There are three main components to promoting any affiliate program. In fact, these three items are critical to any Internet Marketing promotion. The three essential items for affiliate success are:

· A valuable product with a generous commission payout

· An attractive and functional Website that leads your potential buyers to the sales page

· An abundant supply of targeted traffic to the Website

When you think about Internet Marketing or more specifically, affiliate marketing, what else is there but a profitable product, a functional Website and the ability to put targeted traffic in front of your offer? In this article we’re going to focus on five free traffic-driving strategies that will bring you the visitors you need to produce sales.

Article Marketing

You may be tired of hearing it, but content is king. A great way to drive targeted traffic to your offer is to deliver useful and valuable information on the topic in the form of articles and posting them to popular article directories. But it goes a little deeper than that. You also need to be aware of the common terms that people are likely to use in searching for information on the topic. These are known as keywords or keyword phrases. Incorporating these words and phrases into your articles will eventually have the search engines placing your articles higher in the rankings. This is known as search engine optimization or SEO for short.

Press Releases

Press releases work much in the same way as articles and obviously incorporate keywords as well. The difference is, a properly-written press release should be written with a journalistic style. In other words, it should be written as a news piece. Since I’m focusing on free traffic methods, you’ll be submitting your press releases to the many free services that distribute them. Do a search for free press release services and you’ll have enough sites to keep you busy for days.

Blog Posting

Let’s face it, the more you get the word out about your offer, the more visitors you’ll attract and the more sales you’ll make. There are a couple of things you can do with blogs. You can seek out blogs that would welcome valuable content on your topic and include a link to your offer or landing page. And since there are dozens of sites that allow you to create unlimited blogs, you can create as many as you like and promote your offer through your own blogs. Simple, yet very effective.

Forum Posting

In my experience, forum posting is a close second in driving targeted traffic to your offer only to article marketing. There are dozens of Internet Marketing forums on the Web where you can participate in discussions about hundreds of topics. Join those forums that relate to what you’re doing and again, offer useful information. Be sure to become a valuable member of the forum community rather than dumping Spam on the forum. Most forums allow you to place links in your signature or bio tag. Make that link count. Oh, and if your offer doesn’t relate to Internet Marketing, there’s still a good chance that there’s a forum out there for your topic.

Viral Marketing

This one can be worth thousands of dollars in sales if you do it right. Create a free report or guide around your topic. And once again, make sure it is loaded with valuable information. Once you have a report with useful info place a few affiliate links within the report offering products and services that relate to the information within the report. To make your piece viral you’ll want to allow people the rights to freely distribute the report. And please, don’t load the report with dozens of unrelated affiliate links. People see through this and resent it. One other thing, when offering free reports you should require visitors to provide an email addy in exchange for the report as this is a great way to build a mailing list.

Virtually every one of these free traffic strategies requires good, solid content. Many people feel they aren’t able to write well enough to pull this off. And in many cases, that’s true. But that doesn’t restrict you from using each and every one of these methods just the same. The only challenge you’ll face is you’ll need to outsource your writing. And that isn’t much of a challenge at all. Good luck!