The field of affiliate marketing is probably the fastest developing way to make money online. After all, billions of ordinary people use the Internet every day. Affiliate marketing gives you the opportunity to target potential customers regardless of their location in the world.

For this reason, it is not surprising that a large number of people earn a considerable amount of money through advertising and affiliate marketing. Many qualified affiliate marketers end up making more money in this field than their previous job and therefore some of them even quit their normal 9 to 5 job and go into affiliate marketing full time.

A quick overview of affiliate marketing
Now that we have a little idea about the capabilities of affiliate marketing, let’s dive deeper and discuss what it actually includes.

The easiest way to describe affiliate marketing is when you help another business sell their products online and then they pay you a commission for every sale you make to them.

If you are promoting a product priced at $200 and the company pays you a 10 percent commission on the sale, you would earn $10 for each sale.

How do you refer to sales? You can start promoting your seller’s products on your website, which gets targeted site visitors in the same niche as the product you’re advertising. For example, if you have a website that sells makeup, you wouldn’t be promoting health insurance, instead you could be promoting makeup-related products. Every time one of your website visitors clicks on your affiliate link provided by the seller, you will be paid a commission.

How to choose a good affiliate network
One of the biggest mistakes new affiliate marketers make is becoming a member of just about every affiliate network they come across. This is definitely considered as a totally incorrect technique. That is due to quite a few reasons.

First of all, being an affiliate marketer is a business that requires a lot of awareness. Therefore, if you try to work with many affiliate networks at the same time, it is likely that none of your initiatives will go as planned and, consequently, none of them will end up being very successful.

Second, focusing on just one or a few products will certainly allow you to thoroughly research them before you start promoting them. This method also helps you refine your strategies, making any necessary adjustments and therefore making your marketing that much more powerful. An effective approach will produce better results and reward you for your efforts and time.

Third, make sure you do some research on the affiliate network as there are some networks that only pay you once a month and that might not work for you or worse, might not pay you at all. I am not saying this to discourage you from being an affiliate marketer, rather I want you to be successful in finding the right network and products to market and earn your commission.

There are affiliate networks that resort to “shaving”, a very common exercise in affiliate marketing where the networks display a discounted sales number of what you referred, thus paying you drastically less in commissions.

Therefore, to avoid falling victim to this action, I suggest you stick to known and trusted affiliate networks. In any case, the only way you will be successful with a network is if you are comfortable with them and the products you are promoting.

How to start getting sales as an affiliate marketer
Cutting to the chase right away, some affiliate marketers use social media websites including Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and more to do affiliate marketing, others decide to build their own site. Getting your own site is a great approach to affiliate marketing because it gives you control over everything.

Therefore, we will focus on affiliate marketing using your own site in the future. First things first, as mentioned above, you’ll want to find an affiliate network that you’re comfortable with. This includes being knowledgeable about the products you’re promoting, so you’re not selling products you know nothing about.

Amazon Associates Program
That said, many marketers consider Amazon’s associate marketing program to be one of the best. It is possibly the most reliable network and has a huge inventory of products to promote and earn your commissions.

This gives you the ability to promote just about any product on the market, or pick a niche with little competition and you could be earning commissions in less than a week.

Find a good keyword
It is considered to be one of the most difficult parts of marketing. You can’t just blindly pick any one keyword and expect to start generating sales quickly. One of the reasons many affiliate marketers fail is due to using the wrong keyword.

If you’re new to affiliate marketing, you’ll want keywords that have little competition. Start your keyword research by finding long tail keywords with low search volume, that means a lot less money, but not really the ones with a lot of competition.

You can test the top 10 and 20 results and do some research to find out if you can beat them. Review the keywords your competition is using to determine if they’re using identical keyword phrases to the ones you want to target. If they are, and they have a high authority website in that niche, I would recommend that you stay away from that niche and go for a new, less competitive one.

quality content
This is significant. If you think that you will make a lot of money by creating articles that do not help visitors in any way, you are very wrong. Even though your goal is to make money by referring visitors to the offer, you’ll need to offer them something important. By simply posting your hyperlinks along with lame sales pitches like “this is a great solution, buy this product through my personal hyperlink and get a discount” and so on, you may just be headed for disaster.

If you decide to join the Amazon Associates Program, you can write an informative article on your home page and include your main keywords and some secondary keywords throughout the article. You could have the shopping guide, and write your brief opinion of each product you are marketing. Remember that the higher the cost of the product you sell, the higher the commission.

backlinks
We realize that it is probably the most complicated method to achieve, unless you are an SEO guru. Contacting the site with high authority and guest posting on these sites is a well-known means of getting great backlinks. These great backlinks, along with guest posting on related sites in your niche, will get you on the first page of search engines as long as the keyword you choose has very little competition.

However, even when your site doesn’t make it to page one, as long as you have guest posts on various sites in your niche, you will attract a substantial amount of targeted traffic from these sites. So it’s a great tactic anyway.

mistakes to avoid
Now that you know the process of becoming a great affiliate marketer with your own website, I want you to also consider some of the most common mistakes new affiliate marketers make.

Not providing any good value
Although we have covered this topic, it is important to remind you that if you try to be extreme with your words to pressure visitors to click on your affiliate link, it is likely to be considered junk or spam by many websites.

Rather, it is suggested that you help these people select the right solution for their particular needs. This method makes these people feel more, which in turn will check the products you are marketing based on the value of your item.

product research
Many online merchants will not do proper product research to gain knowledge about the product they are promoting, but are only concerned with how much commission they will earn per sale, regardless of whether it will provide value to their visitors. This is an oversight, and at some point it will make your readers not trust anything you tell them.

Track your links
When you start advertising on Amazon or even some other affiliate network, it will be beneficial to track your affiliate links. It can help you find out which website is generating the most sales and then you can make your other websites have the same type of setup.

final thoughts
I would like to say that even though affiliate marketing can be very rewarding, it does have a steep learning curve. You may face disappointment numerous times before earning a good amount of money online.

That said, affiliate marketing is simply for people who are likely to face several failures, but will come back with a positive attitude and willing to learn from their mistakes.