Often, people starting out with affiliate marketing look for the holy grail for success. But they are either hit with information overload or tend to take the wrong path.

A lot of time is wasted looking for secrets, short-cuts and quickies. I would like to throw some cold water on your face; there is no such thing as a “secret.”

The information is out there in the open — true, tried and tested — for you to take action and succeed right now. For now, there are three things that could catapult your affiliate marketing business:

1. Reinforce your marketing efforts by testing

Pay Per Click ads will place you in the elite group of affiliates who rake in the big moolah. However, successful affiliates didn’t just jump into it and became overnight successes.

There’s something most people miss: testing your ads. Testing is paramount. Test the ads until you get results( the links, the copy); test landing pages (consistent with the ad? Do they have a strong call to action?); test your ad and page combination with various offers and tweak the time your ads show up - weekdays or weekends?. Try different strategies and see what works for you.

Assume that you tested a few hot keywords out, prepared a great landing page, made a good offer and even made about $30/day.

At this stage, most affiliates commit a blunder by thinking that they have arrived and that they have achieved everything they need to. They promptly switch niches or move on to do something else. They are, however, turning their backs to unlimited riches…

2.Without Leverage, there ain’t no Business

Business can only be profitable when they can be leveraged. That means you, as an affiliate, must look to scale-up your business. If you pump up that daily sale figure to $300/day or $3000/day, you have a profitable business running.

How would you do that?

Build your opt-in list with a passion; use your auto-responder; go deep and spread out with your keywords; target long tail keywords; pick up more affiliate offers in the same niche and send emails to your list; think of other ways of marketing your affiliate business like offline strategies, for instance; pick up products from similar niches;sell products that are complimentary in nature and market them too.

3. To Automate is To Get Smarter

The final “secret” is to automate or systematize your business. This puts your affiliate business into another league altogether. This allows you to do what you are good at and spend less time on non-productive tasks.

– If you need help setting up a landing page, ask for a designer to help you

– If there are tasks that need to be done all the time like posting articles on a site, optimising the meta tags, cleaning up the code etc, have a “webmaster” do it.

– Outsource everything that you are not good at or should be best done by someone else.

– Use technology to your advantage. You can outsource a task to a “machine” as well. There are tools that help you create a keyword list like PPC Keyword Generator. Or, tools that help you upload your campaign like Adwords Editor.

– Document everything so you can replicate it next time. Fine tune the process every time.

That’s it for now :-)