Phillip,

If you are looking for no-cost, then I'd recommend a Blogger website to get your feet wet.
If you are looking for a small cost, I'd recommend getting some cheap hosting and registering a domain. After this, setup a Wordpress-based website which is very easy and provides powerful options to customize.

I have found that the best way to market affiliate products is to build a website FULL of good, valuable content for your visitors.

Here's why:

Most affiliate marketers fail because they try to immediately make a sale, when the visitor most times wasn't looking to buy.

Think about it. People go online to search for INFORMATION. A solution to their problem. (Just like you came to this forum to find how to effectively build a site that makes money)

People these days are so used to being 'sold' that once they see anything that looks like a sales pitch, BOOM, they're outta' there. They wanted content, information. Not a sales pitch.

Now am I saying there's never a good time to offer them a chance to buy a product? Of course not! But, you have to be willing to give them the info they are looking for, build trust, and once they like you, recommend your product.

The content that you DO give them will be relevant to highly searched for keywords, so that you are not wasting your time making webpages that no one is looking for.

You need to go where the traffic is, and sell there.

Not only that, but the information on your pages will gently warm up your visitors to eventually get them open to buying from you, and then you send them along to your affiliate site and let the sales page close the deal.

Your only job is to get them 'open' to the idea of buying the product.

For example, if you are an affiliate for 'Self Defense 101', you will build a website that has high quality information about self defense that is slowly making them interested in actually learning the stuff. Then when THEY are ready, they'll click the link and buy.

Just a tiny bit of info, but hope this helps.

For me I am using the PLR Product and create the tips in the PLR Product to Link to clickbank product. Exampla: For Tips on Diet & Exercise in PLR Product mentioned that using Yoga exercise for health so I will add the Clickbank Link for my affiliate product to sell. In other words if they are 10 tips I will link to 10 affiliates product from clickbank. The best is I give the E-BOOK Freely to my leads/mailing list.

Here are a few things to help you out...

1) If you are using your own domain and web host and want to promote multiple affiliate offers then you would need to create different landing pages. Here's a simple example of promoting multiple offers using one domain: www-yourdomain.com/product1 - www-yourdomain.com/product2 and so on... (Of course the product1 and product2 name would be a specific keyword you are trying to rank for.

2) Or, you could use a product that cloaks your affiliate link and redirects the visitor to the correct product you are promoting but you will still need your own domain name and web host.

I suggest using your own domain name with your own hosting and set up a word press blog. Blogger is free but there are people that don't take blogger blog as seriously as they take wordpress. Of course there are people that don't know the difference either.

With wordpress you can create subdomains for each product you are promoting.

You definitely need to create good quality articles to put on your blog about the products. And you should add new content continually. You will also need to create yourself some back linking articles so you can put them into article directories to get some link juice going.

If you continue to add value to your website then you should eventually make sales.

It's not quite as simple as just building a site and "forwarding" an affiliate link to it. If your site is nothing but a bunch of affiliate links, why would anyone bother to visit it? You need to fill it up with great content to get people interested in your site and your offers.

I would go with a blog. Easiest route to getting up and running with minimal html/site building skills, but you will still need to start posting info to it to get people to buy.

The one book worth buying for newbies for sure is Rosalind Garder's Super Affiliate handbook. Read it cover to cover and do nothing during that time except for learn the concepts.

Then you can write your own business plan.

Or you can keep doing what you are doing.

I suggest you to buy a domain name so that you will be able to have one page for each of your products, this way you will have a more organized website.
If you go with a blog, your products "will be lost" after a couple of blog posts. You still can create pages for your products, but it will not be helpful as you will not choose the name of the sub domain name.