Actually there is one very powerful advantage that online entrepreneurs involved in affiliate programs have over their counterparts earning from their own ecommerce web sites. And that is the fact that people are usually bound to believe a person referring another web site to them much more easily and quickly than one trying to promote their own site. This coupled with the fact that the Internet is an amazingly powerful referral marketing tool has made the rise of online affiliates phenomenal within such a short time.

But there is one major stumbling block that affiliates face today. And that is how to advertise their programs or how to generate enough sales leads. To be successful in any online venture a person needs numerous leads on an ongoing basis, that way they will have a chance of turning as many of them as possible into actual sales.

Many affiliates generate leads by finding ways of harvesting email addresses of visitors to their web sites to create an opt-in email list which they then use as leads to refer to their affiliate sites. This is usually done via special links to the sites that identify the particular affiliate through which a visitor arrived at a certain site.

The more prosperous affiliates use pay-per-click ads. The effectiveness of these ads is being eroded daily by the increasing number of fraudsters and scum artists who have invaded pay-per-click ads in droves. This has meant that out of the total click-through a person receives and has to pay for, an increasingly horrifying percentage are generated by fraudsters who have no intention of buying anything from the advertised web site.

That leaves one extremely effective form of online advertising that is in fact free. This is free articles posted at various targeted high traffic web sites.

The net is full of experts and many of them have been quoted as saying that articles alone are not enough to generate the sort of traffic that brings success. My advice is that people should not be too quick to comment on and pass sweeping judgment on subjects that they have only had brief experiences in. As you read this there are an increasing number of online entrepreneurs making serious money online using only articles as their marketing tool. Including the writer of this particular article.

The other thing that has caused many to doubt the effectiveness of articles is the fact that they are free. Free but effective? Does it not sound too good to be true?

Actually although using articles as a marketing tool is free, you will be required to spend time putting in lots of hard work consistently, to really reap the rewards. So there is a price to pay after all, although it is not in the form of hard cash.

In fact in many cases, used skillfully, articles can be much more effective than web sites in generating quality leads. Here's how.