One of the biggest mistakes I made years ago is I did not set up opt-in form and builds my own list. I want to share it with you here to let you avoid the same mistake I made.

Based on the nature of affiliate business - you sign up as an affiliate at merchant's website, get your unique affiliate link and then start to promote the product or service to whomever to generate the sales and make commissions. However, after time being, you start to feel down and disappointed because you didn't make any sales.

Originally, you may think it is easy for just promote the product or service directly to the visitors, get them come to merchant's website, and buy the product. Well, in general, this is not the case especially if it is their first time visiting the website.

Here is the fact, before visitors willing to purchase anything from a person or a business, often time; they need to get warmed up to a product first, use course of multiple visits and additional information method can achieve it. This is where building a list comes into play.

As an affiliate, build a list, your own list is an essential step toward to your affiliate marketing success. Your list can help you retain traffic, warm up their desire, and make different purchases in the near future.

In order to do it successfully, you must invest bit of your money in autoresponder service tool.

Speaking of autoresponder, personally, I highly recommended you use Aweber autoresponder service. They give you 30 days risk free try out, if until the end they didn't help you build your opt-in list and convert more website visitors to you, they'll give you a 100 percent no questions asked refund.

In addition, their email deliverability delivery monitor tool allows you to test and track your message content and service provider deliverability performance. Reliable email deliverability ensures that your opt-in email is delivered to major ISP's. Best of all, it is white listed by many email clients and boasts a delivery rate of 99 percent.

As I said, Aweber autoresponder service not only manages your list, it also helps you build it. It includes free tools that allow you to create web forms and pop-ups, all of which that can use to increase your opt-in rate.

In addition to purchasing an autoresponder service, you will need to setup your own website. If you do not own one, you need to create your own domain, find a reliable hosting service company to host your site, and then add opt-in form to your website's page.

Once you have your site and your autoresponder setup, there are only two steps left: the first one is creating a course of some sort, which related to the affiliate products or service you are going to sell; and the second one is upload course to your account to generate the list.

The first part is relatively easy. You can start by determining your topic and then outline it to five to seven day mini-course. When you do this, remember that everything should be written as if you are talking to a person, rather than writing a formal article.

If you do not feel comfortable writing these articles by yourself, you can always hire a ghostwriter for $5-15 per issue; the price charge is depending on the length of the article.

After you created your autoresponder series, you need to sign in to your Aweber autoresponder account and feed them into it. You can also write short advertisements in the text for the affiliate product or service you are planning to sell.

Once you get above these works done, the only thing left is to use various traffic methods to drive the traffic to your website, collect visitor's email addresses and wait for the commissions to roll in.