1. Spend a lot of time trying to get a high ranking in search engines for your web sites. Learn as much as you can about search engines and make it a weekly task to try to get good rankings.

2. The word "free" and especially when written "FREE" is over used. Use it only occasionally on your site. For example you could use it to give away a free E-Book or free article you have written.

3. Spend 75% of your time marketing your web site and affiliate programs and 25% of your time working on them. Most people spend about 10% to 20% marketing their web site and affiliate programs. Then again, most people online do not make any money!

4. Use text links rather than banners for your affiliate programs. Text links get a much higher click through ratio. People have trained themselves to ignore banners.

5. Write you own articles and post them on a separate page on your site. Then submit them to following article resource sites:

http://www.ezinearticles.com/add_url.htm

http://www.ideamarketers.com

They first might try all free advertising available, and that may or may not generate some income. However, they are using "tried and true", but very "tired" ads supplied by affiliate, and wonder why they don't do better.

Then they try some paid ads using same tired ad copy in newsletters, ezines and on web sites with similar results. At this point, they might do one of two things, and sometimes both. The first is they discount this type of advertising as not being effective, and/or quit affiliate program. After a program gets saturated, thousands of people have used these affiliate supplied ads, and potential customers have seen them a "jillion" times. Once an ad gets "tired", it is a waste of time and money to continue using it.

However, many people rely on ezine advertising to sell these affiliate programs that others are failing at, and do very well. So what are they doing to be successful?

They do not just post an ad, and wait for dollars to arrive in their mailbox. They have not fallen into what is referred to as "the earn while you sleep" trap. You know, you throw up a few ads on web, and at night people all over world are sending you their hard earned money. They realize that like anything else, if they are to succeed, they have to work at it.

The first thing they do is write some original ad copy, and back it up with their own web site. With cost of registering a site AND a full year of web hosting for about $35, (see http://bitshack.com) which is probably less than their monthly fee to affiliate program, this is a must.