I'm sure you want to be the kind of affiliate who gets a steady flow of checks to your mailbox monthly. There are lots of people receiving monthly commission checks all year long. However, it is sad to know that there are also a lot of affiliates cannot generate a sale and have never received any check from their affiliate programs. No matter what type of affiliate marketing you are in, you will want to be one of those who make a steady income in affiliate marketing. Below are some tips of building a good and sound affiliate marketing income. 1. Identifying a niche market. Try to identify the niche market you want to focus on or you are passionate about. 2. Find a stable affiliate program in the niche market you have identified. Here are some of the top affiliate networks that might contain the affiliate program you are looking for: ClixGalore.com Shareasale.com CommissionJunction.com Clickbank.com Do some researches before signing up for an affiliate program. Find out the conversion rate of the affiliate product. A product that has a conversion rate of 4% is fairly good. This means that for every 100 visitors you send to your merchant's website, 4 visitors will buy. Also, take a look at your merchant's website to find out whether the offer pages or sale pages are convinced enough to generate sales. 3. Create a website to promote your affiliate products. You can make your website looks like an online store by displaying all your affiliate products with a description on each product on your homepage. Or you can write a review for each of your product on your website to encourage visitors go to your merchant's website and buy the product. Another alternative is to provide a product recommendation list on your website such as 'Top 3 Affiliate Marketing e-Course', 'Top 3 Herbal Products' and so on. Don't recommend something that your are not certain about. 4. Create Your own newsletter and invite visitors to subscribe your free newsletter when visiting your website is necessary in affiliate marketing because people usually don't buy in the first visit. You need to collect their email addresses to follow up with them. To encourage your targeted visitors or audience to sign up your newsletter, you may offer free gifts, e-courses, tutorials or tips. Teach and sale is one of the effective techniques to encourage your subscribers to buy your affiliate product. For instance, let’s say you are promoting SEO software, you can teach your subscribers how to optimize a website to boost the website's ranking in search engines and recommend the seo software to them. Tell them the SEO software will save their time and tons of SEO work. 5. Drive targeted visitors or traffic to your website to generate sales. There are many ways of getting targeted traffic. You may start off with pay-per-click (PPC) advertising programs like Google Adwords and Yahoo Search Marketing. PPC advertising can drive traffic to your site with minimum effort but the costs aren't cheap. You should test them first before investing a lot of money in PPC advertising. Article marketing is another way of getting traffic. This method is absolutely free. What your need to do is create some articles related to your website with a link to your site in the articles resource box and submit them to many article directory. Some of readers may visit your site after reading your articles and increase your website's traffic. Resource Box Alan Liew is a full-time Internet marketer. He currently owns and operates http://www.online4income.com and http://moneymakerinfo.blogspot.com. Both of the websites contain guide and tips to help people start making money online.