Your army of affiliates can be viewed metaphorically as a tree. Full grown, it will thrive in rain and sunshine. Strong changing winds can shake its branches, but tree will continue to grow. In early seed stage, however, special care is needed if you want your tree to break through surface.

You spent a great deal of time, energy, and likely at least a little money creating your affiliate program. You need to attract strong affiliates that can rapidly build your customer base and return your investment. How can you bring these powerful marketing dynamos into your camp, ideally without drawing on your already diminished cash reserves?

1.) Submit to Online Directories The method that will show most immediate increase in new affiliates is listing your program in online affiliate directories. These reference sites are first stop for hungry potential affiliates looking for income opportunity that is going to allow them to quit their 9 to 5 jobs. Many such directories exist, and obviously some will bring you better results than others. Since submitting to almost all of these directories is free, though, get listed on as many as you can. Here are a few links to submission pages to get you started, but by no means should you stop with just these few:

http://www.becomeanaffiliate.com/cgi-bin/add.cgi http://www.affiliatesoftware.info/joinaffiliatedirectory.php http://www.affiliatescreen.com/suggest_program.php http://www.affiliatematch.com/cgi-bin/links/add.cgi http://www.2-tier.com/cgi-bin/add_url.cgi http://www.affiliatesdirectory.com/links/add.cgi http://www.earnfind.com/addprogram-howto.php

Basically, you just sit back and wait for those huge commission checks to roll in.

Sound too good to be true? Good, because you guessed it. If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.

I'm referring to affiliate 'links' opportunity sites that are becoming increasingly popular. 'All' you have to do is promote site.

In these schemes, you are given a free site into which you insert your affiliate link. That link becomes 'featured link' on your site. Featured link? Picture a site like Yahoo!, then try to pick out one link as being featured. Can't do it, can you?

As owner of a fr*ee site, you also earn a paltry commission when you sell one of these sites to someone else. Earning a commission on sale of a product or service from which no one benefits sounds like ML*M to me.

Now here's good part. For a 'small fee' company promises to do 'all work' of building masses of traffic to your affiliate site.

Oh wait. Before you can earn commissions from those links, you'll have to JOIN all those programs first. Until then, links belong to person who gave you fr*ee site, and any sales made from those links will be credited to him, not you.

Considering those sites typically consist of hundreds, and sometimes thousands, of links to various affiliate programs, it's starting to look like you're going to have to do some work, doesn't it?