For the final part of our series on affiliate marketing, we look at the last two ways that you can build up your business and your business relationships before we move on to what you can expect in your bid to become an affiliate marketer. First, building your business.

Write PPC (Pay-Per-Click Adverts)

These are your bread and butter but succeeding or failing is all down to how well you write that ad. For a strong ad, one that will entice traffic to click on it, you need to:

1. Make sure it is focused on solving a specific issue. Tell the reader that your product is the solution and give one or more benefits

2. Make sure you use keywords that are strong, keywords that make visitors want to click the ad. Google AdWords Tool is ideal for helping you find the right ones

3. Make sure the keywords you use are on the landing page of your website – this is the page that the link takes the visitor to

4. Make sure your ad has got a CTA (Call-To-Action) that urges a visitor to click

Quality Before Quantity

It doesn’t matter if you have 20 or 2000 affiliates in your network, what counts is the quality of those affiliates. The only ones that will make you any money are the ones that drive the results – they may be large or small sites; what you need to do is build up your relationship with the quality ones and forget about those that don’t do anything for you.

Knowing What to Expect

The first thing you can expect when you get started on becoming an affiliate marketer is a lot of work. Don’t make the mistake of thinking you are going to rake in the money straightaway; it won’t happen. Some marketers have reported working seven days a week, a minimum of 10 to 12 hours per day to get their affiliate platform up and running. Affiliate marketing is one of the most competitive fields there is and there are loads of marketing companies that can afford to pay out the big bucks to bring the traffic in.

Do learn how it all works. Your link, embedded on your specific platform, will not have any real impact on your customers and it won’t have any effect on the price of the service or product your merchant is selling for. However, you do get a commission from any sale, but the purchase must be made within a specific time frame after the link is clicked. How much you get depends on lots of factors – the price, your percentage for the commission, how many sales in a week or a month, etc.

Lastly, you must fully understand the demographic you are targeting. It's up to you to make sure your ads target that demographic, or your reviews are aimed at the target demographic so that you reach them. If you know how old, or what sex your demographic is, you can tailor everything to reach them in the best way possible.

That concludes our mini-series on affiliate marketing; it isn’t easy, but the rewards can be well worth the effort.