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Affiliate marketing is a very hot topic right now. Who wouldn’t want to just start making money from selling someone else’s product or service online, without even leaving their home? Sounds easy, right? While affiliate marketing is not rocket science, it does require work, dedication, and patience. You are not the only person who finds it intriguing to think that they can actually be making money off of someone else’s product without even leaving your house. The field is very competitive and if you want to become a player you will need to invest time and effort, and possibly money, into your endeavor.

The first step in effective affiliate marketing is choosing a commercially viable product to sell. This is not particularly hard, but keep in mind that you have millions of products and services to pick from, some good and some not so good, so you want to have a list of criteria that your product must meet. Clickbank is an extremely popular site and a good place to get started with affiliate marketing. The site itself also offers many affiliate marketing tips. And, you can see stats which tell you how well a product or service is doing. Some feel that these stats aren’t all too reliable, but if you find a product that you like, and one that has a good “gravity” and “popularity” measurement, then just go ahead and contact the owner of the product and ask him or her to show you some sort of proof of sales and conversions. This is very simple, and any merchant worth his salt will be happy to provide you with the details.

Another of the most overlooked affiliate marketing tips has to do with traffic testing and tracking. As you probably already know or will soon realize, there are a million and one ways to get traffic to your affiliate offer. How do you know which one to choose? You really don’t. You have to try one for a while and see how that works, or try several at a time and compare them with each other. When you find some that are clearly outperforming others, invest more time, effort, and/or money into those and let the others go.

Last but not least, take a look at the support that you can offer your customers. Yes, that’s right. If you are selling a product (whether it’s yours or not), you should be prepared to answer questions about that product. While this may bother you, it is also one of the factors that will separate you from other affiliates who are not answering questions. This also probably means that you will have to actually buy the product and not just promote it blindly, without knowing its real features, advantages, potential problems, etc. Making use of these three affiliate marketing tips will distinguish you from the other affiliate marketers in the business today.