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In affiliate marketing you are concerned about finding matching buyers and sellers, then about connecting the two together. In other words, bring the buyers to the seller, facilitate the sale, and get your commission.

There are several ways to bring those two together, but mainly there are two categories of promotional activities that an affiliate can use: paid and free.

Paid Advertising:

Paid advertising is the most reliable form on which you can build a business. Think about it this way: you can build a business only on what you can predict. Paid advertising is predictable. You pay a certain amount of money expecting a certain number of visits to your website.

The most famous form of paid advertising in the affiliate marketing field is PPC or pay per click. As the name says: you pay per visitor to your website. You need to submit your ad to the advertising network (mainly Facebook, Google, Yahoo, and MSN) and bid on the keywords you want your ad to show up for.

Other paid forms of advertising include banners (also called media buying), adware pop ups, and inline text ads.

Free Traffic:

This title is deceiving. Not because you don’t pay money for this kind of traffic it becomes free. You work for it, and your time is the most precious asset you’ll ever have.

Free traffic comes from search engines when you build a website and optimize it to rank for certain keywords when searched on search engines. Depending on your keywords this process might take any time from a few weeks to years in order to show on the first page of search results.

Other free sources of traffic include using social media and web 2.0 websites like blogs and article directories.

The huge defect in these methods is that they are totally out of your control. Search engines change their algorithms frequently and this means continuous optimization efforts. Also web 2.0 websites have their own rules that they also change frequently and they can delete your traffic generating contents at any time. I know this first hand.

Free promotional methods are only good for making money, but not for building a business with liabilities and commitments.

Formal affiliate marketing training, unfortunately, doesn’t exist. The good news is that I have a completely free affiliate marketing training series posted on my website: http://marketing-online-101.com where I explain it the way I do it.

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