The most appealing factor of online Affiliate Marketing is its potential to self-manage or autopilot itself, generating profits and building customer relationships irregardless of your involvement. A well set-up system will continue to work and bring in sales for you while you focus on build additional streams of income. Compared to traditional brick and mortar businesses, the opportunities that the Internet can offer are incredible, allowing you to market to a worldwide audience in hours and selling products you don't even have to keep an inventory of! You could be working out of your home, at a coffee place, at the beach, anywhere as long as there's an Internet connection.

So, what are they tools you'll need to get started? Here's a quick rundown on the 3 essential components of Affiliate Marketing.

1. A Lead Capture Page
2. Email Autoresponder
3. An Affiliate Product

Lead Capture Page.

This is basically a one-page 'website' with a short (but effective) sales copy. The purpose of this page is to grab your visitor's attention and collect their email before you send them to the actual website with the product you'll want to sell. This step is vital for your marketing efforts as you'll lose them for good if they decide not to buy.

Email Autoresponder

A good Autoresponder service is the lifeblood of you business. Its a service which you subscribe to monthly that manages all your emails that you've collected. A good system will send a sequence of timed messages each designed for a specific task (e.g. Product information, short courses, sales pitch, etc)

Affiliate Product

What good is your Lead Capture and Autoresponder if you don't have something to sell? There are many places that you can get products to sell, but a very popular place to start would be Clickbank.com. You can easily be a member and choose something you want to promote. When a visitor buys from your unique link (which Clickbank will supply you), you can get up to 75% commission!

So, there you go - the 3 components for affiliate success, but how do we string them all together? First, find your product, then make sure you read up about it. Next setup a quick one-page website with a sales copy for the product (could also be a positive review of it) and add your Autoresponder subscribe form (which your Autoresponder service will generate for you). You can set the "thank you" page in your Autoresponder after your visitor has subscribed to the actual product page with your affiliate link.

But wait - don't forget to preload your Autoresponder with more products timed to auto-send itself for the next 60 days or so. That way, you're constantly connecting with your customers and if your web copy is effective and your product selection is good, sit back and enjoy your new income stream!

I've made it sound very simple, but in actual fact, you'll need to read up a little more before you start. Learn about building a webpage, buying a domain and finding a good webhost. There are many excellent Autoresponder services online, just try posting at some forums and you'll sure to get some good advice. There's tons of resources online so I won't get into it here.

My objective is to give you an overview on how you can setup an effective automated sales cycle which can bring you an awesome return on investment. There's no business like it, the startup capital is very small but the returns can be really big!

I hope you've found this useful and will get you thinking about Affiliate Marketing - To Your Success!