You've joined an affiliate program and found a merchant. You have a website or landing page ready to go and it's time to start testing how well your web page converts visitors into sales. How do you promote this page? There are some common strategies that affiliates use.

Article marketing is a good way to get targeted traffic to your affiliate website absolutely free but it takes a little practice to not only write an article but how to write an article that will pull traffic into your website. You also need to learn which article directories are the best to submit your article to.

There is email marketing, this can be expensive and there is a lot of ways to do this wrong and lose money. There is search engine optimization and it is a great way to get targeted traffic but it can take months to properly "seo" your website and web page and if you optimize your website for ineffective keywords, it can take months to optimize all over again for different keywords.

The fastest way to send quality traffic to your landing page is ppc marketing. Google Adwords is the "king" of ppc marketing and the best place to start. Google has the biggest search volume and the best quality search traffic known to man.

Google Adwords many advantages over SEO. First the speed of being able to test keywords is amazing. Any changes you do to your ads or keywords is instant, no waiting for months. Google makes it easy for affiliates to track the effectiveness of their landing page with conversion tracking and Google Analytics. These 2 combined can tell you which keywords are bringing in the sales and which are duds. Google Analytics can tell you many things about your visitors where they live, how they found you, what pages of your website did they visit and how long did they stay on your website. this is just to name a few. Google Analytics is free to anyone with a Google Adwords account. Since it is free and there is a huge demand for it the wait time for an account with Google Analytics is months.

The reason you hear so much about advertising with Google Adwords is because it has made those who have learned to use it properly a lot of money. The keyword here is properly since there is a lot of people who have tried it out without learning anything first and lost their shirt. It is not that hard to learn Google Adwords you just need the right resources.

After you open your Adwords account you can be up and running live in as little as 15 minutes Google claims. From my experience with a brand new Adwords account it usually takes a couple or a few hours before you will go live.

You create your ad groups and ads do your keyword research and test which keywords and ads are brining in the clicks and sales. You keep what works and either tweak or drop what fails. You tweak your campaign until you have it performing optimally and then you keep testing and testing because you should always be looking for ways to improve.

I am sure you have heard all of the hype but you really can and many marketers do - make huge money with affiliate marketing and Google Adwords.