Why affiliate marketing ? Well, affiliate marketing allows you to advertise products created by others on your website, and then earn up to 75% commission for each sale. You can choose from affiliate programs that sell almost anything, but you tend to be able to make the most money through selling electronic products such as ebooks, reports, software or videos. This article will provide you with a number of tips to help you make a start in affiliate marketing.

Why participate in affiliate marketing programs? Here are four simple tips.

• Find a program in a niche that you like and are interested in.

• Look for a program that is associated with experts

• Find a product in a growing market to help ensure more and future demand for the niche.

• Make sure the program has a good range of useful tools and resources to help you promote the product and grow your business.

When you have decided on your chosen niche, and selected the products you want to promote you must consider why customers would want to buy from your site. So, you must remember the following when designing your website.

• Develop unique web pages to promote each product you are marketing - your site must focus on each product individually and nothing more.

• Always include product reviews and testimonials on your site, and offer free content or reports to your visitors.

• List the benefits of the product and focus on points like how the product can make life easier and more comfortable.

• Write articles for ezines and ereports highlighting the uses of the product and include them on your site. Try to write a couple of articles per week (300 – 600 words). Remember that search engines like article sites and ezine sites such as ezinearticles.com.

Clearly you want all of your visitors to click the order button, but converting them to customers is a challenge. On average only 1 out of 100 visitors are likely to buy. Therefore, if you can generate as much as 1000 hits to your website every day, on average you can make about 10 sales. But how do you get people to visit your site ?

I have mentioned writing articles already as a way to get people to your site for free. A popular way to generate traffic for your website is by paying for it using pay per click (PPC) advertising on the main search engines such as Google or Yahoo. PPC is one of the most cost effective ways of targeted internet advertising. The idea is that you write really good short adverts which appear on the search result pages, and you only have to pay when someone clicks on your link. Your ranking in the search engine results is determined by the amount you are willing to pay for each click on your advert. The highest bid will be ranked number 1, followed by all equivalent lower bids.