If your aim is to achieve any real level of success with affiliate marketing than you should have your own product to sell.  Once you have that, you'll need to create squeeze pages, sales pages, graphics and more just so you can sell your product and make money online.  That's the best way to do it with affiliate marketing.  Although this is the best way to make money online, especially the quickest way, many marketers just don't get it.

Affiliate marketing will sometimes take time to develop for some people, while others catch on and make money online almost immediately.  Affiliate marketing requires some basic strategies that you need to use in order to promote your products.  You also need to spend time testing these strategies as some will work more effectively than others and the same thing goes for the products that you are promoting.

One of the biggest problems that affiliate marketers have when first starting up is thinking that the only thing required is to grab an affiliate link and the sales will start poring in.  Unfortunately that's just not the case.  Affiliate marketing is simply broken down into two simple steps that you need to understand.  The first thing required is to find a hungry market and basically give them what they are looking for.

It's that simple.  Find a hungry market of buyers before you do anything else.  People buy products based on their emotions and their has to be some kind of motivation in it for them before they buy.  As an example, look at the weight loss industry.  That market is filled with emotional people begging for information and products that will help them lose weight.  Another emotional market is the self help and personal development niche.  This market is filled with emotional people that buy up everything that has to do with inspiration, motivation, reaching success, fear, anger, shyness, public speaking, and so many more.

The next thing you have to do in finding your hungry market is to break down the niche market into smaller sub-niches.  Try looking for different problems within each niche market, problems that might cause anger or pain.  Are there people who are overweight that might be in pain or angry or disgruntled with their current weight problems?  Are there people in the self help niche that might be angry, stressed or feeling overwhelmed?  Of course there is and that's the sub niche markets that you need to focus on.  Remember, when looking for hungry buyers in a specific market, there are always going to be triggers that put people into buying mode and that's the place where you want to be so you can offer them a solution.

Now, there are other tactics, methods or strategies that need to used as well as certain tools that will simply your efforts such as an auto responder for your email marketing.  When it gets to this point and sometimes even before this, many affiliate marketers just give up or they try to go on without the proper advice or training.  This ultimately leads to costly mistakes and lost time.

This is the point where a mentor needs to come in and guide you.  Someone that has already achieved the level of success as an affiliate marketer and has the proper coaching and training programs in place.

A mentor can show you different tricks or techniques that they used to sell and promote products as well as guide you through different stages of the affiliate marketing business.  Another great thing about having a mentor as a coach is being able to reach out and ask questions when you need help the most. 

If you are just beginning as an affiliate or even if you have been at it a while but still having difficulty making money online, my advice is to align yourself with a mentor.  A mentor does not want to see you fail, it looks bad on their part.

Just remember this, success with any internet marketing business is not about going at it alone.