The beauty of social marketing sites is that they are free to promote to and the traffic you can get from them to your websites is nothing short of insane. One of the best positive effects of these websites is their ability to build crediblity for both internet and affiliate marketers. However, just because it's free doesn't mean you don't have to work at it.

Stealth affiliate marketers don't mind getting their hands dirty and know that to stay on top you need to have a solid understanding of your fellow foot soldiers.

Nowadays surfers online are much more savvy than ever before. They don't like being sold to, they like feeling as though they've made the buying decision without your help at all. This is even more so for social bookmarking sites.

Every forum and community online has its own climate. While others are friendly to newcomers, others will eye you with contempt and suspicion until you prove yourself. The key is to tread carefully and ever so gently, and particularly not on anyone's toes and become a covert affiliate from the get-go.

Before you even start posting it's important that you make friends and build relationships with people. Ultimately, you want your social shop set up as quietly and covertly as possible. Not only do you want to get on well with the people you "meet" but you also want to grow a list from the contacts you make as you add them to your friends list. Trust and loyalty are of paramount importance if you're trying to build a list from people who loathe handing out their email address to anyone.

One social site adores internet marketers and that's Squidoo. In fact, they are welcomed there - provided the lenses that they create are informative and of high quality. When you join Squidoo you become not a Zen Master but a Lens Master. The key here is building as many lenses as you like around niche keywords. Instead of trying to make friends as you would on MySpace you join SquidU which is the main Squidoo forum. There you can post links to your lenses and also other lenses that you like. It's a good idea to also visit the top 100 lenses and sign their guest book as that will give you a free automatic link back to your own lens. Squidoo will even allow you to hyperlink within the guest book so that you can have the traffic funnel to a squeeze page that's on your own website.

It's incredibly easy to set up a lens once you have signed up to your free account. Write an informative but keyword rich title and choose the url domain. If you are promoting a product then the best way to do that is by having a url with the name of the product in there somewhere. Don't restrict yourself to the name of products, highly regarded people are also popular names.

There are numerous ways that you can populate your work here. You can actually have numerous modules but some of the best ones for a reseller to have include links list, amazon, ebay, guest book, rss feed, Delicious, YouTube, Links list and Digg.

Your Links List is the best place to link to any web pages that you own. Amazon and Ebay gives you the ability to earn even more commissions. It is also a good idea to have a guest book though at times this can be annoying. A guest book will let you know who's been visiting your site, you can then visit yours and exchange links with one another, etc.

If you have a blog then you can also add a rss feed that will showcase the entries from your blog.