You put on your helmet each morning and trudge out on to the affiliate battlefield, hopeful that this brand new day will bring you the rewards you seek.

What you need to know is, hope is not necessary to succeed with affiliate marketing.

There are a great many affiliate programs out there to choose from.

Unfortunately, most will lose you time and money.

Did you know that ninety six percent of affiliates make less than one hundred dollars a month?

A large percentage of the ninety six percent make no money at all or actually lose money.

The main reason is, most people are lazy in nature. They are usually drawn towards the shortest, easiest path.

This happens to be good news for you. Since, they are your competition, you only need better their efforts to achieve more.

Sadly, most also leave the affiliate battlefield prematurely.

In affiliate marketing, knowing the product or service you are promoting and testing, is the key. Testing advertisements, dropping the losers and running with the winners. is the most important single thing you can do to ensure you win the affiliate battles.

This applies whether it is your approach of potential buyers, and the places you find them, or paid advertisements.

Let me give you an example. You are promoting a product and have twenty keywords you use with Adwords. You have not been tracking the sales from each keyword, and simply let them all run. Without you knowing, seven of these keywords are very profitable, seven are mediocre, but still provide a small profit, and the other six are losers, with two in particular not making you any sales at all.

Little do you realise perhaps, that if you only cast aside these six keywords, your profits would double!

However, the affiliate program you are involved with has been so successful, you have not bothered to track and test the profits you are getting from each individual keyword.

Such is the power of testing and tracking, that you could turn a seemingly poor performing and ultimately costly affiliate program, into a winner. Yet, without the testing you would not have known this.

The big secret of winning the affiliate marketing war is doing more than your competition is prepared to do. Which actually is the secret to achieving more of anything in life. Going the extra mile further than other people are prepared to go.

If you are willing to do this, being successful is almost guaranteed.

The question now is, are you ready to win the affiliate marketing war?

Copyright Gary Martin 2006 All Right Reserved