As online joint venture partnerships, affiliate programs allows both content publishers and web merchants to maximize their online profits by working with each other.

Content publishers, including webmasters, ezine writers and forum owners, are able to focus their energies and resources on what they know best...creating great content to attract web visitors.

Affiliate merchants on other hand, are able to focus their efforts on creating great products, receiving online payments, and getting their products to customers.

The success of affiliate marketing has resulted in an unfortunate problem:

Because they are so popular, there are now so many affiliate merchants fighting for affiliates that it has become hard for them to differentiate themselves from each other and to attract good affiliates.

Put another way, while affiliates can help merchants solve problem of finding customers, merchants are now facing problem of having to first find good affiliates!

This has given rise to some innovative merchants setting up affiliate programs that pay affiliate commissions to multiple tiers of affiliates, most popular being 2 tier affiliate programs.

These people called "super affiliates" are just ordinary people like you but they do things differently from rest of crowd. They see game from a different angle and they play it with a different strategy. How then do these super affiliates play their game?

The first strategy super affiliates adopt, is that instead of sending traffic to site of program/ product they are promoting, send it to theirs. You see, most people advertise their affiliate sites which people will go to and never buy anything.

Super affiliates understand that people are not inclined to buy anything at their first contact with product, that they will need to be contacted on so many occasions before they can make precious purchase. Super affiliates use this as an edge over their competitors.

When they drive traffic to their sites, they entice them to join their opt-in list by offering them something "nice" in return. After joining list, people can then be advertised to as long as super affiliates want and so long subscribers are not complaining.

So, it is very important for you to know that if you want to make it big in affiliate game, you must have your own opt-in list. Stop spending money to send traffic away, instead bring them to your site and make them join your list by any means, it is very IMPORTANT.

Super affiliates do get to know product they promote inside out. That is another advantage they exploit over their competitors. They buy product they want to promote and they digest all contents of product so that they will be able to tell their prospects what is in it for them.

How many times have you signed up to promote a product you don't even know about? Do you think if a sales person turns up at your door to tell you of a product, he cannot even tell its usefulness to you, will you buy from such a person? No! That is why some people will not buy whatever you promote, because they don't really know what it will do for them and what it has done for you promoter.

Get to know what you are promoting so that you can tell your prospects what product is all about and how it can be of help to them. Your own personal testimonies matters a lot because it is what will motivate them to buy from you.

Another super affiliate's game plan is that they stand out from crowd.