Affiliate Marketing On A Shoestring Budget

For those who want to use affiliate marketing to make money online but are
strapped financially there are several no cost ways to start earning
commissions. The methods are free but do require an investment of time to
be successful.
They generally are not as fast at generating commissions as paid
advertising such as google adwords but are more of a gradual way of building
income online.

Blogs are the most effective tool to earn affiliate commissions without
incurring any expenses. Writing niche blogs around a specific topic that
are keyword rich tend to get ranked well in search engine results. It's
important for a blog to be updated often and provide a feed to draw in
traffic. Posts to update a blog should be done everyday. Anyone who runs
out of ideas for updating his or her blog can find free articles on just
about any topic in article directories. These free articles can be used as
blog posts. Feeds from other blogs can also be included in a blog to
provide updated information. Having a interesting and frequently updated
blog will recieve links from other sites and will get noticed by the search
engines.

Writing articles and publishing them online is another no
cost affiliate marketing technique. The articles can have
an link to an affiliate site in them. A good strategy I recommend though is
a link to a blog or site with information related to or reviews of the
affiliate site itself. Once an article is published it is often reprinted
on many websites, blogs and ezines all accross the
internet. This alone will produce some targeted traffic.
Oftentimes the articles will rank well in search engine results and also the
links the articles generate help the affiliate site rank well.

Traffic exchanges are another free affiliate marketing method. With traffic
exchanges one views other websites to gain credits which can be redeemed for
traffic to their own site. Traffic exchanges are much less effective than
blogs or articles. There are two reasons for this. First of all exchange
traffic is not targeted. Secondly traffic from exchanges are from people
who are mailnly interested in generating hits to their own websites. Even
so commissions
can be made from traffic exchanges. The time spent on
traffic exchanges should be much less than on blogs and articles though.

Placing advertising on free classified sites and ezines is another affiliate
marketing tool. Since there is usually a lot of others placing these free
classifieds an ad should really stand out from the others and compell
someone seeing the ad to click on it.

Using free affiliate marketing methods to make money online isn't a way to
"get rich quick". It takes a lot of time writing and placing ads. If one
works at it consistently especially blogging and writing articles they
should be able to build a nice income over a period of several months and
not have to spend any money doing it.

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Aaron Ballantyne owns a blog with useful information and links to resources
about affiliate marketing. To learn more go to:
http://ajballan.typepad.com/affiliate_marketing