* Target a niche market
Promoting high conversion (popular) products online can be frustrating especially when your up against a large pool of other competitors out there promoting the same product. Unless your a marketing guru you'll be lucky to make 50 bucks a month on sales. Chance are, when you search a specific product with has high conversion you'll see 50 different pages on google selling that same product. The secret to making money online is to promote products that target a niche-market that very few or no affiliates use. This way you get a better chance of getting top ranking on google. ClickBank is a popular market where you can find thousands of products to sell.
* Gain your audience trust
The most successful way to use affiliate programs is to anticipate and meet the needs of your readers. Gaining trust from your readers is vital in internet marketing. Try putting yourself in your readers shoes and ask yourself would you buy that product you are promoting? Can you guarantee your readers will benefit from it? Make sure you are promoting/selling quality products that will benefit them, having said that you will see an increase in sales from visitors coming back to your website because something about you resonates them. Delivering products you believe wont benefit your visitors will destroy their trust in you resulting in a loss of sales and even traffic to your website.
* Quality is better than quantity
For those of you just starting up affiliate schemes just stick with one or two affiliate providers and its important to make sure they are reliable and trustworthy. If you're having trouble finding the right affiliate programs let me introduce you to two great affiliate marketing programs which i use - Implix and IMC. Stay away from using more than two affiliate programs because you would have more of a problem hitting the payment threshold especially for a website with low traffic.
* Build your email list
Building an email list is one of the most effective and efficient ways of making money online with affiliate programs. This can be done by integrating an email opt-in list form on your webpage giving visitors the choice to subscribe to your weekly newsletters. Depending on your traffic you can build thousands of emails every month giving you the opportunity to sell a product/service through email to thousands and thousands of potential buyers with just a single click of a mouse. Just imagine if you had 20,000 email subscribers and just 2,000 of them bought your promoting product at $50, thats $100,000 easy money you just made with little effort! In order to build your list of emails your website needs an autoresponder email system, the best one out there to look for is GetResponse.
* Educate Yourself
There's no better way to succeed with affiliate marketing than to learn, learn, and learn more. Read lots of articles from successful internet marketers. Do your homework and learn about how marketing on the internet works. Study your visitors habits. Is there a specific page on your webiste that gets the most views? If so what is it about that page that makes it more appealing? By learning marketing strategies and how you can use them to an advantage over studying your visitors habits, you are able to determine which products are best to promote on your website and which ones arent, thus, resulting in more sales. | 
