There are tons of books out there telling you how to make money from Affiliate Links. Most of them are trying to sell you something. You won't find an easy answer here, but you will find a truthful one.

The best and most successful affiliate earners do so by placing Content Related (contextual) links on a page that has merit by itself. So we tell you what the pros will tell you who AREN'T just trying to get you to buy their program: Creat a good website with interesting information. THEN find affiliate programs you believe in and link to them.

Last night I earned $100 from an affiliate link, while I slept. I told my sister that in the morning, and she said it looked like I was onto a good thing, quick, go back to bed and sleep some more!

If only it were that easy! It took three months of full time work on my sites just to see the first $100. And more time and effort to see consistent earnings on any of my sites. But it did happen, several times over, with several different online marketing approaches. If you want to earn money while you sleep, you have to be willing to put in a lot of long days.

Making money from affiliate links does happen. Most people who earn this way do not make the millions overnight that are promised. They do not just place links on their site and watch the checks roll in. They spend a lot of time in web design and writing articles or informational pages. They either write well enough to create content themselves (or they are able to create images, or do research that others want), or they pay for it. It takes work to create a site that people WANT to visit. You also have to generate MUCH more traffic to make money from any kind of advertising supported site than you do with an online store, so popularity matters.

Your first task is to find a theme. If you have a passion, something you love, and you think others will want to read about it, then you have a natural content area to form your website around. Let's use Music as an example. Say you like Jazz. What can you write about that you know a bit about, and that you would enjoy learning more about? Are there salable items related to the theme you have chosen? Perhaps music vendors offer affiliate programs. Maybe you want to sign up with Amazon.com and recommend books on the subject. Perhaps you can link to other sites that sell products or information related to it.

Before you launch your big dream though, go onto a few search engines and find out what is there already. You want to find that delicate balance between no listings because there is no interest, and no listings because nobody thought of it first but people DO want it. If others have caught onto a hot market, you will be lost in the crowd unless you can differentiate yourself - more on that later. Generalized topics CAN succeed if you can do it better than anyone else and market your efforts successfully. But you may have more success in a niche market where you can provide a smaller more specialized focus to a special interest group. Check it out and see what the competition would be, and whether you can offer a fresh perspective or new twist on what is already there.

Next, you can start on the actual product by building a good website. Many e-Books will recommend that you try various tricks to influence search engine placement. Generally so called "secrets" recommended by them are either known ways of spamming the search engines (for which your site can be tossed out), or they are just common sense old fashioned marketing tactics. Forget marketing until you have a site worth marketing. And the site worth marketing is one with good information, good design, and easy use features. So focus on that first.

Website design is covered in another tutorial, Basics of Building Your Own Website. The most important point in affiliate link success is content. Content refers to any material on your site, visual, textual, video, music, etc, that viewers want to see. This is to the web what food is to a restaurant. You can get information on content in our booklet on Creating an Infosite.

So how do you get content? There are several ways:

1. Write it yourself. If you are an expert in anything, you can write about it. If you have friends that like to write about things, you can ask them to help. Be sure to credit them if you do, and to write a simple contract stating rights and compensation if any. If you write it yourself, make sure your writing is professional sounding. Punctuation and spelling MATTER.

2. Research information elsewhere, and write about what you research on. If you quote anyone, you must credit them. If you quote more than a sentence, you must get their permission in most cases. Sometimes you must get their permission for even that much. Respect the copyright laws or you can get shutdown, or worse, sued.

3. Quote others. To do this you have to get their permission. If you want to link to other articles, and give a brief overview of what it is about, and credit it, generally this is ok. Most writers like this because it is free advertising for them. If you quote them without crediting them though, you are in trouble. If you quote a whole article, you MUST have their permission. Many people on the web are happy to give permission if they get something in exchange, even if it is just a link to more of their writing, or to their business. There are many experts who use writing articles as a means of advertisement for their business, so you can often find relevant content in this way. The drawback is that your site may lack originality if you use this method. A few of these articles to fill in the gaps are acceptable, but a whole site of them would likely be less valuable as a resource in its own right.

4. Create a listing. Directories are everywhere on the web. This is a useful niche, but only if it is in an area where others have not killed the market with tons of the same thing. You could create a directory of Jazz sources. Links to and reviews of websites related to the topic. This kind of site provides a perfect background for an affiliate link site because it gathers resources in a single spot, while being for the purpose of providing links. So if a few have tracking info in them, it won't make a difference! Again, the difficulty to this though is finding a niche market that has little competition so you can be a genuinely valuable source.

Once you get your content planned, outline your site and navigation. Create a template to work with so you don't have to reformat every page to get consistent site navigation and design, and then begin putting content on pages and linking them together. Upload your site and preview it - test the links and make sure the layout looks good in your browser, and in at least one other browser or on one other platform than what you are using (Linux, Mac, PC, etc).

After your site is basically created, go and find your affiliate links. These exist in pretty much every market, and you should have found a few when choosing your topic. Go sign up and get your links. Research proves that text links placed in context work better than banner ads. You can put a few banner ads on pages, but keep them small or logically placed. Most of your links should be something like this:

"Jazz afficionados will remember (song name) by (artist). Hard to find a copy of that anymore, but we managed to find a digitally remastered edition on CD through (music distributor affilate link)."

Creating text in this way that offers genuinely useful information, with the link dropped in in a way that makes it convenient for others to find what you found is highly effective. It is more effective if links that you do not profit from are provided where appropriate also. Your entire site should have links wherever they naturally fit in. Whenever you can direct someone to something they need, you should, whether you can profit by it directly or not, because that will increase your credibility as a generally knowledgeable source, which will make people more inclined to check back with your site, and to trust the links you provide.

Create a separate page for each of your best affiliate programs. Especially if you have an expensive item that needs explanation. Place links to that page elsewhere in your site, instead of the affiliate link. Put the affiliate link on the page you made, and explain why you like the product or service. Be honest about it, state whether or not there are elements that would make it unsuitable for some people. This can be an effective tactic for making affiliate sales, especially if you have a site where your visitors trust your advice. It also makes it more convenient for you to place links elsewhere in your site, because it can be an easily rememberable link name instead of a complex affiliate number and tracking link.

After placing links, you must find a way to market your website. It consists of more than just registering it with search engines, though that is a necessary step (we have a booklet on this topic also). Find specialty directories to list it with, and find other sources that publish news about your topic to announce the site to. You have to do some legwork here, and you have to follow up on tracking down places where a listing will be beneficial. Skip the free Classified sites, they are all but useless as genuine advertising sources, about all they will give you is an inbox full of SPAM. Marketing is a whole different topic that is also covered in another tutorial.

At this point many people want to sit back and let the money roll in. But working online is like every other task in life. It is slow to get rolling, it takes time to gain momentum, and once started will stop if the engine dies. You are the engine. To keep a site active, you must update it regularly. Whether that is daily (HARD work), weekly (still a lot of work but doable for some people), or monthly (infrequent enough that it is harder to persuade users that content is fresh), you must be dedicated enough that once you say, "Stay tuned for the next installment" that the next installment actually arrives in a predictable manner. If you want full time income, you have to do a full time job.

You see, the real power of marketing is in REPEAT visitors. People who like your site so well they come back again and again. They may not remember where they bought something, but they remember they started on your site. When you have to get new visitors all the time you are expending huge amounts of energy per visitor. When you keep content fresh and encourage repeat visitors, the work it takes to do that keeps many customers coming back. It is a more efficient way of doing business. History is full of products that people bought once, but that did not last because they could not sustain repeat purchases. They became flashing fads which we barely remember. But products like Coke, Cheerios, Big Macs, and Bandaids have lasted because the manufacturer produces a consistently good product that people continue to enjoy or rely on. They no longer have to make a huge push for new customers, their marketing consists of reminding the old customers that they are still there, which is a much simpler task than persuading someone of the quality of your product the first time around.

So to make your site work for you, you will have to keep working on it. After the initial creation period and marketing push though, you will be able to settle down to a more predictable maintenance schedule, spending a few hours a week on it instead of a few hours a day. Eventually the site may run its course, and you may run out of ideas for fresh content or regular updates. If your site depends on contemporary events for new content, this is simpler to manage long term.

But if your site does wind down, don't be afraid to venture into a new area if you felt the effort was worth it the first time. If you can do it once, you can generally do it again! Since your structure is in place, and you now have experience, the second time around can be even more successful, and won't take quite as long to get going.

The usual rules apply here: Common sense, hard work, and realistic expectations. In my own efforts some things have succeeded, some things have failed in the original goal. But sometimes even though my original goal was not realized, I found unexpected rewards along the way. I got things out of it that I did not expect. And sometimes that failure lead to a success that would not have occurred if I had not done the thing that failed. And the adventure can be pretty awesome.

http://www.adventuretech.us/directory/ - Independent Affiliate Directory - Directory of independent affilate programs which are not managed by a large affilate program management company.

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