Steps Involved to kick off affiliate marketing are

1. Sign up with affiliate network
2. Select the campaign, with merchant promoting good product and paying enough commission.
3. Based on the content on the merchant landing page do the keyword research using the ad center, adword etc.
4. Create the ads with your affiliate link and post it on the search networks.
5. Consumer searching for this product clicks on your ad and buys the product through your affiliate link.
6. Merchant pays commission promised to you. This way several product can be promoted on several search network and commission get paid to you, this way you make money from home.
Why Keyword Research is Critical For Your Business
Keyword research can make or break your affiliate marketing business. The Correct Keywords will get you tons of targeted traffic and sales, while lousy ones waste your time, money and efforts. Marketing the product means driving traffic to your website and sales page. You can buy traffic or get it for free. The most common way to get instant targeted traffic to your website is to buy it through pay-per-click (PPC) search engines like Google Adwords, Yahoo Search Engine Marketing, MSN Adcenter. Long-tail key phrases have low search counts. So need to target such long-tail key phrases for your campaigns in order to drive enough traffic.