This article is part of the “Affiliate Marketing Guide Book”.

If you read the first two articles, you now should have a good idea of what affiliate marketing is, and how to join an affiliate network to find new offers. Let’s move on to the “marketing methods” and how you can start promoting offers and making money.

On Site / Web Site
The most obvious method for advertising, is on site advertising. This type of advertising can consist of anything from text link advertising, to banner advertising. Almost every web site you visit has some form on on site advertising. When buying banner advertising on a web site, advertisers are usually paying on a monthly or CPM (cost per 1,000 views) basis.

Social Networks
Two of the major social networks with great advertising platforms are MySpace and Facebook. The huge benefit to advertising on social networks, is that you can heavily target your ad campaigns to nearly any demographic. MySpace accepts several different banner sizes for ad campaigns, while Facebook offers 120×80 images and text advertising. Both platforms are setup for CPM or CPC bidding.

Search Marketing / Pay Per Click
The bread and butter of affiliate marketing is known as search engine marketing or “pay per click”. When you go to google and search for any term, you will see an a separate listing of sites on the right side of the page called “Sponsored Links”. Advertisers are listed in this section because they are paying to be shown on the first page of search results, by bidding on specific search terms. The major search engines for PPC advertising are Google, Yahoo and Bing.

Pay Per View
Over the past year, pay per view or PPV advertising has grown tremendously. PPV advertising is usually in the form of a pop under window which spawns when the user visits a web site. PPV advertising is very cheap, and can cost lower than a penny per view, but can also send thousands of impressions within minutes. When advertising with pay per view campaigns, you select what interests/web sites you want your popunders to appear on.

Email / Mailing Lists
Another effective type of advertising is done through email and mailing lists. The difference between regular email and advertising and building up a mailing list is crucial. When sending out emails for affiliate marketing / profit purposes, you are usually sending out solo mailings with just an advertisement. These emails are usually from site visitors when they fill out surveys, forms or request to receive mail from third parties. The other type of mailing is when you are trying to build up a mailing list for your web site or product. In most cases, you are trying to build up a loyal readership and don’t want to spam your readers. The profit in a mailing list is that the readers will keep coming back, and actually enjoy your mailings.