You will find that are numerous offers on the internet that promise to provide you with a free affiliate website from which you can make a ton of money, selling their products or services. That’s right, at no cost to you, the company will accept you as a distributor for their products and give you an affiliate website and any sales that come from your site will result in a huge commission check. On top of that, if you can recruit more people to accept their free website, then you can receive a commission on their sales as well.

All of this is free and sounds good on paper, but when reality sets in you will soon learn that there is no such thing as a free lunch, or website. Yes, most of these companies will give you a free affiliate website, a replication of their own site and it will be configured with your name or company name on the landing page. It will also track the visitors that place orders through your affiliate site and yes, they will pay the promised commission. The challenge for you is getting visitors to your specific website.

This is when the free affiliate website begins to cost money. For sake of argument, consider a company sells cell phones and you are now a cell phone distributor for its brands. Chances are, you have joined a group of more than 100 other websites selling cell phones for the same company and you all have the same or similar title on your website. A person searching for the company name may end up with a choice of 50 or more sites with the same name as a result of their search, and research shows that most users only look at the first 10, and in rare cases 20, of the top search results.

The odds of a search making your site one of the top searches is extremely low so you will have to become involved in paid search and or online marketing just to make your site standout from the rest. Additionally, if you did manage to recruit others into the program, you have added to the competition. Print advertising that includes your specific website name may work, but most internet savvy users know that anything past the “/” in a site name is usually an obvious affiliate website type link.

Your site’s name for tracking purposes is for instance, "cellphonesales.com/yourname" and people only type in cellphonesales.com, knowing they will end up at the company’s main website. You did the advertising and will receive none of the financial benefit because the sale did not come from your affiliate site. First thing you need to do is cloak your affiliate link. Refer to the next page on this site, Affiliate Marketing Done Right.

You can spend more money by producing articles about the benefits of your cell phones, with a signature link that includes your web address, but most free distribution articles are not picked up by sites needing articles. Paying for distribution to a few hundred potential users increases the chance of them being used, and while the cost may be small, it will need to be recurring if you hope for any type of success. You will still need to find new ways to refine free or paid marketing and SEO techniques.