When you take your first steps out into the world of affiliate marketing it is all too easy to get over obsessed and brain washed by the search engines. All you hear is people talking about the top position on google and the first page on yahoo, SEO (Search Engine Optimization), SEM (Search Engine Marketing), PPC (Pay Per Click), Sponsored, Natural, Organic and lots of other fancy words and acronyms. Its enough to drive a perfectly sane person crazy.

If you search Google for Affiliate Marketing you get almost 15 million search results. Yes thats right, 15 million different webpages all trying to compete for that golden nugget called 1st place.

The Times Newspaper in the UK ran a article about Google in comparison to the other search engines and came up with some interesting information. Out of all the searches performed each day on the web Google is used for approximately 70% with Yahoo following a very distant second. So Google is definitely the king of the castle.

If you manage to get your webpage on to page 2 of Google; which lets face it is pretty good and takes a lot of work, you will only receive 1% of the search traffic. What does this mean? For every 100 people who search for a given keyword in Google only 1 of them will look at page 2. The other 99 do not get past the first page.

So if you are not on page 1 of Google you are not going to get massive amounts of visitors, thats the cold hard truth. The problem with this is that getting to the first page of Google takes a lot of time, hard work, experience and skill nor does it happen overnight.

Now the good news. You don't need Google. Yes thats right I am telling you to discard the biggest traffic source on the web. but why? There are thousands of other ways to get traffic to your affiliate website.

I would recommend that you start building your traffic in different ways. Some of the most popular and successful include the following.

- Write articles like this one and submit them to article directories.

- Produce videos and upload them to YouTube and other videos sharing sites.

- Use forums and bulletin boards put your web link in your signature.

- Try social networks such as Facebook and Myspace.

- Put you website in the signature of emails you send.

- Press releases and other offline traffic.

You are better investing your time in these other methods rather than spending every minute of your free time, trying to calculate why your website is not yet on the first page of Google. You can start the above traffic methods quickly and some of them will give you instant visitors to your website.

A final twist, the days of writing code and meta data to get your website to the top of Google have long gone. Google like any business want to give its customers the best service, so when you use Google to search for a given subject they want to provide you with the best and most accurate results.

Google now uses page rank, this is essentially a measure of how popular a website is. Google measures popularity based on how many other websites link to your own and how relevant the content on your site is. For example if you have a health and fitness website and have lots of articles about health and fitness distributed around the web Google is going to start taking notice you will slowly start to move up the search engines.

I realize the irony, I started of telling you to ignore the big search engines yet we end up here with them at the end. The only difference is that by using this method you get traffic and make money along the way. You are not sat there waiting for your site to hit the first page of Google, while your bank account remains dry.