Once you have a compelling affiliate website up, the hard part comes – getting traffic to the site. There are a ton of different ways you can get traffic to an affiliate website, from the totally free to the high risk, high reward.

Here are a few smart ways of promoting your affiliate marketing website.

==> Pure Free SEO

If you don’t want to spend a dime on marketing, you can still earn a very decent living through purely free SEO.

With this method, your goal is to identify several moderate traffic, low-competition terms to go after.

You build your pages around these terms, then get as many backlinks to your pages as possible. Use a myriad of free backlinking tactics like social bookmarking, directory submissions and article marketing to boost your rankings.

==> Accelerated SEO

Instead of just going for the low-hanging fruit, you can be more ambitious by using accelerated SEO techniques.

These techniques can help you net high PageRank, high authority links.

One common method of getting high rankings is to do paid blog posts. You pay other bloggers for the permission to write a blog that gets posted on their website. The link back to your site will be in-context and high in PageRank.

Another method of accelerating your SEO growth is to start outsourcing much of the work. By hand, you might only be able to do ten backlinks a day. For just $3 an hour, however, you can create your own mini army that goes out there creating these backlinks for you.

==> YouTube Traffic

Another method you can use to promote your affiliate marketing website is YouTube videos.

Put up innovative, informative and entertaining YouTube videos. Make sure the video is high enough quality that people will want to pass it to their friends.

Then put a link back to your affiliate website in the description box or in the captions.

==> Buying Up Related Sites

Go on Flippa.com and take a look at sites that are related to your industry. Buy them up and use the traffic to your advantage.

You can use the traffic to build an email list which funnels into your affiliate marketing list. You could put a banner ad for your site or an affiliate product on your list.

You could even just 301 redirect the entire site and its traffic to your primary site.

==> Pay Per Click Advertising

PPC advertising is quite difficult to master, especially when it comes to affiliate marketing. There are pitfalls when it comes to finding profitable ROI campaigns, as well as navigating the rules each PPC system has around affiliate marketing.

All that said, PPC is still one of the most lucrative ways of earning revenue through affiliate marketing.

These are some smart ways of promoting your affiliate marketing website, from the innovative to the proven.