Affiliate marketing is one of the easiest ways to start making money online without being required to develop your own product or manage customer support issues. As an affiliate marketer, your job is to pre-sell visitors to your website who view your recommendation and follow through to the purchase page, typically hosted by the product developer.

There are many ways to set up an effective affiliate marketing campaign, including setting up a blog that showcases honest and thorough reviews of the products you intend to promote. Whenever someone visits your website, they will be able to evaluate the product prior to visiting the purchase page, and if your review is written professionally and appears to be genuine, it’s a relatively easy way to pre-sell products through what is considered ’soft-selling’.

Here are five simple steps to help you get started:

Step One: Choose A Market or Niche

Deciding what niche market you plan to focus on will allow you to set up a blog or website quickly, while researching for available products and content to promote. Do not create a blog that showcases multiple niche market products if possible, otherwise you may end up confusing your visitors with a vast array of products that are not relevant to the primary subject matter that they are interested in.

Step Two: Choose Products

Visiting sites like the ClickBank marketplace will help you load your website with fresh products as they are released. Be careful to review the landing page of the product before you decide to promote it, and ensure that it is well written, looks professional and contains no dead links or errors. Since your name will be tied to the product whenever you recommend it to others, you want to pay special attention to the fact that you are promoting viable products by developers that take care of their customers, follow through on orders and refund requests.

Step Three: Build A Lead Capture Page

You should consider signing up for an auto-responder account through a service such as www.Aweber.com or www.GetResponse.com so that you are able to build a list of subscribers while you continue to promote related affiliate products. Starting your list building early will enable you to reach out to a subscriber base of interested buyers, and will save you time and money with future promotions. You should also build an attractive squeeze page that will feature your autoresponder/newsletter and encourage visitors to opt-in. Offer a bonus or free download in exchange for their confirmed subscription.

Step Four: Traffic Generation

Whether you decide to utilize the power of social networking, or you dabble in PPC, Paid Advertising, Forum Promotion, Traffic Exchanges or other methods of generating traffic, you will need to start your campaign as soon as your squeeze page is ready. Don’t leave a landing page up believing that people will find it without guidance. Even as an affiliate marketer you are required to promote your website and drive targeted traffic to your pages, in order to then direct them to the original product developers website, or through your autoresponder where you can send them additional information.

Setting up a Squidoo lens is a fast and easy way of getting the word out about your new website.

Step Five: Once you have a website designed, an opt-in form set up and have traffic coming to your website, you will want to locate additional products that will compliment your current campaign, and feature them on your website or as follow-up mailings to your autoresponder list.

Be sure not to spam your list with repeated offers, but instead, take short breaks in between mailings and use that time to offer them free content that may include tips, techniques, or reviews that will help them learn more about the current topic, or help them in some way.

The better of a relationship you build with your list, the more credibility you will have when promoting products that you feel would be useful to them, so make this a top priority.

Make Money related resouces: More about Affiliate Program resouces and Make Money Online.