Affiliate Marketing

I found affiliate marketing completely by accident. I knew nothing about it only a few short months ago. I joined an online forum to promote a program I was in (a horrible cash gifting experience that I would rather not re-live) and a kind soul wrote me a private message. It pretty much said this "Hey, you idiot. Cash gifting sucks and is pointless, try affiliate marketing." So needless to say I asked him what it was and what it was all about. He actually took the time to explain it all to me. He even went so far as to walk me through each baby step of getting my own domain from GoDaddy (one scary website!) and setting up my first affiliate site. He was great! There is no way possible that I would have figured all that out without some serious help. Personally, I think he should cash in on his ability to get people up and running. If he'd had an affiliate program, I would have joined in a heartbeat! (Without his permission I won't say any more about him, but you can check out one of his sites here. Ready Ramps.)

So my goals with affiliate marketing are to learn all that I can about it and maintain my sites in my "free" time. Not that I have much of it working a full time job. But it never hurts to have a little extra income. So my goal is make a few hundred bucks extra a month. If it takes off more than that, it's icing on the cake. Because I like working on the sites. (Though sometimes I make them more complicated than they need to be.) So if I sometimes have large gaps between posts, I've probably fallen into the bottomless pit of html code and gotten lost somewhere between databases and domains. But I should resurface at some point.

Again, welcome to my life.