Affiliate marketing is by far the fastest way to get started making money online. What “affiliate marketing” means is that you just refer visitors to someone else’s website, they handle the sales, support and billing, and you keep 50% or more of the sales

Here’s just a few benefits

1. You’re able to start right now without having to develop a product, set up a website and sales page, develop the website, create marketing materials, or set up the ordering, billing & delivery system.
2. It’s completely hands-freefor you because they handle the billing, support, maintenance, etc.
3. Your efforts are risk-free, because the product owner has already made sure the product sells. So if you send visitors you will get paid.

Obviously affiliate marketing makes sense – these benefits make it a clear winner!

OK, but it’s not all rosy…

You work hard to send the traffic to the product owner’s website, but once you do that you will never see those visitors again. Less than 10% of the visitors your send will actually buy the product. And of the 10% or less that do buy, the product owner will be able to sell to them again, but you will not.

What’s the solution?

Simply put, you need to capture the name and email of your visitors *before* sending them to the product sales page. By getting their contact info, you can follow up increase your odds of making the sale by sending them back to the product owner’s website multiple times. And if you want to do it like a pro, you’ll give them some great content before sending them to the sales page.

Here’s what these affiliate marketing strategies will do for you:

1. By building your own list, you’re creating a renewable resource that you can tap again and again for instant profits.
2. You’re generating good will by giving them high-quality content. This way, they are much more likely to make a purchase when you send them to the sales page.

Here’s what you’ll need to create affiliate tools like this:

1. A Video Squeeze Page (with video)
2. Several high-quality content pages
3. An email series with at least 5 high-quality content emails

The video squeeze page is where you’ll direct your traffic instead of directly to the product sales page. It captures the name and email of your visitors and puts them into your autoresponder, which then begins sending out the 5-part email series. Once your visitors have been subscribed to your email series, they are sent to your content pages.

These high-quality content pages provide value and build good will. This way your visitor is more likely to buy when they get to the product owner’s website. And even if they don’t buy on the first visit, your email series sends them back to the product sales page again and again to increase your sales.

Putting all of these pieces together will increase your sales by 500% or more, so it’s obviously worth the time and energy to do it. And after you get it all set up, it runs on total auto-pilot. You just refer people to your lead capture page, instead of the product sales page.

If you don’t have the time or expertise to set it all up yourself, you can use something like Affiliate Silver Bullet. With a service like that, you don’t have to do anything. They make the video, build the squeeze page, write the email series, develop the content mini-site, etc. And then just give you a finished package. The major benefit of using a service like this is that you can get started right away, and for a whole lot less than it would cost to do it all yourself. The drawback is that you won’t be the only one using these affiliate tools. But the internet is huge, so this shouldn’t really affect you.

The other route you can take is to hire people on Elance to create and implement the various aspects for you. Either way, it’s an important step that you need to take if you’re going to be serious about your affiliate marketing.