How To Start an Affiliate Marketing Website

Every so often I get asked the following question: How do I start an affiliate marketing business?

Here is what I recommend:

Before you start joining every affiliate program like cg.com and Clickbank.com - its important that you do the following:

1- Focus on a very specific niche targeted market. Throwing up some ads trying to promote online games is not going to get you anywhere.

2- Once you have nailed down your niche market - start doing keyword research. Spend time doing this.

3- Create optimized - pre-selling content. Optimized to capture the relevant search engine traffic and then you want to pre-sell your visitors on your affliliate program related products.

4- Pre-selling simply means that you are sharing valuable information in order to build trust and that you know what you are talking about. The pre-selling information should guide your visitors to your affiliate links.

5- After joining a relevant affiliate program - many affiliates are faced with the question: Should I place a banner or hyperlink? Split test. Try both and see what works. I personally like hyperlinks - many times visitors will ignore the banners because they will think its some kind of unrelated advertisement.

6- Your site at the end should look like an information packed site with "By The Way" we also have affiliate links!