I'm new

My first advice as someone who has been there, is to
stop working yourself to death. Work on your budget
and your living expenses and do whatever you can
with all of that.

I got a part-time job once, on top of my full-time job,
and I was splurging on things I didn't really need and
I asked myself "is this why you are working the extra
job." That was back when I was in my 20s, I retired
early because of my online business. I still do online
business but it is at my leisure.

There are many ways to make money on the internet,
affiliate marketing is just one way. But there are other
things like publishing, selling products including digital
downloads, print on demand, MLM, buying and selling
websites, freelancing, etc.

You can do affiliate marketing without a website, but
it helps to have your own site(s) as it demonstrates to
affiliate networks that you are serious.

I would advise you to read books on passive income,
that is where you set something up that pays you on
a continuing basis - publishing books for example.

You can find free ebooks at Amazon and read those
on your computer, you don't need the Kindle ebook
reader for those. You can also do the read aloud
with them which can make reading easier.

Also read about side hustles, WAHM, home business,
and that should give you enough material to figure out
what will work so that you're not struggling to make
ends meet or whatever you are going through.

Final advice for now, you probably aren't using AI yet,
I highly recommend it. Start with ChatGPT, it is free for
the basic version and $20 per month for the upgrade.

That thing is life changing because it can help with
personal problems, recipes, business plans, etc.

Good luck and I hope things work out for you.

Use the Quote button so we know who you're replying to.

Affiliate marketing is straightforward. Someone else creates the offer. They also host a sales page, which has some kind of sales letter or video sales letter.

That part of the process is called Conversion, ie. converting (some) visitors into buyers.

What they need you for is the earlier part of the process, which is called Traffic, ie. bringing eyeballs to the offer.

The reason why you would do this is, ideally, the offer has a history of converting well when the right people are brought to it. Affiliate networks will show you this data, so you can see for yourself before you put effort into Traffic generation for offers that could work for you.

Now there are levels of complexity to being an affiliate marketer.

The easiest, simplest and IMO "dumbest" is sending a person over to the offer page. One time, without keeping any information about them.

This is called a "hop".

The more hops you send, the greater the chance of you getting a conversion ie. a buyer, and the offer owner will send you a commission some time later after the refund period has expired. The rules for sending commission will be in the affiliate agreement and you will know what they are prior to agreeing.

Why is this "dumb"? Becuase you are neither capturing the lead, nor making it possible to send them to the offer page more than once.

A smarter way of doing affiliate marketing is to capture the lead. This means sending the person from where you find them, eg. Facebook, to an opt in page where they give you their email address in exchange for something of value. Clickfunnels hosts these pages. You could host your own website. Email marketing tools also give you landing page options. What's the bait? Could be your thoughts on the problem the offer solves, opinion of the offer/solution itself, a Top 10 list of things related to the offer, and more.

Once the person has done this, they are now your lead. You paid for that lead, whether in blood, sweat and tears or Facebook ads or some other way, so you should capture it.

You can now market to them. You can send them emails warming them up about the problem, offer, solution, benefits etc. And most importantly, you have opportunities to send that lead to the offer sales page several times.

Why is that important?

Because people are busy and may not have the time to fully read or watch that sales letter--DESPITE wanting to! Eg. they are sitting in an oil change place and watching the offer's VSL...and then the tech comes up and tells them their car is ready. Or even worse, that there is a problem. Woosh! Your offer is out of their mind as fast as the wind blows.

So having captured the lead and being able to market to them again, you can send them the link to the offer page once more the next day. Now they are home, relaxed, remember your offer, and this time buy.

To increase complexity even more, you could have your own branded website with your opinions about the niche, problem, state of affairs, possible solutions, things you have tried, etc. etc. that warm people up to buy and show them you know what you are talking about regarding the topic. And if your initial vendor goes belly up or disappears, you can easily swap in a new seller here. This BBQ tools provider vanishes? No problem: you can replace them with another supplier. And you're already established as an expert.

These things of course take time to put together and build up. If you had resources you could do this more quickly. But for the moment you should get a free autoresponder service to capture some emails. They should provide a free landing page designer for you to capture the lead with. Monitor this list carefully as in the beginning you'll be limited to a few hundred leads tops and should delete those who don't buy after awhile.

As you are able to afford to pay for more leads on your list, you can do that.

Now the final issue: Where the heck are these leads going to come from??!

This is the big question. It's what the affiliate seller is paying you for.

One of the best sources is to build your own Facebook group on the topic. Again, free. But not easy.

I'll leave it to others to suggest or you to research other leadgen/warmup methods. But for now, understand affiliate marketing is not easy. It is not a magic yellow brick road to riches. You will not get 5 hops and a sale (I wouldn't bank on it, anyway)...or perhaps even 500 hops and a sale. How you choose and find your leads is a critical factor to hop quality, and the affiliate vendor will be watching your hop quality. If your hops suck, they will cancel your relationship with them after awhile because you're hurting their stats.

So understand what you are getting into. Probably difficult to generate traffic...challenging to set up even the basics of the system...and you likely won't get paid out for a month or more. This, in my opinion, is NOT something a broke person should attempt. It's an OK second income stream job, something to putter away on knowing your bills are already taken care of.