So if your whole goal is to drive traffic to your articles, how can you do it? The easiest way is to get your article to rank high on Google. Have you ever been on Google and typed something like “How can I make money online?” I sure do, isn’t that how you found this article? Well, for most of you it is. Now that’s called a long-tail keyword. The goal is to write articles based on longtail keywords on websites like Go Articles, EzineArticles, or UsFreeAds. The key here is to make the longtail keyword the title of the article and wow, you have a page that will appear easily in Google.

So let’s quickly look at an example of how you would do this. Let’s say you think of the longtail keyword “how can I train my dog”. Nice job. So you go to the article site and write an article about it. REMEMBER to make the title the longtail keyword. So in this case, that title would be “How can I train my dog?”. Well, how simple was that? Now, do your research, give users some tips. How-tos and top tips (top 5 or 10) work very well. There you have it, you have an article that will rank quite high on Google.

Now you’re probably thinking “great, I know how to get an article to rank pretty high on Google, but how can I turn this into money?” Well, let’s go back to the example of the dog training article. This is where the “affiliate” part of affiliate marketing comes into play. There are hundreds of thousands of websites on the Internet that sell products like Walmart, eBay, and many, MANY others. All you have to do is go to sites like Walmart and sign up for their affiliate programs. Going back to our example, let’s say there’s a dog training book that further expands on your item being sold online at Walmart. You go to their website and sign up as an affiliate. You get an affiliate link to the book and post it at the end of your article. Obviously, the people who come to your article will be interested in the book and many will buy it. Let’s say the book costs $20. Walmart may pay you 20%, which is a common affiliate payment. That means he earns $4 per book sold. Now remember, you could be getting thousands and thousands of page views per month because you’ve learned how to get to the top of Google. Let’s say only 1 out of 100 people (which is an extremely low rate) who visit the article buy the book, but you get 1,000 visits in a month, that means 10 people buy the book, at $4 each. That’s $40 bucks a month on that item alone. Now this may sound miserable, but add it up, you can easily earn it for each article you write, and it can take you an hour at most to write a good article and post affiliate links in it. So let’s say you take an hour out of your day every day and write an article every day for a month. That’s 30 articles earning around $20-$40 per month. That’s an extra income of $600-$1200 a month!

Folks, this really is the key to financial freedom. You can easily expand and write as many articles as you want per day. The limit of the amount of money you earn is up to you! That’s really an exciting statement right there.

Now this is just the basic beginning and essentials of online marketing, starting with affiliate marketing only. There are many (and I mean 100 when I say that) other ways to make money online. Others extremely more effective than this method. There is a very, very popular e-book on the internet right now that shows it all. I personally bought this book and would rate it 10/10. It shows you all the tips and tricks, and leaves no stone unturned.