Still, thousands others wait for their generous checks from all sorts of affiliate programs and laugh all way to bank, every month. I make good money from an affiliate program using articles as main part of my affiliate marketing strategy.

But what is more is that there are plenty of other guys out there doing same, although some of them use more expensive methods than free articles. For example, recently I personally saw a monthly check for $15,000 shown to me by a friend involved in a leading affiliate marketing program.

So what is difference between frustrated and successful?

The difference is that top earners have an affiliate marketing system for generating a constant supply of leads or traffic to web sites they represent. In contrast, ones who do not make any money do not have any system. They often just sit back and wait for things to happen. Sorry folks hype is just not true. You have to put in some effort!

In this first article in a series, we will deal with 3 key factors one needs to address to launch a successful affiliate marketing strategy using articles that can work for virtually any affiliate program.

1) You must know what works and what doesn’t.

The problem with most affiliate programs is that you will not be able to know where your traffic is coming from. Online that is a disaster. It is like flying an aircraft blind. Sooner or later you will crush.

A good solution is to start a blog with an identical topic to your affiliate program. Use a good site meter to carefully monitor traffic you are receiving. You can then easily refer people who visit your blog to your affiliate site. To make your blog even more interesting you can carry Google Adsense pay per click ads. This way you can have some income even as you build up your affiliate program. Use articles that you are posting elsewhere on your blog.

While generating revenue from your blog, do not lose sight of your main objective which is to monitor what articles posted at which web sites are bringing in most traffic. You can then use this information to constantly improve on volume of traffic headed to your affiliate program site.

Tip #1 – Disabling Advert Optimisation

Disable automatic advert optimisation feature (set in your campaign settings) to avoid giving away valuable IP to your competitors.

Visit following link for an example:
http://www.pdqprospects.com/AdwordsOptimisationScreenshot.html

Why would you want to do this?

Ok - Let's say you are diligently testing 2 adverts side by side within an ad-group (as you should always be btw).

With optimisation turned on, eventually 1 advert will be deemed leader and shown more.

For arguments sake – we will take keyword ‘marketing’. Your competitor has 2 split tested Google Adwords adverts which will show (in a round robin manner) whenever this keyword is searched for.

You can find out useful information regarding which of adverts is performing better by searching for keyword marketing, noting ad results and refreshing search results.

Because you get to know best copy Suppose you do this 4 times (by reloading your webpage) - and 3 times advert 1 is shown, but advert 2 is shown once - you now know which of these adverts is best.

Knowing what adverts are working for your competitors allows you to start to understand mindset of your potential prospects (what's working and what's not to encourage click-throughs).

This of course is very valuable intelligence to have for you to construct your own adverts - which means you can ultimately have higher click through rates and as a direct result pay less.