If you have ever thought about starting a legitimate home-based business, this is probably the best time to start one. With heaps of opportunities available online, making money with internet marketing has become easier than it ever was. Take affiliate marketing for example, you can start building your online business through affiliate marketing with an investment as low as $50. If you have no idea how to start a small business online, the article below would help you setting up a plan for your online business.

The best thing about affiliate marketing is that it requires almost zero capital. You can literally start from $50 and make a hundred thousand or even more just within a year. All you need to start off is a website and a small business web hosting account. In this article I am going to discuss 5 essential steps to tell you how to make a lot of money by affiliate marketing.

1- Research

Before you start looking for a product to promote, you need to do an extensive research. You do not want to dive into a niche where there might be a lot of traffic but no money because people are just looking for some free information, or a niche where there is way too much competition for a newcomer to attract any audience. Use tools like Google trends and Twitter search to look for hot trends and then visit sites like Yahoo Answers to find out what kind of solutions people are looking for in your niche. Make sure you pick a niche where there is audience that is willing to spend money for quality products.

2- Select a product

You need to find a product in your niche that has moderate popularity and lesser affiliate competition. It is always good to first try the product before you start promoting it. Go through the sales page and make sure it is good enough to capture visitors and turn them into customers. A strong sales page can make all the difference.

3- Promote

Now that you have done your initial research and selected a great product, it is time to promote it. This is going to be the key to your success. You need to have a strong presell page. Do not send your visitors directly to your affiliate link. Later I’ll explain to you why you don’t want to do this. Drive traffic — targeted traffic to your presell page, there are lots of methods that you can use for this purpose, but first – here you need to do another research and find out your targeted keywords with low competition and comparatively higher monthly search volume, this can be done using a good keyword research tool and then drive traffic using Pay Per Click (PPC) marketing, article marketing and search engine optimization (SEO) for your selected keywords. Remember it’s not about getting lots and lots of visitors but few very targeted visitors.

4- Build a list

Now here is why you do not want to send your visitors directly to your affiliate link. Force your visitors to opt-in if they want to see your offer. Yes! Force them, if they can’t even give you their name and email, there’s not much chance they would buy the product. Using this method, not only will you be able to filter out the visitors that are not interested but you’ll also be building a list at the same time. It’s important to build a good relationship with your subscribers, don’t pitch them a new product every day. Instead provide them free information and build credibility so they can trust you and leverage your list when you find a product worth promoting. After completing these four steps, you’ll be able to actually see how to make a lot of money of money by affiliate marketing.

5- Rinse and repeat

That’s right, now that you know how to make a lot of money by affiliate marketing all you have to do is repeat the process because once you have setup a successful campaign it won’t need more than a couple of hours a week to maintain it.