If you are reading this article I am going to assume that you have basic understanding of what affiliate marketing is. I am now going to expand and give you a few ideas on where to advertise your vendors website; some of these may be obvious but others not. All you need to get started is the referral hop link URL and the HTML code the vendor provides.

The first is obvious, your website, blog, tweet, Facebook and/or MySpace. It’s free and easy to make a blog, you can blog about anything you would like-I do suggest though that you do write something on the same topic of the product you are promoting. After every page or so just stick a one liner in something like this:

If you enjoyed my article/blog about so and so then you may be interested in this product. Cheezy I know but it works. I found Facebook headlines work astoundingly well especially if you have a lot of friends.

Just say something like: Hey everyone, I found this great product about. (Insert Product here) you might be interested in. Then when your friends ask you about the product you can promote it even further.

Word of mouth has been proven time and time again the most effective advertising method. Next MySpace makes it very easy to insert the HTML code so I wont give an in depth explanation. As for twitter, tweet to your hearts content about your product.

Now that we have the most common methods out of the way lets look at some others. Forum signatures, writing reviews on products, eBooks, yahoo answers, and Google AdWords. Other offline methods are friends, business cards, flyers, posters, and classified ads. Lets start with forum writing and the signatures, if you are an avid forum poster then this could be one of the best free ways around.

For those of you who do not know what a forum signature is, it what always appears at the bottom of your posts. Now lets say now that you are promoting a movie website. You can start by compiling a list of movie forums, then you search the forums for every place that a user asks for a good site to watch streaming movies. You then come to there aid-or so they think and give them a totally unbiased representation of your product, or so they think. The same is true for yahoo answers.

The next great way to promote products is to write reviews of the products at places such as Google products. Again give an “unbiased” review of your product.

Google AdWords is a CPC program or cost per click which is almost guaranteed to get you traffic, but there is a catch. You will get a lot more traffic but you are paying for it.