There are many benefits surrounding the affiliate marketing business model.  While regular brick and mortar businesses require commercial space, liability insurance and employees, running an affiliate marketing business can be accomplished from the comfort of your home; providing you have web hosting, a reliable merchant account such as Paypal and a high speed internet connection.

Because affiliate marketing is based on promoting other peoples products, you don’t have the added stress of creating your own market-busting product or service.  A great affiliate program will have all of the tools you need to start promoting; including banners, sales copy, website templates and even fully tested email and Google ad campaigns – keywords included.

To reach super star affiliate status, conversions is the name of the game.  You start by sending traffic to your website or landing page that is promoting the particular affiliate offer.  If your content is fully optimized and relevant, sending targeted traffic to that page will result in more clicks on your affiliate banners and text links.  From there, if the affiliate offer itself has a high quality landing page you can count on getting a healthy conversion rate between click throughs and those who actual purchase the product or complete the offer.  A 5% – 10% CR is considered by many to be lucrative.

At the end of the day, affiliate marketing is not easy.  Everyday more and more people are chasing their tail in circles trying to be successful with affiliate marketing, and everyday more and more people are failing.  Just like any other business, you have to put in your time, learn from your mistakes and continue to educate yourself.  Nothing can guarantee success, but you can definitely increase your odds.