For those unfamiliar with the term, Affiliate Marketing refers to the approach of promoting other people's products for a commission - a share in each sale. The reason this is growing in popularity is that an increasing number of people visiting the internet are seeing more and more evidence that real money is actually being made doing affiliate promotions. You have to follow some pretty important rules if you expect to become good enough at this to be consistently profitable.



Tip #1:

Determine your most profitable niche marketing areas by doing research on the top affiliate product hosting sites. Just as I always advise on other topics - to be successful you'll want to learn from those who are already doing it successfully. Most of the top affiliate product sites allow you to see which vendors have the largest number of affiliates promoting for them. That is an important piece of information! This is just as important as it is to analyze search trends in choosing your product niche, as I explained in one of my other articles.

Tip #2:

Competition: Don't make the wrong assumption that more competition is a bad thing. Quite the contrary is true: a higher number of affiliates promoting a vendor's product or service is a good sign that the affiliates are making money. It also means the product they are promoting is popular and therefore worth your time to promote. There are hundreds of very good affiliate marketing and affiliate products sites out there with thousands of vendors signed up. Choose products with the highest number of affiliates - and within those - look for the ones that pay the highest commissions.

Tip #3:

For recurring income, filter your product choices down to those that pay recurring commissions. Generally this means some sort of subscription or service that offers renewable memberships on some periodic basis. You can make good money on single sale products and services - I am not suggesting you should discount them... but on many of the subscription products, you get paid over and over every month! That's called passive income - something we will explore further in later articles. It means you don't have to do anything more to earn the recurring portion of your income. It's the gift that keeps on giving!

Tip #4:

Use the top affiliate marketing product sites rather than the PPC ad programs offered by the search engines. Affiliate product sites with large numbers of vendors signed up are more profitable overall and can make money faster than you can with PPC programs.

The term PPC stands for "Pay Per Click". It refers to a service offered by most top search engines that pays advertisers (who show ads on their web sites provided by the search engines) a small amount of money for each click when visitors click on the ads planted there. With the PPC approach, the product vendor pays the search engine for the clicks they track, not for the actual product sales.

If you are a web site owner who features these PPC ads on your web site, you get paid for the click whether or not it results in a sale for the product. This can be quite lucrative for the web site owner -if- they have a LOT of traffic and the ads generate a lot of frequent clicks.

But the downside is, the search engines do not pay very much per click. Some ads may only pay a fraction of a cent per click, so you have to build a tremendous amount of click-generating traffic to your web site to make any real money.

By contrast, the top product affiliate sites help you analyze which products are attracting the most affiliates, and you don't even need a web site to promote the products. They allow you to set up your own "hop link" to get your affiliate credit - and you can place that link in lots of places - on social networking sites, in e-mail messages, in blogs you visit, on message groups and in chat rooms... just about anywhere you can post messages or other textual content for free.

Unlike search engine ads, with affiliate hop links you are selling the product, not just clicks. So the person actually has to buy the product before you get paid a commission. But again, you can qualify the product through all the free analysis tools available, and increase your chances of choosing products that convert into frequent sales.

Also you will get paid a lot more for a sale than you do for clicks on search engine ads. You can make a list of the products that are getting the highest numbers of affiliates and cross reference them using some of the top tools that let you see trend information on what people are clicking on, what they are purchasing and what they are searching for in the search engines.

Most of the top search engines have these kinds of tools and you can use many of them for free. The trending information you can obtain there will give you an idea whether the type of product you're considering promoting has hit its peak and is slowing down, or if it is still gaining in momentum.

The bottom line is, you really do have to do some homework to make your online ventures profitable. But you most certainly can make money if you use the tools available to you, and if you model your approach based on what the most successful people are doing. The best part is, most of the tools you need to do this are free if you know where to look for them.

In later articles, I will drill down more into product and search engine research, how to beat the odds on search engine placement for your web site, and more.

Cheers!