The Internet has transformed our lives significantly in the past ten years or so. It began as a novelty and rapidly became one of those things that no one can do without. Need a movie review in a pinch? It’s on the Internet. Need tickets for a ballgame? Go get them. Want to make a lot of money without having a store? Set up a Website and you’re ready to go. Of all of the things that the Internet has changed, nothing has changed as much as retail.

The Internet now makes it simple for anyone to have a retail presence without competing with the likes of Wal-Mart. With the advent of affiliate marketing, retailers do not even have to stock product anymore. Through affiliate marketing, a Website owner merely registers with a creator or publisher, advertises a product on her own Website, and provides a hyperlink to a site where the prospective customer can buy the product. If the customer buys, the Website owner, or “affiliate” gets a piece of the sale. It’s seemingly a perfect way to sell, as there is no overhead for the seller. You just need a Website.

Unfortunately, most affiliate marketers make very little money. The “there’s nothing to it!” approach to selling has led many unprepared people to jump into affiliate marketing, convinced that their first million will be theirs just as soon as they build their Website. What is it that the publishers who recommend affiliate sales don’t tell you?

The deep dark secret that no one is eager to talk about is that in order to make sales, you have to have customers. The single hardest thing to do in the world of Internet commerce is to lure visitors to your site. If you’re offering Product X as an affiliate, you aren’t alone, and your brand new Website has to compete with the publisher of Product X along with every single affiliate the company has in order to find customers and make sales. The difficulty of getting traffic is what no one wants to discuss. If you have a Website, you need traffic. What can you do about it?

There are any one of a number of things you can do, and a Yahoo! search for “Web traffic” will probably produce many more suggestions. You can buy ads; Google Adwords is one possible place to do it. You can write articles and publish them to various Websites, which will eventually bring traffic to your site. You can optimize your Website to be friendly to search engines by becoming familiar with search engine optimization (SEO) methods or by purchasing one of a number of SEO programs.

If you can conquer the customer problem, you can, without a doubt, make a lot of money on the Web. You should, however, be sure to consider that the task of building Web traffic is a tough one, and it’s likely the biggest barrier standing between you and probable sales. You shouldn’t be discouraged by the problems with drawing traffic to your Website if you are participating in affiliate marketing.