I spent this past weekend at a Bob Proctor live seminar.  The man really knows how to make money, and he should because he’s been studying it for more than 40 years.  One of the books he has studied is The Science of Getting Rich by Wallace Wattles, which was written 100 years ago.  Have you seen or read The Secret?  The movie and book were originally inspired by The Science of Getting Rich.

When I got home from the seminar I had an email about a new online version of the home-study program on the Science of Getting Rich that Bob Proctor has done with Rev. Michael Beckwith and Jack Canfield.  I have the old CD version of the program that used to sell for $2,000.  The online version is only  $197, almost free compared to what it used to cost.

There are two things you need to create a business, a product or service, and a marketing plan. Affiliate marketing lets you shortcut your startup time by allowing you to plug into somebody else’s product or service, and so far all of the affiliate programs I have found are free to join.  All you have to do is drive traffic to their website and they take it from there. You don’t really have to worry about a marketing plan either because once you have directed traffic to their site, they have all of ad copy to promote the product already in place. All you need to be concerned with is directing traffic and collecting a commission, which is usually a percentage of the selling price. I have seen some affiliate programs offer commissions up to 33% of the selling price.

To get started in affiliate marketing you will need to first find a company that offers an affiliate program. They are pretty easy to find, like Amazon.com for example. I am interested in personal growth and network marketing and I was able to find several companies with affiliate programs in those fields. Once you have found an affiliate program you want to join, you will have to create an account so that the sales you generate can be tracked and credited to you. Keep in mind that this is a business, so you will have to provide your Social Security Number so that they can report your earnings to the IRS and send you a 1099 to file with your taxes. I am not a tax professional or accountant so you may want to talk to a professional to fully understand the ramifications of starting your own business. I have been filing a Schedule C, the self-employment single-proprietor tax form, for years and it is pretty straight forward.

Now that you have an account, you are all set to begin directing traffic to the company’s web site and generating sales for them. There are several ways to get that traffic. One easy way is to include a link in your signature on every email you send. A better way to reach more people is to add your links to your profile on websites such as Facebook, MySpace, or Twitter. If you are a blogger, you can write a blog post about the product or service and add your link to the company website. Sites like Squidoo that let you create pages are another great place to write something about the product or service and post a link.

The second part to driving traffic is the link itself. When you created your account you were assigned an id that they will use to keep track of everything for you. They will also give you instructions about how to create your links to include your id so that clicks can be tracked and recorded properly. A lot of companies make this easy for you by giving you the link already formatted properly or, as in the case of Amazon.com, give you a tool to generate the link. Either way, you just have to copy the link from their page and paste it on yours. They might also provide you with banner images to help draw attention to the links on your page.

The last thing to affiliate marketing is keeping track of your sales. You will probably receive an email from the company every time you generate a sale. Some also provide you with an account page where you can login to look at some statistics about the traffic you generate. They might show you how many unique visitors you have generated and how long the visitor stayed on the site. You will also see how many sales you generated and how much you have earned in commission.

To see some examples of affiliate marketing at work, check out my Resources page. Just about everything there, all of the books and personal growth programs, are links to products from companies that I have an affiliate account with, including Amazon.com. The nice thing about affiliate marketing is that I can make some extra money by helping to get the word out about companies and products that I believe in, and would be promoting whether I made money or not.

Affiliate marketing doesn’t usually generate a lot of income. Next time I will talk about a home-based business that is like affiliate marketing on steroids where you can make enough money to live comfortably.

The word “job” is really an acronym for “just over broke”. Too many people toil their lives away at a job for 45 years and end up having to get by on Social Security or work as a greeter at Walmart. I have nothing against greeters at Walmart, but by the time you retire you should have a choice about what you want to do with the rest of your life. If that is to be a greeter at Walmart because you enjoy the social interaction, then that’s great. It shouldn’t be because you need the money.

But we are doing exactly as we have been programmed to do. We are taught that we need to study hard in school and go to college so that we can get a good job making a good salary. Once you have accomplished that you’re set for life, right? I don’t think so. The first thing you do when you get your paycheck every month is pay the bills. There isn’t much left over afterwards, is there? Maybe enough to take the family out for dinner or to see a movie. If an emergency comes up then it goes on the credit card. Now there are more bills for the next payday and even less money left over.

It doesn’t have to be that way. You just need to learn about money. How to make it and how to use it. Our school system doesn’t teach us how to make money, and it isn’t designed to. You wouldn’t go to a drowning person to learn how to swim, so you can’t expect a teacher, who is paid only a little, to teach you how to get paid a lot. And you deserve to make a lot of money. We live in a world that has a lot to offer, but you have to have money to experience it.

Before we go any farther we have to get one thing clear. Money is not the root of all evil. The love of money is. Money is a tool and nothing more. You shouldn’t love money any more than you would love a hammer or a pencil. Money is also how we keep score in our society. You make money by providing a service. If you aren’t making much money then you aren’t providing enough service.

Don’t forget that.

Now for what this blog is about. For the past couple years I have been studying people who are making a lot of money and I want to share what I have learned. I am really just getting started on this journey and I will use this blog to share what I have learned and how it is working for me. I want you to join me on this adventure and to share your comments with me and everyone else.

Will you join me?

Next time I will write about Multiple Sources of Income.