You have a website, you need people to go there, or you aren’t making money. That is the number one challenge that affiliate marketers have. How are affiliates to get traffic when there are so many sites out there competing for it? There are just as many ways as there are marketers, and there are new ways to build traffic all the time. The thing to remember when trying to build traffic is to build a name. Make a site that is memorable and branded, not just a site that tells you to buy something. Affiliates getting a high traffic flow have branded themselves and established trust in their sales area. This may be by having their picture on the site and writing a lot of content for it in a personal way. This can also be through targeted information sent to potential clients. So just spam people with your information? Not in a million years. Spamming, in addition to being illegal, is annoying and will do the opposite of establishing trust. You need to build a legitimate list as soon as possible that will accept your targeted marketing. These are people that you know are interested in your information, or in the product, or both. These are the ideal people to market to. Many affiliates send out informational newsletters, information reports, ebooks, or any other type of regular contact they can think of that will convey information the customer wants and keep reminding them about the products. Setting up a auto responder is the fastest and easiest way of keeping track of all of it and getting the information out to the customers. And if you can send them items that will keep their attention and establish your trustworthiness, they will likely come back to your site again as customers. Repeat customers are the cream of the crop, so once you have them, don’t let them go. Blogs are hot right now. You don’t have to discuss Paris Hilton in your blog (unless you want to), but you should keep some type of blog that will keep people interested enough to keep returning to read it. The content is up to you, but sites without a blog are quickly dying out. Starting up a blog is easy and is usually free as well. You can review the products you are selling, talk about the industry that the products pertain to, or you can talk about Paris Hilton if you really need to. But get the blog out there and get people hooked on it. Some people are now keeping several blogs going at once to promote different items or different categories of items. One of the best ways in the beginning for capitalizing on the free power of search engines is to make sure your site is search engine optimized. Get the appropriate keywords and keyword density on every page of your site, and let the search engines help get you traffic. Everyone uses search engines, so let that work for you to bring you interested searchers that may very well become customers.