STEP 1: Set a goal: find an area where you have solid knowledge and experience on which to build your affiliate business.
STEP 2: Find your niche: Spend a lot of time thinking carefully about this and jotting down notes. You're planning a business, so don't rush it. It's very important.
STEP 3: Examine your potential competitors, find their weakness and prepare to create a better, more interesting, more useful site from a new angle, a new approach.
STEP 4. Choose a profitable niche: Do some research on Google AdWords and Wordtracker to choose the most profitable niche from among the ones you're considering.
STEP 5. Research affiliate merchants:find if there are suitable affiliate products which match your topic and have excellent products, excellent reputations and sites that look as though they're good at selling.
STEP 6: Build a useful, interesting website on your niche. Here's an very important step, the best ways is to build a site which solves people's problems, and content rich, keyword-rich site, designed to be found in search engines.
STEP 7: Join various online pay programs to prepare receiving payment from various affiliate programs.
STEP 8: Add affiliate links, your task as an affiliate is to help your visitor decide what to buy.
STEP 9: Place AdSense ads on your site.
STEP 10: Get good quality links to your site, because without links to your site, your site won't be found in the search engines.
STEP 11: Write good Anchor text, the words you use to link to pages on your site, the words people use when they link to your site.
STEP 12: List your site in major directories and niche directories in your industry.
STEP 13: Place your articles on other websites, Write articles and distribute them to article directories (fairly easy) and try to persuade newsletters and other sites to publish them.
STEP 14: Add more pages and get more links.
STEP 15: Expect to see signs of success, check Google, Yahoo! and MSN and find your site and start sending you traffic, the sign of success is that you'll be receiving 100 visitors a day and visitors will like what they see and some site owners will start linking to you and asking you to link to them.
STEP 16: Tweak your site to boost your conversion rate (your visitor-to-sales ratio).
STEP 17: revise and repeat from STEP 8 at least in a weekly base to improve your affiliate program skills, also practise your SEO and SEM skills.
STEP 18: Reach your earning target and do things bigger. When you reach your goal of $300 a month, you wonder whether you should expand your site, perhaps adding a newsletter, an autoresponder course or two, a forum, RSS newsfeeds, a blog, a whitepaper, a report to sell ... and turn it into a portal. You dream big. Perhaps you even start dreaming of having your own affiliates promoting your reports for you.
In conclusion, the formula is to find a niche and create a useful, interesting, content-rich, keyword-rich website on one topic and weave in affiliate links and AdSense ads.
