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If you're new to affiliate marketing online, you may not have much money to spare for marketing and advertising efforts. Thankfully there are some great alternatives that cost little to nothing, other than your time. One of the best known is Article Marketing.

Article Marketing is the process of writing quality articles which are then given out free to various places around the web. These articles have your name and information on them, along with a link or two to your website. Your website should then have some kind of information available about the affiliate program or product you're promoting.

When you give away your articles at no cost, more people will read them around the web. And each person that reads the article could potentially click your website links and visit your site. If you've done a great job of introducing your affiliate product on your website, they may then click the affiliate link and make a purchase. This of course earns you money.

Not all affiliate marketers promote a product on their website though. Instead, they use article marketing to get visitors to an email sign up page. When the visitors sign up for the information you're offering, they'll start getting regular email messages from you. And your email messages are the ones that will promote the affiliate products for you instead. This allows you, as an affiliate marketer, to build your own targeted prospect list around certain topics. And over time you'll be able to promote additional affiliate products to that list which are related in topic, so you can make even more money from the same people.

Whichever way you decide to use it, article marketing can be one of the simplest, most inexpensive ways to start making money as an affiliate marketer. And there are just four simple steps:

1. Find a great topic. Sometimes this is called finding a niche, but the point is the same: Figure out what people are really interested in - or even desperate for - on any given topic. If they're really itching for information about something, they're more likely to buy without thinking twice about it.

2. Find a great affiliate product. The affiliate product you choose of course should be related to the topic you found in the previous step. Make sure the product has an excellent sales page, so the traffic you send to that page will be more likely to convert. Also of course, make sure that product is as great as it seems, so you don't end up with lots of sales that end up being refunded.

3. Start writing articles. These don't have to be perfect and they won't be graded by your English teacher either. Just write the article about small pieces of the topic you chose in step one. Write as if you're talking to just one person, and that will make it more conversational and engaging.

Your articles don't have to be long essays either. Most good web based articles range in size from 300-500 words, but you can make it as long as 1000 words if you have that much to say. A better option though, would be to break a longer article into two parts because that will give you two articles to distribute instead of one.

4. Distribute your articles. This is the easy part. Once you've finished writing, be sure to create a signature style area at the end of your article which has your name, copyright, a bit of information about you or your website, and a link. Then simply submit the articles to various directories and distribution sites around the web.

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