By Sam Bakker

If you want to learn affiliate marketing there are some important things that you need to know. In this article I am going to describe what I see as the biggest stumbling block for new Internet marketers who want to learn affiliate marketing.

I can recall when I first started to learn affiliate marketing, I was new to the online world but I knew its potential after a friend had gone from earning practically nothing to 300 thousand dollars within just a few months. I was determined to make this Internet business work for me; the problem was I simply did not know where to start affiliate marketing. I had no website, no contacts and no one to tell me what to do next. As a result I began to research deep into many niches and spent a lot of my time thoroughly researching until I found a market with little competition that I could dominate. As a result of using this method I wasted months of my young Internet marketing career.

What many Internet marketing trainers don’t tell you is that in order to learn affiliate marketing you first of all need to learn how to build a list. A list is a group of contacts who have expressed an interest via an online form that they want to receive information from you on an ongoing basis. The benefit of a list is that once you build it, it’s always going to be there to profit from. Treat your list in the right way and nurture a relationship with the members of that list and you can make a lot of money on an ongoing basis.

The money really is in the list if you learn and implement the right process. I never realized it before but a list is a real necessity when it comes to making money selling affiliate marketing products. Without a list it is a long and hard path to success online.

So when you first start to learn affiliate marketing you should be drawing your attention to first of all building your list and finding key methods or traffic sources to further build your list. List building is something that completely passed me by when I first started to learn affiliate marketing, now that you know about the influence a list can have you’ll have a head start on others beginning online and you’ll avoid all the headaches that hit me when I first started to learn affiliate marketing.

If you would like to learn about Affiliate Marketing you can do so by signing up for free at Sam Bakker’s new Internet Business website ModernCogs.com. Once you sign up you’ll get his weekly affiliate newsletter as well as a guide to creating your own website and getting it online within minutes.