Affiliate marketing is a form of marketing in which a business rewards its affiliates for the sales and marketing efforts that they undertake on its behalf. This is similar to multi level marketing and is a rage among users of the internet. There are many people who use the internet to make money or the self-employed using the World Wide Web as their source of income. There are lots of ways in which you can use affiliate marketing to earn that extra bit of income or even make it a full time occupation. There are some simple things that you can follow when pursuing affiliate marketing. The first and foremost of this is to write on topics that you are familiar with. For instance, if you like pets then you can try writing on topics related to keeping pets and their rearing. Since affiliate marketing involves building a website and promoting your product, the best way to start off would be to build a site around the topics that you consider are your expert areas and then continue on the same vein. Initially, this may not bring in the commissions that you hope for but trust me, over a period of time; this would result in increase to your income. The next tip would relate to putting less number of banners on your site. It is tempting to stuff your site with banners and more banners, but doing so would make your site look un-attractive and even ugly to potential visitors thus making you lose business. You should use the optimum amount of space for banners and make sure that people actually click on the banners provided by using catchy slogans and titles. One of the other things that you have to remember is that there are no best merchant programs that are available and it is up to you to make the decision on which merchant program you want to join. You should prefer a merchant who is liberal with the commissions and someone in your line of interest. As outlined above, someone who is related to the area in which you have built the site would be a potential merchant for you to link your site with. Remember that starting off in building a site is the first step and the most difficult as well. Once you have the site up and running, you have taken the initial steps to making your site viable for making money.About the Author: