Affiliate Marketing in its purest form is Cost Per Action Marketing. In this business model, a merchant pays salespeople for “actions” or “sales” that are generated. This form of online marketing is very popular and can be a great way to create an additional revenue stream while you work from home. While affiliate marketing is simple, it is not necessarily easy. I will discuss some of the requirements that you will need for your own affiliate marketing business.

Affiliate marketing has exploded online because it offers tremendous leverage for merchants and affiliates alike. Since a merchant only pays of sales or actions this offers them a powerful alternative to having a sales force that they pay salary plus commissions.

While affiliate marketing blossoms online, there are still many affiliates who struggle. My research and experience indicates that this occurs because of a few important factors. To be successful in affiliate marketing you need to be able to drive traffic to an offer cost effectively and simultaneously track your progress. Many new affiliates overlook this simple reality.

Here are some guidelines that affiliates can implement immediately to help their businesses.

1)Speak with Affiliate Managers at companies to find out what offers are doing exceptionally well. Many affiliates struggle with trying to find something to promote or promoting offers from merchants that are not wanted or needed by the public at large. The most important step in affiliate marketing is selling something that has proven demand and established metrics. BY this I mean, that you are selling a product that is already being consumed and purchased by a large audience.

2)DO research online to see how other people are successfully promoting the product. IS it being promoted through pay per click? Email? Targeted banner placement? Find out what types of traffic generation are proving to be most successful.

3)A great tool in this regard is SEO QUAKE. This is a free utility that many search engine optimization professionals use to generate traffic to their pages. When you install this utility on your browser and you look at your google search results you will also be able to see what keywords that advertisers are using to promote successful offers.

4)Find one keyword that you think is fairly priced and now drive 100 clicks to the offer you have decided to promote using Google, Yahoo, MSN or second tiered pay per click search engines.

5)After you have drive 100 clicks to the page it is time to evaluate your results? How did you do? What was your net profit or loss? What can you do to change your outcome? Can you lower or raise your bids to get more or less traffic? What is your break even point based upon the current bid.

Once you have those answers…..Ramp up by adding more targeted keyword to your campaign and repeat, lather and rinse. The idea is you need to track everything.

Perhaps one of the great things about your online affiliate marketing campaign is that it becomes automatic. What you just setup could continue to run for days, weeks, months or years with very similar results.

These are the nuts and bolts of affiliate marketing. When you master this simple process you are on your way to huge success with affiliate marketing.