First of all, if you are an affiliate marketer, I’d like to congratulate you on your new financial freedom.

Affiliate marketing is arguably the easiest and quickest way for anyone (who knows how) to start making money online.

You don’t need any product or service of your own. You just promote other people’s stuff and get paid when they do.

Getting started with affiliate marketing really is as easy as 1-2-3.

There are two ways of doing it:

1) Sign up at Amazon Associates , become a publisher there by filling out some forms, set up links to products on their site via special links which track traffic back to you, and submit the produced contentwritten reviews etc.) – where your visitors can buy those products.

2) Sign up with one of the many affiliate networks (ex.: CJ, ShareASale). As a publisher you list yourself there and offer to promote other people’s products for a commission. The network then sends your offer out to their merchants and whenever somebody buys something through your link you get paid.

If you haven’t done it yet, I highly encourage you to do each of these steps right away . It’ll take like 15 minutes and will make this article make much more sense (trust me on that).

So now that we’ve got that part over with, let’s talk about the future of affiliate marketing since the industry is changing so fast nobody can even guess what it might look like in 10 years.

Well, if you ask me – affiliate marketing is far from dead and will continue to grow and become even more powerful than it already is. It’s just getting started. And I’ll tell you why:

1) Affiliate marketers are everywhere – they don’t look like affiliates so nobody knows what they do for a living and everybody finds their job boring (which is very wrong). That means that there is no competition on the market because it’s not mainstream while at the same time millions of people are hungry to make money online .

2) A great number of marketers have realized the potential of being an affiliate marketer, which makes it even harder to compete with them because there are so many out there who know their job very well.

3) Affiliate marketing is always in demand because it’s all about promoting other people’s products. The affiliate marketer just takes care of the sales funnel while the merchant has to create the product in the first place.

4) People say that affiliate marketing is in need of a ranking system which would filter out inexperienced marketers so only professional affiliates could join certain programs. Well, I think this will never happen because allowing everybody to join your program = more money for you . And how can anybody know if somebody actually knows what they do? Chances are that even though they don’t look like affiliates, they may very well be one (or many). They might even be making much more money than you do.

5) Affiliate marketing is the cheapest type of an online business. You don’t need any product or service of your own and you don’t even have to know how to create one (in fact, people make more money selling other people’s products than their own). All you do is promote it and get paid when somebody buys through your link.

6) Since affiliate marketing doesn’t require taking care of customers after they buy, affiliates can work from anywhere in the world with just a computer and an internet connection . All they need is good content, a tracking system and websites where they can send their visitors to.

7) Affiliates are independent marketers who not only sell the merchant’s product but also their own (which is what makes them different from regular employees). That means that they don’t have to work for one company, which makes them even more independent. They feel at liberty to choose whatever affiliate program will best suit their needs right now. And since there are so many out there…

8) At the same time affiliates don’t need any training or education to do their job (unlike most other jobs in the world), they can just join an affiliate network and start promoting products whenever they feel like it. As long as you have a website with good content, everything else falls into place on its own since you don’t have to keep up with deadlines at all.

9) Aff marketing can be done on practically any niche you can imagine because almost every market has its own affiliate programs. And since there are so many different niches out there…

10) Affiliate marketing is the best way to promote products online. You don’t have to be an expert on whatever product or service you’re trying to sell (although that’s always a plus), it’s enough just to know what your potential customers want/need and how they behave in general. That means that even though you might not be promoting something useful for yourself, you’re still providing valuable information to somebody else who happens to be the target audience of your site. And that’s exactly what affiliate marketing is all about – helping others make money too .

11) Thanks to affiliate networks like CJ , ShareASale , FlexOffers and Rakuten Affiliate Network, affiliates can promote literally thousands of products. And since there are no limitations whatsoever, the only limit is your imagination .

12) The affiliate marketer’s main sources of income are commissions that he/she gets when somebody buys something through his/her affiliate link. Since it doesn’t take any extra time or effort to get money this way (unlike in the case of salary), they are willing to work for less which means that you can too .

13) Opting for an affiliate marketing career gives you a chance to stay at home with your family instead of traveling all over the country in search of good jobs . It also allows you to spend more time with your friends and loved ones, no matter where in the world they are.

14) If you lose your job tomorrow, affiliate marketing will allow you to keep doing what you love and even start making money from it within a couple of days . If anything happens to you, there’s always a backup option that doesn’t depend on the decisions of other people.

15) Affiliate marketing is actually an international business which means that American affiliates can work with Chinese companies while living in Thailand for all anyone cares. There are no boundaries so it doesn’t matter where your customers live either. And since anybody who wants to buy something online can do so at any time…

16) Last but not least, hiring an affiliate marketer costs much less than recruiting a regular employee. That makes affiliate programs an extremely cost-effective solution for both sides .

It is said that the first reference to “affiliate marketing” appeared in July 1996, and was related by Gary Flake, a former Yahoo! vice president:

Associate marketing creates additional revenue streams for website owners. Internet users are exposed to advertisements when they follow paid or sponsored hyperlinks from affiliates’ websites to their eventual destination — e.g., a retailer’s online store. When an online user clicks on one of those advertisements and then makes a purchase at the advertiser’s website, the affiliate earns a commission on the sale. Eventually, affiliates start earning more money than before as their websites’ traffic increases due to their promotions.