If you want to make a living and making money with affiliate marketing, it makes it incredibly easy if you have the right components and ingredients. If you want to bake a pizza without the right stuff, it is going to be a disaster. Same can be said of affiliate marketing. You need to select your niche and focus on it by delivering quality content, which will drive traffic to your blog and convert into value for you.

You begin with the most crucial component first – you niche, your expertise. Make sure it is not too small. Unless there is enough audience to convert, you will be wasting your time. Make sure there are not too many competitors in your selected field. Find out what your audience is looking for and think of a way to connect with them on that topic. If you have an experience in predicting new upwards trends and if you can spot one, it could be an excellent way to start.

It is imperative that you provide niche quality services and products. Every visitor to your site that you help is a potential customer now and a bigger one later. If you solve their issues with sound and to the point answers, communicate with them in timely manners, you raise your chance of converting them. Any useful content that you provide will increase your chance of nudging them your way to your thinking, product and services.

Optimize your website with keyword friendly to search engines. Use these keywords strategically on your websites and social marketing tools. You may have the best ideas, services and tools, but if you cannot be found, you are wasting your resources.

It is a numbers game. To be successful with affiliate marketing, you have to drive as much traffic to your website as possible. Besides keyword, some of the best components are social networks such Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, MySpace etc. Create videos of your expertise and post them on sites like YouTube and Vimeo. Articles writing such as this one and blogging are other tools to drive traffic to your website. Use a multitude of social tools, don’t be focused on just one.

Have an end in mind, when writing articles, blogs or making videos and podcasts. Provide quality content and tell them what you want them to do. After you have attracted them to your site, call for an action for them to buy your product, or subscribe for your services.

If you fail to implement any of the above, you are doomed to failure in your online affiliate marketing venture.