To do Affiliate Marketing correctly you need to get these two pillars done right!!
1) The first Pillar is your Market. You need to know who your market is and what they are looking for. After you know who the market is you need to find your niche keywords (very Important).
Once that is established you need to send traffic to your Market, which can be done in a number of ways either by free traffic or paid traffic. I suggest if your are just starting out to use free traffic until you get the hang of it and then experiment with help from someone knowledgeable with paid traffic. You can use Utube videos, keywords, SEO (search Engine optimization), PPC (Pay Per Click), Yahoo, Article Marketing, etc.
2) The second Pillar is your Offer. The offer can be some ones product, your own product (can make more money from your own), but that requires much more time and effort so I suggest you stick with someone else's product for now.
The offers could be Google Adsense, CPA (cost per action)-which could be a sale, a lead, a download or even just some information that you will get paid for if someone clicks on the link and completes the action required, or you just send then to someone else's product and if they buy it, you will get 50% commission or more usually. Some of the places to send people to are Clickbank, Paypal, Dotcom.com and there are numerous other places that will give you a commission for the product that people buy who you sent to their site.
When you sign up with these affiliate sites you will be given an Id which you will need to put in the link so when the person goes and buys from that marketplace you will be credited for that sale and be given your commission.
Now you must remember that your market is looking for a particular item or information, so you must target those people to send them to your sight and then to the proper offer. If they are looking for information on lawn care , don't give them an offer for bird seed or whatever, they simply will not buy.
