Affiliate marketing is a somewhat simple process in principle, but given that there is a failure rate of around 95%, it is obviously not that simple to put into practice.

The reasons people fail are generally a combination of false expectations, and the absense of good business practices.

I have written a seperat hub on Goals and expectations, and I would encourage you to take a look at that and make sure you have a realistic view of your affiliate marketing opportunity.

Once you have your mindset right you can then focus on the mechanics of getting your business started, and building it to the level you desire.

Marketing on the internet is in principle no different to any other business. And once you have that concept set in your mind you can really aproach it with a business attitude, and not as it is often portrayed, as a part time hobby that will make you millions.

It is true that many online marketers maintain quite large incomes with a minimum of effort through online marketing. You must recognise that their business was not built overnight, and that they have built their business, and maintain it useing sound business practices.

Here is the outline for best practice in STARTING an affiliate business.

1. Choose a market place that is of interest to you, AND that you have some knowledge about.
2. Research the internet to see what sort of products people are looking for within your chosen market.
3. Choose a reputable product to promote.
4. Identify the keywords and phrases your market is useing to search for your chosen products(s)
5. Market / Advertise your Product(s). Only use 1 or 2 methods, there are many marketing techniques that can be used, trying to learn and implement more than one or two at the one time is a common road to failure to succeed in any. You are far better off concentrating your efforts in one or two areas, and master them.
6. Review and refine your marketing to increase profits.

Your done, you have gone through the mechanics of starting your affiliate marketing business.

This is the fun part and where you get to move away from starting your business, and into building it. Your next step will go a long way to doubling your existing business. If you do a good job you may even do better than that.

This next step can be a bit difficult to get a handle on so it might be best if you are sitting down with no distractions;

1. You start back at step 1 above!

Sorry if that is a bit dissapointing but if there is one golden rule of business, it is that when you have a successful system, you should duplicate it, again, and again.

During this early building phase you should go this process 5 to 10 times useing basic marketing and advertising techniques. Don't make it complicated, just get yourself some solid cash flow.

Depending on the size of the market you have chosen and the popularity of the keywords and phrases you are useing, your results might be a couple of hundred dollars per product a month, or maybe $1000.oo or more if you have gone after some big fish.

My recomendation is simply to build this to a stage of financial comfort that will allow you to start outsourcing some of your work, give up your day job, hire a nanny or whatever it takes to get yourself some more time to devote to your business.

Or if you have attained what you wanted from the business you may just want to sit back and monitor it, and replace the lesser performing products with new ones, on a gradual basis, just to make sure your business does not slip away.

Strangely enough at this point in time I am going to suggest you just maintain the status quo of your business to date. So for a short time just monitor your existing business to ensure your sales remain the same or similar.

Now the time that you were spending researching and setting up promotions for new products can be devoted to expanding your knowledge of a new set of marketing methods. The same concept applies, just choose one method and master it before moving on.

The benefit of keeping your marketing concepts simple in the early stages is that you will have been able to concentrate on mastering one or 2 techniques rather than doing a poor job on 3, 4, 5 or 6 methods.

Now that you have some self sufficient promotions going you can start to apply some new techniques to those existing products for extra profits.

Yes you guessed it, then you can go off and learn 1 or 2 more marketing techniques and or set up another set of product lines.

There are a couple of things that you can be sure of.

1. There will always be new marketing techniques to learn
2. There will also always be more products you can market

And the beauty of affiliate marketing is that the more adept you become at it, the easier it becomes to locate market places and product opportunities.

The key to building your business is to stick to the basic affiliate marketing solutions;

1. Select you market.
2. Research your market.
3. Select a suitable product.
4. Do your keyword research.
5. Market / advertise your product useing the advertising mechanisms that you have become adept at or are currently learning about.
6. Review and refine.
7. Rinse and repeat the whole process with another product.

No matter how good you become, your successes will far outweigh and outpay your failures if you pay attention to the process.

Good Luck

Steve Roberts