Easy! In theory yes, and to be sure, affiliate marketing is one of the most straightforward ways of dipping a toe into the world of ecommerce. You can have a website up, full of nicely produced ads in no time, crikey you can even make and host websites for free these days. For more details www.scroll-pops.com Online merchants provide everything you need - great products, fancy ads, generous commissions, automated payments to your bank account ... life is sweet!



Let's be clear about this - and this is the biggest affiliate marketing tip anybody will ever give you - you will not make instant riches just by creating a website and filling it with hundreds of affiliate links. It's just not that simple.

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Want to know how to do it properly? Read on ...

4 essential affiliate marketing tips for long term business success

If you want 'get rich quick' you need to look at another website now.

Plan, research, work hard and build your e-business on sound foundations ... unless you've come up with the next eBay or Facebook, that's how regular people make an income from the internet.

Take a look at these 3 'newbies' affiliate marketing tips to get you started:

* Build a website that reflects the way web users actually surf. Online, people are looking for solutions and information. When I couldn't find a new coal bucket in the shops, I headed for Google and entered the search term 'coal bucket'. The company that got the business specialised in selling coal buckets and related tools for coal fires. Perfect, they got the sale! Make your website about a specific topic ... if that website had been trying to sell me food blenders and toasters I'd have lost interest pretty quickly. Find a niche, then work it ... hard.

* Don't have a scattergun approach to affiliate schemes. $25 per mobile phone sale, $50 if I sell a holiday, $20 if I sell an insurance policy ... brilliant, I'll have the lot! The money will soon come rolling in ... won't it? No it won't, you haven't planned right. Research a profitable niche, then research related affiliate programs which complement your website content. For more details www.myspace-marketing-secret.com First, attract people to your site content ... once they've arrived, entice them with related products. If you'll excuse the example, I won't buy a food blender from you if I came for a coal bucket!

* Don't make yourself reliant on just one source of affiliate income. Has anybody mentioned the credit crunch to you recently? Unless you haven't noticed, many major retailers are going out of business at the moment. What if your entire affiliate business comes from one of those retailers? If they go out of business, you're in trouble! Once you've planned your online niche, research a range of related monetization options ... never become dependent on just one source of income.

5 practical affiliate marketing tips for when you've built your website

These are 'nuts and bolts' tips, for when you have researched your niche, sourced your related affiliate schemes and monetization options and gathered a great bunch of high demand/low supply/high profit keywords around which to base your online business.

* Build a site that looks and feels good ... don't stuff it with flashing adverts. Pay attention to design and layout tips.

* Create lots of great niche-related content, generate web traffic, then convert those website users into sales.

* Advertise and build your web traffic. Advertising doesn't have to mean spending money ... but you do need to promote your business at every opportunity.

* Read the wealth of information that is available reviewing affiliate schemes and assessing their worth. Alan Gardyne is widely accepted to be an expert in this field, start now by bookmarking his website there is a lot of really useful infomation here and it's all free.

* Sell stuff you love! It's much easier to sell products that you've used, experienced, tested or reviewed. Rather than splashing a huge, flashing banner across you web page, write a properly keyworded, niche-related review instead. The passion and product knowledge will be far more compelling than an empty sales pitch.

Are you ready to get started? Don't get stuck in just yet, as it's worth taking the time to read widely before making a start and signing up to the hundreds of programmes that are available.