In recent years, affiliate marketing has exploded, probably because it seems like the easiest way of earning a decent living on the internet, and perhaps it is. After all, you do not have to find a starving niche market and create a product or build a website and spend months building relationships with potential joint venture partners. All you really have to do is find a product that seems profitable, generate your own unique affiliate link and promote the hell out of that link.

This article aims to provide you with the three major methods of affiliate promotion that has helped hundreds of affiliates make thousands of dollars every month on complete auto-pilot.

The first, and perhaps most widely used, method is by writing and distributing articles which includes your own affiliate link in the author resource box. Once you have chosen an affiliate product to promote, you write an article – either on a subject related to the product you are an affiliate of or a review of the product – and submit the article to as many directories as possible for maximum exposure. You include a sneaky redirected link to the affiliate product in your author resource box and watch as your affiliate payments roll in.

The second method of affiliate promotion is through the use of viral reports. This method is similar to article writing, but it is approximately 8-12 pages long and contains more detail. Throughout the report you should mention and recommend the product you are promoting. Again, the report should be about the subject of the affiliate product and once written, should be distributed using as many methods as possible. Such as giving it away on your websites, on other similar websites, selling it cheaply on eBay and finding JV partners to also distribute your report.

The final method of affiliate marketing is as automated as is possible. It simply involves setting up a Google adwords campaign where you pay for traffic through your affiliate link and hope that the potential customers who click through, purchase the product.

To set up your campaign you should select a number of keywords so that your advert shows up for those search terms in Google, you should then set a maximum bid price so that you are high enough in the search engines to generate traffic but are not paying too much per click so as to be profitable.

Once the campaign is set up, analyse its profitability and continue to tweak, tweak and tweak until it is at the most profitable you can get it. This income stream can be continued for as long as both Google adwords and the affiliate product is around and a few hours work of setting up your campaign can lead to years and years of constant affiliate payments to your bank account.

While these four are perhaps the most widely used methods of promotion, it does not mean there are other profitable methods. With just a little research you could find a number of little known methods which are far more profitable than the three outlined in this short article.