In order to make it in affiliate marketing you need to learn how to work hard without giving up. Once you get past the first stage of actually taking action by setting some affiliate sites up and get some traffic it is time to make some real money.

The first couple months are always the toughest but if you are dedicated enough you will definitely find the hard work to be worth it. But just because you work hard does not mean you are working smart.

What I mean is how do you know you are doing all the right things. If your affiliate strategy is setting up websites with product promotions then how do you know you are choosing the right products, writing effective sales copy, targeting buying keywords, and making everything flow from the search engine?

In order to start making real money and really set up a bunch of different streams of income you need to master the whole process of affiliate marketing.

Keyword Research – You need to choose the best keywords you can find. The keywords you want are the ones with the least amount of competition, the most volume, and the closest to the buying stage as you can get. That is why the most profitable keyword you could have would be something like a product name even though those have a lot of other marketers trying to rank for those. But picking a keyword like "how to lose weight fast" can definitely be profitable, it is just going to take a little more preselling.

Product Research – Of course it is easy to just go to the marketplace in ClickBank.com and pick the number one seller for whatever category. But you do not have to promote the one with the most gravity despite lets be honest it is the best indicator. But think about this for a second. Lets say you actually learned about that product in more depth. Actually read through the whole sales page to get into the details of what the product is offering.

Now if you mentioned all those details in your recommendation to your visitors how much larger than a chance do you think they will convert to sales? Much better. Make sure you know as much as you can about what product it is you are promoting. Also make sure it really can benefit the visitors which it is easy to find great products these days.

Affiliate Site – Now once you have the keyword you want to target and the product you want to promote you need to build your site around that topic that is related to both of them obviously. For your main keyword it is best to put that in the domain name, title, and description of the site so it will be well optimized for the search engines.

Also you need to pump out valuable content so your visitors will know that they can count on you and will develop more trust which may be the most important aspect when owning your own site. So when you do end up making a recommendation for a product you are spot on and know what you are talking about.

Keep all this in mind when you build your sites and you will see some greater results. Then keep on building them as you wish. Remember the more work you do for your visitors the better the output. If you can understand htat then you can understand how to take your affiliate business to the next level.