The explosion of growth in the Internet during the past few years has led to a number of money-making opportunities that didn't previously exist. One of the more successful is affiliate marketing, where the seller of a product offers financial incentives to others to promote his or her products for them. If a customer buys, both the seller and the promoter, known as an affiliate, makes money. A very successful niche of the affiliate marketing industry is the marketing of the industry itself, with a number of books released every month designed to help you make money in affiliate marketing.

Some of these marketing books are well thought out, and others are designed to take advantage of the inexperienced. Sometimes it's hard to tell the difference. One popular subscription program claims to make affiliate marketing easy. For a monthly fee, the customer gets a membership to a site that offers to help them make money selling a number of different products. The creator of the site claims to offer everything necessary to help the member make sales – a product list, a set of ready-made e-mail messages that members can send to people on their mailing list, and even ready-made Web pages that members can use to sign up new customers. The site boasts that “all the hard work has been done for you” and the member just needs to sign up, pay monthly fees, and start cashing checks.

At first glance, the program seems like a great idea. With all of those promotional materials at hand, how can anyone not make money? The answer to that is easy – making money takes traffic. You can have great products and great promotional materials, including fancy Websites, but if no one sees them, you cannot make sales. To make sales, you need to bring traffic to your Websites so those customers can see your products. Many people who are new to affiliate marketing fail to realize that finding ways for people to discover your products is about 90% of the work. You not only need to find ways of attracting customers, but you need to do so while competing against hundreds or thousands of other people who are trying to do the same thing with the very same products. Signing up for a membership site that offers “everything you need” to make sales is a profitable idea. Unfortunately, it's only profitable for the person who is collecting the membership fees.

There is no “easy way” to generate traffic. It's hard work, and it takes time. There are many ways to bring traffic to your Website, but there is no “automatic” way to do it, and no one can do it for you. Before you sign up for an affiliate program, make sure you understand that you can't make sales without customers and that you have some idea as to how you are going to get those customers to find you. If you don't know where the customers are going to come from, you can't make money, even if someone promises to “do all the work” for you.