There really is good money to be made with affiliate programs. The hard part is finding the affiliate program that fits you ethically and will perform as advertised. As I said before you can make a good living with an affiliate website.

Joining an affiliate network is the easy part what most of them fail to tell you is that you will get little or no help in the marketing strategy for your affiliate site. It seems they’ve purposely left this a gray area, perhaps thinking that if they tell you exactly how it’s done you will somehow cut into their market share.

First: Decide what affiliate network you’d like to join, do some research and gather a little information about that particular affiliate program.

Second: You will need a website. There are a lot of hosting options on the internet, the hosting choice is ultimately up to you. You don’t need to spend $50.00 a month for a full featured web host $5.00 or $10.00 a month is fine. I wouldn’t recommend a free web host.

The problem here, is there’s so many ads on your page already that the chances of a prospect clicking on one of “your” affiliate links is greatly reduced, not to mention making it much more difficult for the web spiders to properly index your site.

In other words you cut your chances of making the sale up to 90% by using a free web host. So just spend a few dollars and do it right. It will save you a lot of headaches in the long run. If you start making money “great” you can always write this cost off on your taxes.

Third: You need to actually build your website. Now whether your good at HTML coding or not is really irrelevant. But you still need to build a site, there are plenty of good HTML editors on the market. Some are visual editors while others are code based, some are free and some are quite expensive. It’s really a matter of personal taste and budget at this point.

Fourth: Knowing how to build your site is the most crucial part. You can find the details for how to do this on my website under search engine optimization, along with the nuts and bolts and other goodies and tidbits that will take you through most aspects of online marketing and web presence, onward.

Fifth: Advertising: Most affiliate sites advocate using pay per click advertising, using Google Adwords or Yahoo sponsored search. If you don’t know much about this type of advertising I’m here to tell you, it can add up to an awful lot of money that you will spend on advertising in a very short period of time with possibly no return on investment. This was a big mistake I made my first time out.

The better option is to build a good page with good relevant content good key words and a good page title. As you build your pages you may be tempted to use a lot of bright colors, flashy logos and deep backgrounds. Unless your market niche is bright sparkly graphics try to keep it to a minimum.

You are the public relations director for you website and no one will take you seriously if you pull up to the meeting in a brand new Chrysler 300 with poster paints, jingly chains and stickers all over the car.

You never get a second chance to make a first impression. You want your reader to read what you have to say without too many distractions.

Always, always make sure you speak from the heart and over deliver on your content. The main purpose of the internet is “and always will be” information exchange. Give the reader the information they came for plus a little extra, and it will pay you dividends in the future.

Eventually, as these people get to know you through your website, they will come to trust you and rely on what you say to be the truth as best you can deliver it. You may even find that these website viewers will give you valuable information to help you further your own business or better your life in some way, and that is the true magic of this business.

Everyone is looking for that personal touch, something hand made and unique, it seems to be something we’ve lost in our rubber stamp world. Make whatever you do unique. And there is a hidden treasure here in what I say.

Being unique and original gives you a great search engine advantage over cookie cutter websites. The search engines use spiders or web-bots to crawl the internet and catalog websites, if they find a pile of websites offering the exact same layout, colors, content and theme, the spiders will knock the rankings down for that particular layout, especially if they are all located on the same server. It’s a form of spamming and the spiders hate spam.

There is a lot more to this than what i've said so far. If you want more information. Just visit my website. I'm updating and adding new material almost every day. there are some good offers contained on the site. 

Regards: Mike