Students, Pay for College With an Affiliate Marketing Business

What are your dreams? Do you want to be a doctor? A corporate executive? An airline captain? Well, you should prepare yourself financially because you are going to need a college degree and rising tuition costs already has many students wondering how to pay for college in today's economy.

According to the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), the average cost of tuition for a public 4 year institution for the 2007-2008 school year was $13,000. For private schools, like Yale and New York University, average tuition cost was $30,000. Unless you are wealthy, you will probably pay for college using a mix of scholarships, tuition assistance programs, and full or part time work.

As anyone who has completed a college degree will tell you, there are a few problems with this approach. First, if your or your parent's income is too high, you will not quality for financial aid grants. Instead you will be saddled with loans that will take years to pay off. The New York Times reported that the average college debt for 2009 graduates was $24,000.

Second, when you are working a job, you have less time for your studies and your friends. You will find yourself staying up till the early morning hours studying because you had to work or finding pockets of time at work to study. Your ability to enjoy the college experience, with its parties and friendships, will be reduced because you will spend much of your time working or thinking up other creative ways to pay for college.

But there is an alternative to graduating burdened with debt or running yourself ragged keeping up with the demands of employment. Starting a home based business as an affiliate marketer is one of the best ways to pay for college tuition, books, and other expenses.

In essence, you are a commissioned sales person. However, instead of working in a store or a call center, you do all of your work over the internet from the comfort of your dorm room. The best thing about doing affiliate marketing online is that all of the work you do will continue to produce income for you even when you are not actively working your business. This business model is completely flexible allowing you to make money to pay for college in your spare time.

The biggest challenge to making money as an affiliate marketer is getting started. There are some programs and companies out there that offer to teach you how to do affiliate marketing...if you pay them hundreds of dollars. And the worst part is that you won't know if their program will make you money until you fork over the cash to sign up. When you are subsisting on hot dogs and macaroni and cheese, the last thing you want to do is waste money on a program that doesn't work.

Do your homework and find a product or service that interests you. Then target people that will also be interested in those products. Those people will be your customers. Use social media, keyword articles and word of mouth to share your affiliate programs. This will give you the time freedom you need to study and be social at college but the financial rewards of being debt free at graduation. Oh what a feeling!

Roberta Gerrick is a network marketing trainer who enjoys teaching entrepreneurs how to build and develop profitable home based businesses. For more tips on how you can achieve personal and financial freedom, visit her network marketing blog http://www.RobertaGerrick.com/.

Free affiliate marketing training! Take the first steps to earning a six figure income by signing up for my free Affiliate Marketing Email Course.