If you have decided to become an affiliate, great, the journey begins. I am with you and so are thousands of websites telling you on all the steps you should be taking to be a successful and smart affiliate marketer. Just go ahead and google it and then come back and read my blog.
Yes, there are heaps of information about affiliate marketing. Wait, don’t get excited and start browsing all the sites. Because you will lose focus on what you actually want to do and go in all different directions. It happened to me and I have joined many sites and have lost lot of valuable time and track. So slow down and if you follow my steps, then you are in it for the long run.
First understand your role as an affiliate marketer. You are going to recommend a product based on your in depth analysis or by experience to a customer who is interested in your opinions. Here you should be very transparent and try to help the customer instead if you push the product, without the knowledge of the product, blinded by the commission you will earn, then that’s the last time you are going to see that customer and they will never trust you again. So basically you need create that trust and confidence of your visitors who are going to be your prospect customers, and that’s going to take sometime.
Once the role is clear, you need to create a website. 
You can create here in wordpress or blogger for that you need to decide on your “Niche”. (You will hear this a lot as an affiliate) Niche means a topic that you are interested in or its your passion. Now having an interest or passion that people may not be interested or not keen about it, is of no use, so you need to decide a niche that people are looking for and at the same you are also interested to talk about it and want to experience yourself. How to find that out? Well! you need do some good old brainstorming session or using keyword research in google and come up with your niche. Now you will hear another term SEO (Search Engine Optimization), its a process used to list the websites based on the keyword, by using right strategy on your niche, your website will get listed during a search process.
Don’t get overwhelmed with all techniques and jargons. These are the tools that will help in order to become a successful affiliate. As soon as you have decided on your niche then its time to register your domain. If your question is “Why do I have create a website to sell a product?” . The reason is that you should have an audience and a place to put your affiliate links and the best part is you can blog about it, because its your passion remember!.
If you want to know, is it possible to do affiliate marketing without a website?, Yes, It is possible, that’s another topic to be covered in another blog. However, my advise is to have a website, that’s one of the effective strategies for an affiliate.
Once you have set up a website up and running, its time to recognise the affiliate sites and programs that suits you and your visitors and join. We will go over this in the next few blogs.
Affiliate Marketing 