Join some internet forums on work from home programs and for a month or two, just read a lot and ask a lot of questions. Try and find a niche program that matches your interests that is either just starting out or one that isn't so popular that you will be competing with 200,000 other affiliates.

That was my mistake when I first started out. I joined a program as an affiliate that basically would pay me to get people to sign up for free satellite TV. It sounded good to me. A service that was in demand, was being offered for free, and I would make $50 in commissions per sign up. Well, what I didn't know was that there were over 200,000 other affiliates trying to do the same thing. That's a lot of competition for the advertising dollar, and face it, you will have to spend some money on advertising to get your work from home program noticed on the internet. If the competition is small, then the chances of success are greater.

My personal opinion is that all the work from home programs are good. The problem lies in how do you drive traffic to them. You have the free search engines, which is the holy grail of advertising, the pay per click search engines, where you actually bid on a keyword. This is called the Google Adwords program, but Yahoo and MSN have similar programs. If you have the highest bid, you will be the number 1 person or the number 1 ad listed in the search results. These are the sponsored links that you see on the right hand side of the page of a google search. The right side is the results for people that are paying for their ad to be there.

Then you have classified ad advertising, Ezine advertising, email marketing, and FFA pages. Many marketers advocate building your own list of people through an autoresponder to do your advertising to. You can also start writing articles and submitting them to article directories. This is my preferred method, but you have to have your own website that is yours to make this work, as the article directories won't let you promote affiliate programs for the most part. Some do, but only under special conditions.

Starting out, I would recommend that you look at email advertising through groups such as Yahoo. That was the first thing that worked for me and I was making about $800 a month after just a couple months. Just type in Yahoo Groups into your browser and look for the ones listed in the home business and advertising categories. There are about 5000 of these groups that will accept advertising through the group. Membership in the group can range from 50 or so, to close to 20,000 people. All you do is join up; it's free, and then send an email ad to the group. It then gets distributed to the whole group. Just imagine your email ad being sent out to 20,000 people and all you did was send one out. The more groups you join, the wider an audience your ads will reach. A word of caution here: Try and be unique and offer a product or a service that isn't widely known about. These folks in the Yahoo Groups have seen it all. If your product is unique and in demand, it will increase your chances of making sales. You will need to have an email account with Yahoo to join the groups. Be sure when you join any group that they allow email advertising. If they do, be sure to follow their posted rules so you won't be accused of spamming them. At one time, I had 2700 groups that I sent ads to daily. Then as my websites started to rank higher in the free search engine results, I quit sending ads to the Yahoo groups. But it's a great way to get started out for the novice marketer.

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