Affiliate marketing is the easiest path to make money online.

Here are some ideas that might help:

• Define a niche market, and target your affiliate products to that market. DON'T pick a product just because you think it looks cool… and DON'T cram your site with a virtual flea market of unrelated products!

Find a hungry market, and sell them products they're likely to buy.

• Build relationships and credibility with your site's visitors. You'll be waaaay more effective if your visitors trust and respect your opinions. That means you'll have to spend time engaging with your visitors.

Regular emails, blog comments, and even social media sites are all simple, no-brainer ways to establish your expertise, build that credibility, and form those relationships.

• Actively market your products. You can't just post a product plug and then expect profits. Actively marketing means that you're constantly looking for new ways to tweak your site's design or salescopy, or to engage with your visitors…

… or even to scope out the competition and see what's working for them.

• Create a content-rich, "sticky" website. Much as we'd like them to, people are just not going to sit still to listen to your pitch. You have to give them good reasons to stop by, so create content that's useful to them. Try newsletters, product reviews and comparisons, helpful tips, contests, quizzes, polls, and so on.

The more good stuff you've got out there, the more likely people are to visit your website on a regular basis!

• Constantly test your marketing strategies. Don't settle for a modest income – once you start getting those first sales, look for better ways to bring products to your site visitors' attention. Seek new ways to attract visitors to your site. And find more successful ways of converting those visitors into paying customers.

The good news it that it's EASY to become an affiliate…