I am new to IM. But assuming you are just a newbie like me and no cash to throw around, which direction will you take?
Affiliate marketing through article submission to directories appeals to me. Is that good enough for a start?
Or is there a better way?
I considered all kinds of flame responses to your post, but it turns out I need some good karma at the moment, so I will provide you with an actual usable response.
In business (which is what this is, even if its a hobby to you, its business to someone else that you are likely competing with) you essentially have two resources. Can you guess what those are? They are time and money.
Essentially all of affiliate marketing (for an affiliate at least) is about driving traffic through some method. If you have money then you can buy traffic or pay people to do things that help increase your traffic, like holding a sign with a url on some highway somewhere, or posting links on google. If you don't have money, then you need the other resource, time. If you don't have time or money, you are fucked.
So you've said you don't have money. Since you've mentioned article marketing, you've already figured out that you need to drive traffic through some free method. As you've probably figured out from my post so far, these methods may be free but they will take time. So then what methods are available to you? Here's a quick list.
SEO (organic) traffic from search engines.
Social traffic from other types of websites.
Offline marketing.
That's really it. Any type of traffic can really fail within one of these three sources. I'm going to ignore offline marketing for the time being, because its outside the scope of this post.
You either get traffic through the search engines by ranking a site for keywords or by creating links on free sites (yahoo answers, craigslist, twitter, forums in the niche of your products, article sites, squido/hubpage type sites etc). And, you can automate some of the processes of doing either seo traffic or social traffic (some people call that blackhat).
You asked if article marketing is a good place to start. If you can manage to get traffic to your article, then it can be. Doing that requires learning how to build links to your article (for seo traffic) and spin the article and repost on other sites (for social traffic).
My advice to anyone starting out is to spend a tiny bit of money and build their own site. It should cost you < $90 a year for the domain and hosting. Then you have something you own and can modify whenever and however you want.
Here's a good journal of someone with a limited budget starting out.
http://www.wickedfire.com/newbie-questions/60279-lemons884-journal-will-noob-succeed.html
He was banned from adsense prior to starting this, had he not been that at a minimum his site would have been profitable already based just on his traffic numbers and the $1-$2 he would have been making per day. The point though is he did a lot of things right in that journal.
One last thing, a big part of this is figuring out what niche to promote and what keywords to attempt to rank for. For that I recommend a product called market samurai. I also recommend for noobs something called the thirty day challenge (I'll take some shit here for saying this, and I'm not linking it so you'll have to google). Its free and teaches methods for niche research and free traffic generation.
Anyway your question was more appropriate for the newbie section, so please create future posts there. Good luck.
