You Must Know This Before You Start an Affiliate Marketing Business

Before you start up your affiliate marketing business, you have to know that it is not a guaranteed path, a 9-5 jobs and over 97% of the people fail (give up before they would succeed). So before you are starting up please consider that not every project you start will be a success, more than that: most of them will be a failure. If you can face this fact, you are ready to test offers, methods and tactics and finally make money. If you expect to make money immediately with affiliate marketing, you are doomed to failure. But if you read on and get to know the simple laws of internet based affiliate marketing, you will be able to break the spell and succeed.

Before you start earning a full time income you are going to need the following systems set up. And I am telling you: it can be hard work.
1. You have to build a professional website copying the most successful internet marketers online, or get a professional to build it for you.
2. You have to learn basic Search Engine Optimization tactics to drive visitors to your website, and sign up for your list or buy your
products. You need to learn keyword research and building backlinks in order to get free search engine traffic daily, and to avoid
getting screwed up by PPC advertising. (PPC advertising is nowadays even harder to master than SEO, and much more expensive).
3. You have to be able to pick the products to promote for the niche you are targeting, that will convert well, match your website content
and the interest level of your visitors.
Many people see Affiliate marketing as an option to get rich quick. I would rather say it is similar to an "on the job" training, where you can learn stuff from others while doing the actual work (affiliate marketing) but will only get paid for the results you produce. These people just submit a couple of free ads, put some banners on the site and wait for the checks to cash in. But affiliate marketing is a business, and has to be treated as a business as well.
There is also no proven blueprint that will work for you. Some gurus claim that the system they are using will work for everyone in order to sell high-end information products, but the truth is: affiliate marketing is about you. It depends on your qualities, background and preferences, which way you want to go, which traffic generation and affiliate marketing method you would like to use to build up your business. I can tell you that you should submit 5000 ads a day but if you are not the "bum marketer" type, you will never be able to do it and finally give up abandoning your whole affiliate marketing business. But if you find a method that is helping your affiliate marketing and you find it easy to do, maybe even enjoy doing it, then you can win the internet marketing game. How long will it take for you to achieve your depends on your marketing plan, ambitions and willingness.
If you are determined enough to give affiliate marketing a try the hardest time will be the first few months. When you get to check your
stats and see that you are not making a full time income yet, it is OK, most people give up here. But if you get to analyze what is working and what is not, you can easily duplicate the things that go well and eliminate the things that are only holding you back. Keep on working, an remember: affiliate marketing is all about testing different offers, landing pages, and traffic sources.
You have to constantly keep an eye on your statistics and website stats as well. You have to determine where the visitors are arriving at your site from, the referring sources and also the bounce rate. (bounce is when a visitor lands on your site and leaves right away.) If you can increase the traffic that delivers the less bounce rate, you are a winner. Also it is useful to install Google Optimizer on your site and keep on testing different variations of your page. As well as the keywords a good squeeze or sales page can increase your commissions by as much as 300% overnight.
Another aspect of visitor analysis is to get a full geographic statistic of your website's visitors. See what they were searching for when they arrived at your page, where did they go from there, and if you really would like to utilize your traffic and plan a long term affiliate marketing business, you can create a pop up when people are leaving the sales page, asking them to take a gift from you or sign up for a free training, Once you do have a list, you can spend more time on tweaking your site and choosing the right offers and less on traffic generation tactics, which might be costly and a lengthy process.
If you are determined enough to stick with affiliate marketing, you'll learn more and more every single day. By analyzing the competition, and reading e-books, maybe articles regarding to affiliate marketing, signing up for some super-affiliates' e-zine you will be able to find the field you will become an expert in. Remember: even gurus don't know everything, they usually know one thing inside out and practice it till they master the particular affiliate marketing technique. You can't expect to become a super-affiliate when you first start, it'll take time practice and dedication. By putting the time and effort into your affiliate marketing business, you'll be able to build a profitable and way of earning affiliate marketing commissions.

Source : http://voices.yahoo.com/you-must-know-start-affiliate-marketing-5698320.html?cat=3