Affiliate marketing is making money for thousands of people internationally and it is not that hard starting legitimate Internet businesses as an affiliate.

Let's take a look at a few things that you will need to do to get started.

1. First of all you need to choose a market to be in. Today that is known as finding a niche that you want to be involved in.

Choosing a niche market as a first step is a better approach to take than choosing a product to sell because what you are looking for is a niche market that attracts a lot of interest and is dynamic enough for you to make money in.

Also, once you have chosen a niche, many viable products within that specific niche will present themselves to you. If possible, I would suggest that you choose a niche market that you are an expert in or have an interest in.

2. Now you can actually begin looking for products to sell within that particular market. Utilizing online directories such as CJ.com or AssociatePrograms.com is a great way to find products to sell for the market to you choose.

Select several products that appeal to you and then decide on just one to promote. At this stage, it would be a good investment to purchase the product so that you can test drive it and become an expert on it.

3. Your next step in starting legitimate Internet businesses is to subscribe to an auto responder service and write a series of messages about the product you want to promote.

Find out what promotional material is available from the affiliate merchant as soon as you've selected a product. A great way to write your advertising copy is to describe the detailed product information from the affiliate merchant and show how it will benefit your readers.

If the affiliate merchant provides pre-written messages, you can either plug them straight into your auto-responder or rewrite them to fit your own campaign requirements. Also if you choose to purchase the product you can write about your experiences with it.

4. Savvy marketing affiliates will not send prospects directly to affiliate sales pages. What they do is to point them to a lead capture page first.

The advantage of a lead capture page is that you can then redirect all of your visitors into your auto-responder for follow-up and then send them to your affiliate sales page. Bear in mind that few people buy a product on the first viewing.

They need to be warmed up to the benefits of the product first. That is why it is so important to get them to give your their email address; you want to have their permission to send them several posts about the product over a period of time.

You may have to make several posts to get a sale, but just keep on doing it and eventually it will happen.

5. You will either need to make a website and post your landing pages on it, or start a blog and host them on that.

6. A lot of your time will go into driving visitors to your lead capture page or pages. Initially you are going to want to master one form of traffic generation.

To do that you'll want to learn a little bit about several of them, including article marketing, ppc advertising, blogging, ezine advertising, traffic exchanges, and so on.

All of these methods will be a big plus when starting legitimate Internet Businesses.

This will give you a good system for creating traffic, prospects for future follow-up, and ultimately, product sales. This is the best way to start an affiliate marketing business for longterm success.