Article Marketing has always been my favorite way to advertise affiliate programs. Since I love to write, this was a natural for me. When you bought a pay-per-click ad, on the other hand, you drove traffic to the website for as long as you were paying for the ad. But with Article Marketing, once your article was out there, it stayed out there and continued to send traffic to the website. I wrote reviews and gave good content and used the Resource Box to send people to my affiliate link, so that they would hopefully make a purchase and I would receive my affiliate commission. This worked for me.

But along the way, things changed. More often than not, article directories, especially the better ones, refused to allow affiliate links in the Resource Box. They wanted you to send people to your own website and promote the product from there. Oh, no! Another roadblock for the non-techie. I didn't know how to set up my own website and things looked bleak!

Luckily, I discovered Simple Money Machines. This was a point and click website that even I could set up. No HTML, no FTP, no learning curve. Traffic tracking and split testing was included and you could even put audio on your site. An autoresponder was included so I began to build a list as well. And that's when I really began to build a business. I began to set up a site for each affiliate product that I was promoting and all was well.

But as I progressed, I realized that I really didn't want to set up an individual website for EVERY affiliate product that I wanted to promote. I already had 5 Simple Money Machines for my favorite affiliate products and it was becoming too time consuming since I already had a full time job and just wanted some extra income. So I tried setting up a quick blog for each affiliate product, but that was time consuming too.

It was about that time that I attended my first Internet Marketing Seminar. What an exciting weekend! I listened to many wonderful speakers, learned so many new things, but best of all, made some great friends. I mentioned the Resource Box problem I was having to the person sitting next to me at lunch one day and she just happened to be a technical whiz!

I'll never forget what she said to me. "Oh, that's an easy problem to fix. You just set up a redirect." "Hmm, easy for you to say," I thought. "What on earth is a redirect? " So she patiently explained it to me in words that even I could understand.

You register for for a domain name and then have that domain name redirected to your affiliate link, so that when someone clicks on your domain name, they will be redirected to the affiliate website. Everyone is happy. The directories are happy because you are using your own domain name and I was certainly happy, because it really was an easy answer to a difficult question.

So things are easy now. When I want to set up a whole website for a product, I use Simple Money Machines, where I can build my list. When I want to simply send someone to an affiliate link, I set up a redirect. Couldn't be simpler.

So now I focus on what I like to do best, which is writing. I've practiced the skill of Article Writing for so long now, that my articles are usually accepted very quickly. And I still don't have to be a techie!