Plans are very easy to implement, but usually some find them difficult to follow through effectively, and so an affiliate marketing plan is just the same as most plans people either stick to them or they do not. If we simplify the process however and just explain the basic steps broken down into manageable steps then you will be on to a winning streak of income as an affiliate marketer.

Affiliate businesses follow an order of steps to build up any income and here are them steps that any affiliate must follow:

Select a niche, one that you already know to save some time and research more on it, write articles, build content and build a one way link building strategy for your main cluster of content and drive that traffic to your home base of information which would be your very own website and you can get them very cheap if you look, as you are going to create an affiliate website you don't have to spend alot on just the one webhost account to start with.

Examples of link building with one way links:

• Article marketing - Write useful articles that are different to your main website and submit them to article directories with your website link in the author resource box.
• Join and post in forums - Add to the conversation and help people out and people will visit through your signature link eventually.
• Create useful tutorial videos -Every niche has use for good videos that either entertain or inform, so be creative with these.
• Social Bookmarking - The casual bookmarking of your best article content works quite well for short bursts of traffic, but don't rely on it too much though, just look at it as a way of others bookmrking your stuff and then it might seem that bit more effective.
• Squidoo, Hubpages & Similar sites - Content publishing sites are a good place to write about your interests and then back link to your main website every so often, the authority that these sites hold is quite good as there is a vast amount of original article content being published every single day on them.
• Link directories - Some reckon these are not worth the time to do, but I say if they are free then why not? maybe getting something like the link directory submitter to speed up the process of link submissions could be what's in order for this.
• Blogging - Writing blog posts can provide personal insight and content that is allowed in it's very nature of link building to link to your other sites and stuff online.

Then when all is well with your content, you begin to create products such as free reports, pdfs and full on pay to download ebooks, and of course within these valuable reports there are your targeted affiliate links to related products and services that you recommend based on your useful 40 page report and the way it reads.

You promote the free reports by offering it as a bonus for signing up to your email list and that's why an autoresponder comes in very handy here, and also within your further email messages you have the opportunity to reach them further with more additional free and useful content with the occasional affiliate promotional offer.

This is perhaps the hardest part of new affiliates building up a simple affiliate promotion or campaign as they expect not a lot of work will or should go into it, but it does and then when you have the automated part of this all set up, it's time to replicate the process for either something completely in a different niche or a sub niche of the first affiliate campaign you created, I would recommend going with the latter, as you would want to build up a good few sub niches under your main niche banner, so that you can provide recommendations to a variety of targeted and related resources that will solve a problem or help others do something in that niche.

All of the above one way link building strategies come into play to promote your affiliate campaign and they should be used with whatever tools and online software you have at your disposal.