Clickbank is one of the easiest ways to get started promoting products as an affiliate. Unlike other affiliate networks, you don’t have to have a website in order to be approved as an affiliate. In fact, you don’t have to do much of anything to sign up aside from have an email address. You can use clickbank.com as a means to generate easy links that you can use in any number of different internet promotion strategies.

Many businesses don’t want to manage their own affiliate programs so they sign up with companies that manage their affiliate program for them. These are affiliate networks that manage the relationships between the businesses and the affiliates. This means that as an affiliate, you can get access to several businesses through one affiliate network. Depending on the network, you may still have to apply to be accepted by each business individually.

CPA Networks are another type of network you can use to generate revenue. These can be easier to get a conversion because you’re not asking someone to buy something, instead, you’re asking someone to take some action, like fill out a form or complete a survey. Companies will pay you for this information or the work to get the leads.

If you were to take your links from Clickbank and try to find a place to start promoting affiliate programs, the easiest would probably be online classified ad websites. There are some major disadvantages. The main one being that because it’s free, there are a lot of other affiliates trying to do the same thing so the number of clicks you get back to your affiliate program may be relatively small compared to other sources and the conversion percentage may suffer. The important part to promoting on classified sites and anywhere for that matter is to make sure you’re using and keeping a record of the tracking IDs. Make a unique tracking ID for every site or advertisement that you use. If you don’t have a way to track your results, when you start getting sales, you won’t know where they came from and won’t know what to duplicate.

If you’re good at writing or can find a writer to assist you, article marketing may be an excellent way to go. Articles have the capacity to drive some great traffic to your website or affiliate landing page. In my experience, articles tend to produce about a 7% click through rate, or the rate at which people will click on the link in your resource box is about 7%. Some articles will do better than others which isn’t unexpected. If you submit to article directories with a good ranking and good “authority”, you’ll have the chance to have those articles rank well in the search engines.

Social networking is becoming more and more popular and can be leveraged to help you promote your affiliate program. Some sites, such as squidoo.com and hubpages.com allow you to create a page talking about and promoting whatever you want to promote. Other social networking sites can be leveraged significantly for getting your main website into the search engines as well.

Another way to promote affiliate products is through blogging. Some people use the blog to specifically sell their products, other people will use a blog as a means to get traffic usually for some controversial topics or instructional topics then promote products as advertisements on their sites. Blogging can be a great strategy to help you get traffic to your affiliate promotions.

You can develop a more traditional website which would be similar to wordpress on a self hosted site. In fact, there would be no difference for the most part assuming you’re using a program like wordpress to manage your content. The SEO tools and plugins that come with wordpress on a self-hosted blog scenario are very good. The idea here is to generate the kind of content that attracts people and keeps people on the site. Some ideas for how to generate this type of content can be found on copyblogger.com and problogger.net which are two excellent resource for how to make money using a blog.

Pay per click advertising can support driving traffic through to a page that you control the content, such as a landing or squeeze page or can also redirect traffic directly from the advertisement itself through to the affiliate site with your affiliate ID in the link itself. This method is called direct linking. Another scenario is to send the traffic from pay per click to an information site or a theme based site where you’re going to rely on the fact that a certain percentage of people that visit that site are going to take action.

These ideas are just meant to introduce you to some of the concepts. You can do some additional research on any of these methods and find a lot of great free information online. Several websites offer great resources for how to get started with affiliate marketing. Good luck!

In addition to writing articles similar to this one, I also promote affordable web hosting and bluehost coupon. I have started podcasting again. You can find me by searching for Brian Armstrong in iTunes.