Getting starting in affiliate marketing?

[gtijon]

I've had an idea for an affiliate marketing website. I've got a full time job, and this would purely be for a bit of extra spending money at present.

I've previously worked in the area I'm thinking of, and could write a decent "consumers guide" type site with some affiliate pieces linked in, rather than the entire site revolving around links. I've also written a bit of copy in the past and in the VERY distant past wrote a bit of HTML. I'm sure there would be a learning curve to get caught up to modern web skills! At the moment, there doesn't seem to be a great deal of risk beyond time and maybe a few quid on hosting.

I appreciate nobody who does this full time is going to let the cat out of the bag entirely, but has anyone got any pointers for a starter or any literature to read? Even a few successful sites to take a look at would be very handy.

[gtijon]

Cheers for the advice guys. It's pretty clear the first steps in finding out what works will be googling for financial products, hunting out the high ranking affiliate sites and digging into how they work.

It looks like I could spend a long time reading articles which eventually lead to "Sign up for my webinar!" or skim over those for the basic and dig into real world sites.