Many people enter into the affiliate marketing arena with the hopes of making some quick money whilst doing the bare minimum amount work and preparation.

They expect to be making the type of money super affiliates make within five minutes of joining an affiliate program without doing anything other than send out a few ezine ads.

How do I know?

Because I was there, I did exactly the same thing, it was what the affiliate program owners instructions said to do; sign-up, send some of our pre-made ads out to a few ezines and newsletters and wait for the money to come in. Oh and send them straight to this affiliate link so youll be credited with the sale.

Ok, yes, I did make a few sales, but only just enough to break even. It wasnt the sort of income they promised, so I thought to myself, well there must be other affiliate programs out there thatll make me more money, so I moved on to another one, and guess what, the cycle repeated.

Does this sound familiar to you? Its sometimes referred to as the 30 day average affiliate life span.

When you sign-up for an affiliate program dont they just make it sound so easy?

Well heres the truth its not easy if you dont know what youre doing! But if you do, you can make the big super affiliate type income that only a small minority of affiliates are making. But it does require, time effort and persistence!

Now ask yourself these three questions,

-Do you have your own website?

-Do you have a newsletter?

-Do you send prospects directly from your advertising to your affiliate webpage?

If you dont have either of the first two you stand very little chance of making big commissions through affiliate programs. Sorry but its true.

The top selling affiliates all have a few things in common; they all have their own websites and newsletters and they also never send prospects directly from their advertising straight to their affiliate webpage.

Its really important if you are an affiliate marketer to have your own website with the ability to collect e-mail addresses. Im sure you will have heard that the money is in the list. If you have no list your unlikely to make much money.

If you can offer visitors to your website a free newsletter, ebook or training course, if they sign-up to your list, you should be able to build that list of prospects without too much difficulty. But you have to sell the opt-in as much as you would a product as people are much more wary of handing over their e-mail addresses these days. So make sure you offer something of good value to earn the trust of your prospect and build your credibility.

In the ebook or newsletter you can include or recommend products with which you are affiliated with. So instead of sending the prospect directly to your affiliate webpage, you send them to your website, where you collect the e-mail addresses; this allows you to follow-up and recommend products and related products which you believe they would be interested in.

Therefore you can make multiple sales from one prospect, whereas before you may have made one if you were lucky or simply lost the prospect forever.

Provide good content in your newsletters and ebooks, give honest recommendations on products for your prospects and they are much more likely to trust you and buy from you.

(Feel free to use this article online and in your email newsletters as long as you leave it intact and do not alter it in anyway. The byline and biography must remain in the article.)