Everyone who wants to make money online needs to know the secrets to promoting products correctly in order to maximize your affiliate commissions.

Here are seven proven ways to boost your affiliate income:

Affiliate Advertising - Affiliates often overspend due to the high cost of Google AdWords, but overlook much cheaper sources of PPC traffic. GoClick, SearchFeed, 7Search, LookSmart offer PPC ad spots starting at $0.01 per click. On Miva, Mamma, and Lycos/Ask, you can get clicks for $0.05 on popular terms that cost ten times that much on AdWords. The volume isn't as large, the traffic isn't as high-quality, but the cost is much lower, so your ROI is way, way better..

Blog Posts - Use affiliate links in your blog posts. Be creative with how you describe the offer. Reviews work well because they provide real value to people searching for information about the product. Disguise your affiliate sales links with Simple Links Manager. And of course, use the HitsUSA SEO techniques to get your blog posts top 10 Google rankings for your chosen keyword phrases.

Best Affiliate Programs - Promoting membership sites is a great way to tap into recurring commissions from monthly membership fees. Each sale contains a built-in residual commission stream that continues to pay you as long as your referral remains a member. Signup for your free website traffic membership and earn 50% recurring commissions on everyone you refer.

Niche Products - You can make a lot of money promoting products where you don't have a lot of competition. Look for a niche within a niche (or microniche) that you can dominate easily on a small marketing budget. Examples would be time-saving tools or money-saving ideas aimed at markets with money to spend.

Top Affiliates - Always build a list of future prospects for additional offers by capturing name and email addresses from their web site visitors. Even if you don't have a full-blown website, set one up and host squeeze pages. Squeeze pages serve as name capture devices before redirecting the customer to the product you are promoting using your affiliate link.

Joint Ventures - Build a mailing list of 5,000 subscribers and participate in product giveaway marketing events. These free product giveaways allow you to distribute your free report or other giveaway item to thousands upon thousands of new visitors to your website. Participate in one event and your list will triple in size!

Affiliate Videos - Use screen capture video software to create an informative product review and promote it on all the video sharing sites. Use an iframe link on your own web page that displays the video and your writeup of the product. The iframe link will automatically add the affiliate cookie for the product to each visitors computer.

OK, I'll admit the last one is a little sneaky, so here's a bonus tip: Use a product called Affiliate Video Brander to take product videos created by the product owner and turn them into affiliate videos for your own site.

Your site visitor watches a video and then gets redirected to the product sales page upon completion of the video. And of course, to capture those with attention spans too short to watch a whole video, it includes affiliate links to the product above and below the video box.

Do yourself a favor: Signup for a free membership at HitsUSA and discover the best ways to maximize your profits from affiliate marketing!