Affiliate marketing is when you promote other people’s products and services, earning a small cut of the revenue for every resulting sale made. It’s incredibly popular, with 81% of surveyed brands using affiliate marketing in one study. And the benefits of tapping into this market are numerous. It’s a largely passive income stream, for example, and has a low barrier to entry.
Twitter allows you to narrow down the audience you’re trying to reach through a number of search factors. For instance, if your niche is mattresses, you’ll be looking for people who are talking about sleep and mattresses. Don’t forget to narrow down a location and select a time frame as well (the last two weeks is ideal).

If the reason why you’re looking at how to start affiliate marketing isn’t purely monetary, then this might be a great way of getting started. A lot of companies (especially smaller ones), when they are starting to work with smaller or lesser-known affiliates, like to send them items for reviews and promotions. This way, the company will be able to check if the affiliate is worth working with the long-term, and the person doing the promotion will be able to practice and acquire free stuff.
With this in mind, the ideal situation for affiliate marketing would only be a supportive income stream rather than your main source of revenue. To minimize this risk, don’t focus all of your efforts onto just one affiliate network – diversify your risk across affiliate networks so that if one of them suddenly decides to be an asshole, you could just leave and not worry about your income stream so much.