Because of the fact that there are many new people who start an affiliate marketing business every day I decided I was going to write an article for the internet marketing newbies. Even though this article will be primarily targeted to new internet marketers I’m sure even experienced marketers may pick up a good piece of advice.

What is Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing is really two things in one. Firstly, it’s a way for a company that has a product or service they want to sell to sell that product or service without spending a huge amount of money on advertising and product promotion. Secondly, affiliate marketing is a way for individuals like you and me to make money selling a product or service without having to provide the product or service ourselves.

It’s really a win-win situation for both parties involved but the great thing about it is it’s a great way for someone to start an internet business literally on a shoe-string budget.

The reason you can get started so easily and inexpensively is because you can get started without your own website, sales letters, advertising copyrighters, and other things that can be very expensive if you’re trying to start a business selling your own products. As you gain experience and start making some money you might want your own website and your own product to sell but you don’t have to start out that way. In fact, I recommend that you don’t start that way.

In my opinion, affiliate marketing is the perfect way to get started with internet marketing and something you should definitely consider when you decide to get your feet wet.

The reason I believe this is because there are literally thousands and thousands of merchants offering millions of products that can be sold through affiliate marketing. I’m not just talking about e-books, which is usually the first thing people think about when they think about affiliate marketing. I’m talking about products that range in price from a few dollars to thousands of dollars.

Let me give you a brief overview of how affiliate marketing works and then you can start getting into the details of what you need to do to have a successful affiliate business.

Briefly, here is how affiliate marketing works. You find a product or service that you want to promote. Your choice of product can be determined a couple of ways. You might only want to promote a product that you are personally interested in or have personal knowledge of. Or, you might want to choose a product based on how much demand the product has or how well you think you will be able to promote it. Probably the best thing to do is pick a product that meets both of those criteria.

Once you decide on the product you are going to promote you then need to go the company’s website and sign up for their affiliate program. This is usually a simple process and it shouldn’t cost you anything to sign up. In fact, if a company tries to charge you to become an affiliate I would run the other way.

Now that you’re officially an affiliate of the company you will probably be supplied with a special affiliate’s page that you can log into in order to get promotional materials to help you promote the company’s product(s). Usually, at the least you will be provided with banners that you can place on your website and an affiliate link with your ID attached to it that leads visitors to the company website.

Other promotional materials that are often offered include classified ads, pre-written emails that can be used to send to your newsletter list. If you don’t have a newsletter list a lot of times you will be provided with “Solo Ads” and “Top Sponsor Ads” that can be used in Ezine advertising campaigns.

Now it’s your job to pick one or more of the promotional tools and get them out there in front of prospects that will click on them and hopefully earn you a nice affiliate commission.

A good place to get some detailed information on the best ways to promote your affiliate program is on your affiliates member’s page.

Now that you’ve gotten started it’s time to start doing your homework. Subscribe to a free ezine, read more articles, and if you can afford to buy a couple of good affiliate marketing books please do so. Every little bit of good information you learn will help you make your affiliate business more successful.

Rodney Bruce is an Internet and Affiliate Marketer who offers advice and tips in his Free ezine:
Affiliate Marketing Power Strategies
Permission is granted to reprint this article on your website or in your newsletter as long as it is reprinted in its entirety including this Author Information.

Making money while you sleep sounds pretty good. Of course it is not that uncommon, especially for those with capital to invest. Business tycoons and those who dabble in stocks and shares do it all the time. But what about the rest of us? Wouldn’t it be great if there was a business that needed only minimum investment and still allowed you to rake in the dollars while snuggling under the duvet?

There is such a business. It is called affiliate marketing and is one of the new opportunities opened up by the internet marketing explosion of the last 10 years. Briefly, an affiliate is someone who probably does not have their own product but entices customers to visit the website of an online merchant. If the customer buys something from the merchant, the affiliate is rewarded with a commission.

Anyone with a computer and a good broadband internet connection can become an internet marketer. Short of setting up a tea stall there can be few businesses where the initial investment is so low.

This is a perfect business for anyone who needs to work at home - moms with young children, people caring for elderly relatives or silver surfers looking to top up a pension.

So how does it all work? The steps below summarize the process.

1. Choose a market - health, beauty, fitness, weight loss, outdoor activity, gadgets, finance, travel, hobbies - the list is endless. Flip through magazines to get ideas.

2. Research your market to find a niche where the competition is not too intense but where there are customers with needs to be met. Find the keywords that these customers are using in web searches.

3. Find a product in your niche with an affiliate program that will pay you commission on sales.

4. Understand your customer. Spend time finding out about your customers and what exactly their problems are. You can meet your customers on forums related to your niche.

5. Set up your own internet space. As you progress you will almost certainly acquire your own domain and website, but when you start you can make use of the various free web pages available - Squidoo lenses and Hubpages are examples.

6. Write some compelling pre-sell copy on your web space using the keywords you identified under point 2. Perhaps do a review site where you compare the pros and cons of different products in your niche. Your carefully crafted text should prompt any vistors to your site to click onto the merchant website.

7. Drive traffic to your website by free methods such as article marketing or, if you have some money to invest, by pay-per-click methods eg Google Adwords.

7. Go to bed and if you have done steps 1-7 properly you should find some commission in your merchant account!

Sounds too good to be true? Well- yes and no. The process is indeed that simple but only works if you carry out the steps in the most effective way. This means you must invest in some affiliate marketing education and devote enough time to learning the most profitable techniques and strategies.

There are a number of programs on offer. Look for one that will give you ongoing support and keep you up to speed with changes in the affiliate marketing environment. Other points to look out for in choosing a package are an active private forum and some personal coaching.

Affiliate marketing is an excellent way to earn income on the internet, but it is not the only way. To read ways to make money from home, check out Work at Home Business Opportunities, where you can read the Wealthy Affiliate Review.

Affiliate marketing is one of many new online business opportunities. It began about 10 years ago and has grown astronomically since. An affiliate works by introducing new clients to online merchants. In return, they are paid a commission for each purchase made by customers they have introduced.

It is an attractive proposition because the set-up costs are very low. You do not need much more than a computer, a desk and an internet connection. You do not need your own product and can even make a start without your own website.

Other advantages are that you can work from anywhere in the world and choose your own hours. You do not have the risks of processing payments, the hassle of handling and shipping goods or the nasty business of dealing with customer complaints.

But, before you quit the day job and choose affiliate marketing as your business model, there are one or two things you should know. In theory anyone can earn money at internet marketing but in practice many aspiring affiliates fail. Here are five pitfall points you must think about.

1. Affiliate marketing needs huge investment in time
Research is essential to affiliate success and this is inevitably time-consuming. Further, if you do not have money to invest when you are starting out, then you must use free techniques, such as article marketing, to drive customers to your pre-selling web pages. This can involve writing anything from 10 to 100 articles for any one campaign. Your articles do not need to win prizes for literature but they should make sense and have valuable content. This takes time.

If you are not a techie and set out to build your own website, then that is likely to be time-consuming too. And once your site is up and running you must keep it fresh and continually build backlinks to boost its Google rank. Then there are regular emails to your opt-in list, daily posts to your blog and weekly updates to your Squidoo lenses. All take time.

2. It is easy to lose focus
When affiliates give up, it is often because they have failed to plan and have lost sight of their goals. The internet is full of distractions and, when you work at home alone, you are all the more likely to waste time on useless activities. Unfocused activities will not make money and you will become frustrated. Disappointment can be avoided by proper planning and discipline.

3. Be prepared for failure
In spite of all your best efforts, some of your campaigns will fail. When this happens, it is hard to stay motivated. But you must. Analysing your failure will teach you lots of valuable lessons. If you persist, you will emerge wiser and stronger and more likely to gain an edge over the competition.

4. Goalposts will shift
Internet marketing is an evolving environment and affiliates must be ready for change, whether this involves new Google parameters, new opportunities to capitalize on, or new techniques to learn.

To give yourself the best chance, it is a good idea to hook up with a membership program that will let you rub shoulders with expert marketers, teach you the essentials and update you on new developments, provide coaching if required and moral support when the going gets tough. There are a number of these programs around and the best of them are well worth the membership fee.

If you have the right training, however, you can overcome any pitfall in the affiliate marketing world. Some of the best training comes from Wealthy Affiliate.

One of the best ways to succeed as an affiliate is to promote products in small niches or sub-niches. What is a small niche? Well, a niche is ‘cars’ or ‘autos’. Slightly smaller is ’sports cars’, although this particular niche is very, very competitive. On the other hand, either ‘Italian sports cars’ or ‘classic British sports cars’ are small niches, and ‘used classic British sports cars’ is better as a niche.

Wanted: Niches with Little Competition

What you really want are niche affiliate marketing programs that find you small niches without much competition, but these don’t exist. What you need to do to get a niche affiliate marketing program is to use various tools to find the sub-niches you want.

The first tool you will need is a keyword finder. There are plenty around, some cheap, some expensive, and some offered as a membership. You don’t really need to spend your money on these, though, because there is a great tool you can use for free.

Use the Google Keyword Tool

This is the Google Keyword Tool/External in Google Adwords. This tool includes all the keywords or key phrases used by surfers to search for products on Google. As a large number of surfers use Google, you are getting the best results.

When you look for keywords for your niche affiliate marketing program you are looking for long-tail key phrases, not single keywords. For example, if you were looking for niche keywords about hypnosis, you might consider terms like ‘hypnosis to stop smoking’ or ’self-hypnosis to help you succeed’. But first, you are finding a small niche within a popular niche which gets a lot of traffic.

Once you have found the keywords, you then need to get products for your niche affiliate marketing programs, and after that you will need to refine the keyword list to make sure it is related to the product.

Go to Clickbank

To find the products, it is best to go to Clickbank, which lists a huge number of digital products in the major categories, with sub-categories as well. You may need to look at categories which are outside your main category because some merchants put their products in odd categories, and some small niche products do not really fit in any category.

Always read the merchant’s sales page, which Clickbank calls the Pitch Page, to see whether it encourages you to buy the product. If it is good, it should have you looking for your credit card.

When searching for niche products, make sure you don’t force a product that belongs to another sub-niche into your sub-niche. It will not work.

Once you have a niche and a product that really fits the niche you have your own niche affiliate marketing program.

Get FREE reports and loads of information about affiliate marketing at www.jrhmarketing.wordpress.com - your source for guides and tips, run by John Hartley.

Affiliate marketing is a very popular path to making money online allowing you to work from home and giving you the freedom of working for yourself. If you want to get started in affiliate marketing, you should know where to get good affiliate programs. ClickBank is the cream of the crop. Here’s how to tap into the ClickBank treasure chest.

ClickBank is the most well known and highly trafficked affiliate products marketplace on the internet. You can become a ClickBank affiliate simply by opening an account and getting a ClickBank ID. Once in as a registered affiliate you should then click on the Earn Commissions tab. Here it is your task to seek out products and services that fit your target market and your website. Look for the popular products and you’ll get a good idea of what is selling well and you can pinpoint the products that are already selling successfully.

ClickBank operates as a 3rd party middleman between the merchants selling products and the affiliates who promote them. ClickBank delivers the merchants offers and sets the affiliate up to promote that product for a commission. This is what makes affiliate marketing so popular - the product is created and ready for sale with no effort on your part in bringing it to the market. Your effort and reward comes in promoting it. ClickBank tracks your sales and delivers you your commissions. You get real-time sales reporting, statistics, and a paycheck twice a month.

As an affiliate you are free to choose marketing techniques and promotion tools as you wish to direct traffic and encourage clicks and sales. But affiliate marketing is far more than promoting a product. If you are to excel and become a super affiliate through ClickBank’s marketplace you will need to develop your skills in search engine optimization, general internet marketing techniques such as email and article marketing, newsletter marketing, back links, link exchanges and your own website content promotion. Promotion of products on your own website through articles, reports and e-books is one of the keys to super affiliate success. Using your affiliate links in all your content you provide your visitors with quality information and advice about the things they are interested in. That done you can link to a product sales page you are promoting and the chances of their clicking through and considering the product are due to your helpful approach in offering free content of value.

It is essential to offer multiple products rather than just one or two. You don’t want to fill your site with everything on the market though. Choose affiliate programs that are geared to your site and audience. With affiliate links and sales pages in place you are setting up an automated system that gives you passive income and more time for other projects.

To be a super affiliate you do have to remain on top of the trends of online marketing. What worked last year and even last month can change to something completely different. Watch your statistics to be aware of what is working and what isn’t. If you miss out on changes, new ideas and tools you will lose in traffic and sales because your competition will be way ahead of you.

In the affiliate marketing business you must have a strong sense of ability to succeed and a willingness to learn and apply what you learn on a consistent manner. Don’t hesitate. Hesitation and indecisiveness are the characteristics of mediocrity in affiliate sales.

Don’t forget that success won’t happen overnight. It may take weeks or months. It will require a large chunk of commitment from you but in the end you will be so glad you spent the time establishing a good foundation. With patience, persistence and knowledge you will start making sales. Once you find out what works and do more of it, you’ll be clicking your way to the bank, thanks to ClickBank and your hard work.

Cynthia Mosher has been working online since 1998. She shares her advice and experience on working at home and internet and affiliate marketing at her website Wahm Daily.