Making Money with Affiliate Marketing using Free Advertising

by Theodore Goodwin

Affiliate Marketing can be a great way to grow your online income. There are an ever increasing amount of affiliate programs to choose from. Many of them will claim they are the best of the best. Of course, they have to claim this to get interested affiliates. It's your job to cut through the hype and find the ones that will be worth your time.

Before you do that though you have to realize that affiliate marketing isn't as easy as many of the programs would have you think. If you don't already have an advertising budget it will be difficult to make sales. And even if you do have an advertising budget you have a lot of steep competition that has been marketing online for many years.

Without an advertising budget your marketing will be very limited. Probably the best free way to market is with articles. But article marketing can be a slow and tedious process. For instance, you can submit an article to a site like www.ezinearticles.com. If you have keyword density you could land your article on page one of a Google search within a day or two. That's great and will get you some quick hits and hopefully some people will click the link to the affiliate product you are trying to sell. The problem is that your article will only be on page one for a few days at the most. After a few days it will simply disappear. Ezinearticles.com and other sites like it have the necessary page rank to get you the initial bump. To keep that bump you have to create back links. If you don't create back links to the article then your free advertising is basically over. Very few people will see your article again.

At this point you'll need to create another article and hope you can get a sale from it. But the sales do not come pouring in. You may get lucky and make a sale in the first couple of articles. Or you could write dozens and not make one sale. You won't have much control over whether you make a sale or not. The only thing you can do is make sure your article is good and the signature box with the link to your affiliate product is interesting enough to get people to click through.

Be sure to make your signature box interesting and unique. Stuff like "click here for more information" just doesn't cut it. You need to create some curiosity with your signature box. Adding some humor also helps. You spent all that time writing an article, don't waste it with a bland signature box. Take your time with it because it's what actually gets people to click through. The article is just there to hold their attention long enough to read your signature box. The "signature box" I use in this article is an example of what not to do. Be creative.

Using traffic exchanges to sell affiliate products is incredibly difficult. The best thing you can do with a traffic exchange is build up a list. The best way to build up a list is to offer something for free that the target audience will want. Sometimes creating curiosity is enough to get someone to join your list. But if you give them additional value up front they'll be much more inclined to stay on your list once they join. Once you have your list growing you can start offering tips and information that relate to the affiliate products your offer. Don't just send out sales pitches. Too many sales pitches in a row and your list will start to dwindle. A good idea is to do the same thing you would do with articles. Offer a good tip or two that is related to your affiliate product and then create some curiosity for what you are offering.

There are not too many free advertising methods that will work well for selling affiliate products. Article marketing is perhaps the best way and even it is slow going. If you're new to all this you might want to join some email lists that offer marketing tips and information.

Your best friend in all this is patience. Free marketing will only get you so far. You'll need to use the free marketing to get a base income that can then be used to pay for ads. But before you pay for ads you will need to do a good amount of research on internet marketing so you don't end up wasting your hard earned money. There are many sources out there to help. Just keep your eyes open, join a bunch of email lists and research everything you can.

© Theodore Goodwin, All rights reserved.
You may publish this article on your site or use it in any way you wish as long as you include this signature box in full with no changes. For free articles updated at least every weekday please visit the Article Library.
Submitted on Feb 3, 2009