The first thing that anyone who gets in to the affiliate marketing business soon realizes is that there is almost an unlimited amount of resources to choose from. You could literately spend a life time trying all of them and not finish.

There are multiple affiliate programs out there like Click Bank and Commission Junction. Each one having thousands of products to choose from. Even individual websites offer affiliate programs to help promote their products.

So what do you do with all of these choices? Sign up for as many of them as you can? Promote hundreds of products so you have a higher chance of making a sale?

No, let me say that again, NO. That is exactly what you don't do.

It's all about focus. You need to focus on one program and only a few complementary products in a niche market where people are looking to buy. We will get into finding these markets in the next article.

If you spread yourself out too much you will not get much accomplished at all. Like the old saying goes, "Finish what you started." Think about what you could do if you spent 100% of your time focusing on one program and one group of products.

This is hard to do at first. I know from experience. When I first started I had this grand vision of an affiliate product super store with hundreds of products. Just like an online store, but I was just promoting other peoples products not actually selling them. I ended up spending months trying to get the store designed and up and running. I wasn't able to spend much time researching products and putting together a good campaign for each one because I wanted as many good products as I could get my hands on. The whole time I was not making any money what so ever. And when I finally got it ready, I realized just how much work I was causing my self. It’s a full time job trying to maintain an online store, and that’s not what I wanted. I needed at least 5 people to accomplish the goals I had in mind. On top of all that I would have to try and compete with huge sites like Cnet.com and Downloads.com.

It was a very bad decision on my part and exactly what you should not do. Go to http://www.eproductshop.com to see what I was working on. I think it may still have potential, but it will require way more time and effort than I have to give to it.

Now imagine I spent that same amount of time working with a handful of complementary products, three or four at the most, that I could research and develop very in-depth marketing campaigns for, then tie them together and cross sell to potential buyers. Thus increasing my conversion rate and making more money.

This is exactly what you need to be doing and if your not, stop and start over. Focus your efforts on one program and a very few select group of products. Make it successful and ideally running on autopilot, then move on to your next project. If it turns out to be a flop, learn from it and move on.