Affiliate advertising is not new
Affiliate Advertising is not new online, but it is getting more exposure as increasing amounts of companies take advantage of this new marketing technique.

Companies pay you to try a product
Here's the jist: A company will pay a middleman a fee for each person they refer to their website who will try their product and potentially become a paying customer. The middleman offers to the consumer benefits for trying the companies product and referring others to do the same.

Finding Referrals is Difficult
What's difficult about this, is getting the referrals. It's always easiest to ask friends & family for help, but for some of this that isn't an option. Fortunately, some very clever individuals have create some great communities for helping us swap referrals with others who are also looking for referrals. I'll talk about that later in the guide.

Nothing is really free
First and foremost, nothing is really free, especially IPODs, Laptops, Game Consoles, televisions. But you can get them much cheaper than retail with a little effort, patience, and some knowledge.

You're going to need some tools to get started. Here's a quick summary:
1. Paypal
2. Prizebook
3. Anything4Free Forums
4. Referral Swapper

First, sign up for a paypal account.
You'll need to verify it with either a savings or checking account.

Get a paypal debit card.
Next, you'll want to upgrade your account to a "premier" account - which means that they take more from you when you get money from places, but it also means that you can get a paypal debit card, tied only to your paypal funds, to work with online. You have to request the debit card to get it.

After you request the paypal credit card, it will take 14 days to get to you.

Get Paypal Funds from Prizebook
While you're waiting for the credit card, you need to generate some "seed money" for this process. When I started experimenting, I had no interest in gambling my hard-earned cash. So, I generated some money with prizebook.

Prizebook is a site that pays you for "completing offers." They get paid for referring potential customers to advertisers. Typical advertisements are things like: Sign up with Advertiser X for a 7 day Free Trial, we'll pay you 20 dollars.

I started by doing 4 offers and making roughly 80 dollars for my seed money, which worked perfectly.

Swapping Referrals
The next step involves Anything4Free and ReferralSwapper. Both are sites that allow you to "swap" referrals with people. These sites are the bread-and-butter and will help you connect with people in order to trade referrals to get what you want.

Anything4Free is a pretty simple forum site. It does track the history of users who trade - you can pretty easily tell who will be reliable.

Referall Swapper costs $10/year for a membership. It is far more sophisticated than Anything4Free and in my opinion a much better resource.

Note: When joining Referral Swapper, enter the coupon code "SWAP" and the membership fee is reduced to 8 dollars.