Many internet marketers are making a lot of money promoting affiliate products. You don’t have to worry about developing your own products, setting up downloads if it’s an infoproduct, or responding to other problems people may have. You don’t deal with refunds.

You can spend your time marketing.

Not everyone, however, is successful in this arena. Just what little secrets are the big guys using?

They are not really secrets. If you implement some of these strategies, however, you just may find your affiliate sales increasing dramatically.

The first thing you want to do is make absolutely sure the product you promote is a good product and worth the money. Once you make that first sale to a customer and they like the product and respect your opinion, it will be much easier to make additional sales later. That’s where the real profits are.

By the same token, if you recommend a product and the product has numerous bugs in it or is poorly written or is simply junk, not only will the refunds be high, that customer will never listen to anything you have to say in the future and just may let others know of their dissatisfaction. It is one of the quickest ways you can destroy your business.

A good rule of thumb is to always own an affiliate product you want to promote and be certain it offers great value to your customer. After all, if you don’t own it, how can you convince them they should?

Many top affiliate marketers rewrite the sales page they receive from the products creator. While these ebook writers and product developers are great at what they do, they may know very little about copyrighting and actually selling the product.

If you own the product, you know some of the features that will grab your potential audience and make them want to own it. Your copy will be the copy that sells, putting you at a distinct advantage over other affiliate marketers promoting the same product.

Although there are many internet marketers saying you can make a lot of money as an affiliate without a website, not having your own website won’t allow you the opportunity to put together your own copy and may not project the right image to your potential customer.

A huge step the top affiliate marketers take is to capture their potential customers email address. This might be one of the best tips you can follow. You now have their address and you know their interest. Follow up with newsletters or autoresponders and keep your name in front of them. If they did not make an immediate purchase, you have a much better chance of selling them something later.

You can recommend other affiliate products to them that are in line with the original product they were interested in. Your newsletter should contain good, solid information that will benefit your reader and not simply be a sales letter. This is how you gain their confidence. As mentioned earlier, you are now an expert in their view.

Affiliate marketing can be very lucrative but you need to be willing to put forth the effort to build your business.

So you have been wanting to get into affiliate marketing, and want to know the rules. You have your website and or blog all set up and ready to go. You have chosen your niche and market that you want to promote and make money off of. You just need links to start making money. Promoting other’s services and products is not something that is difficult to do. However, you will find that with all of the many companies that offer affiliate programs, and referral options, they all have their own rules that you must follow.

Affiliate marketing is pretty easy to follow, that is unless you have many different programs that you are a part of. When you start getting so many that you cannot remember the rules, or the guidelines that you have to follow, you might have a problem. This is because the rules for affiliate programs are as different as the companies. Each company is allowed to make their own rules. However, you might see many similarities. That does not mean that they are copying one another, or cloning their affiliate program so to speak, but yet it means that they have the same rules.

Affiliate marketing rules can be so very different. They can range from not mentioning the brand names that they sell anywhere on your website, to not have that particular market in your website URL. Because they are so different for each program and company that you promote, you are going to have to be sure that you read each one well and make sure that you understand it fully. If you all ready have your URL for your website, you may not be able to participate in some of the affiliate programs. This is because you will not meet the requirements for the rules.

Another rule that you are going to see often when you are into affiliate marketing is the page rank rule. Some of the companies that will allow you to promote their services or products will not want you to have a higher page rank than they do. Nor will they allow you to have a website that is higher in the search engine rankings. For example, if you were promoting coffee, and you wanted to become an affiliate for Folgers coffee. Your website would not be able to come up above the official Folgers coffee website in the search engine results when coffee, or Folgers coffee is used as the search term. The companies that have this rule in place for their affiliate marketing programs feel as if your website were higher than theirs for the product that they are selling, that it would hurt their business tremendously. And, it just might. They would rather have the straight sales any day, than the commissioned sales. Who wouldn’t?

Keeping a spreadsheet of the affiliate marketing programs that you are a part of and their rules is a great idea. This way you are never confused and know just where you need to stand to be a part of that program. This is the best thing that you can do for your affiliate marketing business. Not only that, you will also find that some of the sites that have broken rules and have been caught have resulted in law suits. Cover your tracks and make sure that you are following the rules that are set by that company for the best results.

You will also find that there is a thing that is called affiliate marketing software. If you can find a program that fits your needs and will help you keep everything straight, you may not have to worry about keeping track of them yourself. Use your software to keep track and make sure that you are doing your affiliate marketing the right way. Your efforts will pay off eventually, and you will be glad that you went by the book and followed the necessary affiliate marketing rules.

There are many different ways to generate revenue online and some are more difficult than others.

Let’s face it, many people that first come online and find out they could make a few bucks realize really quickly that it’s not all that easy.

They start searching for information about making money online and find out all too soon that there are a lot of sites out there that will let them purchase information they can use to learn how to make tons of cash for themselves and shortly thereafter they realize that the next step is to go purchase even more tools, info and study material at an even higher cost.

The other problem many people run into is that they find the many different newsletters that are online and each one is promoting a different way of making money online. Some may talk about affiliate marketing, others are discussing how to use their blogs or the power of Web 2.0 and yet others review how to use AdSense and PPC (pay per click) to boost their business.

In both cases, the new and aspiring Internet marketer is confused, lost and all too quickly fed up and frustrated after just a short time and most likely a ton of money they feel was thrown out the window.

And yet, making money online doesn’t have to be difficult, you don’t even have to have a website, your own products are not needed and you don’t have to run a massive affiliate program of your own to at least make some money to help you get started and you can quickly plug that hole in your wallet where all those precious dollars have been falling out of.

One of the simplest and quickest ways to get started generating some revenue online is to use articles coupled with affiliate marketing.

Here’s a simple guide to help you get started:

1. Head over to Clickbank and take a look at the many products waiting for you to promote them.

There are a few things you might want to look at while you are browsing around the Marketplace. Clickbank has a pretty good guide that will tell you how to tell the difference between products that are performing well and those that are bombing, but here’s one simple tip to keep in mind as well. As you look through the Pitch Pages, think to yourself for just a moment, if I was interested in this product, does this page even grab my attention? Would you be likely to purchase what you saw?

Once you have picked out a couple of products you really like, consider purchasing them so you can provide high-quality reviews of them, but if the budget is tight, that sometimes isn’t an option, so you will have to make note of the features, benefits and any other important information you got from the sales page.

2. Write one article.

Yes, that’s it. Write one simple article that features some of the key benefits of the product you will be promoting. Keep it simple and don’t make it look like a sales page. For example, if the product you plan to promote is about Planning Your Wedding you could write your article based on “The Top 10 Things To Keep In Mind When Planning Your Wedding” and then list the 10 things (or however many you got) from the sales page that are related, such as Choosing The Location For Your Reception, How To Avoid Relatives Embarrassing You, How To Keep Your Bridesmaids From Looking Like Clowns. Whatever the information you found, write it out in a bullet point list and then add a few short sentences to each bullet point. It doesn’t have to be fancy, short and sweet works better. For example, if you are working on Choosing The Location For Your Reception, you could add a sentence or two about the things to keep in mind if you are planning an outdoor reception.

3. The Resource Box or About The Author

If you go look at some of the popular article directories, such as www.eZineArticles.com online you will find at the bottom of each article a section known as the Resource Box, or also called About The Author.

This is your place to shine. Your article was to the point, without any sales pitches, but now in this last part you are free to tell a little about yourself (and if you have a website you can add a link there too) and you can also suggest a helpful solution (the product you are promoting) that could further assist the reader with the challenges of planning their own wedding.

Keep in mind that you only have a few lines for the resource box, so you will definitely have to rewrite it a few times just so you can tweak it and get it just the way you want it, but ultimately, the goal is to have the reader click the link at the end of your article and purchase the product you are promoting, so make it straight to the point. A simple and yet effective example might be: “For more helpful information as well as awesome ways to save hundreds if not thousands on your wedding visit youraffiliatelink.com today”.

Again, you don’t want it to be fancy, but your call to action has to make sure the reader has no choice but to click the link and hopefully the sales page you are referring them to is good enough to close the deal and earn you some referral commissions.

4. Last but definitely not least.

If you go to your favorite search engine and type in “Article Directory” you will find hundreds of different websites where you can submit your article for inclusion. There are other ways to spread the word about your new article, but directories are a quick and easy way to get the word out there and they are all quite easy to use. Just search for the article directories and then submit your new article to as many as you can. If possible, try to submit it to at least 20 or 30, but the more the better.

What will happen is that webmasters, bloggers and newsletter publishers that search through these directories will come across your article and if it’s a good match for their readers and visitors they will be inclined to post your article on their website, or publish it in their newsletter and they will include your Resource Box, along with the link to the product you are promoting.

Bottom line this has the potential to get your article very quickly on thousands of websites, in front of tons of newsletter readers and ultimately you didn’t have to spend a single penny for all this exposure and advertising, you didn’t have to have your own fancy website or subscriber opt-in list and you didn’t have to create your own product.

This same method has been used for quite some time very successfully and has in many cases returned more than just a few hundred bucks within a couple of weeks, in some cases, 1 single article has returned over a thousand dollars in a month and the best part is that your article will continue to be out there, week after week for others to see, click your link and order the product, making you more commissions.

The final thing to help you get started is when you’ve gotten this far congratulate yourself. You have done more than many of the people “day-dreaming” of making it online; you’ve actually done something about it. Now get back over to Clickbank and find yourself another product to promote, start back at step 1 and have fun making money.