One of the most effective ways to promote a product as an affiliate is to do an honest review of the product.  You can do that by email to your newletter list or to your customer list.  You can create the review in the form of an article and publish it with one or two of the article syndication sites like ezinearticles.som or goarticles.com.

Or… you could write a detailed review and post it on your own blog.

A number of my own affiliates use this last technique and it works great for them as well as for the merchants they represent.

Here’s an example

Take note of how thorough Case Stevens has been in reviewing the product.  It’s obvious from his write-up that he has, indeed, used the product and is making an honest evaluation.  Assuming his readers have come to trust Case’s judgement, they won’t have any trouble at all following his recommendations.

Just like any pre-sales/landing page you might create to promote a merchant’s product, you can get organic search engine traffic to your blog post.  You can also target your post in any other form of advertising.  Whether you use Google or Yahoo PPC advertising, purchase ezine ads, or simply link to the page in traffic exchanges, you now have an effective promotional page in place to drive sales through your affiliate link.

You could even marry a couple of strategies.  Go ahead and create the blog post like in the example above, but then write a small introductory article for the article directories, that lead to your blog post.  Go the extra mile and watch your affiliate earnings begin to grow steadily.