For those who want to use affiliate marketing to make money online but are strapped financially there are several no cost ways to start earning commissions. The methods are free but do require an investment of time to be successful. They generally are not as fast at generating commissions as paid advertising such as google adwords but are more of a gradual way of building income online.

Blogs are the most effective tool to earn affiliate commissions without incurring any expenses. Writing niche blogs around a specific topic that are keyword rich tend to get ranked well in search engine results. It's important for a blog to be updated often and provide a feed to draw in traffic. Posts to update a blog should be done everyday. Anyone who runs out of ideas for updating his or her blog can find free articles on just about any topic in article directories. These free articles can be used as blog posts. Feeds from other blogs can also be included in a blog to provide updated information. Having a interesting and frequently updated blog will recieve links from other sites and will get noticed by the search engines.

Writing articles and publishing them online is another no cost affiliate marketing technique. The articles can have an link to an affiliate site in them. A good strategy I recommend though is a link to a blog or site with information related to or reviews of the affiliate site itself. Once an article is published it is often reprinted on many websites, blogs and ezines all accross the internet. This alone will produce some targeted traffic. Oftentimes the articles will rank well in search engine results and also the links the articles generate help the affiliate site rank well.

Traffic exchanges are another free affiliate marketing method. With traffic exchanges one views other websites to gain credits which can be redeemed for traffic to their own site. Traffic exchanges are much less effective than blogs or articles. There are two reasons for this. First of all exchange traffic is not targeted. Secondly traffic from exchanges are from people who are mailnly interested in generating hits to their own websites. Even so commissions can be made from traffic exchanges. The time spent on traffic exchanges should be much less than on blogs and articles though.

Placing advertising on free classified sites and ezines is another affiliate marketing tool. Since there is usually a lot of others placing these free classifieds an ad should really stand out from the others and compell someone seeing the ad to click on it.

Using free affiliate marketing methods to make money online isn't a way to "get rich quick". It takes a lot of time writing and placing ads. If one works at it consistently especially blogging and writing articles they should be able to build a nice income over a period of several months and not have to spend any money doing it.