With the stock market continuing to drop many baby boomers are choosing affiliate marketing as a source of extra retirement income. Starting a internet home business appeals to many because there is no need to produce a product of your own to sell. Additionally, most affiliate merchants offer the necessary promotional material needed to be successful running a internet home business.

Another feature of affiliate marketing is that you a given an affiliate website to promote your home business. The question most often asked is do you actually need a website of your own to be successful with a internet home business.

For traffic generation purposes it is better,in my opinion, to create your own affiliate marketing website. Having your own website will also enable you to present your products in your own words, which will make pre-selling them much more effective. However, many people want to first try affiliate marketing without the time and expense needed to build and maintain a web site. There are several options available. Here are a few of them

You can still do email marketing without an affiliate website of your own. You can promote your affiliate links directly in the e-mail messages and send your leads directly to your affiliate sales page if you choose to do so.

You can purchase leads in various ways and import them directly into an auto-responder that contains prewritten messages about the product you are selling. Then all you have to do is promote your auto-responder email address.

Starting a blog, article marketing, discussion forums, are just a few ways to promote it. Creating e-books and giving them away is another option. Focus on a specific theme and write useful information about it that people would want to read. You don't have to be a great writer, and nor do you have to write a 200 page book. Twenty to thirty pages would be enough. Within the content of the e-book you can include links to your affiliate products and make sales that way.

Some article directories and discussion forums do not allow you to place a link to an affiliate sales page in your signature file. On the other hand they do allow you to link to a website or a blog. So if you do not want to run a website, all you need to do is start a free blog with Blogger.com. Regularly updating or adding content to your blog is not even necassary. All that is necessary is a sign-up form and possibly a pre-sell article about the affiliate product you are selling. Then you can participate in discussion forums send traffic to your pre-sell blog article via the link in your signature file.

While I must emphasize that having a website of your own is the best way to be successful with affiliate marketing, if that is not something that appeals to you then it is not an absolute necessity. Instead, you can promote your affiliate link directly and make sales in the various ways that I have listed in this article.