If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. We now use CommentLuv on this blog so feel free to leave a good comment and get some LinkLuv!

I love affiliate marketing ever since I first started learning about it years ago, but I must admit it has been a hard learning curve to get where I am at today. After having bought many e-books thinking that was the way to learn how to become a successful affiliate marketer, I was very close to giving up.

You could very well say I was on complete information overload and as a result I started to become paralyzed, thinking there was a secret nobody really wanted to share, and that maybe this business was not right for me.

However, I hung in there, I kept trying different methods and things slowly started to pick up, but still the return I got for the time I was putting in was well below the minimum hourly wage.

I decided I had to take a closer look at what I was really spending my time on, and what things I should dedicate to more, cutting out on time wasting programs and tasks I was doing everyday.

I finally grew wise and started to treat my job as a real business.

Instead of dedicating a lot of hours to submitting manually to different directories to get my website out there online, I decided I had to automate several tasks so I could start working faster. Because sincerely, spending a whole day submitting to directories manually really is not the most things to do, and many people soon give up, getting completely bored when they don’t see fast results.

This is probably one of the biggest reasons so many people fail in affiliate marketing and give up without even giving themselves a real shot at the bigger money, without even realizing it!

You have to automate as many daily task possible so you can work faster and more dedicated, getting more links to your site and more authority in the search engines. I am referring here especially to directory submission and article directory submission.

Did you know there is software available that will let you submit to hundreds if not thousands of directories without having to fill in all the details of your website over and over again?

I will tell you more about the software I am now using in a future post, because I want to stress another mistake many people make when trying to make a buck online.

Not treating this as a business creates another mistake many make when first coming to affiliate marketing, which is not having their own websites. Nowadays getting your own website is fairly cheap and you should look at it as the foundation of your business. Owning your own domain has many advantages over free websites, since you will always have all control plus you can eventually sell your domain if you choose not to renew it anymore.

Investing in domains and websites, amplifying your portfolio is never money thrown away. Even if you hardly do anything with your domain, when it starts aging, its value go up because search engines prefer aged domains to new ones. Think about that!

And then the third biggest mistake too many affiliates make is that they try cold selling without preparing their visitor. When I say preparing, I mean to say that many try themselves selling the product they are marketing so when they do achieve sending their hard earned traffic off to the final product page, the visitor will feel like something is being sold again to them and will run away instead of actually going through with the sale.

If you want to become a success, treat your work as a real Business!

If you are thinking of going into online marketing you must make sure you are able to follow and obey the 2 most important rules in order to become a success.

Let’s assume you belong to the huge crowd of people who dream of making a lot of money without having to leave your home or put on a suit and tie. To many people nothing sounds better than having a multiple stream of income ensuring their financial independence, without having to stick to a strict working schedule or following the orders of a boss.

Earning reports of successful online marketers make most of us dream away, thinking they were just lucky to get where they are today.

But nothing is further from the truth.

In order to cash in large affiliate checks, there are 2 things you have to really and completely understand and live by if you want a success as well.

The first thing you should never forget is: Content Rules.
Let me repeat it in case you did not understand… Content Rules!
It really isn’t all that hard to get people to your website, the more complicated issue is actually have them read more than just a few words before hitting the back button. This means you have to be able to produce quality stuff and come up with your own content. And keep producing quality content, over and over again.

The second most important thing is getting organic traffic to your site. Forget about cheap traffic you can buy in blocks of 100,000 hits, you need to make links pointing to your site so it goes up in all the search engine rankings. Building links should become your second nature and ideally you should be spending at least 80% of all your online activities on creating more and more quality links.

How to do it:

Identify the niche market you want to focus on, pick some topics and start creating your content. Write at least 10 articles and put them online before you start building your links to all separate articles, either by submitting to directories or creating links through article directories.

Keep creating new and fresh content and keep focussing on submitting the articles you wrote and after a few weeks you will start noticing how your traffic is building up. You might want to have a closer look at the first articles you wrote and rewrite them if you think they were poorly written, or you could actually link to those articles in-site as well.

Many people focus on looks just too much, wanting to have everything 100% perfect and in the end they will just give in and freeze. Remember it is better to keep refreshing your content and show people you are actually a real person with something interesting to say.

You really don’t need to worry too much about slick marketing campaigns, their importance is overrating in comparison to active link building and content creation.

You don’t need to spend a huge amount of money promoting your site either, just make sure you are using enough keywords throughout your articles and put in links to the merchants website you are promoting, and you will see that organic traffic that you have build up will start to create your bi-weekly or monthly pay check before you know it.

There you have the big secret to becoming a successful affiliate marketer, the 2 most important steps you need to do, over and over again, without overcomplicating things for yourself.

Does that sound too simple to you? Did you really think there was a hidden secret nobody wanted to share with you? Sorry to disappoint you then, it really is that simple, although it isn’t always as easy to do the work it takes.

Create your own strategy you can stick to or get the help from the guys at Making you Richer, where you will find an online marketing program that covers a lot of the affiliate marketing fundamentals. But, only do it if you are determined to achieve multiple income streams and financial independency!