It's no secret there is money in affiliate marketing, in fact there is great money in affiliate marketing if you align yourself with a good company with good products.

The reason there are some failures and jaded feelings about affiliate marketing is because people don't think about what the very phrase means. There are two words to consider. Affiliate is a definition that comes to most people quite easily as it means "A person, organization, or establishment associated with another". Easy enough. The second part of that phrase is the one that will make or break your efforts to be a success in affiliate marketing.

Marketing. People think it means knocking on doors, making hundreds of phone calls, sending out thousands of e-mails, just to market your product or service that you're selling through an affiliate network. True, you are an affiliate of a company and you are selling the same thing as dozens of other people, how to you set yourself apart from the crowd?

Establish a relationship with your prospects. When you contact someone about the product or service that you're representing through your affiliate marketing program, your initial contact is not about making a sale or a fulfillment order, it's about establishing a relationship with your potential client. Setting yourself up to establish a relationship with your prospects takes a little preparation but it's not hard to do.

If you're marketing your affiliate program through cold calls, first of all, make sure you're targeting the right market. You can't build a relationship to your prospects marketing services if the person you're contacting has no base interest in your affiliate network service or product. Many affiliate marketers get discouraged because they feel every proverbial door is slammed in their faces. It's not that they aren't good sales people or they have chosen the wrong affiliate network to market, they have simply chosen the wrong venue to sell those affiliate marketing services to.

When you're marketing your affiliate program from your own website. First all, make sure there are no frames. You might as well be wearing Harry Potter's Cloak of Invisibility if you're going to frame a webpage. Your site won't show up in return results because it won't be indexed by the major search engines.

Next, throw out useless graphics, do you really need that dancing sack of money on your website? Screaming sales fluff words "It's the BEST" or empty promises to prospects mean nothing and quite frankly, turn most people off from anything of substance you really had to say about your affiliate marketing program. Instead, think about what you would want to know if you were joining an affiliate marketing program. Write your website as if you were speaking to one person only, the person that is reading your website at that moment.

You can build a relationship from the get-go through your website and e-mails by addressing common problems most people have. No one is looking to join an affiliate program because they have too much money. People want to join a legitimate affiliate marketing program because they need money for various reasons. Use that as a beginning for making a starting point in a business relationship.

On your website, tell a little about how the affiliate marketing program took you from a paycheck to paycheck existence and you can now afford certain luxuries that were your motivating factor. You wanted to take a vacation, help put your kids through college, buy a new car, or pay off your credit card bills. Think about the issues that originally made you want to get into affiliate marketing, there are a good majority of people that feel the same way and they all have the potential to be part of your affiliate marketing network.

Invite a dialogue with people. You can't have a relationship with your prospects without open communication. Tell people they can contact you and ask you questions and when they do, be friendly but remain businessnesslike. It's a fine line and you'll find it quickly. One successful affiliate marketer would answer his various prospects questions sent via e-mail and then always throw in something about the weather he was experiencing. Could be the snow on the ground, the drenching rains that would drown a duck or just the heat that made him wish for an ice cream truck from his youth. Just that one sentence made him more real to his potential clients. They would write back wanting more information and then tell him about their weather. It seems small and insignificant, but it's really huge. He was giving people a real person to deal with. Not an affiliate marketing program, not a faceless website, not the black and white text of an e-mail, but an honest to goodness friendly person they wanted to join up with all because he talked about the weather.

When you're using relationship based marketing for your affiliate program, you're not trying to create a best friend - you are creating an honest, trusting business relationship and there's nothing stronger. Studies have shown people will stick with an affiliate marketing program longer if they have a comfort level with the people they are dealing with. Relationship based marketing does exactly that.

Now that you know how to create a loyalty to your affiliate marketing program, use these tips to make yourself stand out from the other affiliates and boost your network base and your affiliate sales!

David Cooper is the editor of the Affiliate Marketing Articles Newsletter. David specializes in helping people separate themselves from the affiliate marketing crowd. Download his FREE Affiliate Marketing Primer ebook at: http://www.affiliatemarketingarticles.com