Affiliate marketing was one of the leading ways to make money online, and to this day, you can still find many people who are easily making six figures or higher simply by promoting others’ products and services. Although the “middle man” still isn’t cut out of the equation, unless of course you are offering your own products and services, you are still benefiting much more than through other methods, in terms of how much time you have to put in.

Along with the sense that there must be fine print with affiliate marketing, rumors were spread about how the business was run, and these are not always true. In this post, many of these will be dispelled.

#1. It costs money to get into affiliate marketing.

This is false. Although many affiliate promotion companies want to provide their service to people who have a strong background in the field, you can still get started with many individual products with a Blogger or other developer-hosted account, many of which are free. Beyond this, there may be additional costs, but getting started with a simple website reviewing products and promoting the links will be free.

#2. It takes a lot of time to maintain affiliate pages and blogs.

Like blogging, you will find that some people try to constantly update their blogs’ previous posts, while others simply write a new one, effectively voiding the older post. Similarly, this is seen in affiliate marketing. Single pages might not have to be updated for a year or more, at least until the product or service sees a major update. Other than this once-a-year update, you can simply leave the pages alone.

Management, updating links, and making sure there is a “fresh” image on the page can certainly add some time and help in the long-term, but isn’t required. As soon as you have one page done for a particular product, it is time to move on to another product/page, especially if you want to diversify.

#3. There is no money to be made, because the market is already saturated.

Often, I find it impossible to say that something is at or beyond saturation on the internet. There are really no caps on how much content can be pushed out to the public, because there will always be someone to stumble upon it. All it takes is one person to discover a page to purchase a product from, and then you will have made money from the purchase.