In A Word Absolutely!

If you wish to be successfull as an affiliate marketer, it is essential that you employ an Affiliate Marketing System.

The real question is what is the right Affiliate Marketing System for me?

Detailed below are some examples of setting up a system that can work for you, but first you need to consider the following questions;

• Are you intending to use your own website?
• What budget do you have to work with?
• How much time do you have to devote?
• What level of technical knowledge do you have?

It is possible to commence your business without having a website. If you intend to do this, then I would suggest that you seriously consider budgeting to use your own website in the near future.

Achieving solid long term results from you marketing efforts will be very difficult with out your own website, and indeed there are a number of other services that will become critical to your business. They include, developing sign up pages, useing auto responder services Etc.

However if you are keen to do some solid research into affiliate marketing, and this is really the key to your success, then starting off with out a website is a great way of testing the waters.

Just don't expect to get fantastic results. For example if you are planning on useing Pay Per Click advertising, you will get better recognition from Google once you start useing your own web addresses.

There is an intermediate step and that is to register domain names relevant to the products you are promoting to use in your Pay Per Click advertising. You will then redirect the domain name to your products sales page.

OK there are a lot of promotions out there suggesting you can build your empire with no start up budget. - AND you can, but your empire will take some time to get a roll along.

It will also require a large amount of time to be invested before any results are to be seen. The vast majority of people loose patience and give up well before an income stream will start to flow.

There are two ways to go and the critical ingredients are as follows;

1. No or very small budget - less than $500-00. You must be prepered to substitute your time for your cash, and the critical ingredient is PATIENCE. You need to be looking at about 10 hours a week for around 3 months before you can expect to see some return on your investment.
2. A budget in excess of $500-00. OK so now you have some cash to work with your most valuable asset is your PATIENCE. Yup, you see just because you have a budget to work with does not mean you are all of a sudden an expert. You would not be the first and won't be the last to blow a good budget in the first month. Then you are back at option 1!

Hopefully you have the idea, regardless of your budget, be patient. Allow yourself the time to learn and conduct your research. And make sure you do your research fully. Any new business will be better in the long run if built on a solid foundation.

Don't get caught up in this stage you do need to take action, but i am just warning you about investing your budget to early.

If you were to spenf your first 3 to 4 weeks getting a handle on how you intend to build your business and researching your products and market places, you will be well placed to start useing your budget wisely.

Many people focus way too much on how much money they have to invest. The far more valuable asset is how much time you have.

Please don't over OR under estimate the value of this asset.

I recomend that you take a serious look at what you are already commited to every week. See which TV shows you can do with out and make a comitment to the time slots that you can set aside to build your business.

Once you have done this you can start to allocate different jobs that you need to achieve, to specific time slots.

This is an area that can bog people down big time. I would suggest that you be really honest with yourself. If you have a nack for dealing with computers and a variety of software applications, you may well be able to do a lot of the technical stuff.

However if you struggle in this area, you do not have to learn it. Pretty much everything you need can be outsourced and mcuh of what you require in the early stages of your business is available within many Affiliate Marketing Systems.

My advice is to concentrate on what comes easily, and keep an open mind to outsourcing. Ultimately regardless of your technical ability there WILL be aspects to your business that you will need to outsource, so if that is technical stuff, don't try to battle through it. By doing that you will probably get caught in a downward spiral that heads towards Giving Up.

You can set up a simple system like;

• Market Research- Choose an area of interest, and research relevant keywords for popularity and commerce.

• Product Research and selection - Review blogs, forums and social sites to see what people are looking for in you area of interest and choose an appropriate product.

• Marketing - Use Paid advertising for faster results, or SEO tactics for longer term results or best of all both!
• Review and repeat - Review your effectiveness and start the process over with more products and or new market places.

And I suggest that in the early stages I recomend that you keep it as simple as this. If you were to go through a full process like this for just one product, you could be seeing a small return in a month. If you have a large budget and utilse Paid advertising wisely, you could be seeing some significant results in this time frame.

You can also choose an Affiliate Marketing System provided in the form of a course and there are many short free courses. All of these will lead you to a paid version, so while I recomend you sign up for the free ones, be carfull not to sign up to too many at once, and to be wary of getting involved in a paid version with out checking its affectiveness.

There are also many comprehensive website style packages. Most of these will give you a fully set up website, training and support in the form of forums etc. You will have to pay for the monthly hosting.

These can be fantastic particularly if you are technically challenged. The most important aspect is that the website MUST be able to be customised. You don't need to worry about this too much at this stage, but you don't want a website that looks exactly the same as hundreds of others on the net.

You also want to make sure that the features you are getting in your hosting are not overpriced. Remember that you are getting a website and training so it is likely you are paying a small amount for those features, just make sure it is not excessive.

You can easily check all these offers by doing a google search on the product name. If you also type in the product name and add the word forums at the end you may find some interesting info around the place.

Here is another place you can get some information on affiliate marketing.

Good luck.

Steve Roberts