According to some experts, the only way you can make a lot of money as an affiliate is to spend a lot of money. Whether the method is through pay per click marketing or building a large affiliate site, the message is clear…you need to spend! Not so, says Jennifer Ledbetter.

Better know by her online moniker, “PotPieGirl” she has laid out a complete plan for developing a profitable affiliate marketing business without spending one red cent, besides the cost of the course itself.

“One Week Marketing” (OWM) is a 65 page ebook with checklists and additional resources as bonuses. There is also a keyword research guide upsell. For about $50 you can get the entire package. The underlying theme of PotPieGirl’s method is to create small niche sites with free methods and then use free methods to drive traffic. The course gets its name because she suggests creating and marketing one site per week.

Rather than spend money on domain names and hosting, OWM uses Squidoo lenses to create landing pages for affiliate products and programs. Squidoo lenses are free to create and they can be built without having any HTML knowledge, which make them a great choice for newbies. Recent Squidoo policies changes have made some types of campaigns totally impossible (like weight loss methods). However, the traffic that Squidoo lenses receive and their ease of use make it hard to give up the site as a method for making money.

Much like Bum Marketing, OWM focuses on using low competition, in demand keywords to create the campaigns. Each campaign includes a Squidoo lens and some other free promotional methods. I’ve written a lot of Internet marketing products for clients and done marketing on the side, and there were some free methods of promotion that I hadn’t heard of!

Getting your first campaign set up is very easy to do following PotPieGirl’s instructions. She is very committed to visually showing her readers how to put together their sites. There are a ton of screenshots to guide you through the different promotion methods. Best of all, one of the bonuses is a checklist to keep your organized. The package also includes an action plan, mind maps and the transcripts of one on one coaching that PotPieGirl gave to a fellow marketer. The transcripts alone are over 130 pages and chock full of tips and tricks that are only touched on in the book.

What struck me most about the OWM course and the follow up e-mails (as well as PotPieGirl’s newsletter that you are automatically subscribed to upon purchase) is her willingness to help people. She is very accessible and does her best to answer all e-mail questions she receives. I’ve heard her refer to herself as a “help-a-holic” in several videos and teleseminars, and it shows. She goes above and beyond to make sure that her customers understand the method.

The only downside to OWM is its popularity. Since its release, Squidoo has been populated with OWM lenses on every topic imaginable. It may be difficult to find a lens title for the keyword you are looking for, particularly in a popular niche. This doesn’t mean, however, that the method is obsolete. With some creative thinking, and possibly applying the same philosophy to another free platform, the OWM method can still be used.