SEO before promoting affiliate programs -

• Chose your low competitive niche and sort top search volume keywords but with low competition.
• Check your content frequency with your website content and keywords.
• Remember, Content is always the king, so make your content unique and targeted with your business.
• Now, get rank for those keyword phrase by bookmarking, article submitting and sending pings to search engines
• RSS feed is the best atom distributing tool to spread your content to various directories.

I think, above mentioned steps are enough before promoting your affiliate programs.

Now, chose your affiliate program with top affiliate networks like CJ, Clickbank and Hydra where many lead and sale offers are available for various topics. After choosing your favorite affiliate program, grab your promotional materials like banner, text link and email text. Place your affiliate program's promotional material at your website where your visitors offently click you pages or ads.

If you have good traffic at your niche or website, you can easily generate more leads per day, As there many pay per lead affiliate programs which pay up to $5 per lead.

PPC -

Pay per click advertising is the best way to generate more money by converting traffic into lead. All you need is to sort and collect proper keywords at your advertising network like Google Adwords. First set your bid high and promote yous campaign with targeted traffic and then lower the bid when your campaign is getting massive hits.