Dreaming of the big bucks, eh? You want to become an affiliate making money online, passing hapless web surfers into the "checkout lane" for piles of dough. Well, here’s a surefire way to guarantee you’ll never make a dime:

By Making only half of the sale.

Poor affiliates, and by that I mean both poor in technique and poor in the pocketbook, fail because they do too little. They spend too little time with their potential customer, kicking him out right when he’s getting interested. Put yourself in the customers shoes and take a look at what happens with about 90% of the affiliates out there. They try to make the sale but get a sort of inverted sequence which looks like this:

* Customer gets or already has interest in a product which you’re advertising,

* He believes your site holds fulfillment of his interest. He wants either good content or a good product,

* He sees the content/product isn’t on your site, realizes you’re a middleman and that he’s now got to go even further to find what he was looking for,

* This dulls his interest and makes him feel duped. Dissatisfaction or even anger sets in at you for wasting his time,

* He goes elsewhere, knowing the internet is a huge place and that there’s quicker satisfaction to be found. He may never come back but even if he does he may recognize you as "that site that duped me" and leave. You’re on his blacklist for life, whereas if you’d done the process correctly he’d have been a customer for life.

Do you see why that’s an inverted sequence of events? Do you know why this happens?

It’s the wicked half-sale and all comes down to content.

The first thing website owners are taught nowadays, and rightly so, is that they need content. Good, honest content and lots of it. This holds true for many reasons we won’t get into here, but I mention it to remind you that if you’re trying to make money as an affiliate, you’re going to need content as well. In fact, it may even be more important for you since there’s money on the line which often acts as a catalyst to your customer’s satisfaction or lack thereof.

See, someone comes to your site to fill a need, whether it’s to find information or an actual product he can order from you. You have to supply the fulfillment to that need. That’s your only job. I repeat, it is your ONLY job. Even if you’re an affiliate and don’t actually manufacture, store or process the product you still have to give the guy what he’s looking for.

You have to satisfy his need. If you satisfy him half-way, he’s gone. If he needs to keep searching and clicking link after link and trying to find the other half of what he’s looking for, you’ve lost him.

So there’s a good axiom for you: Unsuccessful affiliates only make half the sale.

The corollary to that is: Real affiliates, the successful, seven-figure ones, make THE WHOLE SALE. 100% of it.

That’s right. Whatever company you’re working for as an affiliate only has the job of actually having the product you’re selling and processing the payments. That’s it. You’ve got to make the sale. You’ve got to get you customer so pumped up, so interested in the product that he’s got to have it, no matter what. This comes down to all the essential copywriting points: strong headlines, good copy, urgent close, etc. And only then, when the guy has already been totally convinced that he wants what you got, do you say "Click Here to Purchase."

Any time before that is TOO EARLY.

He’s got to have decided he wants it. He’s got to have the need, the desire and the overwhelming commitment to continue the sale that one last step. Then and only then can you be sure that he WILL take that one last step. If you make him click out too early, he’s not ready. He won’t want to fill out the form, or enter his credit card info, or read more info, or even wait for another page to load. He’s not sold 100% yet.

And remember this. Even if you’re shuffling him off to another page that is good and relevant and has good copy, it’s just more time involved from his end. With that added time his satisfaction and urgency have been blunted and when that occurs it’s even harder to get them back.

Sorry, I hate to put it all on your shoulders, but if you want to be an affiliate, a real affiliate making money online, you’re totally responsible for making the sale. Depend on the stores and businesses themselves only to actually have the inventory.

The rest is up to you.

Good luck.

C. Pabst is an author, entrepreneur and the owner of Work From Home Businesses. He is also the creator of the revolutionary money-making system Internet Triple Header, based on simple, applicable and practical concepts, not positive thinking or luck.