You may have read or heard about affiliate marketing as a method to make money online. This is a very simple process that can be started with a very small budget, as small as $25.  

The first thing to do is to decide on a category or "niche" you are somewhat knowledgable about, This can be anything from fishing to politics.

The next thing to do is sign up to some affiliate programs. The most popular site to find affiliate programs is commission junction.  Once you have signed up you can search for websites and products related to your niche to promote.

There are many methods you can use to promote affiliate links, some of the more popular and effective methods are pay-per-click advertising, article marketing, and creating a website.

The best place to start as a beginner is through the use of article marketing and pay per click advertising. This is a simple and very effective method to make money online quickly.  

To get started you first need to hire a writer, you can most times find a freelance writer to write you a few articles for about $10 a peice. You can find freelance writers on bizreef.com, or elance.com.

Give your writers the link to the site you are looking to promote, and a few ideas of keywords you wish to target. Explain to your writer that these are keyword ideas and that you expect them to do the actual keyword research.

Once you have some articles written you will need to place them online. The best place I have found to do this is right here on hubpages.com. You can sign up to hubpages and your articles are live as soon as you publish them, and you also have much more freedom with articles on hubpages.

Place your articles on the internet making sure to place your affiliate links exactly as it is given to you by commission junction in the text of your article. At the end of your article create a capsule for links, here you can place your affiliate links again aswell as links to your other artilcles.

Now that you have a few articles published promoting your affiliate links, now you must promote your promotions. One of the easiest ways to start is through the use of pay per click advertising.

Pay per click advertising allows you to pay to be placed in search results for keywords or search terms that you pick. The more popular the keyword the more you will pay. The most popular sites to use are yahoo search marketing, and google adwords. I recommend using both of these sites to promote your articles. Though this is a fairly simple process there are a few tricks to the trade, so make sure you take time to learn these before you get started.

Social networking can be a fun and simple method to promote your articles. Sign up to sites such as facebook.com and meet others who share similar interests as you. You only need to meet a few people for this to be effective. For example if you are communicating with ten friends they may have ten other friends each of those have ten friends etc. It doesn't take long before your article links are in front of thousands of people who share your interests and may make a purchase that you refer.

Writing teaser articles can be effective method to get visitors to your articles and links aswell. You could pay your writer a couple of extra dollars to write a short teaser version of your article to post to smaller article directories. There are thousands of article directories on the internet just do a google search.