So you’ve spent some time figuring out what’s what with Internet marketing. You realize there are lots of different ways to make money online, but the one that really resonates with you is affiliate marketing. You’re ready to dive in and become a successful affiliate earner. Maybe you’ll even make the Leader Board in some of those big launches.

Usually the best place to start is with some research so you can study the subject and also learn best practices. Look for the quality products about affiliate marketing – the ones that get rave reviews from buyers because they’re getting results from what they’ve learned from the product – and buy them to study. Best practices are tried and true business tactics that don’t resort to blackhat shenanigans or exploiting loopholes in the system.

Another idea is to watch over the shoulders of successful affiliate marketers and do what they do. This is a great way to learn. Don’t copy them exactly; you need to show your own personality. Perhaps pick three super affiliates and optin to their lists. That way you can be the potential customer and you’ll see exactly how they promote products to you.

I recommend you make a spreadsheet and track specific things about these marketers such as: how often they email, how often they pitch in their emails, what social media outlets they use, how often they promote via these outlets, whether they offer bonuses of their own with purchase and what those bonuses are, how they use content to recommend products (podcasts, interviews, PowerPoints, infographics, video, webinars, blog posts, guest posts, article marketing, advertising, etc.). This way the bigger picture of how these marketers are successful will become clearer.

Get coaching. You may be able to get group coaching or access to an insider forum as part of a package you purchased about affiliate marketing, and that’s one way to get some special attention and your questions answered. Group coaching is certainly a less expensive option, but to really move forward quickly, one-to-one individual coaching is usually a better way to go. Yes, it’s not going to be cheap but if they can train you into a super affiliate extraordinaire, then the money you’ve paid them to coach you might be well worth it.

Pick a coach that walks the walk. This person has to have a lot of success and experience with this income stream before you should even consider them as a possible coach. It also needs to be someone you respect, who doesn’t spam people, and who resonates with you. Give it lots of thought and choose carefully. If you don’t know anyone offhand, ask other people whose opinions you value.

If you’re determined to become a successful affiliate marketer, take some time to do some research, learn strategies from quality products about this subject and follow a successful marketer to see how they do it. If you want to jump ahead several paces, consider investing in a coach who can help you.

Affiliate marketing is all about promoting other people’s fine products and earning a commission. That sounds like a wonderful way to earn money – you don’t have to create your own product and you don’t have to deliver the product or handle customer service after the sale. But HOW you operate as an affiliate marketer requires some finesse.

Here are examples of what NOT to do as an affiliate marketer:

Do not promote junk. Promote one bad product and customers question your decision. Promote many bad products and you ruin your reputation. Pick products created by reputable businesses and check out feedback about the product and their customer service.

Do not continually promote products without ever giving your list valuable free information too. The people on your list aren’t on your list because they love to be constantly bombarded with promos, they’re there to learn from you and they want to see you and your personality, and learn what you have to teach them.

Do not email too often. How often is that? It depends on your list and what they’re expecting from you. When they opt in to your list it’s best to explain a little in your first email about what they should expect. If you are going to email them every day or every Monday, tell them. People like to know and they like routine.

Do not send promotions via email to your list about offers that are not targeted to your list. If your subscribers are interested in finance and financial issues, then stick with that topic or something closely related. Don’t start sending them promos on off-topic offers that sound good to YOU.

Do not promote only one way. To be successful as an affiliate marketer, you need to show the offers in other forms. Email is only one avenue. Write up thorough product reviews and post them on your blog, interview the product creator and put a link to the podcast on your blog and throughout your social media channels, do a How To video and post it on YouTube, host a Google hangout or webinar answering questions, etc. It’s better to take the time to thoroughly promote one product in all ways you can think of rather than shallowly promote offer after offer.

Becoming a successful affiliate marketer does take effort on your part. Even though you’re not the one having to create products, you’ve got to do your research to make sure they’re something you’d be proud to promote – your reputation depends on it. You also need to watch how often you promote to your email list and learn how to successfully recommend products in various ways. It may take a little trial and error to find what’s successful for you, but once you do, you’ll be smiling every time you check your PayPal account.

As an affiliate marketer you have a huge number of products and programs you could promote. In fact, you probably have too many choices. To help you decide, consider the issues below.

When someone asks you to promote their new product, consider the timing. Are they letting you know enough ahead to give you time to put together a proper promotion?

Is the timing going to conflict with another exciting promotion coming up? Of course promoting your own products will take precedence over someone else’s unless you don’t mind moving your date back. But what about that thing you were already going to promote? Your email slots are valuable real estate. You don’t want to hammer your subscribers with a bunch of promo emails one week and then not email them again for three weeks. As you can see, timing is important. It’s a good idea to have a promo calendar laid out so you can showcase each on different days or different weeks to your list.

Another thing to consider before promoting is what kind of cookies the product owner uses. If they use first or forever cookies it means when someone first clicks on an affiliate link, they are cookied by that affiliate. So no matter how hard you push at converting sales, you won’t get the commission when they buy if they’re already cookied by another affiliate. This a bummer for you if your hard promotional work is giving someone else the commissions. Last cookies mean if a customer clicks on your affiliate link last and they buy, you get the sale.

There are pros and cons to first and last cookies. It makes the most difference to you depending on whether the product you want to promote is brand new and you get to be one of the first to tell others about it, or if it has been around for a while and other marketers have already been advertising it. Always make sure you know which type of cookie you’re dealing with.

And importantly, take a look at the product itself. You should have a list of criteria it needs to meet before you endorse it. The first one can cut out a lot of them from the start – is it a good fit for your list? You know your subscribers, will it really help them? Do they need it to fill a void, fix a problem? It doesn’t have to be an exact match; maybe you’re in a non-IM niche but you found a tool or software that they’d benefit from having, even in that non-IM niche.

While looking at the product, look at the creator too. Their reputation for putting out quality goods is mandatory, but they also need to have stellar customer service and back it all with a good guarantee.

Start by considering these three things when looking at products to promote as an affiliate. It’s crucial for it to be of high quality, but the timing of the promotion and the type of cookies will matter to you too.

Myths abound when it comes to affiliate marketing. Let’s go over some of these myths now and see what the reality is.

It’s better to create your own products instead of marketing others’ products.
While it’s always a good idea to have some products yourself, it’s not the only way to make good money. You can do both! In fact, one can complement the other.

For example, if you’re promoting an ebook about A and B but people want to know about C too, whip up an ebook or video series about C to sell to these customers. Or set up a paid membership where you can group coach them through further aspects of ABC.

If you’re selling your own ebook about how to do something, you can promote someone else’s tool within your ebook or on the backend that helps automate that something. Or maybe after customers learn about it from you and they decide they want a done-for-you option, you can promote, as an affiliate, a company that will give them that.

You can make more money when you have your own products.
Yes, it’s true IF you have a good-sized list of ready buyers. But… think of the time it takes to make something yourself – you have to make all the components, get a sales page written, set up all the pages, have something to offer people as a lead magnet, get the marketing parts set up and in place, and so on. It’s pretty time-consuming and exhausting. You really don’t have to recreate the wheel. If another marketer just introduced her own huge whiz-bang creation, then promote it. You could make just as much money introducing three or four affiliate products to your list in the time it would take to make your own.

As an affiliate marketer, you never have to handle customer service.
Technically, your name is not on that product. But realistically, you’re endorsing it and when customers don’t get their downloads or their bonuses, many will come to you about the problem. Your reputation is on the line and sometimes you have to step in and represent the customers who bought through you.

You should only promote profitable niches.
If you’re new to affiliate marketing, it’s better not to jump on the bandwagon of the newest and biggest product launch. There’s quite a bit of competition from seasoned players. Instead, start with a niche and products that appeal to you. It’s a real yawner to try and sell stuff you have absolutely no interest in. Your efforts will come across as flat, if you can force yourself to even keep promoting. If it’s something that excites you, it’s a lot easier to excite others.

Affiliate marketing doesn’t take much work.
While it’s true you don’t have to do the initial work of putting a product together, your work comes on the other end, the marketing end. It won’t sell itself just because you put a small ad on your website, you have to promote it in a myriad of ways.

That could mean a video where you walk through the product, a podcast interview with the owner, a webinar answering questions, a blog post showing your results from using it, PPC ads, emails to your list and lots and lots of social media posts, tweets and pins. Where do your potential customers hang out? Those are the places you want to be.

Hopefully this has busted a few myths for you and given you some further insights into affiliate marketing. It’s not a Sunday stroll in the park but with some strategic work, you should find this particular income stream quite rewarding.

Perhaps you’re switching business models or maybe you’re totally new online. Either way, you’d like to create an income stream by promoting products as an affiliate marketer. So what do you really need to have to start making affiliate sales? Here are 5 things in no particular order:

#1 You need at least one promotional platform to start, but several are better. By a platform I mean something like a niche blog or static site. A place, your home base, where you can showcase the products. People need a place they can go to check out the item they’re interested in, learn about it and get their questions answered, and decide if it will solve their problem. Importantly, they need the opportunity to buy it, and from a trusted source.

It is possible to promote products by simply doing a redirect from your website address to the creator’s product page, but that’s not usually the best way to do it. You need to presell before you send them on. Potential buyers are more comfortable having a recommendation before they buy.

#2 Every affiliate marketer needs an audience. You can write up a nice little product review on your blog but obviously if no one reads it, you won’t make sales. SEO every piece of content you put on your site, offer free lead magnet material that people actually want, join online forums, offer your lead magnet material somewhere highly trafficked such as on a forum, do joint ventures, partner with marketers who have followers, run ads, create and post YouTube videos, and any other method that gets exposure to you and the products you’re promoting.

#3 Related to #2 and the desire for traffic, you need to open several social media accounts. Which ones? Start with Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest. You won’t know which are the most successful for you until you get them established, work them, and look hard at your results.

#4 This probably goes without saying, but you need quality products to promote. The best place to start is with products you already own and use. If you want to promote Internet marketing items, what have you purchased that you’ve had great success with? Tell your story. People respond to authentic stories and they want to have the same great experiences.

Otherwise, choose carefully. Products need to be well presented, without problems or the problems already fixed, backed by a guarantee, have good customer service, and plenty of “meat”.

#5 Successful marketers need to track their various promotions. Why waste your time throwing everything at it in hopes that something will stick and you’ll make some sales? Not only does it waste your time but drains your energy and is very discouraging. Track your promotions! You can use tracking software and do split tests with ease. At the very least, use a separate affiliate link for each way you promote. Are you selling a bunch via email or your blog post? Is the tweeting a bust? You will know with tracking.

There is a lot more to affiliate marketing and as you go along you will settle into methods that work best for you. But if you’re just getting started, these 5 things are what you need now.