1. How to build a good site that converts

2. SEO - you need TONS of traffic since only maybe 1 out of 200 will buy and your commission per sale may only be around $10. SEO help your site get top ranking in the search engines so more people can find you. There may be over 1 million pages competing for a search term relating to a product you are trying to sell so you have to be really good. Thousands of people already know how to do this, so you have lots of catch up to do.

3. Then there is lots of trial and error in picking the right merchants and learning the best ways to promote them.

Too many people think affiliate marketing is a ?get rich quick?. They throw up a couple banners and wonder why they never make a single sale.

How long? Depends partly on how much money you need to make. My best guess (trying to be realistic not pessimistic) is that if you were EXTREMLY fast at learning this and EXTRMELY good and EXTREMLY lucky you may hit 2000 in 2 years. That's based on the fact that you are starting at 0 and based on the fact that if you have another full time job you won't be able to devote much time to working on affiliate marketing. One of the biggest deciding factors in affiliate marketing is going to be the traffic through your site. Many of the posts so far are great advice, and are part of the affiliate marketing mix, but without having TARGETED visitors to your pages, you will not have pre-qualified visitors that will click on your affiliate programs. For more details go to www.boost-website-traffic.com .Without trusting visitors that accept your advice and offerings, and without knowing what interests and needs you can fulfill for these visitors, you will have a rough time at the affiliate marketing game. Yes, you can have tons of traffic coming through your site and offer a wide variety of programs for them to click on, bit it lacks a targeted direction that will not leverage your visitor traffic, and the results will fall short of what you could actually be realizing in affiliate marketing income.

So here is some advice if you want to start affiliate marketing:

1. You must be passionate about the site or sites you are developing. You're going to spend a lot of time with the subject - better like it.

2. If you just don't have any ideas what to design a site around, use Word tracker to see what people are searching for online. You'll get an idea of what's popular and then find something in that list that interests you. For more information logon to www.ad-tracking-pro.com .The ability of the Commerce site to "convert" the traffic you send is your priority. If they cannot turn the interested people you send to them into buyers at a reasonable rate (2-5% of more) drops them and find a site that can. Conversion isn't your job, it's theirs. Traffic is YOUR job. Learn search, pay-per-click, developing newsletter lists, link pop, and stickiness.