If you have a blog of any kind, and you want to use it to make money online, promoting other people's products is one of the best ways to get started quickly, and make commissions on autopilot.

Unlike advertising revenue like Google AdSense or Text Link Ads however, you cannot just expect so slap in some codes and do nothing else.

Affiliate marketing, as it has always been, requires a lot of smart pre-selling on your part. The good thing is that is you do this properly, you can make so much more from affiliate products than you can from picky, fickle-minded web advertisers.

Here's how you do it:

1) Post a useful product review

I've made over 40 sales of a $97 affiliate product just by posting a useful review of it. The keyword here is that it must be "useful", not a blatant sales pitch. While you highlight the benefits of the product, do also mention the drawbacks or limitations, playing them down as necessary or simply putting them in a more positive light.

People aren't stupid. They know that there must be something about the product that you're not telling them just so you can make a sale. So go ahead and tell them everything, but craft your words so the negatives won\'t sound like a big deal.

2) Do a podcast with the product owner

I've sold over 56 copies of a $47 ebook with this method. All I did was interview the product creator, and put up the MP3 on my blog. When you interview someone, make sure you provide content first, and when the person's authority is established, move in for the sale. But do it tactfully!

The best way to do it is to mention your affiliate link at the beginning and the end of the  interview so that people can get more information on the product. You have to make the URL easy to remember, and don't ever attempt to give out a raw affiliate link during the call. A simple page that redirects to your affiliate link will do.

You can, and should, also put your affiliate link in the blog post itself.

3) Interlink your articles masterfully

When you have a product review or podcast download page up, you can always write new blog posts related to the product, and link to the pages. Never scatter your affiliate links all over your blog; it's better to leave them on one or two pages and link all other posts to that page.

When promoting affiliate products from your blog, you must identify your "money pages", which are the ones you'll spend the most amount of time writing, preselling and selling the actual affiliate product.

All over your blog, try to drive the traffic to those pages, and your affiliate income will surely increase.

Affiliate marketing with blogs is really simple. The mistake most people do is they copy and paste promotional emails created by the product owner into their blogs, making it look more like a messy notice board instead of a useful a site you'll want to come back to! With this level of effort how can you expect to really make money from affiliate marketing?

You need to put in your share of effort, but your one-time effort will multiply itself by getting more search engine traffic and referral traffic from others to your review or podcast. When you have a carefully crafted "money page" you can even drive traffic from Google AdWords to it and your conversion rate will be great.