Six steps to begin making money from affiliate marketing.

In order to know what affiliate marketing campaigns are out there it's best to join an affiliate marketing network site like Commission Junction. If you already know of a program you want to participate in you can start with that but by joining a site like CJ you have access to information like the average earnings per click (or in this case per 100 clicks) over the last 7 days or 3 months and Network Earnings. This can help you find a hot market to promote.

To do this in CJ log into your account and select Get Links from the top menu bar then choose Advertiser Links from the sub-menu and sort by 7 day EPC.

Currently the top Advertiser is Paddy Power, a gambling website, with a 7 day EPC of over $500. However if you keep looking at the other top advertisers there are many financial advertisers such as HSBC, Citi financial and the Lending Tree with 7 day EPC around $200. They're grouped under the mortgage category. This is great information as you can make a small website with mortgage related content and promote a few different advertisers.

Another good source of ideas is to see what's popular in the news and current affairs. Since there's currently a financial crisis triggered, at least in part by, trouble in the mortgage market this is likely a hot topic. You can confirm this by checking Google News, Google Trends, and Google Zeitgeist.

A very popular piece of advice is to write what you know. Since I majored in economics in university I have some background knowledge of banking and finance that can make writing mortgage content easier.

Now we have an idea of something to promote. It took me 10 minutes to sign up for CJ and find some high earning affiliate programs in an area I know something about and that is currently popular. The next step is to register a domain name for our mortgage website.

Your domain name should be short, memorable and contain keywords. You want to avoid stuffing your domain with keywords: mortgagecrisis-refinance-cheapmortgageloans.com is a bad domain name for our example. You also want to avoid domain names that don't hint at what your website is about: supernumberone.com is also a bad domain name for a website about mortgages. A better domain name for a mortgage loan affiliate website is mortgagemess.com. It's short, memorable, and contains a keyword without overdoing it.

I would recommend using a dot com domain unless you have a reason not to. If you want to target a specific country you may want to consider a country specific domain (mortgagemess.ca, mortgagemess.co.uk) but generally other domain names are not as reputable as dot com. A domain name should cost around $10 year. A safe bet is GoDaddy. GoDaddy may not always be the cheapest option but it's a company you can trust to bill you accurately and you can call and speak with a representative. I used GoDaddy a couple of years ago and they called a few days later to make sure everything was good.

If you don't want to spend any money you can get a decent domain for free from www.co.cc. You can get up to two domain names for free. If you want to register more a $10 'donation' is required. Some domain names with popular keywords are not free, however you can usually find a free one close to what you want with some experimenting. The domain name you get from co.cc is technically a sub-domain but it looks like other top level domain names such as co.uk.

After you register your domain name you need a hosting site.

If you paid for dot com domain name you can usually get hosting from the same company. Again GoDaddy is a safe bet. You may be able to find cheaper options but it's not always worth the extra time, hassle, and uncertainty in dealing with an unknown company. Keep in mind your website will likely be small so you won't need much storage space but hopefully you'll need bandwidth to accommodate your traffic!

Another option is Byethost. They offer a free hosting service with no ads and you can attach your domain to it for free. The free hosting includes mySQL databases, email addresses, cPanel, and pre-installed scripts for Wordpress, Wikimedia, Joomla and other common website tools.

To use your free domain name and free hosting account sign into panel.byethost.com and click Addon Domains under the heading Domains. You'll find your name servers listed there. Open a new window and log into you co.cc account. Select Manage Domains, choose the domain you want to manage and click the Manage DNS option. Enter the name servers Byethost gave you and click set up.

You now have a domain name and a hosting service!

Sure you can write an html document in notepad, even add some CSS to jazz it up but you probably won't get anything that looks Web 2.0-ish. I like a plain html site if I'm going for the academic look, e.g., arXiv.org and ideas.repec.org. Here the emphasis is on the information not the design. However this is not usually the look you want.

You can use a blog platform to easily create a good looking website. I prefer Wordpress but Blogspot is also an option. In fact I suspect Google favours Blogspot but if you are using your own domain then Wordpress is clearly the better choice. If you used byethost it's easy to install Wordpress. Just select the script installer program on the cPanel page and choose to install Wordpress. You can choose to install it to the main site, to a sub-domain (http://blog.mysite.com) or a directory (http://mysite.com/blog).

If you're feeling more adventurous make use of Joomla. It's well documented and there are many support forums.

Writing the content for your affiliate marketing website is the least technical but perhaps the most difficult step. Writing on the web differs from 'dead tree' writing in a few ways. The most important is that people tend to skim much more on-line. Keep content short. You need at least 200 words but around 500 is ideal. Highlight important points for your reader and make sure your writing is scannable. Sub-Headings, bold, italics, bullet lists, and highlighting are all helpful tools.

You also want your copy to be both human readable and machine readable. This means using keywords to attract search engine traffic while remembering that people are your ultimate audience. If you're faced with making something more machine readable or more people-friendly always opt for people-friendly.

For more on writing content see CopyBlogger and for more on how people read on the web see Jacob Nielsen's website.

I recommend Commission Junction because of its statistics and reporting. Adzoogle is another top option, perhaps better paying offers but harder to optimise. Google has a new service called Google Affiliate Network. Since it's Google it's worth a look. Beyond that you can explore on your own however Commission Junction and Aszoogle are really the top two in the industry.

Now you have a website up and running with affiliate links. You can sit back and relax, get started on the next project, or continue to tweak your current project.

You can optimise your website by experimenting with different keywords and landing pages to see what works best. Once you have a winner keep it for 90% of your hits and throw in some variations for the remainder to see if you're missing anything. You can also try experimenting with new designs. I don't know a lot about that area but the most important aspect to consider is the way the eye flows over your site. You want to draw the reader to the affiliate link. Think of it as the conclusion.

Beyond experimenting with your site there are two major directions you can take: SEO and PPC.
SEO refers to search engine optimisation. These are techniques for getting better ranking in search engines. Using SEO will increase your organic traffic and the nice thing is your affiliate revenue is then pure profit.

The alternative is to pay for traffic. PPC, or pay per click, advertising is the most popular. This is the type of advertising Google offers on their search pages and with Adsense. The trick is to earn more off your traffic than you pay for it. With PPC you're moving into more complicated territory but I would advise you to start with Yahoo and experiment with different keywords and ad copy then move to MSN when you get Yahoo working. You can try Ask.com for cheap traffic. Only move to Google when you have something you know is working. Google will send you lot's of traffic but you will pay more for it so it's best to be ready.

Now actually take the plunge and try it out. You can do it in a few hours for free and have a new hobby to tinker with - one that pays you!