Affiliate marketing is a great way to either make a few extra bucks to pay some bills with or to kick your day job for good. However you must learn to do affiliate marketing the right way by avoiding the pitfalls and con artists associated with trying to make money online. Here are a few tips that will help you make money online as an affiliate marketer.



#1. Join a proven affiliate marketing network. This means to join a reputable network that offers good affiliate programs. This way you can be certain that you'll get paid (yes, there have been companies that don't pay their affiliates) you'll receive a good amount of help from the program affiliate managers to get going and you can be pretty certain that the products that they're offering are good quality, because the affiliate network is staking their reputation on it. Some good places to start are companies like Linkshare, ShareaSale, Performics, Commision Junction and more.

#2. Build a professional looking affiliate website and do product reviews. This means to stay away from these free page builders, free autoresponders and free hosting plans. These things look cheap and have other people's ads all over them. Your visitors WILL KNOW that you're too cheap to spend $10.00 per month to at host a blog or other professional web page.

#3. Generate large amounts of relevent, TARGETED traffic to your website by using articles and pay per click advertising. Learn how to do these types of advertising right away. Article marketing is free, but very time consuming, whereas, pay per click costs money, but will bring you immediate, targeted traffic. Be careful using pay per click! Don't try for the most popular keywords, keep your bids way down to begin with and DON'T FORGET to set your daily budget for what you can afford to spend. If you can only afford to spend $5.00 per day, then set your daily budget at $5.00 and your ads will stop once you've reached your limit. If you don't set your limit you could lose HUNDREDS of dollars or more!

The best thing you can do is to find a mentor and get started. Review the top 10-20 websites that are ranked in Google for what you want to do. Read how their content flows, look at what they're advertising and how their ads are placed, etc. Learn by watching what others do, but make sure that you TAKE ACTION every single day!