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Affiliate marketing is a highly competitive industry that has a high potential for profit and passive income. Here are some tips and strategies to get into affiliate marketing:

Back a Product or Service You Can Believe In – It helps if you know the company well from experience. Knowing a product or service inside and out can give you an edge over other people promoting the product. If you don't believe in the product, what makes you think other people will?

Avoid One-Time Referral Fees – Let's say you successfully acquire a paying customer. The company pays you as the affiliate a one-time bonus. Now you have to acquire new customers to make more money. See the problem here? The best affiliate marketing model is to earn a bonus for the lifetime of the customer. This is called two tier affiliate marketing. This way, every time the customer makes a purchase, you get a bonus. And the more customers you acquire, the more you continue to make money indefinitely.

Pretend Your Promotion is a Review – If people think that you are pushing the product too hard, they will back away. People like to search for product and service reviews before they buy. Take advantage of this and write a mostly positive review, and don't forget about the referral links and banner ads! Don't be afraid to say a few critical things about the product, as this will ad legitimacy to your product review. This strategy is a way to harness web traffic from things people are searching for anyway.

Promote Your Product on Your Website – This is the cheapest way to acquire customers. If you already have website traffic, you can tap into this potential. For example, if you have a financial blog, become an affiliate for a brokerage firm. Building a website from scratch can be time consuming and difficult to get search engine hits.

Sometimes You Have to Spend Money to Make Money – For extremely niche products, you can buy impressions for your ad from other websites. Rather than building your own promotion website, you can just pay someone else with a successful website to advertise your product. I've had mixed success with this. Always test the ads first with a low dollar amount to see if you can acquire customers. If it doesn't work, then don't invest in a full fledged ad campaign.

Don't Spam – People don't like to be spammed and as an affiliate marketing strategy, it's really inefficient. Websites will quickly flag your content as spam, where no more viewers will see it, and your account could be shut down for violating terms of service. In addition, the company itself could terminate your affiliate account for violating terms and conditions.