While many people may have you believe otherwise, selling online is not an easy thing to do. Coming up with a great domain name, setting up your website, integrating the whole lot with a payment processor, getting inventory, handling shipping, the list goes on.

It is a great thing then, that affiliate selling came about. What this is is basically you referring customers to merchants. For example, if you point John to MerchantA.com, and John buys some products there, then you get a cut of the profits.

This obviously simplifies the whole process a lot, and allows you to concentrate on marketing. In fact, you might not even need a website to do this, as I will show you later.

What Do You Sell?

Affiliate networks like Commission Junction, LinkShare and Clickbank are one-stop shops where you can find thousands of products from different merchants to sell. In this manner, you will only have to sign up once and you can consolidate payments from different merchants in one cheque!

So sign up with one of these networks and look for products to sell.

Why Isn't A Website Needed?

While a well-designed and effectively promoted website is always better, it is optional for this method of affiliate marketing, because you simply use Google AdWords to generate relevant traffic to your affiliate links. In other words, you can link your AdWords ads directly to the linking URLs that networks like Commission Junction, Linkshare or Clickbank provide you with.

Signing up with Google AdWords takes only a few minutes and costs only $5 to activate. Don't bother about any promo codes that the sign-up process asks you for, because they have to be bought, so it isn't really worth it. Once you're done signing up, you can start creating your ads immediately.

AdWord ads are in this general format:

Ad Title
Description 1
Description 2
URL

A point to note is that AdWords has two parts to the URL portion. One URL is your display URL, which is the URL people will see appear on your ad. The other URL is your actual URL, which is where your users will go to when they click on your ad. So you can actually just put the web address of the company whose products you are selling as your display URL, and have your affiliate link as your actual URL!

Choosing Keywords

Great! Now you are ready for the next step, which is choosing the keywords that will trigger Google to display your ad. Choose keywords that you believe potential customers will use to search for your product/service. If you have a larger profit margin, you can bid for the more competitive keywords, but usually other just as relevant keywords may be less in demand and cost less. Don't worry about selecting keywords, because you can have a whole list of keywords to trigger your ad.

This list is not finalised and you can edit your keywords at any point of time. Also, Google Adwords works great with your advertising budget since it allows you to determine the maximum cost-per-click you are willing to pay, as well as the maximum daily amount you want to spend in your campaign.