Beginning internet marketers often run into trouble when it comes time to drive traffic to their affiliate links or get traffic to their site.  What follows are 5 proven, and rather simple ways to get traffic to your site to create sales.

1.  Blog 

My very favorite way to not only promote my affiliate links but to build trust and community with my target market is on a blog. Whether you decide to use a free blog platform like blogger or host your own using WordPress the level of  flexibility and amount of things you can do from a blog makes it a must have.

2. Building a list  

After having a blog this is the best way I know of to promote your affiliate links ~ as well as build trust and community with your subscribers. You have the ability with a list to send your link out to your readers multiple times giving you a better shot at getting a sale than if they just clicked through to the sales page.

3. Squidoo 

This is a free platform where you can create content that leads to your affiliate sales page. This site does quite well in the search engines if you choose good keywords. You can get a lot of traffic to your sales page. Once you get them ranked you can often times stay on the front page of Google with minimal extra work.

4. Writing articles 

Writing articles and placing them in an article directory can get you a lot of quick traffic. Especially if you use the biggest and best directories.  You can not only send traffic straight to your sales page, you can also send traffic to your opt in page or your blog from the same article.  Articles can also be repurposed and used for your newsletter or blog posts. They are seriously a multitasking piece of content.

5. Forums 

Find a forum that is highly relevant to your niche.  Start slowly and begin to let people get to know you  by posting informative posts and information, answering questions and being a generally helpful member of the community. You can have a "signature file" or "sig file" post automatically at the bottom of all your posts in most forums. From your sig file you can send people to your blog or opt in page ~ where you promote your affiliate products. I would not promote products directly here, but it is a great way to get targeted traffic to your links.