Study and Research – Identify what to feed to a hungry niche market. When you know what the market likes to eat it will be easy to feed them your product. So explore, brainstorm and research before selecting a product to market to them. Spend some time on Google Trends and research.

Test it out - Before trying to generate huge amounts of traffic, create a small test campaign with a few ultra targeted keywords to see if it converts. Highly targeted traffic that converts to sales is the sign of a successful affiliate marketer. Testing it out first makes it easy to track because the campaign is small.

Doing your job – Affiliate marketing is all about PRE-selling. Let the merchant do the selling. Your role should be to provide value. Help your audience find what they are looking. Find a solution to their problem. Avoid the concept of sell/sell and embrace the concept of PRE-sell/sell. If you can put yourself in front of your customers pc and visualize yourself as them, you can certainly PRE-sell.

Capture Page – A customized, relevant, keyword rich landing page does two things really well. It creates your brand of high value and allows big daddy (aka Google) to see the keywords you advertise under as relevant. So learn to build it, and they will come.

Seduce Google – Make yourself attractive to Google and all of the other major PPC services out there. Pay less than all of your competitors when Google thinks your style of advertising is attractive. Pay TONS when you use PPC's the wrong way. An understanding of how these services work will help conversions.

Be Specific – Lots of traffic, no conversions and no money in your bank account is the result of bidding on keywords that are to general. Bidding on a term like "fishing gear" is not productive. How about "deep sea fishing gear albacore tuna" or even more specific than that. Make a customer say, "Awesome! Exactly what I was searching for."."

Build the list – If you don't capture your customer's email address you're leaving the money on table. It's going to take around 6 or more contacts from you before the purchase so follow-up. More important is that you can market to them in the future for free if you choose to.

I've never underestimated the importance of learning what the successful affiliate marketers are doing. Do it and be much better off.