Affiliate marketing is one of the most popular ways to make money online. Affiliate marketing is in essence acting as a salesman for a product that is not your own and getting commission for every lead you generate that ends in a sale. It is a quick way to get started online. A lot of affiliate marketers send traffic directly to affiliate sites. If you do that you are leaving money on the table.

If you send traffic directly to an affiliate site, you get paid a commission for every lead that buys, but you don't know who they are. You don't know any of the traffic that you sent to the affiliate site. That means for the next affiliate product you wish to market, you are starting all over again at ground zero.

A smarter way to affiliate market is to put your own site up between your traffic generating method and the affiliate site. What you want to do with your in between site, is to collect the name and email information of all the traffic right before it moves on to the affiliate site. In other words, you are building your own list of leads that are interested in the niche of your affiliate product.

As an example, a common affiliate marketing technique is to create Google ads with your affiliate link sending anyone who clicks on the ad directly to the affiliate site. This method does not allow you to collect name and email information.

Instead of using your ad to send traffic to the affiliate website, send them to a squeeze page you have created to harvest their name and email information and then send them on their way to the affiliate site. It is possible to loose a few leads this way because you are adding a step to the process, but the advantage of building your own list far outweighs any leads you may loose.

In building your own list, you can now directly market to that list similar affiliate products. If you grow your list to say, 1000 members, you now have 1000 targeted leads you can start with right away even before adding any other traffic building methods to your affiliate effort. As you continue the process your list will get larger and you will have more targeted leads. More leads means more affiliate sales.

Having your own list makes it much easier to be successful as an affiliate marketer. You don't have to constantly start over as you try to create traffic for your affiliate products. You will have a larger and larger customer base that you can sell to over and over again. This is exactly how the super affiliates are so successful. Now you can use the same method and be the next super affiliate.