Welcome back once more. In the third part of this series, we are going to look at how you can build up your business.

Study Other Affiliates

Learn from what they do. That’s by far the easiest way to get some experience and the best way to do that is join a forum or an online community. These tend to be free and are invaluable in the information and advice they offer. Three of the very best sources are Warrior Forum, BestWeb and Digital Point, all free and, as well as offering access to those experienced in affiliate marketing, you also get a lot of opportunities to get together with other affiliate marketers.

Build Up Your Relationships

To be an affiliate marketer is not easy and you need a good deal of patience before you start to see any real money come in. While marketing programs are designed to push the traffic to your website, it is up to you to build up relationships with your affiliate partners as well as be continually searching for new ones:

1. You need to learn and understand the ways that your partners like to communicate. Each is different, and you need to respect what they want

2. You also need to understand exactly what they require of you

3. Come up with innovative ideas to put to your partners – extensively research their websites and see if you can come up with ways that they can make improvements

4. Ask them to tell you how you can make improvements

You Need Targeted Traffic

Traffic to your website is all well and good but it's even better if you get traffic that converts. By this, I mean traffic that is likely to click through your affiliate links and make purchases so that you can make money. You can get targeted traffic in these four ways:

1. Use Paid Advertising -  you will need a combination of graphics, good ad copy and a link that people want to click. This kind of advertising tends to bring money in irrespective of whether a purchase is made

2. Use Free Advertising – for this, you need to put adverts and links on websites that are free, like Craigslist and, whenever a link is clicked on, you and the website the link is on will earn cash

3. Use Article Marketing – this will, hopefully, give you a better ranking on the search engines because, provided your content is original and up to date, it can establish you as a source that is credible, one that doesn’t make use of spam software. There are lots of article directories where you can upload your articles and, as your article gets published by other web managers and bloggers, you can move up the engine rankings

4. Use Email Marketing – on your website, you need to place an option for subscribing to your email list. Once you have the email address and name, you can send regular, relevant emails, helping you to build up a better relationship with them

In part four, we look at the final way to build up your business and a few tips on what you can expect as an affiliate marketer.