It doesn’t matter if you are selling your own product or promoting an affiliate product.
This is a business and should be treated as one.
If you don’t have a business plan you are going to end up running in circles and never accomplish a thing.
Many people, especially when they are first starting out will try promoting a product, see no results and jump to a new and different product. They haven’t got a plan let alone a business plan. They will fail, give up and decide you can’t make any money on the internet.

On the other hand those that realize this is a business and treat it as such will have success, even if it doesn’t come right away.
The difference is those that know it’s a business have a plan. They also realize their plan has to be flexible and workable.

For example they may be starting with little or no money for advertising in their budget. They have a web site and want to drive traffic to it, but can’t afford buying adwords or placing a classified ad. So they start with article writing and post their articles to free article directories. This gets them not only traffic but backlinks to their site as will. As time goes on they are able to budget money for advertising and review this part of their plan. If article writing is still working, they continue with that and add either adwords, classified ads, or both. Of course they are tracking all of this so they know what is working and what is not.

You also have to know what market you are approaching to be effective in your marketing business.
You don’t want to try selling motorcycle products to the dog crowd now do you. Learning what your market wants is also important. It is easier to sell widgets to a crowd that is looking for widgets then to a crowd that is looking for boxers. So when you start your business do some research to find a need, then fill that need. When I get an idea for a product, weather it’s my own or one I want to promote, I see if there is a market for it. Three years ago WordPress became supper popular and you couldn’t go to any forum without seeing posts about how to set it up and use it. I also noticed that most of the ebooks and products people where creating for WordPress assumed the buyer already had a blog and knew the basics, they where partially right, but many didn’t have a clue about installing WordPress let alone how to set it up after it was installed. I saw a need in that market and wrote one of the first how-to guides for WordPress.

One of the nice things about having an online business is you don’t have to limit yourself to just one niche. Where in the brick and mortar world of off line businesses you are limited to what you can offer in your store or service field, on the Internet you are only limited by the number of websites you can maintain.

I’m in a few different niche’s at the moment.
I tried being in more but found I couldn’t put in the time I needed to for each to work for me. So now I focus on three and for the time being that is plenty.
My advice is to start with one niche and build from there. This isn’t a race or competition to see who can be in the most niche’s or have the most web sites. This is about starting and running an Internet business. If you are in one niche and a year from now you’re making good money in it, maybe then it is time to decide if you want to get into another one. Remember though it’s up to you and what you think you can handle.

Here’s a few simple affiliate marketing tips that should help you get on the right path.

• Use your own website

Why send people to your affiliate page and give all that traffic to someone else?
Also more then likely the product you are promoting has a sign up form there to capture the visitors name and put them on their mailing list.
By setting up your own website and doing the pre-sell there you can get the traffic and build your own list.

• Build your own list

Why let the product owner have all those names to send offers to? I’ll get into the hows and whys of habing your own list in the future. But for now let me say it’s a real good idea to have one.

• Concentrate on one niche

If you’re all over the board with your marketing efforts, you are wasting your time and money.
Focus on one niche at a time and do the leg work to find out what they are looking for and how they are looking.
An example would be dog products.
People looking for flea control products aren’t going to be typing in dog products as their keyword to search.

• Product Reviews

This is the new style of affiliate marketing that has really been around for ever in one form or another.
Try to think of the people you are writing the review for. I don’t mean the people who’s products you are reviewing, but the people that are reading the reviews. One style that may work in the affiliate marketing niche, may not work in the dog niche.
When I started marketing in a sub niche of the dog niche I addressed the market as if I was going through what they where, and in fact I was.
So my approach was to show them a bunch of products, listing my personal experiences with them and then saying ‘this is what I used that worked’. I’m still getting commission checks from that site and I haven’t updated it in about a year.

Well that about raps up this affiliate marketing post.
I’ll have more in the future and expand on the points I made here.