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One of the most important things that one can do with affiliate marketing is to promote their website.  These days basically anyone can create a website with just a little bit of know how.  But having a website really isn't enough.  Sure, you can tell your friends and family members to visit your website but if you want more than a dozen visitors you have to do more.
Google is still, by far, the largest search engine.  You absolutely have to get your website listed by Google to  draw traffic.  Fortunately this is pretty much automatic.  Any site or business that claims that they'll get you listed in Google for a fee is an outright scam, same thing for anyone who claims that they can speed up the process.  Google is constantly indexing new pages of the internet as it finds them.  I have actually had websites that weren't finished - and in some cases didn't have more than an index page - get listed in Google and return searches.
So, getting listed isn't the issue.  What you want is to be the top result for your term.  Or to at least be on the first page for your subject.  That's what I'm working on now along with a few others.  There are many factors which make up Google's ranking and the algorithm that is used is a very closely guarded secret.  However one thing that is definitely known is that you need links to your website, the more the better.  But you also need quality links.  There are lots of places that you can post links and thousands of services that will do it for you for a fee.  My experience - and I've tested this to prove it - is that services that put links to your page are completely worthless.  They don't have your ranking at all.  In fact, some sites are considered spam and can actually get your site black listed from Google.
This is where articles come in.  This is one way to create quality links to your site.  There are numerous sites that you can post articles on.  Each one has different rules but what they are looking for is quality content.  Tell a story, offer an opinion, or explain how to do something.  Within the context of your article you can work in a link to your site.  If it is obvious that the only purpose in your article is to create a link the good sites will not approve your article, so you have to submit quality, not garbage.
So yesterday I created my first article to promote the site.  The other guys that I'm working with wrote articles as well so we should have at least 5 quality links to the site by the end of the day and soon we'll start climbing up the search engine rankings.  If you're interested in my first article, I went with humor.  You can find it at http://therealowner.com/humor/what-happens-when-the-dog-eats-your-keys/