In affiliate marketing just like in life, sometimes the best things are free. Methods that attract profitable traffic to your website for free may sound a little too good to be true, but rest assured they aren’t!

With a little bit of patience and elbow grease you will be surprised with what you can accomplish.

So, where to begin? Let’s take it step by step to make sure that you’ve got all of your bases covered:

Step 1 – Research, research, research! (A lot of time spent here will be profitable in the long run.)

Step 2 - Select a product and/or service to promote

Step 3 - Cultivate a relationship with a merchant and accept your affiliate agreement.

Step 4 - Register a domain, build a website, and get organized to collect email addresses for a distribution list.

Step 5 – Now all you need is traffic – but how do you get it for free? Articles!

I’m a fan of writing myself, but even if the thought of staring at a blank screen gives you the creeps, you’ll still be able to handle this – no problem!

Start out with one simple article about an issue related to your niche. I find that sitting down and verbally explaining what I want to write about gets my brain in the mood to write about it.

Keep it short. You don’t need an excessively lengthy article – in fact, shorter articles work better for marketing purposes. If you can say all you need to in about 450-500 words, you should be okay.

Use keywords. Make sure that in the process of writing, you optimize your article with one or more keywords.

Link! Include links to one or more pages on your website. This is imperative for the next step.

Once your article is finished; get it out on the web for people to read. You should start by putting it on your own website. Then look around for other online publications in your niche such as ezines that may be looking for some free content and article distribution sites.

Sites such as Affiliate Classroom’s own http://www.AffSphere.com, http://www.IdeaMarketers.com, or http://www.EzineArticles.com are some of the best spots of “place” your articles.

Since day 1 I have given a lot of credit for my success to article marketing – it was how I made my first commission and till this day it makes me a lot of money in many niches (growing monthly). One of the things I’ve noticed is that a lot of big PPC affiliates look down on article marketing.

Typical comments I hear are things like “there isn’t enough traffic in article marketing.”

I absolutely agree…no way you’re going to receive thousands of visitors the day you post your article, I’ve never had that happen till today.

But at the same time, today I receive traffic to niche sites that I put up 3 years ago. I couldn’t turn this traffic off even if I wanted to. I don’t worry about Google algorithms, I don’t worry about Google slaps, the traffic is coming from my various articles.

The really disappointing thing about not seeing PPC affiliates use article marketing is that they don’t know the wealth of information they are sitting on! Through the data they collect with their testing, they literally hold the power to DOUBLE the amount any “non ppc” affiliate can earn from article marketing.

Here are a few ways doing some PPC can really give you an advantage in article marketing (another way to put your bulk data to good use):

1. You know what topics get the most views (a.k.a clicks).
2. You know the topic that CONVERT the best.
3. Take your highest converting ad and use that in your resource box of your articles.
4. You know exactly which keywords to optimize for because you know their volume in Google…

You can use your best converting keywords and sales message in your article topics AND (most importantly) in the TITLE.

Thanks to your split testing you have an almost perfect resource box written for you as well (with some modifications of course).

Maybe I won’t be able to convince BIG PPC affiliates to take article marketing seriously just yet, but if you’re doing article marketing, perhaps this post will make you think about the value of also doing PPC marketing so you can gather the appropriate data to help your marketing.

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Quick *Marketing* Note – PPC Classroom will be re-opening again for a very short period. We’re so amazed/excited about the results our students have had from the training, we’re going to make a *crazy* offer, but please watch your e-mail because we’ll only be open for a day or two (in about 7-10 days).