Owing a home based business is a dream of a lot of people. The home entrepreneurs enjoy the benefits of working at their own hours without a boss and high income potential. But, many people aren't dared to start a business at home. They afraid that they don't have the available fund to start and launch their business or they worry that if their business doesn't work as expected, no income will come in to support their living.

There is a good solution for this situation, which is affiliate marketing. It is a type of Internet home business requiring minimal capital to begin. You only need a computer, broadband Internet access and one to two hundreds dollars to get started. There is no stock and inventory investment needed. You don't keep any stock, so no products storage space is necessary.

Affiliate marketing works pretty simple. You first join an affiliate program, then market the products or services of the program on the Internet, when an Internet users purchase a product through your affiliate or referral link, you'll earn an affiliate commission.

As an affiliate, you main task is to promote and market the affiliate products or services of the merchant that you are affiliated with. You will put in effort in marketing your affiliate products on the Internet and hope to refer as many cash buyers as possible to your merchant so that you can make the most from affiliate marketing.

To get in to affiliate marketing business, the first thing you have to do is find a profitable niche market you want to focus on. Think about your interest, experience and area of expertise, these things can help you choose which niche market is right for you. You should pick a niche that you are passionate about. For example, if you are passionate about online games, then you may choose online game as the niche for your affiliate marketing.

After you make up your mind on what niche to focus on, you may proceed to conduct market research to determine whether there is any money can be made in your selected niche. There is a free advanced software called Hexatrack that can help you a lot in finding a profitable niche market. By just typing in a few keywords related to your niche into Hexatrack, you will know whether it is profitable.

Once you have finished researching your niche and found out it is profitable niche you can focus on, it is time to look for the affiliate programs of your niche market. If your niche is online game, then you should search for affiliate programs that sell online games. One of the best ways to find affiliate programs is search through an affiliate network. Here are a few of the well known affiliate networks:

Commission Junction
Clickbank.com
Shareasale.com

Join one or two programs at the beginning. You will not know which one works for you until you test and experiment these programs.

There is really not much risk involved in affiliate marketing as the startup cost needed is little. If you have been wanted to start a home based business, give affiliate marketing a try.