5 keys to you becoming a successful affiliate:

1) HAS THE OWNER OF THE PROGRAM DONE HIS OR HER RESEARCH?

Before you become an affiliate for someone, you want to know one major thing. You want to be very sure they've taken the time to test their whole sales process!

Have they invested some of their own time and money into fine-tuning and improving their sales letter until it really converts visitors into buyers? Is their ordering process simple for your prospects to navigate?

The last thing you want to do is spend a lot of your time and money to generate traffic to a sales letter that can't sell its way out of a paper bag, right?

One way to figure this out is to use a little common sense. How does the sales letter affect you? Is it professional? Does it suck you in? Do you find you can't stop reading it because you just need to know how this product can help solve the problem it's saying it can?

Does it make you want to buy? One thing you don't want to do to the lifeblood of your business (your prospects) is sell them "junky" stuff.

2) $25 MINIMUM

You should pick a product that pays you at least $25 for each sale. Unless you become an affiliate for more than one product (we'll touch on this point a little later), stick to the $25 as a minimum price point so you can take your advertising costs out and still make a profit.

3) FREE TO JOIN

It must be free to join an affiliate program. If they are charging you to join, or require you to buy their product first, it's not an affiliate marketing program.

4) WHERE TO FIND GOOD AFFILIATE PROGRAMS

A great place to start is Clickbank. They have one of the largest affiliate marketing programs you can find. Just go to http://www.clickbank.com and get a clickbank ID.

At Clickbank's home page, go to "Earn Commissions" and search for products that fit you and your site. They are even ranked in order of popularity. That's another sign of whether it's a program worth your time.

Another place you can go is http://www.lifetimecommissions.com.

Amazon has a good affiliate marketing program. Go to http://www.amazon.com and click on "Join Associates" near the bottom of the page. You won't get as much of a commission for each sale as you will from Clickbank or Lifetime Commissions but it does accumulate over time.

5) USE A CONTENT SITE

The real key to being successful with affiliate marketing is to develop a good content based website and weave your affiliate links into all your content. You want to "pre-sell" your prospects rather than "sell" them.

Leave the job of "selling" to the sales letter page you are transferring them to. Your job is to provide your prospects with good, quality content regarding whatever they are interested in. Inside this information, when it's relevant, just "recommend" that they click to an offer you honestly believe will be of immense help to them.

Wouldn't you rather have a friend recommend you something of value and allow you the time to consider whether it's right for you rather than be "sold"? Everyone who visits your site feels the same so remember this.

We mentioned earlier that we'd discuss becoming an affiliate for more than one product and how it affects the minimum commission you're willing to accept. If you put together a content site as we're recommending, the $25 minimum isn't as critical.

Of course, you'd like the maximum, fair commission possible, but if you have 15 or so programs you're recommending, you can offer quality products for less. If one of your products brings you $10-$15 in commission and you have some others paying you $25, $75 or more, you can see you're averaging a good return over-all.

Why aren't you making a ton of cash as an affiliate? Follow these 5 points and we see big profits in your future!