Now I don't want you to think this article is a guide to instant affiliate success. Most people won't succeed that quickly, and explaining each and every tactic in an article is frankly impossible. But there are some basic steps that will help you get into affiliate marketing.

The very first thing to do is to start reading. Depending on your preferences, you can buy some of the better ebooks out there on the topic, or you can do your own research by reading in some of the major forums. There's tons of information out there free for the taking, but you have to spend a great deal of time digging it out. The right balance of time vs. money depends on you.

But don't spend too much time on this one step. There's much more to be done.

The information you gain from reading can help you to decide which way you want to start out your affiliate marketing efforts. Some prefer information based websites. Others prefer to use datafeeds. Others prefer to drive traffic straight to the merchant's website with pay per click marketing. And there are still more tactics you could use.

Each has a learning curve. Fortunately, there are people out there succeeding with each tactic. Do more research and start working at the kind of marketing you want to do.

If it's information based affiliate marketing, you're going to have to start writing or hiring someone to write for you. You have to figure out what people who would be interested in the products you want to sell want to know.

On the other hand, if you want to use datafeeds, you're going to have to start programming, hire a programmer or find a program that can already handle the datafeeds for you.

Driving traffic direct using pay per click can be one of the fastest ways to get results, but it's also one of the riskiest. You can lose a lot of money at pay per click before you realize that the sales aren't happening or that there are too many returns for you to make a profit. However, many affiliates swear by it as one of the fastest ways to start earning.

Of course, with any affiliate marketing tactic you need to have a product or product line you're going to sell. This means you have to find the right merchant.

The right merchant needs to have a combination of products that sell well, with a good commission, not too many returns or other issues, as well as just being something you'd like to work with. Especially when you're just getting started it really helps to be strongly interested in the product. This helps you to have more insight into the product itself and hopefully make it easier to come up with ideas for selling it.

No matter what you do, one of the most important steps you can take is to test, test, test. Without testing, you don't know if you could be doing better. You only think you know what is working as well as possible until you test it.

There's no one right way to get started. The exact steps you take will depend on what works best for you. But the earliest steps of all methods of affiliate marketing have two things in common - lots of research and reading!