Below are the six basic steps to starting a profitable affiliate marketing home business:

Step 1 - Choose a Niche Market
Why you should focus on choosing a market instead of a product? A profitable market will have different needs of products which mean you can sell more than one single affiliate product to the market. Pick a market that really suits you.

Step 2 - Choose a Product
Once you have chosen a niche market, the next step is to find a product. You will definitely want to market most of the high demand products to your niche market at the beginning, but it is advised not to do so when you just started. It is always best to start off with one affiliate product at the beginning so that you can stay focus and achieve better result. When you have begun to getting consistent sales then you can think about promoting more affiliate products.

Step 3 - Build a Website
A website is required to market your affiliate product to generate sales. You site don’t have to be full of catchy graphic, but it does need to look professional and clean. The content must be related to your affiliate product and bringing value to your visitors. Whenever possible, add you affiliate link into the related content. Besides helpful content, you can also write a review with supportive information about your product.

Step 4 - Create a Squeeze Page
Through your website, you can entice many visitors to click on your affiliate link to your merchant’s sale page. But usually many of the visitors will not make purchase in their first visit on your merchant sale page. So, you need to gather their email addresses to follow up with them.

One effective way is by creating a squeeze page. The squeeze page will offer your visitors free gifts, newsletters or e-courses. Visitors who sign up for your free offer will automatically opt-in to your email list allowing you to send email to them at any time. With an email list of your potential customers, you can promote your affiliate products to the potential customers occasionally.

Step 5 - Generate Traffic
After your website and squeeze page are up and running, it is time to generate traffic for your website. There are numerous traffic generation methods and you should try different methods to see the results. Then focus on the methods that work best. Learning and applying traffic methods

Step 6 - Look for additional Related Products
Once you are earning consistent affiliate commission on a single product, you may start looking for other related affiliate products to promote. This is a way to expand your affiliate marketing business. But you must do research to evaluate each new product before you really marketing them.

Always begin with one quality product in order to get good results. Focus on this single product, build a website to promote the product and collect the email addresses of your visitors. Keep good contact with your visitors and send valuable information to them occasionally to build up trust within them. This will make your email selling much easier later.

Affiliate marketing has various advantages and also some drawback you have to deal with. Let us compare affiliate marketing business with other businesses. This may help you determine whether affiliate marketing is right for you.

1. Low Investment
Most home based businesses require quite a lot of money to get started. But with affiliate marketing, you need to worry about the initial capital required. You can set up an affiliate marketing business with less than three hundreds dollar. You would have possessed all the equipments needed for getting started. A computer with fast speed Internet access and a printer are all you need for starting an affiliate marketing business.

2. Inventories Not Required
For most businesses, stock management is part of the operation. You must arrange a space to store your goods and products. That will involve money and work. But in the case of affiliate marketing, you hold no inventory. All the stock management works are handled by the company that you affiliated with.

3. High Income Potential
They are people earning hundreds thousand of income through affiliate marketing without having to invest more for buying inventories and expensive equipments; and hiring employees. In affiliate marketing, you main focus is promoting your affiliate products using various marketing tools such as websites, squeeze page, and etc. The more time and effort you can put into your affiliate marketing business, the greater the revenue you can possibly earn.

4. Worldwide Market
With affiliate marketing, your market is not restricted to your local area or even your country. You have a worldwide market. You just need to build your website and market your affiliate products to people around the world who have an interest on your products.

5. Risk
Any business has risk and so as affiliate marketing. But since you don’t have to spend a big money to start and grow an affiliate marketing business, this business has a very low risk. This is the reason why more and more people are jumping on the affiliate marketing bandwagon.

6. 24 hours Sales
As I have said, as an affiliate marketer you will set up your own website to market your affiliate product and your potential customers are worldwide. Your website run and promote your affiliate products twenty-four hours a day. This means you are making money even when you are sleeping.

The above are the major benefits of affiliate marketing you will enjoy, if you have chosen the right niche market, the right company and the right products.

However, not every person can achieve success in this online business because it requires patience, focus and proper knowledge of affiliate and Internet marketing. To build and grow your affiliate marketing business successfully, make sure you are equipped with the proper knowledge and training.