Of course the best option for doing any kind of Internet marketing is to have your own website - but it's not necessary. There's a long list of methods you can use to market your affiliate products. Here are a few of the most productive that will work with or without having your own website:

Email Marketing

If you don't have your own website you can send people directly to the merchant website. People can click on your affiliate links present in your emails and can go directly to the merchant website to purchase the products.

Your email should contain the introduction about the product you are promoting and your affiliate links. Try to make your emails interesting and brief.

Offline Promotion

You can use the offline methods of promotion, like the classified ads, flyers etc. The best choice is the classified ads because its exposure is largest.

Writing free e-books

This is similar to email marketing. But in this method you will write the informative and interesting e-books and will send to the people via their email address. These e-books should be easy to read and helpful for their readers. The topics should be related to your affiliate products so that you can recommend the products in the body of e-books. Alternatively you can add a brief note about your affiliate products and affiliate links for promotion. If the readers like your e-book, they may visit the merchant website and make a purchase.

Writing in Forums

Search for some forums - at least three - that are related to your product and have high page rank. Register on these forums and start some discussion in the forum where maximum people are involved. Just post your questions there or answer some questions of other members. But don't add any promotion text in the body of your posts. You are allowed to put your signature at the end of your post and this is where you would put your affiliate link to the merchant's website. Be careful, here, though. Some forum moderators do not allow affiliate links. Always read the rules and regulations and abide by them.

Writing Articles

You can write articles and publish them in the free article directories. You can embed your affiliate links in the text of your articles. If your articles are well formatted, informative and the article directory has large traffic then you can expect some good traffic to your affiliate links. And you know that more traffic on your affiliate links will result in more sales through your affiliate links.

Bloggers are abuzz with the news of Google’s recent addition to its free Keyword Tool: the tool now shows real search numbers instead of a little bar graph.

Now you can type in a word or phrase and see exactly how many people searched for it at Google the previous month as well as the average monthly searches.

The improved Google Keyword Tool is now much more useful for basic keyword research for PPC campaigns, websites or product research.

Google's Keyword Tool
https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

How to use the Google Keyword Tool
http://adwords.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=25918

Info about Keyword Tool's search volume statistics
https://adwords.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=96571&hl=en_US

So, how does this affect your keyword and market research?

Now you can be absolutely sure of the size of a niche because there's no more need to make wild guesses about search volume.  And, you don’t need to pay for services like Wordtracker because you can get the real results from the “horse’s mouth.”

 

Search and prosper!

 

Linda

Is Email Obsolete?

That is a pretty startling question. And in that you no doubt have checked your email dozens of times today, sent numerous emails out and gotten that many or more in, to say that as a mode of communication that email is obsolete would be a mistake. Email is no more obsolete than letter writing or talking on the telephone is. But it is safe to say that its possible that email is no longer cutting edge and its era as a primary tool for internet marketing may be coming to an end.

When email first became a popular mode of communication, it virtually changed the way communication worked in a way that can only be compared to the invention of the telephone. Email combined the quickness of a telephone conversation with the ability to document what was said of a letter writing exchange. At the time to be able to send an email that reached the recipient's email box in moments time even if they were on the other side of the world was mind blowing.

The internet marketing potential was tremendous. As internet marketing became a genuine mode of doing businesses, it grew up as the use of email grew up. However there was trouble in paradise and we probably don’t have to tell you what the problems were. It can be summed up in one word - spam. Spam is nothing more than unwanted email communications usually from an internet marketer. The corresponding experience outside of the internet is the solicitor phone call in the middle of dinner or junk mail and both are just as irritating and unwelcome as spam marketing emails.

So in the last decade internet marketing using email as the primary mode of communication with your customers has grown in two parallel lines. The legitimate side of email marketing and customer support has grown and become more sophisticated and useful. Many businesses were able to build impressive online business empires supported by email marketing and ongoing email communications with a growing customer base. For thousands of online marketers, the idea of conducting business without email communications with customers seems impossible.

But it was the other parallel line that grew like a cancer to the point that it snarled email communications and has interfered with email deliverability for the many legitimate email based internet merchants working in cyberspace. The spam merchants working with sophisticated mass mailing services and software have flooded email boxes of every citizen of cyberspace to such an extent that without spam control software both at the server level and at the desk top level, it is virtually impossible to use email for routine purposes any more.

Spam control software has grown exponentially as well and become powerful and sophisticated. It has also spawned a cottage industry which has imposed a whole new cost of operations on every email user in the world who wants to avoid the spam avalanche they will face if they go unprotected. This has created resentment and distrust in the email system of communications in general and certainly toward online merchants who wish to use the internet for customer service and marketing. To say that a few bad apples spoiled it for everyone puts it mildly.

Because of this ongoing war between spam operators and spam control software services, email deliverability has become a tedious chore to maintain and without constant oversight, an internet merchant can lose contact with its customers in short order. For that email has become obsolete as a valid and easy to use tool for marketing and customer communications.

Meanwhile new forms of communications such as instant messaging, VOIP and WEB 2.0 interoperability have started the next wave of evolution in internet communications. The chances are that we will see internet merchants move away from email marketing to exploit these much more dynamic methods for customer communications. And while email will never die as a cornerstone of online communications, from an internet marketing point of view, it is very much out of step with the times.