For anyone who is keen to participate, or just started in the affiliate marketing industry, here are a 7-steps system to help you get started and receive your affiliate commission in as little as 7 days.

Step #1: Finding A Profitable Affiliate Niche Market

This is the most important steps that you need to do. The trick to locate a profitable niche market is easy. First, compile a list of topics from your interests, hobbies or the problems that you are trying to solve. Next, use existing Internet resources such as the search engine, directories, forums, discussion groups to identify the public's level of interest for each topic. Lastly, use keyword research tool such as Wordtracker to determine the profitability of the topic. A profitable affiliate niche market should have a high level of interest from the public with a good range of affiliate products already exist in the market.

Step #2: Setting Up Your Affiliate Website

The next step is to set up a website to build your mailing list and market your affiliate link. This can be a product review site, informative content site or just a one-page website with a redirect to the affiliate site. Whatever you do, do not forget to include an opt-in form to capture leads and build your mailing list. This list will bring you income over and over again in the future.

Step #3: Building Relationship With Your Leads

This can be achieved by setting up an autoresponder. Write content rich email message and set it up in your autoresponder system. The purpose here is to automate the whole follow up system and at the same time educate and build relationship with your leads.

Step #4: Final Checking Your Website Before Launching

The purpose of this step is to make sure that everything runs smoothly. Test drive your website to make sure all links are working, check for spelling and grammar mistakes, image layout, browser compatibility, check all your autoresponder messages etc. The last thing that you want to do is to scare your visitors off with bad website design and tons of broken links.

Step #5: Generating Traffic To Your Website

There are various strategies you can use to drive traffic to your website. The most common ones are pay-per-click advertising, article writing, forums posting, joint venture.

Step #6: Back End Affiliate Marketing

This is a crucial part to generate extra revenue. Make use of opportunities to market more affiliate products. Checkout page, thank you page and error404 page are good places for you to do back end affiliate marketing

Step #7: Duplicating And Leveraging

The last step is to duplicate your current success and apply it to another affiliate product. Once you have automated the process from step 1 to 6, this last step will become much easier.