Two ways to become a successful affiliate

Let us imagine that someone decides to sell ClickBank products. So he is going to find the text quoted below inside "Promote Products" page at ClickBank website:

ClickBank makes it easy to become a successful affiliate. Opening an account and gaining access to our marketplace will provide opportunities you can't afford to miss. Just follow these simple steps and start earning right away:

1: Sign Up as a ClickBank affiliate.
2: Search the ClickBank marketplace for products to promote.
3: Incorporate our simple "hoplink" into your marketing campaign.
4: Earn commission on every sale you generate.

It is true that using clickbank affiliate hop links is easy, but it is not easy to become "a successful affiliate". It is not simple to find really good ClickBank products to promote and it is not easy to create marketing campaign that will be successful. If you already have your own popular websites or blogs to direct all the traffic to vendors' sales pages, then you are able to pre-sell the actual products/services, make sales, and get those commission checks coming in. However, if you don't have loads of traffic, it is hard to make even few sales.

There are a number of very simple strategies to get some traffic. We can examine blogging for illustration. You don't need to know html coding to make blog, but you need some time to create your blog content. And you need even a lot more time to get some traffic to your blog actually. Yes, you can use forum posting, article marketing, link exchange for SEO and other ways of free advertising, but you need too much time for it. If you want to get sales fast, you got forced to pay-per-click advertising, or email marketing, to get immediate, massive and qualified traffic to your pages, but it's too expensive.

So, it seems that there are just two ways to become successful affiliate. In the first place, you need to create popular high-quality web-resource(s) and in the second place, you have to know how to get loads of cheap and quality traffic. Doesn't matter where you will get it from. Maybe you are able to get tons of traffic from social bookmarking websites or maybe you know SE optimization well enough, if you succeed in one or both of these tasks, you are going to become a successful affiliate either with ClickBank or not.