We are now in 2009 and Your Money Online would like to wish all my readers, both old and new, have a brilliant New Year.

It is so important a time that we are all having our family together and sharing the interesting things with them.

But I need to take a few minutes with my blog and my blog readers as well. lol... In the past three years I have been writing posts on YMO and it grew steadily. I need to thank myself for my sticking to it but I must thank you very much for your kindly support in any way.

Why I should make money from affiliate marketing? What are the advantages of affiliate marketing? And is there any disadvantage of affiliate marketing I need to pay special attention? All the questions can be turned into one question instead: What are the pros and cons of affiliate marketing?

As any other thing in the world, affiliate marketing has its own pros and cons. Here is a list of both pros and cons I summarized for your information:

The Pros of Affiliate Marketing

1. You don't have to source or create your own product. Sourcing or creating your own product needs a lot of time and hard working. However, affiliate marketing allows you to sell other merchants' products and/or services and get commission from your promoting performance.

If you want to make money from affiliate marketing, you must firstly find a product or service to promote. Since there are almost any product out there online, it is not difficult for you to find a great many products you want to sell. Let's say you finally find a merchant selling this product or service. This merchant has an affiliate program and provides a 20% commission for the sales amount.

You need to sign up this affiliate program by filling out an affiliate application form. Once you are accepted by the affiliate program and become an affiliate member, you will get at least one affiliate link which contains your affiliate ID. The affiliate link can be a text link, an image link or a javascript code.

In the past days, I was asked several times about affiliate marketing by others who don't know it very well. Although I am currently not an expert in affiliate marketing, but to make it understood by a complete newbie, I investigated and gathered much material and will compile this into a brief series. Let's call it The Affiliate Marketing FAQ. This series assumes you don't know anything about affiliate marketing and covers the most basic information about it. If you are a Guru in this field, please ignore it.

FAQ #1: What is affiliate marketing

Affiliate marketing is a marketing practice that the affiliates promote a merchant's products or services and get paid from the merchant if a customer is redirected to the merchant's site by the affiliate and take a required action successfully (eg. making a purchase, filling out a from, etc). Affiliate program is also called "associate programs" or "partner programs".

There are many ways you can use to make money from your blog, such as Pay Per Click (PPC), Affiliate marketing and sell advertising spaces directly. But if you are a new blogger and your blog doesn't rank high in search engines and does not have so many visitors, it will be difficult to monetize your blog. So is there any way for us to make some quick cash at the early stage of our blogs? The answer is LinkWorth. LinkWorth is the first money maker of Your Money Online.