Affiliate Marketing may be on your mind with the economy having joy rides on Spiderman loop in an amusement park. A lot of people are looking up at the internet as their life raft to get out of the dull drum. However some are already pulling their hair off not knowing which guru to follow or which step to take first since there is so much confusion out there. Others have decided to invest their last penny on some sort of coaching program. Still others, like you want to do it right in the first place but do nor have hundreds not to say thousands to invest.

So what to do? Well today is your lucky day. Since you are reading this article you are one lucky fellow who will learn how to make money with Affiliate Marketing in any economy without spending a dime. I guarantee that you will be successful if you follow those simple steps, the seven secrets, which we'll elaborate.

1. Most beginners will start Affiliate Marketing by going to ClickBank Marketplace and grab the best selling product and start marketing it. This strategy is sometimes advocated by some gurus too. But studies have shown that the popularity of a product does not guarantee sale. The first thing you need to do instead is find your market, then your product. You will actually need to find a "hungry market". Then find what they are hungry for and give them what they are ready to buy (hungry for).

2. Next is to focus on what is going to draw that crowd of hungry buyer and turn them into your customer. The tool to perform this feast is your sale copy. That's right your sale copy need to be written once you find your product. The sale copy is your salesman that is going to break the last objection and persuade your customer that your product is what they want. The sale copy is the determining factor of whether you make a few sales or a lot of sales.

3. Your website is the next step. You hear me right. The website comes after the copy, why? Because you want to facilitate the sale process and the best way to do that is to design it around the sales copy. When designing your site keep in mind that you need to make an impression on your visitors within the fist 10 seconds, so keep it simple. Again market research had show that simple designed sites pull more sale than fancier ones in Affiliate Marketing.

4. Now that you have your site up you need to get traffic to it. This is when the proverbial question always comes up.  Paid or free traffic? Both sources will bring traffic to your site. The decisive factor is whether you need traffic now or can you wait a few months? If you need immediate traffic go for the paid one. However be careful and learn the rope first otherwise your visitors could cost you the farm.

5. Once the traffic start to trickle you will need to build a relationship with your website visitors. The best way to do that is to follow up with them through a sequence of emails that will create trust and remove the last doubt about your product.

6. Once you have converted a visitor into a buyer you have done only 75% of the job. I can hear you, "but I made the sale, it's a done deal". You may have made a sale but if you want to really make money, you will need to nurture that relationship you have created and make that buyer a repeated buyer buy offering them different related products. Don't you think that it is a lot easier to work 50% less and make more money? That's one of the big secret.

7. Now that you seen you can work less and make more, how about working a lot less. Working less and make more money?  No I am not crazy. Actually his is the biggest secret of all. It is being used by all the gurus and it's called affiliate. It is when you leverage the effort of other to make money that you actually move to the next level. Even if you are an affiliate yourself you can have affiliates working for you. All you need is to find a program that pays in 2 tears, and voila!

So let's recap and see those 7 secrets in making money in Affiliate Marketing regardless of the economy.

1. Find a market of hungry buyers

2. Create a killer sale copy.

3. Design your website.

4. Get an avalanche of traffic to your website.

5. Use email to create relationship with your site visitors

6. Convert one time buyers into repeated buyers.

7. Start an affiliate program

Here it is folks with this new found knowledge go and make a killing.

If you're new to Internet marketing, one of the easiest ways to get started is affiliate marketing. You have no start-up costs, you don't need a website or a product and the average Internet user knowledge is sufficient to get you started.

So what is affiliate marketing? Affiliate marketing is promoting someone else's product and getting a commission for the sale. You choose a product that is already doing well and you promote that product. When someone buys the product from your link, you will get paid a commission. So you can basically start from nothing.

First of all you will need to find a product or several products to promote. The best way to find products in the Internet marketing niche is Clickbank marketplace. ClickBank is the online retail outlet for 10,000 digital product vendors and their 100,000 active affiliates. Go to Clickbank and sign up for a free account. Then open the marketplace, enter a keyword and do a search. Clickbank will produce a list of products relevant to your keyword. Under each product you will see information on how much commission you will make in dollars as well as the percentage of the product price. You will also see what percentage of the sales are made by affiliates (%refd) and the gravity of the product (grav:).

These are interesting figures, which you should pay attention to. For example, if the percentage of sales made by affiliates is low, it could mean that the product is not converting very well. The gravity shows the popularity of the product - the higher the gravity, the better the product has been doing for the last few weeks.

After you've found some products that seem interesting to you, do some more research on them. Go to sites like cbengine.com and cbtrends.com to find out, how the products are doing there. The gravity of the product on Clickbank marketplace doesn't always reflect how well the product is currently doing. Instead, you might find out on cbtrends.com that the product has a falling trend. That could mean that the product has been on the market for quite a while already and its sales are decreasing. You may also find new products with a highly rising trend, which don't have a high gravity on Clickbank marketplace yet. That means they were only recently launched and haven't built up the popularity yet, so it would be a good place for you to start promoting these.

When you've done your research and found the products that are doing well and that you'd like to promote, go back to Clickbank marketplace and find the product there. Then click on create hoplink below the product description. In the new window enter your Clickbank user ID and click on create hoplink. This link will be the link to your personal sales page - anyone buying through that link will make you a commission.

The next step - start promoting your links. There are tons of ways to do that. The quickest way to get targeted buyers is Adwords (Google's paid ads), but I don't suggest using adwords, if you have no experience in it. Instead of making huge sales commissions you could make a huge loss on your ads, if you don't know how to find the right keywords and place your bids for optimal results. Adwords is an entire science, so if you're interested, do a Google search on it and you will find hundreds of resources of information on that.

I would recommend to use other methods for promoting. You can use safelists and traffic exchanges. You could also start a review blog for promoting your affiliate products. Blogs are free and easy to create (blogger.com, wordpress.com) and the best part - search engines love blogs. Blogs get indexed and ranked much quicker than regular websites, they get more traffic and higher visibility. The reason for that is that blogs are updated constantly with new content and search engines love content. Review blogs are a great way of promoting affiliate products. Write a blog post on each of the products you've chosen to promote. Try to be honest and precise in your reviews - bring out the characteristics of the product, but also what you don't like about the product. Honest opinion is worth much more than a bunch of empty hype and sales pitches. So if you think a product is priced too highly, be honest about it and say you'd rather like the price to be half of what is asked, but if you could afford the price, you'd buy it.

Good luck - looking forward to seeing you among top affiliates!