You should try to make sure that your traffic is targeted to your particular niche. If you sell information related to home mortgages, you don't want to send your visitors to a site that offers fishing supplies. So make sure your product is relevant to your audience.
Once you start to get traffic to your site, it's time to convert them into customers. A good way of doing that is not to blatantly send emails everyday selling something. Make sure you are offering your potential customers, good content, a free service or a free report. Offer value, because a valuable freebie always appeals to your potential customers. But let's face it, you are in this to make money, but you don't want to appear to be a salesperson. Make recommendations about the products you're promoting. If you offer them good content and recommend your services, your customers will start to trust you and you will convert more of them in to buyers.
Freebies are also a good way to get traffic to your website. This is very effective for getting subscribers to sign up on your list. I suggest you build an opt in list because you can promote to your list with back end offers.
Article marketing is another great way to get traffic to your site. Write articles about your particular niche and send them out using article directories. You can also do some research and find a good article submitter and that way you can send out more articles at once. You can also join programs that will send your articles out for you.
Also, writing articles can be very time consuming. So if you don't think you can write or just don't like to write, you can hire a ghostwriter. There are lots of services that have freelance writers and will write your articles very inexpensively. You can check out places like Guru.com, Elance.com and Scriptlance.com.
You can offer a free mini course about the product you are selling. Just give away a few of the benefits about the product and keep reminding them that they can get more information when they purchase the actual version of the product. Be sure to put your affiliate links in the mini course. You can make this a hands off process by loading your course in an autoresponder.
Having an ezine or newsletter will get a lot of traffic to your site. Remember to offer something valuable to get people to subscribe to your newsletter. As with any business, promotion is the difference between success and failure.
Affiliate marketing can be a very rewarding experience. If you're willing to put forth the effort to learn more about affiliate marketing, you will end up developing a successful home business.