There are many ways to try and get traffic to your site when you are an affiliate marketer and most of them will cost you some money. If you really don't want to spend a lot of money to do that you can always consider trying the 5 ways listed here that can generate some traffic without spending any money just some of your time and effort.
One good way to get some free traffic to your site without spending a dime is to become a regular participant on several different major and proactive forums on the Internet. Getting involved in different forums is probably one of the best ways of getting traffic for free. Word of advice though, check out all the forums you might be interested in and join them for awhile as a guest to get the feel for the people that frequent. Don't join a forum before you feel comfortable with the people and the setting.
You can also consider setting up your own free blog. When you blog online you can do something that not only gives you freedom to express yourself but it also allows you to freely promote your affiliate associations, just as long as you don't go overboard and turn people off. You need to have content on your blog that is going to interest people and want them to comment on your blogs. In order for your blog to be successful remember that you need to post to it on a consistent basis and promote your blog. You can ping your blog, post comments on other related blogs and then include your blog in your signature, use RSS and podcasting technology as well. So to get that traffic you need from a blog you are going to have to work to get people to come to your blog.
There are a ton of active social networks still out there so you should start taking a look at all of them just like you did with the forums and see which ones that you might feel the most comfortable becoming a member of. Of course the three most popular are Facebook, Twitter and MySpace but there still are a lot of other ones out there that you might feel a lot better being a member of. When you have joined one or several then you can start building relationships where you can eventually start talking about and sharing with others information about your affiliate marketing.
You can also start making videos about your marketing and the products that you are trying to promote. Video has really become an important tool on the Internet so there is no reason why you can't cash in on it as well. Probably the best place to go would be YouTube. Create yourself a fun and interesting video about a certain product and then put it on YouTube and then start promoting. This could very well get you some free traffic to your site.
The last idea and some make think it's weird but do some free advertising offline. Go ahead and make up fliers and put them around places that have free WiFi and other public areas that have computers set up. You can then attract people to your site in this fashion. You also should remember good old fashioned word of mouth advertising. Tell all of your friends & family as word of mouth is still a powerful tool for getting people to take a look at your work.