To become a really successful and wealthy affiliate, you really need to focus on 5 main steps. There are some steps in between as well, but by doing these 5, the others come automatically with.

1. Pick and research your niche – first you need to find a niche that you know something about, or you like it for one reason or another – or you can related to it somehow. Then go ahead and research it. Go to Amazon.com and check out the most popular books in the niche. Usually Amazon has a Table of Contents that is freely viewable. Check that out, see the topics, find some interesting tags and keywords. Write them down. The go ahead to the various free keyword research tools (Google’s tool being one of them and find some nice longtail keywords that you can use. Of course there are whole books written only about keyword research and there are specific software that will help you tremendously with it, like MicroNicheFinder that I totally use in my daily research, but I won’t go into details about research just yet, that is for another article.
2. Find some great converting affiliate programs that you can advertise – some people like to start with finding a Clickbank product and then building the niche around it. I prefer it the other way around. I want to know that I have a hungry market eager to buy the products and then I’ll research for something that I know I can happily product because I know the market is already there.
3. Create your website and build your content around it – first get yourself a domain name that is relevant to your niche, so that Google can see it as such. Then decide whether you want to create blogs around the niche, or landing pages that will have buttons where people will click to go to your selected product that you promote, or maybe you’ll do a sales page yourself or a squeeze page. The possibilities are endless here. But make sure that you don’t just point your domain to the seller’s website with your affiliate link embedded in it. People have grown accustomed to seeing these pages and they will be fast to clicking the back button when they see that you don’t offer anything of substance but a trick to lure them to buy the product.
4. Get targeted traffic to your site – I have discussed getting targeted traffic to your site here, so I will not repeat myself. Make sure you go and read this article.
5. Finally now is the time to monitor and tweak – see how all is converting, what traffic you are getting, and tweak if necessary.
6. A last step, which is not really part of this process, yet, it is integral to your becoming a great affiliate is: do it all over again in another niche