No matter how much time you intend to devote to your Affiliate Marketing Opportunity, you will dramatically increase your chances of success by treating it as a Business.

Every successful business venture starts with a set of goals and expectations that form the basis of the business plan.

Over 95% of affiliate marketing opportunities fail. The two most common reasons for that are;

1. the absense of a business plan and
2. failure to take action

This guide is to make sure you don't get caught up in solving the first problem and end up failing because you never got around to taking action.

Creating a list of goals and expectations and then fitting them into a business plan can, and does lead many people down the road of trying to create the perfect set of plans.

I think I am pretty sure that I can be confident in saying that no matter who you are, or what your experience is, you will never come up with a perfect plan.

Even if you do, you will never know if you do not put it into action. So here is a guide to going through this process in such a way that you get your thoughts clearly sorted out AND start to put the plan into action.

If you work your way through the following Item, you will quickly be able to frame up the outline of your goals and expectations for you affiliate marketing opportunity.

Once you have established these you can then develop and action plan that you can follow:

• How many hours in the week can you DEVOTE? Don't kid yourself, make sure that you can commit to this time and go the extra step and identify what the time frames will be.

• What budget do you have? OK there are plenty of marketers telling you that you can start with nothin. Well you probably can but realistically an absolute minimum should be $100-00, and much better around the $500-00 mark.

• What do you want to be earning in 12 months. Make sure this is achievable and matches the amount of time you have to devote.

• Make a list of things that you are interested in that you might be able to market. Try not to focus on your biggest passion or interest just yet. You need to make sure that there is a market first, so it is a good idea to have at least one fall back position.

• What do you need to learn about. You could rephrase this as What do I know. In brief you will need to learn about Keyword research, identifying profitable markets, Search engine optimisation, Pay Per Click Advertising and social marketing, but not all at once.
• What aspects of your business will you outsource. You can outsource all of the above. If you are tecnically minde, you might choose to outsource social marketing, if you are not technically minded you might outsource Search Engine Optimisation.

The first 4 of these points should be easily establish, and I would recomend that an hour should be sufficient time to lay out some logical thoughts.

Note that it would not be logical to suggest you will be a millionaire in 12 months with 10 hours of work a week and a start up budget of $100.00.

As a matter of interest with that amont of time and budget, with a focussed effort you could expect to be earning in the vicinity of $5000-00 to $10000-00 per month.

You might need to take a couple of hours each for the last two points. Note that you are trying to get an overview that is sufficient to allow you to set out a program for taking action.

In this way you can stick to a time line that will lead you towards making your first commissions as soon as possible. Once you start making some commissions this gives you the ability to start to leverage many of your activities.

Good luck,

Steve Roberts