Internet Marketing Exposed - Truth About Affiliate Marketing and Who is Really Making Money Online

I know that common sense is what a majority of people believes to be true, now that doesn't mean that it is that way. For example it was common sense a couple of hundred years ago that the earth was flat, as we know today was far from the truth. What scares me is that it seems to be common sense that people that sign up to do affiliate marketing, think they can make money for free. Now the last time I checked there was no money tree growing in my back yard and I am pretty sure that trees don´t grow on the internet. So if you are looking for free money to pick of the money tree, then my backyard and the internet is out.

So the question is, who is really making all the money online and how do they do it? Is the purpose of selling a product always to sell a product, or could there be an anterior motive? Those are just two of the questions that I will in-directly answer in this article. If you want to become an internet marketer, you need to know the truth about how to really build wealth online.

Let's start with looking at the process of being an affiliate and how most people do it. As an affiliate you are essentially promised a cut of whatever the product you are promoting is worth. So essentially you are a commission based salesperson. Most people that sign up for affiliates seem to think that this is the best way to make money online or that is how it is supposed to work. Now granted this works great, just not for the affiliate promoting the product, rather for the person that owns the product. Let me explain this in a little more detail. When you sign up as an affiliate for a product you essentially get your own personalized tracking link, this link is then used to calculate your commission of a specific product. If you sign up for the newsletter of the product you are promoting, you will soon start to realize that the product owner promotes more than just the product you signed up to get a commission for. Are the bells going off in your head right now? They should be.

The product owner is the one that owns the money making system, you essentially are a commission based employee as an affiliate marketer. The reason is simple, as I said above; they promote more than just the product you get a commission off. So let's do the obvious math, let´s say that you make a 50% commission of a product that is worth $100. This means that for every sale you get $50. The average sales percentage is 7%, but to make things simple we will say it is 10%. If you send 100 people to the product owner's website, you essentially get 10 sales, which would be about $500 worth of commission. Sounds great in theory, but that is what separates the big players from everyone else. Now you have just sent 100 people to sign up for the product manufacturers (the system owners) mailing list, and helped him make $500 in the process.

What happens next is that the business owner can now promote several other products to all of those 100 prospects that you sent to him. Now do the math again, if he promotes 10 products, with the same formula used above, that means that he will get 100 sales at $50 a piece, giving him over $5.000 in sales all because of the people you sent to that specific product. How much do you think you get of that $5.000? That is right, you won't see a penny! So before you start signing up as an affiliate and start spending all your efforts on promoting your affiliate link, then maybe you should ask yourself if you should just build your own system and promote several products yourself to the people you have accumulated. Now doesn´t it make more sense to build your own mailing list than to build someone else's, to setup your own system instead of just feeding prospects into someone else's system?

Now don't get me wrong, I am a firm believer in affiliate marketing and I support it 100%. But I also understand how the system works, and how you really make money online. Before you even think about signing up as an affiliate and start spending your time promoting a link, you should consider if you would be better of promoting your own site and your own system, where you can build your own list and sell multiple products instead of just one! It really is not as hard to do as people think; in fact you can setup a system just like the people making the money do for less than $50 a month, but the rewards can be so much greater as you can see form the simple math above! I know when I do the math, it just seems to make more sense, and come to think of it, it is the closest thing I can think of that resembles a money tree online.