As an affiliate marketer, you may have your own website ready to go. You made the decision to market via your own website to have greater control over your business. You are studying ways to optimize your site with great content. You also have a clean, attractive site that your target market will find easily navigable.

Is your work finished? Can you now sit back and watch the money roll in from affiliate product sales? The answer to both questions is “no.” You still have work ahead of you, and you cannot sit back leisurely waiting for money to roll in. Building an online business takes consistent weekly effort and link building is part of that overall effort.

With link building, you strive to get other websites to link to your website. The following are ways to get external websites to connect to you to build your affiliate business:

Submit to Online Directories

Yes, there are multitudes of these on the Internet. Submitting to online directories alone is not enough when it comes to link building. However, there still is benefit to submitting your site to quality directories. The thing is to look at directory submission as an overall link-building plan. Do not view directory submission as your total plan in and of itself.

When taking time to submit to online directories choose the major popular ones. These ones attract search engine attention. There are hosts of obscure directories on the Internet. Spending time submitting to those with little traffic is a waste of your precious marketing time. Along with the major popular ones are specialty niche directories that have significant followings. While not the “big players”, they still can add to your overall effort to build links to your website. Take some time to explore these types of quality directories and submit to them as well.

Press Releases

Do you have significant news concerning your business and your affiliate products? Why not write up a good press release and get the word out. There are places where you can submit your press release for widespread exposure on the Web.

You want to make sure your announcement is newsworthy. You want your press release to offer relevant, timely information to your audience. You do not want your press release to be promotional fluff that reads like a late-night commercial.

You can present useful information to your audience while highlighting the benefits of your business and your product. At the same time, you can include those links back to your website. You present a concise message via the press release, and provide an avenue to where more information resides.

Blog and Social Forum Commenting

Networking on blogs and social forums is the “in” thing when it comes to affiliate marketing these days. Why is that? It’s because it works. When people engage in casual dialog meant to inform and educate they build relationships. This builds trust, which leads to people pre-sold on products and services ultimately offered.

Think of the rapport you have with local retailers in your neighborhood. Through conversations and interaction you developed trust in certain retailers, and frequent them as needed. The same holds true for online commerce. You will tend to frequent those online portals that you know more intimately than those you do not.

Conversations and information sharing with others can cause them to purchase from you before another. During the course of casual conversation on a blog or forum you can refer to your business. You would do this to truly offer help or resources to the person you are dialoging with. You give them the opportunity to link to you, but the decision is one they make on their own. No pressure, no sales hype, is what blog and forum dialog is all about.

Article Marketing

Article marketing is still a major tool for promoting your links on the Worldwide Web. Article writing of the highest quality is a great way to connect with your niche market. People crave information that provides solutions and answers to problems and questions they have.

When you offer this quality content you encourage people to check you out further. They will do this via linking from your articles to your website. An effective article promotion campaign is one avenue you should consider to build quality links back to your website. You pre-sell your target market when you give them information they require through articles.

Seriously consider link building to grow your affiliate marketing business this year. Get your links widespread exposure through employing the above methods. You will see your website traffic grow each month when you make a commitment to the link building process.

A New Year always brings new opportunities, whether it’s for personal or business growth. Concerning affiliate marketing, this New Year can be the year you grab your business by the reins and steer it in a profitable direction.

That means taking action and doing the marketing necessary to build your business. It also means doing those things consistently each month of the year.

It’s wise to have a marketing plan concerning your affiliate business. This plan should include more than one tool to advertise and promote your enterprise. This allows you to reach your niche market in different ways and present your message uniquely via each platform.

The following are five tips for building your online business in 2009:

A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum

Why not make forum-posting part of your affiliate-marketing toolkit for 2009. The funny thing is, for engaging in casual conversation, you can gain quality traffic to your website. Forum posting allows you to reach your specific niche and talk to them in an atmosphere of give and take.

People who frequent specialty forums devoted to a certain issue, topic, cause, et al, are looking for advice. They frequently want to know a better way of doing things.

They are often looking for direction on where to find resources to help them meet their wants and needs. You can provide that advice on affiliate related topics, in a helpful way. This can help you build that website traffic you crave.

Make Article Marketing Marvelous

Can you think of a more cost-effective way to establish yourself as an authority on an affiliate related topic? Article marketing allows you the opportunity to gain widespread distribution of your article writing efforts for little or no cost. Widespread distribution promotes your website links, which are important for building steady streams of traffic.

Make a commitment in 2009 to engage in article writing to promote your business. If you do not have the time to write, look to those who provide article-writing solutions for you. Let them do the writing while you run your business. A good article writing service and article distribution service is an important part of your marketing toolkit.

Get Directly to the Directories

Are you taking the time to ensure your URLs receive listing in the appropriate directories? You should be; this is essential to people finding you when they perform searches on the web. Of course, you want to be in the major directories. In addition, you want to be in those specialty niche directories where your target audience looks.

Devote time in 2009 to making sure you post in directories. Also, take the time to update directory listings. If you want people to find you, get listed in places that people are looking at every day.

Don’t be Bashful about Blogging

Blogging is a good way to post information frequently, with links to your affiliate sites. Blogging offers your target market fresh news several times a week. It also encourages responses from your audience. This dialog can promote interest in you and cause people to check out your links to see what you have to offer.

You can start a blog easily and post to it easily as well. Make blogging to promote your website or affiliate links a priority in 2009. It’s a low-cost and even no-cost way to earn ad revenue too.

With your blog, you keep your audience abreast of news related to your affiliate product related topics. As you build an audience for your blog, you build an audience for your affiliate products.

Let’s Spend Some Time Offline

Being an online marketer does not mean you have to forgo traditional offline marketing. There’s a place and time for online and offline marketing activities. Good old one-on-one communication still works. As that shampoo company handing out samples at the mall the next time you shop.

Your offline marketing activities can include sales presentations in-home or to a group in a meeting hall. It may mean attending local trade shows. It may also mean local newspaper advertising or simply handing out brochures or pamphlets in your neighborhood.

You can also always talk about your affiliate products and business opportunity in everyday conversation as appropriate with those you meet. You never know, your product or opportunity may be exactly what they are looking for.

A New Year is a time of new beginnings. Make a promise to yourself that you will take your affiliate business to the next level in 2009. A commitment and an action plan is the best way to start the New Year off right to build your Internet business.

As an affiliate marketer you may be promoting various affiliate products. Each of these has their own persona or identity formulated by the manufacturer of each product. When you advertise and promote these products you highlight he benefits of each brand to your target market. That’s effective affiliate marketing and something you should strive to do at all times.

However, in your marketing, are you also promoting your brand every step of the way? You have an identity as an affiliate marketer. Your identity manifests itself on your blog, on your website, in your article writing, and in your e-mail campaigns. It also manifests itself in the advertisements you write and the social forum postings you make.

You will better succeed as an affiliate marketer if you present a cohesive, consistent image of yourself as an affiliate marketer. You should do this in all your communications. You want to present yourself as a reputable, unique affiliate marketer that offers quality information and products to your niche market. You also want people to think of your website when it comes to accessing useful information related to your affiliate product.

How do you build your brand? Volumes on brand building exist and are part of business and marketing courses throughout the world. Suffice it to say that you build your brand by controlling the message you send in any format concerning your business.

Consistency with creativity is part of brand building. You want to present yourself so the next time someone sees or hears one of your promotions they immediately recognize you. They tie in what they currently see or hear to what they previously did from you. This takes time and effort.

The following are three ways to begin today building your unique brand as an affiliate marketer:

Tone

Have a consistent tone that speaks of who you are as a business person. Is this tone a raucous, flamboyant one as befits your product? If it is, then that is the tone you should adapt in your e-mail, newsletter, and advertising messages. Are you striving for a more elegant, classy persona? Then set that tone in your article writing and article promotion campaigns.

Exude class and elegance in your social forum postings, banner ads, and blog postings. Make sure your website is the epitome of class as well. In this way wherever people hear or see your message they recognize the tone as being distinctly you.

Logo and Design

Have a unique logo that distinguishes your website from others. Templates are fine but have you ever noticed how some business websites in totally different fields have the same look. Make your website stand out with your unique logo and design.

Incorporate this logo and design onto your business cards, letterhead, e-mail look, and advertising. Make your blog logo and design match your main website logo and design. Consistency of presentation is what you are after in brand building.

Content

Content is what you apply tone to when you write. Your content defines you as an affiliate marketer. You may want the tone of your content to be light, fun, and breezy. That’s fine, but what is your content? You build your brand by having content that people immediately recognize as yours.

If you market organic health foods as an affiliate marketer, your customers will expect content that gives useful advice on eating healthy. Your article writing will include this type of information. Your e-mail messages will be on healthy food alternatives, new organic foods on the market and such. Your advertising and forum postings will be about choosing foods based on certain healthy criteria.

In essence, all your content, wherever and whenever it is, will have this central focus. When people see your logo in an e-mail or on an ad or on your website, they will already know with what your content deals. They expect it and are ready to learn from it.

Branding yourself as a reputable, knowledgeable affiliate marketer will pay great dividends. When you brand yourself, people immediately know upon seeing your logo what to expect in terms of content and the tone of that content.

They form an opinion and image of your business based on what they see and hear. Present them a consistent look and message, in a consistent tone, and build recognition for your business.

In internet marketing there are the “haves” and the “I don’t really have the money right now” ends of the spectrum. Some affiliate marketers begin their business with a good asset base backing their efforts up. They have a storehouse of cash to spend on premium advertising. When it comes to a website all primed for e-commerce and optimized they have that as well. All the power to them, they have a head start on building their business, and that’s a good thing.

However, many people begin affiliate marketing with nothing but an idea. They see the opportunity affiliate marketing affords them and select products to promote. They soon find they need platforms for promotion. In addition, they learn quickly that placing a link or banner on a blog alone is not going to make money pour in. A neophyte affiliate marketer then learns there are other ways to drive traffic to their site quicker. The thing is, many of these ways cost money; money they certainly do not have.

The situation many new Internet entrepreneurs face is how to build their business initially without spending. Many realize that at some point they will have to incur expenses to drive their business to new heights. Not being able to do so right away doesn’t mean they cannot grow their business from day one. A new affiliate marketer does have options for building their business that don’t cost a penny. It will probably take them longer to see healthy income streams, but they can take immediate action.

Patience is a virtue when you have no budget to promote your affiliate products. You can slowly begin to build your business with a time, not monetary investment. The following are a few ways to build your online business without spending money:

Write Articles

Do you want to get widespread distribution of your website or blog links? Article writing and then article marketing of that writing is a great tool. Writing quality articles on topics related to your affiliate products is a way to build credibility as an Internet marketer. Useful information presented to your niche market intelligently can earn you consistent click backs to your website.

You write articles and have them sent to publishers via a good article distribution service. At the end of each article posted is an “Authors Resource” box.

Here’s where you have a line or two about who you are, and a link to where your website or blog resides. Of course, the link takes them to where you can begin to sell them on your affiliate products. If your article was helpful to the reader there’s a good chance they will link back to learn more about what you have to offer.

Post in Social Forums

Again, you are investing time, but no dollars. Check out the myriad of forums on a host of topics on the Web today. There is no shortage of forums and they cover most niches. Choose a handful of forums that interest you and post to them regularly. This is a form of networking.

Businesses do this all the time in a face-to-face sense. They are always holding trade shows, social events, conventions, and get-togethers where people of similar interest meet to discuss issues. That’s what you do in an online forum. You build relationships online and as is appropriate mention your business and what products or services you offer. It’s all done in a casual, conversational, non sales-hype way.

Advertise on Free Classified Sites

Do you not have the budget to pay for premium online listings? No need to get down, there are several free classified sites where you can post your advertisements. Again, they may not drive traffic to you as fast as paid premium listings.

They will get your message and links out, though, which is better than not advertising at all. If you consistently post ads on different free classified sites you will garner some traffic. Just make sure you post on the more popular ones that have an audience. Moreover, make sure you post to the appropriate categories that are suited to your affiliate product.

The above are a few things you can do today to build your online business without spending money. You will be spending your time, especially when it comes to article writing and forum posting. In the end, the time investment will pay dividends.

You will begin to see traffic come your way. You will start to earn commissions from sales. Then you can use that money to promote your business further and take it to the new levels of growth.

Statistics show that 75 percent of online shoppers are dissatisfied with the shopping experience and most of the other 25 percent are not jump up and down happy with it either. The opportunity does exist, however, to make your visitors very, very happy with a minimum effort on your part. A little planning and foresight goes a long way.

Think like a customer and ensure where they land is specifically relevant to their search terms. Nothing hacks searchers off more than getting to a web site only to find that they must continue to search to get where they need to be. Send them directly to the product information page they are seeking.

Landing pages must be highly specific and easy to navigate to the point of the sale. Make landing pages part of a micro-site to avoid a major overhaul of your main site. This allows for a large amount of flexibility as a marketer. Ensure you include all discounts and coupons there as well.

A random set of shoppers surveyed (Bryan Eisenberg, Nov 2007) uncovered some unsettling facts about what a shopper needs to make a purchase online. Roughly 80 percent reported they rarely, if ever, make a purchase without being completely informed about the product.

Of those, 72 percent will find a competitor that does give them adequate information to buy and they will make their purchase on that site. This should kill any doubts you may have as to value of your content. Informed traffic is more likely to buy where they learned the most about their purchase.

Landing pages must offer up not only first rate products but as much relevant product information as possible for buyers to make informed decisions. Merchants who fail to do this are going out of their way to drive business to their competitors. Let’s hope that doesn’t describe you.

These two examples are not that uncommon. In fact, they are far more common than you might think. There are ways to offset many other obstacles to successful landing pages as well. Here are a few:

* Offer multiple images views of products

* Offer customer reviews

* Use easy to read fonts or allow customers to change the font

* Offer free shipping

* Offer in-stock information on the product page

* Offer in-store pickup for online retailers that have physical stores

* Offer shipping costs early in the checkout process and use 4 or fewer steps in the checkout process

* Respond to e-mail questions within 24 hours

* Offer more ways to pay means more ways to buy: pay-by-check, Google Checkout, PayPal and Bill Me Later

That’s a lot to digest in one setting and more than enough to keep you busy for the next week or two. Solutions to problems don’t necessarily need to be complex to be effective. If you will follow this simple advice, you will see a marked increase in the effectiveness of your landing pages.