There is no doubt that affiliate marketing represents a massive opportunity to earn substantial money from the comfort of your own home and the only tools you need are your PC and broadband connection, however newbie affiliate marketers often achieve very little success if any to justify their efforts.

Although this is a business model that anyone can follow it is vital to understand the two key ingredients of affiliate marketing success; targeted traffic and pre-selling the product.

Targeted traffic is self explanatory but what do I mean by 'pre-selling the product'?

Pre-selling the product simply means that instead of sending your traffic directly to the product's sales page (what most unsuccessful affiliates do) your traffic is directed to a review page that provides an insiders view of the product.

Here are my seven simple steps to exploiting the affiliate marketing opportunity;

1 Choose the product you are going to promote. I focus on high value products in my niche preferably with a monthly recurring billing feature to earn monthly commissions. High profile products work best.

2 Buy the domain name "productnamereview.com" (replacing "product name" with the name of the product you are promoting)

3 create a free Wordpress blog on the domain.

4 Review the product (ask the owner for a review copy) and post your review to your blog.

5 Create a video tour of the product (use a screen-shot video tool such as jing.com) and post the video to your blog.

6 Distribute the video to as many video sharing sites as possible (hey!spread will automate this for a small fee).

7 Digg your posts and video (digg.com)

It is important to post new material to the blog every couple of days for the first week.

These simple steps should result in your review site appearing on the first page of search results for your keywords (the product name).

High profile products (especially big product launches) attract a lot of search engine traffic from prospects who want to check the product out before buying, these people will find your review site, read your review and click your affiliate link to buy!

Because these seven simple steps to exploiting the affiliate marketing opportunity cost just a few dollars you can promote any number of products this way and once the initial set up work is done it pretty much runs itself!

For a free step by step guide with example screen-shots and earnings click the link below.