One of the obstacles people come up with for not getting started with business on the internet is not having a product to promote. It turns out there are thousands of people who have made products and sales processes already, and give generous commissions to the people that will help market them.

Out of the thousands of products available, there is likely to be at least one that you either know a lot about already or would like to know about. By virtue of that product existing, there is likely to be a decent market for it since a good author would not put the time and expense into product creation unless they had previously done the market research.

So how does this widespread and potentially lucrative method form the gateway for your internet marketing efforts?

By having a product that is already developed with sales pages, payment processing and product support, the only responsibility you have is to promote the product. Many affiliate programs will use a third party processor like ClickBank to collect payment and distribute commissions. When you sign up to be an affiliate you receive a special link to the sales page for the product you have chosen. There is technology behind that link so that when somebody clicks on it, the affiliate tracking system knows that any sales generated from following your link will be credited to you.

When somebody makes that purchase a commission will show up in your "back office" area of ClickBank (for this example) and you finally receive actual payment by PayPal or by check sent in the mail.

The customer typically receives the product by digital download or there may even be physical items shipped by the product creator. The best part of this is that you don't need to worry at all about how the product gets to the customer, which frees you up for just continuing to promote the product.

There are couple of ways to move beyond being "just" an affiliate and increasing your profits.

One way is to use the affiliate marketing program to test a market for your own products. Before going through the effort of product development, creating marketing materials, and product promotion, you can first market a similar product that someone else has already created. This is direct market research and will tell you exactly how much demand there is in a particular market. If you're improving on an existing concept, you may even be able to sell your product to the people who purchase the affiliate product you were promoting.

A way to use it with [tag-tec]network marketing online[/tag-tec] is to have a product that will be useful for people looking at network marketing as a business model. It's important for a product like this to be independent of whatever company you are involved with. This increases the size of your potential market for the product, but also gives you the chance to introduce your company later on.

The major advantage of using this technique with network marketing is that you are generating your own leads for your business, and earning a commission for the affiliate product at the same time. This is great for people just starting out as they are able to make a short term income from the sale of the training course while building the longer term income through their network marketing business.

This is truly a breakthrough for network marketing online and shows the great intersection between internet marketing as an affiliate and network marketing.