If you have always thought of affiliate marketing as just a supplimental income source, think again. For many reasons, affiliate marketing can actually make a great complete business. Affiliate marketing can be a complete business, and this is the case for it.

If you’re new to affiliate marketing, the concept is pretty simple. Lots of businesses and people online are willing to reward you for referring new customers or visitors. All you have to do is sign up for an affiliate marketing program and direct people to the program owner’s site. If those people purchase something, you earn a commission.

Affiliate marketing makes a great business because you don’t have to create products, write software or hire any employees. You just find customers who might be interested in purchasing a product and show them where they can purchase it. It’s probably the easiest way to get started working online, especially if you find a good affiliate marketing guide to help.

Repeat that and you can earn a full-time living just through affiliate marketing. In fact, affiliate marketing is already a 13 billion dollar industry and growing. The major affiliate network ClickBank has paid out over one and a half billion dollars in affiliate marketing commissions alone. That is only one network.

Affiliate marketing is a highly scalable business model too.

Affiliate marketing can be used to generate revenue for any type of site, from a single-pager to a huge millions-in-revenue-per-year site. You have probably visited some really big affiliate marketing sites before without even knowing it. Here are some you might have heard of:

• Bankrate.com
• Epinions
• Lower My Bills

All three of those huge sites are essentially affiliate marketing sites. Each of them make money that way. They provide content or services based around a particular topic (consumer credit and product reviews in this case) and refer customers to other websites as an affiliate so they can earn commissions.

Those sites are each at least 10 years old, they are run by companies with hundreds or thousands of employees and they generate millions of dollars in revenue a year. Does that sound scalable?

But you aren’t interested in building a huge company, right? Maybe you want a lifestyle business.

If you’re here because you want freedom, you want to do be able to do what you love, or you want to be able to live and work anywhere and decide how you spend your time, I have some great news.

Affiliate marketing could be exactly the basis of the lifestyle business you’re looking for. Look at my friend Karl for example. He has made most of his money over the past 10 years from affiliate marketing (up to $2,000 per day he tells me). We’re not just talking extra income. Real freedom generating income is possible.

Karl has spent considerable time outside of the country over the past year while continuing to grow his business. Affiliate marketing isn’t concerned with where you are or when you work. Even better, you can continue to earn money when you’re not “working.”

Don’t think affiliate marketing is about getting rich quick.

I said earlier that affiliate marketing is one of the easiest ways to get started working online. That doesn’t mean it is without work. Get-rich-quick schemes don’t exist in my book, and affiliate marketing is no exception. You’ll have to put in some serious hours to earn a livable wage. You’ll probably want to enroll in an affiliate marketing course to help you along.

The cool thing is though, that you can start earning money in a short period of time (weeks if you’re a quick study). That’s much different from creating your own product and selling it, which usually takes at least a few months. It’s also much different from blogging, which seems to take even the best about a year to start earning anything meaningful.

Getting quicker results is a big part of staying motivated. Too many people quit online projects because they didn’t see results after a few weeks or months. With affiliate marketing that risk is less.

Affiliate marketing really can be a complete business. If you’re looking for a good place to get started, check out this review of AffiloBlueprint.