Getting Your Traffic from Free Sources

One of the first things you need to learn about affiliate marketing is that traffic is the life blood of a profitable business. If you don't have traffic to your website you don't make any money because you don't have any customers.

But how do you get traffic? Admittedly if you have got dollars to spare you can buy traffic but that can be very expensive particularly if you are targeting a popular keyword. However, many affiliate marketers prefer to focus instead on driving free traffic to their websites.

There are a number of different ways to find free traffic if you are prepared to do some work. Some take a bit more effort than others, but equally some of your efforts will gain you higher numbers of visitors.

A few of the more popular sources for affiliate marketing are the social media sites like Face book, Twitter and MySpace. Then you can look at the well known sites such as Squidoo, YouTube, Craigslist and Ezine Articles. The methods of advertising vary by either making up blog sites, posting your videos to YouTube, creating fan pages and group pages on Face book just to name a few.

However we are going to be concentrating today on one of the oldest yet still effective methods of getting free traffic and that is by writing articles for ezine directories.

Even though you are focusing on building links to your website and trying to get a front page ranking in Google this can all take time to achieve. In the meantime you can give your traffic a kick-start by writing articles and submitting them to directories. In some cases acceptance is immediate and other directories like Ezine Articles (the most well known) can take a couple of days. But even so you are getting readers to your work very quickly.

Obviously you need to write unique, compelling and informative content that will incite people to find out more, so they can scroll to the bottom of your article and then click on the link in your resource box to your website. Your articles should be free from typing errors and spelling mistakes, nothing is more off putting to a reader than something that is poorly formatted and doesn't make sense; it doesn't give that professional feel that you should be hoping to achieve.

You can submit the same article to several different article directories; however it is a good idea to make sure that the one you send to Ezine Articles is just a bit different to the others. Ezine articles are very strict about the fact that your material should be original and not copied from someone else.

You can submit as many different articles as you like, remember the more you get published the better chance you have of being noticed. The other advantage in affiliate marketing is that by becoming an article publisher you can start to establish your expert status in regard to a particular topic whilst at the same time building up your credibility.

It's not difficult to write articles and you will find the more you do the easier it becomes, try and get into the habit of writing and submitting them on a regular basis. One of the reasons that article marketing has been around so long is because it works.