There seem to be an unlimited number of niche affiliate marketing strategies. More and more eBooks about niche affiliate marketing come out everyday.

While many of them offer some valuable tips, having been a full-time affiliate marketer for for quite some time I've been amazed by many of the poor quality or incomplete niche affiliate marketing advice being offered today - from keyword research and competition analysis faux-pas all the way to getting basic things such as proper site structure wrong.

You might want to review the following concepts to help your progress in niche-based affiliate marketing:

There's been a barrage of ClickBank products selling the notion of easy riches with pay per click marketing - sometimes promoting the idea of niche marketing and other times promoting the idea of riding trends.

But I'd suggest you don't invest in pay per click niche-based affiliate marketing initially. You probably have a lot to learn before putting your money at risk. And when you learn what you need to know (which you don't know until you learn it) you're money in PPC marketing won't seem nearly as "at risk" as if you dove right into PPC marketing off the bat. 

I'm not saying that the marketing material that claims that you profit like crazy with pay-per-click niche-based affiliate marketing is lying - only that it probably isn't the best way to start out. Yes, it works well for for some individuals who can keep a cool head, for most people, it is not the best way to start.

The best kind of niche affiliate marketing system will teach you how to understand your target audience first. And to first understand the motivators of those who are the people you think you'd like you believe you'd have a good chance to offer your product to.

Ken McCarthy - founder of the System Seminar - once said "I'd rather understand markets than marketing". What that means is that if you really understand the motivation, desire, and dreams of a market, you'll probably have a better chance of winning them as customers than even the most brilliant marketer who goes in half-cocked.

So, I would suggest you begin with the basic premise of understanding likely buyers before spending a lot of time on traffic generation. Also, think about how to approach marketing to your prospective buyers. This will in turn affect the ways you work on to win their eyeballs and put your product before them.

Ken McCarthy was right. You will succeed at this by knowing your primary audience and their motivations well. You should not at first invest in setting up a site and then try to discover how to attract your audience to the site. You must know your prospects well and after that set up the site.

In fact the best and highest-paid copywriters in the world often spend months researching a market to prepare for writing their high-converting copy. You might be stunned at how much preparation goes into a great sales letter. That's why so many people are disappointed with $300 to $500 copywriters. That kind of money doesn't pay them nearly enough to adequately research a market in a way that will lead to sales copy that understands their dreams, motivations, and desires in a way that will lead to high conversions.

From a traffic standpoint what we're discussing typically called the traffic quality scale. The single most critical idea for generating affiliate commissions is comprehending the idea known as the "Traffic Quality Scale". At times it's called something else like the "Buying Cycle" or other terms. What stage of the buying cycle is someone in? The main thing you need to understand from an affiliate's viewpoint is how soon does it look like someone will buy?

In the MarketingExperiments Conversion Formula this is considered the "M" factor (for motivation) and is the most highly weighted factor in the formula. 

So, start your affiliate marketing career intelligently. The way you begin in the affiliate marketing area can affect your long-term how well you make out with it.

Are you going for a real business? If you are aiming for a sustainable business then you must know that ultimately you will probably reach a period where you'll have many additional skills you need to learn such as management skills, leadership skills, and advanced money management skills - or at least you should understand enough about them to build a good team of professionals.

On last minor point that is a bit off topic: you should also know about tricky back ends of some affiliate networks. If you're new at affiliate marketing figuring out affiliate network backends such as CJ.com can be perplexing. Don't pull your hair out. Over time you'll develop a knack for them.