One of the better ways to easily and quickly starting making some money online, is to sign up and promote affiliate programs. It is possibly as close to a 'business-in-a-box' as you can get. Most programs have everything you need to succeed already created for you.

Always do your research on any product or affiliate program you choose to sign up with and promote. This ensures you'll be marketing a reputable affiliate program and not encounter any unforeseen problems. Dealing with a reputable program will aid you by making your marketing easier and thus bring you in more sales.

Follow the steps I've outlined within this article once you've made your choice on which affiliate program you want to work with, they'll help generate bigger affiliate commissions for you.

Step #1: Forget about using a generic affiliate site, build your own. If you're going to be serious about making money as an affiliate, I would suggest building your own unique website where you can marketing any affiliate products you want and provide unique quality content. Having your own website will give you much more flexibility as to what you can promote on it. Promoting several products within the same niche will increase your commission checks.

Step #2: Work on building your email list, get a newsletter going or offer something free in exchange for your prospects information. An email list is the foundation of your online business venture. It allows you to repeatedly connect and promote to your prospects.

Step #3: You'll be needing an auto-responder service, such as Aweber or Get Response. This will allow you to build and maintain your email list, by capturing their information when they opt-in on one of your web forms. You'll be using the auto-responder to send out information, such as, articles, promotions of products, an e-course or a regular newsletter. This automates the process of staying in touch with your prospective customers and will be a time saver, by making it easier to build up your affiliate home business.

Step #4: Start an article writing campaign. Writing and distributing articles to article directories, such as Street Articles, is a free way to get started and get exposure for your business. Being successful at affiliate marketing will require work, so write or get written, as many articles as you can on your niche and get them distributed around the web. The more articles you get out there, the more traffic you'll get flowing back to your website.

Step #5: Start building links to your website. If you're attempting to rank your website on the search engines, you'll have to build links, a lot of them and from various sources. Backlinks are important to you, because the more you have pointing at your site the higher you'll rank and the more organic traffic you'll attract. Just make sure you build links consistently and naturally.

Bonus Step: In my mind this is the most important step to ensure you'll succeed at affiliate marketing, especially if you're new making money online. Invest some time and money into getting training from successful affiliate marketers or find an affiliate mentor, who can show you the ropes of this type of business.

Taking online affiliate classes from a company such as Wealthy Affiliate will shorten your learning curve and get you making money faster then just coming online and floundering around with no plan or sense of direction. You'll save a massive amount of you valuable time and keep your money in your pocket. Its cheaper getting an affiliate marketing course then to buy every product online that promises to give you overnight success.

Take action on these 5 tips, plus bonus tip, if you want to make bigger affiliate commissions and make a success of your new home-based business.