Every day thousands of people join affiliate programs and yet every day thousands more get discouraged and give up trying to make money from their affiliate programs.

Still, thousands others wait for their generous checks from all sorts of affiliate programs and laugh all the way to the bank, every month. I make good money from an affiliate program using articles as the main part of my affiliate marketing strategy.

But what is more is that there are plenty of other guys out there doing the same, although some of them use more expensive methods than free articles. For example, recently I personally saw a monthly check for $15,000 shown to me by a friend involved in a leading affiliate marketing program.

So what is the difference between the frustrated and the successful?

The difference is that the top earners have an affiliate marketing system for generating a constant supply of leads or traffic to the web sites they represent. In contrast, the ones who do not make any money do not have any system. They often just sit back and wait for things to happen. Sorry folks the hype is just not true. You have to put in some effort!

In this first article in a series, we will deal with 3 key factors one needs to address to launch a successful affiliate marketing strategy using articles that can work for virtually any affiliate program.

1) You must know what works and what doesn't.

The problem with most affiliate programs is that you will not be able to know where your traffic is coming from. Online that is a disaster. It is like flying an aircraft blind. Sooner or later you will crush.

A good solution is to start a blog with an identical topic to your affiliate program. Use a good site meter to carefully monitor the traffic you are receiving. You can then easily refer the people who visit your blog to your affiliate site. To make your blog even more interesting you can carry Google Adsense pay per click ads. This way you can have some income even as you build up your affiliate program. Use the articles that you are posting elsewhere on your blog.

While generating revenue from your blog, do not lose sight of your main objective which is to monitor what articles posted at which web sites are bringing in the most traffic. You can then use this information to constantly improve on the volume of traffic headed to your affiliate program site.

This is yet another reason why it is so important to select an affiliate program based on a subject that you are personally interested in. Maybe closely linked to a hobby you really love. Only then will you have the enthusiasm to constantly come up with various new ideas to market your affiliate program and have the passion required to regularly test and improve and also enjoy doing so.

See my other articles on how to write effective articles and where to post them.

2) Write consistently
Some people will briefly post a few articles and then throw in the towel. What a waste. Not only do they lose the benefits of the viral effect all good articles enjoy on the net (of getting posted and reposted all over the place.) but they will also end up wasting a lot of their valuable time. Time is a very valuable resource, imagine spending so much of it on something and not then you abandon it and end up not having learned anything?

The other thing is that for traffic to rise and continue doing so, you will have to be very consistent with your posting.

3) Use keywords to increase traffic
Ignore keywords at your own peril. Keywords are the currency of online content. You will only enjoy 5% of the effect or even less, if you do not pay attention to keywords.

Look for keywords that are rising in popularity but do not have too much competition yet. That way you will have a fighting chance of pulling in traffic from the search engines, which is the most effective affiliate marketing method so far. This can easily be done using search engines and testing various keywords to see what results you get.

The effectiveness of search engines is the reason why many successful affiliates buy pay-per-click ads as the core of their affiliate marketing strategy. However since you are doing your affiliate marketing with articles, you will need to work a lot harder to place your keyword-rich articles in as many web sites as possible. Done properly it can be just as effective.

For example 10 keyword-rich articles placed in 50 different sites and viewed by an average of just two people per day on average will give you 1000 hits per day. If 20 per cent of these people make it to your affiliate site every day that is 200 serious visitors a day. Enough to make most affiliate programs work well for you.

Please do not take these figures too seriously. It also depends on a lot many other factors which we will discuss in future articles.

Christopher Kyalo is a writer/marketing expert who makes money online only by posting free articles. Visit his blog at http://www.big-online-story.blogspot.com for free tips and valuable secrets.