Reality check! Sure, you might make a couple of bucks here and there, but you are virtually killing any chance that you'll see more than that. Affiliate marketing is not just about directing traffic to your merchant, there is so much more to it that will take your affiliate marketing to a whole new level.

Credibility is an absolute must to be successful with affiliate marketing. You must provide your readers with great information to build trust, then you can recommend products. Without this element of credibility and trust, why should your readers bother to listen to your recommendation, let alone act upon it?

The first step to building credibility is to give your readers, whether they be subscribers to your mailing list, or visitors to your web site, quality information that they can use. This way, in their eyes, you become an expert in your field, and as a result, someone they can trust.

If you just start right off the bat spamming people with product recommendations, what reason will they have to believe that these are worth their time? Avoid sounding like someone who is just out to make money; people want help, they don't want to be sold to.

Once you have gained the reader's trust, then and only then should you start introducing product recommendations. The key here is to always be truthful and honest. Always outline the genuine benefits, and how a product will help them directly, and don't be afraid to outline some of the weaknesses or things you didn't like about product if needed. This will actually make you sound even more honest and trustworthy.

You should always promote products that you truly believe in and that you have personally tried. By recommending a junk product, you could ruin your credibility very fast. The best thing about recommending products you use is that you can later talk about specific aspects, such as a great chapter of an eBook, or an interesting function of a program, and in turn make more product recommendations which will sound totally natural.

Here's a great idea, take the above strategies and build a highly targeted product review web site. Here, you can take your genuine recommendations, and write reviews that are truthful and honest. By doing so, people who are already interested in the product that are looking for reviews can find your site, and this kind of real world recommendation will surely drive them to buy. Making sales this way is about as easy as it gets!