What people do not understand about affiliate markenting is that it is one of the most profitable online business today. Just to have an ideea, in 2007 the affiliate industry worldwide earned about $9.5 BILLION! You can say that a profit of $10-15 thousands/month after first year is not uncommon among the affiliate marketers. Is also the kind of business that require little or no experience and almost no upfront investment. And if you consider working from comfort of your home, at your own pace and hours, i would say that by all means affiliate marketing is one great business.

Yet, there are a lot of misuderstandings about this profession who make people miss an unique opportunity that may change their life forever. I have found 5 of most common misunderstandings about basic affiliate marketing, and i will clarify them for you here.

This is completly wrong.The Internet is maybe the only place where you can start a business with $50 or less and became highly successful within the first year.

I will give only one example: you can became an affiliate marketer of Amazon.com. They will provide you with a completly equiped e-store, all the tools and promoting materials needed to start selling in one hour. All that for free, without having to worry about products, billing, shipping, customer service and so on. As for customers, even my grandma buys today from Amazon!

Of course that are many other ways to start making money without spending almost nothing. Then later on you can use the earned money to invest in paid promotion in order to grow your profits. But to start making money with affiliate marketing you don't really need money.

No matter where you are in the world, the opportunities to earn money as an affiliate are huge. Because the internet is "global" you can work from any place with an internet connection.

You can also target any country in the world. Search engines are so advanced today that is really posible to target any audience in almost any language. Also the affiliate networks are evolving and opening ways for other countries. So to be a successful affiliate marketer you can work from everywhere in the world.

The first thing that most marketers do after they build a website is to bring in as much traffic as they can. Because one big misunderstandings that traffic equals sale. But traffic it just mean that people visit your site, wich is not necessarily sales. For example, if you promote a product that is a guide to computer maintenance, using the keyword "computer" will bring a lot of people to your site. But those people may be searching for buying a computer, computer software or hardware, technical support and many other computer related things.

In order to be successful as an affiliate marketer you have to understand that relevancy is more important than just traffic. Using specific and relevant keywords will bring maybe less traffic, but with higher chances to convert in sales.

This is so very wrong! The Internet is expanding every year, more and more people get access to broadband connection so online spending is also growing constantly. In 2007, only during the holyday season more than $29 billion were spent online. As a matter of fact, the yearly growt of online spending is 21%!

As an affiliate marketing you can work in every industry at all and be highly profitable. Think a minute about that: the next online trend is watching TV on the computer; so people will be exposed to a huge amount of efficient advertising. For an affiliate marketer is free promotion at his best, you will only have to pick the highly advertised products on TV and sell them. Evolving means only more opportunities for everyone.

So thinking that is no more room in internet marketing is a huge mistake, and if this is what stopped you to start your own online business, is time to reconsider.

Money does not grows on trees, is not even made from trees. Don't think that if you decide to become an affiliate marketer and join few affiliate networks, you'll gonna find money on trees. It takes some work, and some effort from your side to start making money with affiliate marketing, but the results will be really rewarding. There is no limit of how much you can grow in internet marketing!

And fortunately you don't have to figure out everything by yourself. There are many internet marketing communities where you can learn how to make money online. I had luck and joined from the beginning to the famous Wealthy Affiliate wich is the best place to learn affiliate marketing and make money while you learn. In fact this lens is inspired directly from what i learned there, and am thankful for that. If you really think about starting your online business then you better take every advantage that can get you ahead of other marketers. And the day when you'll be making an income from internet marketing is closer than you think!

Want to know more? Here you can find more information about affiliate markeing and a great opportunity to join a winners community!