There are HUGE benefits to promoting affiliate programs with your own home-based Internet business, and I've come up with a list of 15 great reasons to become an affiliate marketer.

Let's look at each reason separately:

1. No Production Costs - The cost to develop and produce a new product is prohibitive for almost anyone who wants to start a home-based business. With affiliate programs, production costs aren't an issue. The product has been developed and proven - all on merchant's nickel.

2. Low Cost Set-up - Compared with building a brick and mortar store, starting a home-based Internet business is relatively cheap. You probably already have a desk, Internet-connected computer and word-processing software, which is all equipment you may need.

3. No Fees for Joining or Licenses to Buy - I often compare doing business as an affiliate, with distributing a line of products in real world. The biggest difference is that distributor must often pay for a license to distribute products within a limited geographic region. Affiliate programs, on other hand, are usually free to join, and geographic market reach is limited only by affiliate's ability to promote his web site.

4. Choose From Thousands of Products and Services - What isn't sold online? That list must be shorter than one describing all that IS sold online. There are thousands and thousands of affiliate programs selling every product under sun. That makes it easy to find products related to your current or planned web site.

5. No Sales Experience Needed - When I started my affiliate business, I had absolutely no sales experience. That wasn't a problem, however. The companies I affiliated with provided excellent marketing material. Using their sales copy, I was able to get my first affiliate site up in less than a day.

6. No Employees - The largest expense of most businesses is employee salaries. Although there might be times when you need or want someone to work for you as an affiliate, it's doubtful you'll ever have to worry about hiring full or part-time employees. When you have a project you want to hire out, it is easy to find specialists in every computer- related field who can work for you from comfort of THEIR own homes. You pay only for project, and never have to worry about ongoing employee-related benefits and deductions.

I happen to discover this method after seeing results that I get on one of my website. I don't have any particular reason for doing it that way on my website, but it seems to work like magic.

Sometimes, I search for people who are linking to me by looking at my referrers. You can also do that by checking your website statistics.

Sometimes, I do a link popularity check at MarketLeap.com.

And to my surprise, I realized that when I visited those websites, they are linking to me using my most targeted keywords.

My Keyword

That is how people are linking to me. And result, I am ranked number 1 against 2 million websites on Yahoo and MSN. And this is for a keyword that has about 2000 searches per month.

But just how do you go about doing this?

You are about to know little-known-secret-steps to getting more link partners with your most targeted keyword.

But before I go into that, I just would like to make some statements about this method.

Some people may like this method and some might not. There are pros and cons. I don't really know if this will suit well for business or corporate websites. All these while, I have only used them for content-sites promoting affiliate programs and Adsense, which is I think is most suitable.

If you are thinking about building a passive income with Adsense and affiliate programs, then you should read this.

First, you should do a keyword analysis. You can use WordTracker or Overture Keyword Selector Tool.

http://www.wordtracker.com/

http://inventory.overture.com/

After having your list of keywords, you can compare that to number of competitions that you against with on Google.

By comparing numbers, you know which is easier to optimize for. And you can also try checking popular keywords at Search Guild Search Term Difficult Checker.

http://www.searchguild.com/cgi-bin/difficulty.pl

Another tool that you can use is NicheBot.com.

http://www.nichebot.com

Don't get trapped into analysis-paralysis zone. Just follow indicators and look for most popular and easiest keyword that you can rank for.

I know that you want to rank for more than one keyword, but just follow me on this and select one keyword that has high in traffic and easy to optimize for.

Now, here's secret number one. You are going to name your website with that keyword. If your best keyword is "Growing Orchids", then that's is going to be your website's name.

Here's secret number two. Get a domain that has that keyword in it. If you can't get "growingorchids.com" or "growing- orchids.com", you can try dot-net (.net). And if you still can't get dot-net, you can add some numbers in front of keyword like "1-growing-orhids.com". You should be able to get either one of those.