Becoming a webmaster will require a lot of time on your part. Make sure that you first build your site around a topic that you enjoy and can spend time on.

Think about what topics you enjoy most, and that you know a lot about. This will allow you to easily write about that topic to your visitors and share your insight.

2. Keep narrowing your focus until you find your niche that makes your site unique. For instance instead of sports, make your site about your favorite team or instead of marketing choose to make your site about ezine publishing.

3. Once you've decided on a topic for your site, you have also selected your target audience, and are ready to join affiliate programs that sell products to that audience.

4. When deciding on affiliate programs to join look for affiliate programs that offer a line of products -- this will allow you to earn further commissions when your referrals come back and order something else.

5. Choose affiliate programs that offer a two-tier commission structure, where you get paid a commission on sales of people that you refer to affiliate program, or affiliate programs that offer you chance to earn a residual income.

6. Track your promotional efforts. This is essential in helping you identify what ad copy generates most sales and what marketing techniques are most profitable.

Copyright 2003 (c) Rosalind Gardner, All Rights Reserved.

As an affiliate marketer of Internet dating services, I'm always on lookout for good quality dating sites and products to offer my single visitors. Merchants help me out when they let me know about their new products and affiliate programs.

I was therefore thrilled when one of my friendly affiliate competitors got in touch to tell me that he'd started his own Internet dating service and affiliate program.

Having launched a community membership site myself last year, I could fully appreciate huge amount of time and money my friend had invested to develop this new site. He was justifiably proud of his accomplishment and I was excited by prospect of having a product to promote that would benefit everyone - my customers, my friend and myself.

Unfortunately, it didn't quite work out that way.

The first stumbling block was low commission he offered. His top rate was 30%, with no commissions on recurring sales.

This puzzled me. As an affiliate marketer of dating programs, he should have been aware that new sites offer at least 50% on new and recurring sales to entice good affiliates to sign up. If commissions on recurring sales are not offered, then rates on new sales should be increased to between 70 and 100 percent.

In most cases, his affiliate program would have struck out for me at that point. However, as this was my friend's site, it occurred to me that perhaps his product was so unique that potential for high volume sales might offset lower commission. Hoping for best, I continued my review.