Affiliate Marketing Domination

Archive for February, 2012

Not all traffic is the same. Getting a gazillion hits is great, but not if it is from random subjects and subjects. You want to focus on traffic that has a reasonable chance of converting.

Where To Get The Traffic You Want

Many sites make the mistake of trying to be all things to all people. It is far better to stick to a specific service or product than it is to offer limited options to customers. If you are selling hiking gear, be the best damn hiking gear site on the net and nothing else. This same problem arises when sites target traffic generation strategies.

The key to cost effective marketing is to get worthwhile web site traffic. At first blush, getting as much traffic as possible, regardless of how, sounds like a smart move. It is not. Doing so wastes your money, distracts you from what you should be doing and diverts your time from doing just that. If you are paying for traffic, you must find credible traffic sources.

Credible traffic is simply traffic from sources and locations that are relevant to your site. If you have looked into generating traffic, you have probably seen offers of 100,000 hits for $50. Yes, you will get 100,000 hits. Of course, the traffic is coming off of free lottery sites or the visitors are being paid to visit your site. This traffic is not credible and will not convert into revenues.

The best place to find credible web site traffic is Google and Overture. These are pay-per-click search engines that list your ads directly on their search results. This means you can specify the keyword phrases you want to be listed under, to wit, targeting your advertising to your market. You can also create filters that limit the ad placements to searches from certain geographic locations, such as the United States or Europe. This further targets your traffic by excluding clicks from some country which you can't possibly do business with.

You can also get credible traffic from web sites and traffic vendors. The sites handle it differently, but you can often buy ad space on their sites in the form of a banner. There are some credible services out there, but there are a lot more dubious ones. Personally, I do not use any of them, but it is your money.

Focusing your marketing is important if you want a good return on investment. You can get credible web site traffic from a lot of sources, but Google and Overture are the best.

"Unlimited monies are available for you to grab through online business, it's easy to start your online business today. What you need to do is set up a website and watches the money flow into your account".

Do you heard about the above statement before? Many online entrepreneurs do and start working on it by getting their website up and waiting with full of hopes to see the money "flying" into their account, but unfortunately, many are disappointed.

In fact, the above statement is true with one missing element between "set up a website" and "watch money flow into your account". The missing element is "Website Traffic". After you have getting your website up and before you are able to watch the money flow into your account, you need to put a lot of efforts in driving the traffic to your website.

If you are interested in online business and your goal is to become a success online entrepreneur, then it is important to know where does website traffic comes from.

According to research published by GVU (Graphic, Visualization and Usability Center), most users – novice, expert, young, old, male and female – find new websites from two main sources: hyperlinks and search engines. In average, about 60% of online users use search engines to find information from the internet. This means that most of traffic is generated through search engines; hence, if your website is ranked at high position by the search engines means that more people will find your website when they are looking for the product, service or information you provide at your website.

One of the key factors that determine your website has a good position in search engines is "back links", which are links provide by other websites to your website. When websites provide a link to your site, the search engines deem your site as valuable and this affects your position in the listings.

Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising & Search Engine Optimization (SEO) are among the two most popular methods to drive website traffic from search engines. PPC is the quickest way to get top position of the keyword search listed by in the search engine; as long as your bid price is higher than your competitors in your selected search keywords, your website will be ranked higher than theirs. But PPC is not the cheapest method and it may cost more than what you earn if you do not put some strategies in place.

While PPC advertising is the quickest way to drive website traffic from search engines to your website, SEO optimization for better placement in the search engines should be your ultimate goal to drive unlimited & free traffic to your website. One of the ways to optimize your website to be search engines friendly is by generating back links from other websites to your website. If your website is new, you may find it hard to get others website to contribute their links to you. But, there is one exception, whether your website is new or old, you can always generate back links through articles.

Article writing & submission is one the most effective and cheapest way to generate back links to your website while providing exposure on your products & services to millions of internet surfers who are looking for information. By writing short articles on the topic related to your website, products or services, you can offer these articles for other website owners or newsletter publishers to use by submitting them to article directories, forums or blogs. Publishers who use your articles for their ezines or websites will remain your bio information with 1 to 3 hyperlinks to your website. Article marketing is said to be a "One Stone Kills Two Birds" method that driving website traffic through hyperlinks at your articles while generating back links to your website for search engine optimization.

In Summary

The success and failure of your internet business is determined by website traffic. Without the website traffic, nobody will ever find your website and your products or services will not get exposure to those people who are looking for it. Hence, optimizing your website properly for better placement in the search engines for driving natural website traffic is a technique that you should become familiar with and use to your advantage.

Link trading is the task of getting links to your site on other sites by trading.. umm.. links. This is done to get more traffic to you web site. Link trading creates more traffic in two main ways, increased search engine rankings and also from the traffic the links themselves generate from people clicking on them.

Link Trading and Search Engines

Trading links helps search engine rankings because the algorithms that determine rankings factor in the number of sites that link back to the site to be ranked. The logic is that sites that have many links pointing back to it must be relevant and good in some sense, and are therefore ranked higher in the engines.

How to Trade Links

Now that we know what link trading is, how is it done? There are many methodologies. Since link trading can involve many contacts, requests and link categorizations, it is best to use software to handle your link trading campaign.

Link Trading Software

The software you choose should allow you to create a link directory, ad links to that directory, send requests to have your link posted on other sites and a method for keeping track of responses.

Link Trading Process

The general process begins when the site owner identifies a site which he or she would like to trade links with. Generally, these sites should be relevant to the topic of your site, or at least have a section dedicated to the topic of your site. Trading links with huge numbers of unrelated sites will actually hurt your search engine rankings in most cases. Also, usually it is a good idea to look for well-ranked sites to trade links with. The importance of a well-ranked site's link to your site in search engine algorithms will be greater than those of not so well ranked sites.

After the site to trade links with is located, a link to that site is posted on your site. Sometimes the link would be posted on a different site than the site wishing to get a link back. This produces non-reciprocal links, which weigh heavier in search engines.

After the link is posted, a request is sent that a link back be posted, explaining that if a link back is not created, the original link to the prospects site is likely to be removed.

If a link is returned, then the trade is marked as successful and each of the link traders has one more site linking to it. Other wise a follow up is sent. If the follow up still does not result in a link back, often the link would be removed.

Link Trading Etiquette

Asking to trade links without posting a link to the site you are wishing to trade with is bad form. The prospect is likely to think "If this person has not already posted a link to my site, what will motivate them to do so when I post a link to their site?" Many people will not even respond to a link request whereas the link has not yet been posted.

This is of course only a brief introduction to link trading. In short, effective link trading requires organization, persistence and time, yet is often well worth the effort.

There are thousands of free traffic exchanges online today. The trick is to find the ones that work best for you. Not all free traffic exchanges are created equal and the most active ones or biggest ones are not necessarily the best ones for your needs. Free traffic exchanges are a great marketing tool for a variety of reasons. The most obvious reason is that you get lots of people looking, and hopefully clicking on your website or promotional pages. But there are hidden benefits to free traffic exchanges you may not have even considered.

Search engines love free traffic exchanges. The incoming and outgoing links they generate is one major thing the search engines are looking for. Plus the rapidly changing content is another reason the search engines love these things. Traffic Exchanges that have more content also generate a higher page rank, and therefore more traffic, and increased memberships.

The key is to find exchanges that are very active and have lots of members. The more members they have, the more potential customers you get looking at your offer and your chances for sales conversions are that much better. But bigger isn't always better.

We all know clicking on ads in a free traffic exchange can be very boring, monotonous and can take a lot of time. That's why you need to make the best of your opportunity or you will just be wasting a lot of your time and effort on something that just isn't working. If you have your own niche website, then you already differentiated yourself from the pack. If you are an affiliate marketer, then you need to make yourself a good splash page to capture the leads attention and get them to click through to your site. This is the key having success with Free Traffic Exchanges.

One way to use free traffic exchanges to your advantage is to join a few at first, and see if your sales pick up. If your sales aren't doing well, then test out a few more. When you do find a few traffic exchanges that appear to be generating sales for you, then narrow those down until you find the ones that are working. Now concentrate your efforts on those because they're the ones you want. Things may change and sales may start to fall. You must always be watching your results. If or when sales start falling, it is time to change your splash page or design another one. Always design 2 at a time and measure the results from both. This way you can scrap the ones that don't get a very good click through and keep the ones that convert.

If you're going to be using multiple free traffic exchanges, and I recommend that you do, your first priority should be to pick up a multi-tab web browser such as Modzilla Firefox. You can download that free at firefox.com.

Getting free traffic to your website is a lot of work. If you don't have the money to spend on full blown PPC (pay-per-click) campaigns like Google AdWords, free traffic exchanges are a great way to get the traffic you need to succeed.

Ideally, once you get traffic to your site, it will remain a high-traffic site–WRONG.  Most people when surfing are looking for information-valuable information, about everything from money, news, products, jobs, etc.  Therefore, it's extremely important to make sure that the content you provide on your website is of good quality and true (to the best of your knowledge, lying will only come back to bite you in the butt).  So ask yourself, does this information give my visitors what they are looking for, or does it provide a solution to a problem?  Also, do I provide them with other useful information along within their search, or places to go to get more free info?

Search engines love free information just as much as consumers do, try providing a free subscription, e-book, or newsletter to bring free traffic to your site.  Its sites whom provide valuable information that receive repeat visitors AND referrals.  It's also important that you place keywords on your site.  This will help you receive higher rankings in the search engines and here's why; when keywords are typed into search engines the search engines send out "spiders" which are programs that crawl across the web indexing pages automatically with the listed keywords located on them-so the more words you have relating the search, the better. Also, don't overdo meta-tags, though they can increase visibility, most search engines use them as a flag for potential abuse, and if abuse is detected the search engine will issue a penalty. 

Lastly, try to provide information on other topics, or sub-topics on your site, for example, if your site is about giving piano lessons, you may want to provide information about where one can go online to find pianos or sheet music. If you already own a business and are looking to expand it online your best bet is to go with a favorable SEO company; especially if your looking to see your site placed in a top 20 ranking in the search engines, which will increase your visibility, conversion rate and increase profits.

Whether you have created a website for your business or your website is your business you need people to actually view it in order to get your return on investment. But how does one do this? Well like anything out in the Internet there is no "one size fits all" solution for your website. You need to employ a multi-pronged attack in order to get more traffic to your website. Hopefully I will show you how to dramatically increase the traffic to your website using these simple yet effective techniques.

The first technique is to actually pay for advertising for your website. This can be done using such services provided by Google, Yahoo and MSN where you pay to have your website listed in their sponsored links section when a user searches for a key term. This will get traffic to your website almost immediately. Always refine each campaign to see if you can maximize the return on investment for each time you place ads on these search engines.

The second technique is to write articles and content. Have content on your website that pertains to the products and services you are selling. Make sure you check your website logs to see what terms people are searching for and then make sure you write about those topics. Do not have enough time to do this yourself? A good way around this is to use a freelance service such as eLance.com or rentacoder.com. You could even partner up with a student at a local college or university to write the articles for you. The student would benefit by gaining the valuable experience and would gain writing samples for their portfolio. This is by far one of the most effective techniques of gaining traffic to your website. You must also make sure you publish some articles to those syndication sites that will allow other website owners to benefit from your experience and knowledge.

The third technique I would recommend is to submit your website to the top three search engines. These search engines include Google, Yahoo and MSN. By doing this you will get increased traffic by users searching for content that you have developed using the above technique.

The fourth technique is to partner up with someone else on the Internet that is selling similar complimentary products. Exchange links with these partners in order to increase your rankings on the search engines. be careful who you partner up with and make sure they are reputable in the field as you are attaching your name to this person or company and what they do could adversely affect you as well.

The fifth technique is to find newsgroups that pertain to your products or services and participate in the conversations. Try not to oversell your products or services as you will most likely be banned from them and really create a bad impression for yourself. Rather, only answer the questions that people ask to make yourself the true expert in the field so that people will visit your website.

These techniques are low cost in order to get people to visit your website. While not the only techniques out there for driving traffic to your website these are some of the most effective techniques that will help establish your website as a true leader in the field.