Answering 3 important questions for newbies considering affiliate marketing.Do you find yourself trying and better-trying to get started making some real cash online? Are you frustrated by all the buying and trying of different opportunities that promise wealth, but never work out that way? I was too, I was at the state of despair. After a lot of searching,I found that affiliate marketing is the way to go online, but there is a lot to learn before you start making the bucks. The following are three important questions you need answering to get started in affiliate marketing.Question One: What is Affiliate Marketing?Affiliate marketing is an excellent way of earning money without a product of your own. Product owners (vendors) place their products for sale on sites like Clickbank.com, but they also allow affiliate marketers to promote and sell their products for a commission. The affiliate marketer only needs to promote the product, and get people to go to the owner’s site to purchase (through the affiliate marketer’s hoplink). They don’t have any contact with the customer, so there is no time spent on customer services, handling products, shipping or dealing with payments, that is all dealt with by the product owner.Question Two: Can you show me an example of Affiliate Marketing?The affiliate marketer would go to the Clickbank.com site (after registering with Clickbank) and choose a product to promote in their niche (chosen subject area). All products will have a precis of what they are about, and you can look at their sales page to find out more. They also show stats such as commission you would earn on sales, the conversion rate of the product and the percentage of sales made by affiliates. Affiliates then use their Clickbank ID obtained on registration to obtain a hoplink which is supplied by the product owner of the product they are choosing to promote. This hoplink is linked to the product owner’s sales page with the affiliate’s ID embedded in it, so any sales made by clicking on the affiliate hoplink would credit commission to that affiliate.So, for example, say a customer reading about a product on a blog or website, or a newsletter by an affiliate, decides they would like to purchase the product. They would click on the affiliate hoplink and would be taken straight to the product owner’s sales page with the embedded affiliate ID. If they purchase the product, the product owner then knows which affiliate the sale has been made through and that affiliate gets the commission.Question Three: How can I get started with Affiliate Marketing?You can either sign up with Clickbank at Clickbank.com, and get your ID by registering and giving yourself a Clickbank ID. Then go to Clickbank.com Marketplace and choose a product you would like to promote. Once you have chosen a product, click on ‘hoplink’ which is underneath the product description, enter your Clickbank ID in the box, and you will end up with an affiliate hoplink that looks like http://YOURID.hop.clickbank.net (your ID name goes in after ‘http://’ and before ‘hop‘). You then need to get the product promoted with your affiliate link as the link to the owner’s sales page so that you get commission for every sale you promote. Getting traffic to visit where you are promoting is where the work is. There are several ways to do it, including creating a website and sending traffic to it via Google Adwords, writing ezine articles and promoting in your resource box, or making a blog and directing traffic to it.However, to save a lot of time and effort, following a course by an experienced and respected internet marketer that takes you step-by-step through the entire process is worth considering, as there is so much to learn, and the fact is that most newbies give up when they don’t see any income, because of not knowing internet marketing strategies.