Being an affiliate means you are selling something on behalf of a business. You join their online affiliate site and find products to promote. When you sell something you get paid.

clickbank.com is one of the most popular and so is commission junction at cj.com

It is usually free to become an affiliate and it is a great way to add products to your blog that visitors may want to buy.

There are thousands of affiliates on the internet and what will determined whether you succeed is your own mindset. Here are some traits that you need to adopt if you want to become successful at affiliate marketing

Self Motivation – You have no boss, there is no one looking over your shoulder. You really don’t have to do this if you don’t want to so being able to motivate yourself to get online and promote your affiliate product is essential – especially if you have been at work all day!

A Future Vision – Having a vision of why you want to build a successful lifestyle will help motivate you. It is important to know exactly what you are working towards and why you are doing what you are doing. Spend time creating a plan of what your lifestyle will be like when your affiliate income reaches 4 figures a month, 5 figures a month and even 7 figures a month! Dream big.

Training – Be ready to invest in learning how to become a super affiliate if you want to earn more than a few hundred a month! Decide on who your favourite affiliate marketer is and then find out whether they have a training program – learn from the successful to succeed.

Tenacity – You need a willingness to never give up, to crack the code, to start that snowball rolling that begins with you earning your first 5 bucks and that grows bigger and bigger until you are earning $1,000 a month, $8,000 a month, $27,000 a month, $184,000 a month!

A successful affiliate marketing knows the niche, industry or area they have chosen to focus on, they know what it will take to be successful if that area and that there are thousands of other affiliates all after the same spot but instead of making them feel  threatened this will spur them on to get to the top.

Wallace D Wattles said there is no such thing as competition only creation. So go out and create what you want to offer as an affiliate and focus only on what you are doing to succeed.

No! Many people promote products they do not use but if you are planning on writing a review  you have more to write about if you have actually used a product - it's difficult to write about something you have never used!

If depends on what you want to sell. Some people sell large items like furniture, TV etc and others sell digital ebooks and membership sites.

Clickbank.com is a great site for digital products

Commission Junction is a great site for a variety of different products

If you have a particular niche you want to focus on just go to the search engines and type in "X affiliate programs" (X being your industry or niche - e.g. health and fitness affiliate programs)

If you go through the process of starting a blog you will have a base by which you can promote affiliate marketing products on a regular basis. Here is an affiliate blog example

There are a number of different ways.

You could send visitors straight to the site once they have read your blog post but if you are looking to be a super affiliate you will understand the importance of building a list.

So set up a one page website called a squeeze page and offer something for free.

Here Is a great example of a squeeze page

Once people sign up you can send them a free ecourse, free ebook, free video or whatever they have signed up for and promote the product in whatever you give away.

Setting Up A Page On Your Blog

The other way to do this is to set up a page on your blog that contains a write up of the product and promotes it.

You can also set up a whole blog that contains value packed articles which help people and on that site include an image of the product.

Why not have 2 or 3 products at different price ranges and promote them all giving people an opportunity to choose.

Some affiliate sites do not have articles but just have the products like this site here.

Get creative! Come up with your own way of promoting your product and find what works best for you.

Loads of bloggers use affiliate marketing as a regular indirect income from their blog. It is free to get started, it is easy to join programs and what you need to learn to be successful is how to get people to buy from you rather than the thousands of other affiliates out there.

And that is what training is for!