Affiliate marketing offers many opportunities to earn an income working on the Internet. This is a viable way of developing your own online business. Whether you will be successful at it depends on many things but it mostly depends on you.  If you are considering doing affiliate marketing, you have already thought of all the ways that it could improve your life like; being your own boss, high income potential and low operation costs...among many other things. Like everything else in life, however, you reap what you sow.

Being your own boss sounds so wonderful but what kind of boss will you be. Will you be a slave driver who insists that work be done every waking hour including weekends and holidays or will you be so laid back that you won't start work until late afternoon and be so disorganized that nothing is accomplished? Either extreme will make you a very bad boss.

The high income potential sounds great, but the key word here is POTENTIAL. Potential only means that the high income is a possibility and not a certainty.  Your income will be directly proportionate to how much you are willing to learn and how hard you are willing to work. Becoming an affiliate marketer doesn't mean that bags of money will drop from the sky without any time and effort on your part.

The low operation cost of affiliate marketing is a very attractive point for becoming an affiliate marketer. It's true that it is low cost...but that doesn't mean there isn't any cost. You will still have all of the usual living expenses that must be met while you get your affiliate marketing business turning a profit. You will have advertising costs, as well. You must be sure that you can meet your financial obligations before you launch your business.

Keep in mind that affiliate marketing isn't an easy money tree that is going to just drop bundles of cash into your lap with no effort on your part required. You will find the affiliate opportunities that work the best only by finding them yourself, either through testing and research or networking and business development.
Free traffic is not completely over but it is fading fast. You can work hard to create pages that score high in the search engines and build sweat equity into a site but by paying for clicks and focusing on Google and Overture you will have the top three positions on all search engines that really count on the Internet.

You need to be on top if you want to generate traffic from Yahoo. Overture and especially Google are the best key drivers of qualified traffic on the Internet. Pay-per-click search engines let you quickly test different affiliate offers and new landing pages on your site. You can stay away from top competitive keywords for $1 to $2 per click. Niche marketing on Overture and Google works.

Instead of just sending traffic away and hoping for the best, you should have your own email list to which you can send multiple offers. Sending offers to your own email list is the true way to build freedom and residual income. You can do this by:

• Using subscription forms on your web site.
• Using co-registrations or co-op marketing campaigns.
• Buying email lists.

Effective affiliate marketing involves paying for traffic in one shape or another. To accelerate your income, you need to invest wisely in advertising and get the most mileage out of every one of them.

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