Zlio Affiliate Programs

I am almost a complete newbie to affiliate programs and I am currently making some effort to make use of them. Affiliate programs promise a relatively easy way to make money over internet. What you have to do is to persuade internet users to buy something that someone else is selling. Let's say you have a soccer site. If you link from your site to amazon.com for example and drive traffic from your soccer site to amazon, who buy soccer balls there you get paid a percentage of the soccer ball price. Maybe sounds easy in the beginning... Well, it is not that easy.
To be successful in this your site needs a lot of traffic. And furthermore it needs targeted traffic. If you soccer site attracts Start Wars fans, you are not likely to sell many soccer balls, as Start Wars fans are most likely to buy laser swords.
When trying to attract visitors to your site it seems everything comes to one abbreviation: SEO. That is where things become difficult.
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. This is relatively new branch of the computer science. Well, I guess it is not that new, but I say new, because it is not as old as programming for example. SEO means 'how to make search engines show your site up in their search results' or in more lamer style: "how to become n1 in google?"
So I knew this and that and I decided to give affiliate programs a try. I signed up in zlio. I chose zlio because it was recommended to me by a friend, but there is many, many thousands of affiliate programs you can start with. In zlio you create your own personal stores. Your stores are hosted by zlio and you receive a zlio subdomain, so starting a new store cost no money to me. The stores are 'out of the box'. You don't have to write any html or scripts. Actually you are not allowed to touch your html directly which is a big disadvantage in my opinion. You manage your store through a control panel, through which you can add products, add/delete categories, etc.
So I made about 5 stores, added their urls to Google and started waiting for the google bot to add them to its cache. It showed up in about week. In the beginning everything was developing just as I had expected. I didn't have a lot of visits to my sites, but they were steadily increasing every day. Until.. yesterday. I found that google have completely removed its cache of some of my pages, and left only a page or two of the others. I saw my visits dropping drastically today. I hope this is because my sites are still new and thing will get better in time. But this wait is just so unpleasant after I had put a lot of effort in this over last two weeks...