What it takes to make serious money as an affiliate is to treat it like a business from the start and grow it to the income level you want. Follow these tips and you will be well on your way to earning a good income as an affiliate marketer.

1. Your First Step: Find your buying market. Unless there are people looking to buy what you want to promote, you have no business or income. A basic starting point is finding your market or try to find something that interests you personally. Your first step in growing your affiliate business is knowing who you are going to sell to.

2. Step Two: Focus on Profits. Are there enough buyers to support your efforts promoting in this market is one of the last things many new affiliates consider. You must find out how many people are also promoting to your market. How do you find out if your idea is going to be profitable?

You can do a search on Google, MSN and Yahoo but there's a better way! Nichebot. I use Nichebot because all the major search engines are in one place and with a couple clicks you know if this market is over crowded.  

Say your idea is 'foosball' and your search returns eight million websites using this keyword. It may seem to be a huge amount of competition and be hard for you to gain a foothold with your promotion.

Many new marketers misread this number. This is the number of web pages in Google's database that contain the word 'foosball' - MANY of which may NOT actually be about foosball! There are ites using misleading keywords just to get traffic. They are not your real competitors.

3. Your Third Step: Know who you are really competing with. As an affiliate marketer growing a business, your competitors is not the entire internet community. It's a select handful of businesses that are actually making money promoting products or services to your prospects. Everybody else - they are irrelevant to your needs.

Google, Yahoo and MSN have something called Sponsored Links. These are ads people are paying money to advertise their business. Since they are paying each time someone clicks on their ads, rarely will they use irrelevant keywords. This makes them your real competitors!

If you click on the bottom of the Sponsor Links row, you'll see how many are willing to pay-to-play. At 10 sponsored links per page on Google how many actual competitors do you have? 10? 20? Click 'next page' under the listings and count the number of pages. Multiply the number of Sponsor Links pages by 10 - that's how many real competitors you have.

Now you have real numbers to work with and how many actual competitors are making money with your idea. You can continue with your original affiliate idea or look for something easier to get traffic and make money from.

Starting out you invest time and that's what this is about - investing time to grow your income and affiliate business. As your income grows, you may only need $50 to $100 a month to promote your business but at some stage you will need to invest both time and money.

Try to use these tips in your affiliate business or if you're just starting as an affiliate marketer. You'll soon find yourself having multiple streams of income and a thriving affiliate business that takes very little or as much of your time as you want.

About the author:
If you find this article helpful, you can find more information here: Affiliate Paper.  Georjina Sinese has been earning income as an information marketer online and offline for a little over 3 years.