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If you're new to affiliate marketing, one of the easiest places to not only learn about affiliate marketing from some of the great products but also how to get started promoting products is Clickbank. This is a marketplace of electronic products that you can start promoting any number of different products from dozens of different categories. It's good because they have a relatively high payout per sale. Unlike some affiliates that pay a small percentage of a retail product, you'll typically be making about $20 - $60 per sale which allows you to get less sales to achieve your financial goals.

Most affiliate networks require a website and an application process. One of the more well known affiliate networks is commission junction. Google now has an affiliate program as well. You can also find dozens of other affiliate networks by doing some simple searching on the internet for keywords like affiliate network or affiliate programs.

If you're not anxious to sell anything, you can still make money as an affiliate through CPA networks. These are typically companies that will pay you to get your visitors to take some action. This may be as simple as filling out a form, or a survey for which the company whose services or products you're promoting will pay you a bounty for a lead.

There are a number of ways to freely promote affiliate products. One way that you can find that is usually free is through online classified ads. Craigslist is the largest of these, but several other free online classified sites can generate a significant amount of traffic. The important part of doing anything related to online classifieds is to track your results. You should have a unique tracking ID attached to each affiliate link. If not, you'll get hits to your site without knowing what is generating the traffic and resulting sales.

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.

You can use social media websites to promote an affiliate program as well. Some social media sites that are easy to use and easy to setup are Squidoo.com, Hubpages.com, Ning.com and several others sites similar to this that allow individual users to setup free accounts and create pages with whatever content they choose. These social sites typically have guidelines and some have regulations that might affect what you do to promote specific affiliate products. If you provide good solid advice and content, you'll be ok with most of these types of sites.

Blogging is a good way to promote affiliate products. This strategy does require that you develop traffic to your blog. Unlike article marketing and social media sites that generate a good amount of traffic for you, a blog will require that you do the work to get traffic to that site. You're in luck, however, because search engines tend to like blogs for the most part because they represent updated, fresh content. You can use free websites like blogger.com to host your blog or a self-hosted blogging solution using some software, such as wordpress.

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!