Here’s just a few benefits

1. You can start right now with no up-front costs and no need to make a product, craft a sales letter, develop the website, develop marketing materials, or do support, billing and maintenance.

2. It’s completely hands-free for you because they handle the billing, support, maintenance, etc.

3. You have nearly zero risk because you already know the product sells, because the product owner has already done all the research , development and testing. So you already know that the visitors you send will result in commissions for you.

There’s no denying that these benefits make affiliate marketing the best thing going!

There is one major drawback…

You work hard to send the traffic to the product owner’s website, but once you do that you will never see those visitors again. Less than 10 or less that make a purchase now belong to the product owner. She can sell them additional products, but you can never sell to them again.

How can you avoid this pitfall?

What you need to do is capture the contact info of your visitors before sending them to the product website. This way you can follow up with them and keep sending them back to the sales page to increase your chances of making the sale. And if you’re a super star affiliate, you’ll provide high-quality content before sending them to the product website.

Here’s why you want to implement these affiliate marketing strategies:

1. Owning a list of potential buyers gives you the ability to market additional products at the push of a button.

2. By providing great content without a sales pitch, you put them in a buying mood. So when you do send them to the product website, they’re much more likely to buy.

If you want to create an affiliate marketing system like this, you’ll need the following:

1. A squeeze page, and even better a Video squeeze page.

2. One or more content-rich "warm up" pages

3. A multi-part email series with at least 5 emails in it

Instead of sending visitors directly to the product sales page, you’ll send them to your lead capture page first. This page is where you collect your visitors’ contact info and add them to your autoresponder, which in turn starts sending them the multi-part email series. After subscribing them to your email list, it redirects them to your content mini-site.

These high-quality content pages provide value and build good will. This way your visitor is more likely to buy when they get to the product owner’s website. While they’re reading the content you’ve provided, your email system is already following up with them to send them back to the product website again and again.

There’s no doubt that it’s worth the effort to put a system like this in place, because doing so will increase your profits by 500% or more. And after you get it all set up, it runs on total auto-pilot. You just refer people to your lead capture page, instead of the product sales page.

If you don’t have the time or expertise to set it all up yourself, you can use something like Affiliate Silver Bullet. These kinds of services will build the whole system for you and then just give you a video squeeze page (with video), pre-written emails, content pages, etc. The benefit is that it’s much less expensive then you could do it yourself, and it’s instantly set up. The downside is that other people will be using the same affiliate tools as you. But the internet is pretty big, so this isn’t much of a concern.

Alternatively, you can use a service like Elance to "outsource" each of these components. Whichever way you decided to go, it’s critical to get an affiliate marketing system like this in place, if you’re at all serious about your business.