Joining an affiliate programme and displaying text ads or image ads on your website and a bit of traffic through Google AdWords won't guarantee you success as an affiliate.

A handful of people really think it's that easy because they spend a lot of time reading success stories of self proclaimed six figure affiliates who claim they earn hundreds of thousands or millions annually. I believe it's better or more constructive to spend time working on getting traffic to your website. Traffic means a traffic jam to your website.

So just joining an affiliate programme and grabbing the text and image ads is just the beginning of the beginning. The major affiliates will tell you that success comes when you start getting the couple of hundreds to thousands in page views a day. So before you start thinking of the money, put that to the side for a while and think about building yourself a lot of traffic.

Getting traffic is the hardest thing to accomplish but with time it will come through. At the end of the day it's all about the hard work you put in. The good thing as well is you can always promote your website online for free. But can you do it. Some people spend over 10 hours a day marketing their websites online and some people are plain lazy. Some just build their websites and expect to make affiliate money after they have joined an affiliate programme.

So work on your traffic first and when you have accomplished this stage and your website is properly monetized then success in affiliate marketing will soon be around the corner.