Welcome back to my four-part series on getting started with affiliate marketing. In the first part, we looked at two of the ways that you can get your feet wet and now we look at four more.

Choose Your Niche

All affiliate marketers have one or more niches that they specialize in and, before you can even begin to think about marketing a product or a service, you need to choose yours. It doesn’t need to be something that you are already knowledgeable in, but it does help. For example, if you are into sailing, you might choose that niche and advertise products that relate to it.

To start with, the work is going to be a little intense so be prepared to work for extended periods.

Choose Your Services/Products

Now you have your niche, you need to decide which services and/or products you are going to advertise. There are lots of ways you can do this:

1. Commission Junction or other similar companies provide access to a varied range of opportunities for advertising

2. ClickBank, Amazon, PayDotCom, etc. all specialize in digital content, such as software or eBooks

3. PPC Marketing through Google AdSense. Although this doesn’t pay quite so much as the others, you don’t need to do so much work

Find Your Affiliates

These are the people who are going to help you and there are lots of ways that you can get to meet them. The very best way is to start making a good name for yourself. Publish a blog or a website that is very popular and gets a lot of traffic, publish an article or a book which proves popular, or something like this.

The general rule of thumb for getting your affiliates is:

1. Contact marketers or bloggers in your niche and request that they promote whatever you are selling or ask for cross-promotion opportunities – you advertise each other’s products

2. Look for forums, speak to mutual contacts or look for an affiliate network that you can get involved in online

Drive Some Traffic

As soon as your platform is built and is getting popular, and you have your affiliates on board, the next and most crucial step is to drive that traffic to your blog or website. You can do this in several different ways, but by far the easiest is to publish an article, or a blog post, and make sure you include your newsletter link for subscription purposes. Other ways you can drive traffic are:

1. Provide free articles, blogs or other content to some other websites. Include links that drive the traffic to your blog or website

2. Make use of viral marketing. This is something like a link placed in your newsletter that lets your readers pass it on easily to other people, thus increasing potential customers and traffic

3. Look for websites that drive tons of traffic and getting agreements to put a link on there for free

It’s hard work, folks, but if you follow these steps you can soon be proficient in affiliate marketing. In the next part, we are going to look at how to build up your business.