Affiliate Marketing Domination

Posts Tagged ‘Affiliate Marketing’

Copyright 2006 David Maillie

There are advertisements, articles and more that all state how great these traffic exchanges are. But are they really worth the time and effort they require? Will you really get a lot of traffic and if you do get traffic, is it good, purchasing traffic?

There are many traffic exchanges; TS25, Traffichits, Traffic Swarm, TrafficG, etc… If you can think of a subject there is probably a traffic exchange named after it – there's even Mafia Traffic and Dead hits. The basic idea is that you click on a website and watch it for 10-30 seconds and for every 1-3 sites you view 1 person will view your site. This can be quite tedious as to get a sizable amount of traffic you must view an awful lot of websites.

Most of these traffic exchanges have come up with an upsell from the free traffic exchange. For a set fee around $10-$30 per month you get 1,000 or so free credits and a quicker timer or a better conversion 1:2 instead of 1:3 or similar. The problem here is that most of this traffic is seen as robotic by the search engines so it will ot help much in your ranking. This traffic is also people just like you trying to get traffic. Very, very few will have any interest in your product or site and most will click right through to the next screen. So yours doesn't even fuully load – in other words they won't even see your site. Yes, there are sales made through the traffic exchanges, but it is so low of a conversion that you must really visit tens of thousands of pages for each conversion/sale.

Most traffic exchanges do have a virulence aspect built in which can help, but just like with Mary Kay and any MLM program, only the first program participants will reap much from this. You need a huge downline for it to be worth your time and this can take a long time to build. Just like Mary Kay, there are only 10 or so people per exchange getting most of the results. The rest are basically wasting their time and helping others (their sponsors) to get rich.

There are better ways to spend your time. Write articles and submit them to sites like ezinearticles for maximum readership. This will give you traffic that is virulent and long lasting. And it isn't a scam like MLM, its just you and your site links getting all the benefits. If you write interesting and helpful articles you will get great, targeted traffic. Ezinearticles even has numerous pages devoted to help you learn what to write and how to writ it to get maximum effect. You can also do press releases and word of mouth through forums and other free sites. In the long run you will do much better. Traffic exchanges are a waste of time. Don't take my word for it – try them and you'll see why I'm right.

Traffic exchange refers to internet marketing of exchanging your visitors with others and thereby building traffic for yours as well as for others. In simpler terms there are websites where your can post your URL and this URL is displayed on others website, and similarly you get to display others address in your site. This is done such that visitors can be exchanged with others. This helps in increasing traffic to your own website and bringing in more traffic.
There are several websites, which offer traffic exchange. The various advantages of these online Traffic exchangers are ensure more traffic, increase viewership, the registered member website appear in others as unobtrusive as possible, such that it doesn't cause irritation, the website giving the most referrals are remunerated when their own website is advertised more in others site; this will increase on line traffic for the site owner. The traffic exchanger also provides websites with targeted visitors, for example if a site is promoting products only for pets, then the site is advertised in other sites which are related to pets like that of vets site, pet food site etc. Hence, the particular site gets more referrals from the targeted visitors. Traffic networking has grown largely in the recent years, and is one of the effective manner of promoting online goods and many online newsletters.
When a product is sold on online auction, it needs promotion and advertisements like another products, other than advertising online; Traffic exchange is a cost effective and easier way to increase online traffic. One of the most popular Traffic exchange sites is that of the Free Traffic exchange. The members do not have to pay money to register their websites, but they have to advertise others site in theirs, it is one form of referral and advertisement. There has been a beeline to these Free Traffic exchange programs. It guarantees increased traffic and at the same time, the registration is free. When a website promotes a related website, the viewer ship for the other site also grows and the host website is rewarded when their own site is promoted in others and hence there is an increase in viewer ship and traffic. The big picture of internet business!
Thus Traffic exchange is the most remunerative and effective manner of promoting ones website and hence promoting products which are sold online. There are many instances when sales of products have increased with the help of Traffic exchange. Free Traffic exchange sites are a novel concept, which does not cost anything for registration, except that he gets an opportunity to advertise related sites on his own website. Hence, if you are some one selling products or promoting an opportunity online, then try a Traffic exchange to increase on-line traffic

More and more webmasters with sophisticate programming skills are using customize programming script to automate their work for maintaining websites content and driving traffics to websites. As clearly as you can notice, increasing numbers of improved programming scripts are in the market right now that look just like an-office-in-a-box. Talk about the magic touch with just a few clicks, these scripts are designed for non-programmers and are highly beneficial for marketers who wants make their online marketing go viral.

This method has been developed in the past few years and it has been improving throughout the years. Many success stories have spawned from this traffic driven method, which make use of the tendency of visitors to share contents that are informative, useful, entertaining or amazing.

This form of marketing strategy is typically low cost or even free to use it. Most people find it amazing because it leverages the work from visitors, never the hard work of webmaster alone. All websites would greatly benefit from viral marketing strategy.

Introducing – the lengendary 'tell a friend script'.

This is an easy viral marketing method for web marketers. It is a very simple programming script that any online marketer can install it at any websites in less than 5 minutes. Visitors can now easily send email message to their friends, sharing what great information they have found.

The basic feature of a 'tell a friend script' is wherein a visitor may insert name, email address and friends' email addresses. When friends receive the email, they wouldn't consider it a spam because the sender is a friend they know and trust. With 0% chance of blocking such email sent by friend they knew, this allows a wider spreading of this marketing method.

There are many sites that provide free 'tell a friend script', which you can download them at http://www.hotscripts.com/PHP/Scripts_and_Programs/Site_Recommendation/index.html. In fact, there are over hundreds of such scripts to be used for free. But to achieve the dynamic traffic driven effect, putting up unique and original content in the website is still the golden key for this method to work. There's no shortcut to this method, it all depends on the hard work you spend on putting up great and useful content for your dear visitors.

Surely enough, if you have great content in your website, tell a friend script will boost up the traffics to your website.

What Types of traffic are there?

So you have the best website money can buy you are immensely proud of your finished product but still no-one is buying. Why?

Your final profit is simple to calculate it is a factor of number of visitors * conversion rate * profit per visitor. The third factor, profit per visitor is usually where people focus their resources. It is a known quantity and easy to manipulate by simply charging the right price.

But the killer question is always how much traffic am I getting? And further are they the sort of visitors who will buy my wares?

With that simple statement in mind let's have a look at the main sources of traffic on the internet today.

Search Engine Traffic

The best because it's free. The worst because it is easily taken away. SE traffic is risky. It is easily acquired for relatively low competitive keywords with a simple knowledge of search engine optimization best practice.

Each search engine orders websites for any given term according to it's own proprietary algorithm. This algorithm usually is based upon the various factors detailed in the SEO checklist, however the weighting applied will differ for each.

There are currently 3 major search engines being:- Google, Yahoo and MSN. Google is by far the most popularly used search tool.
For more competitive terms the SEO checklist is still applicable however will require additional effort in the key areas of the same key factors. You can investigate competition via these useful tools.

Directory Listings

These are not the massive source of traffic they once were. Submission to a directory is now more use to substantiate your link popularity, a key factor in search engine positioning. The most popular free and paid directories are included within our directory listings.

Paid Advertising

Once banner advertising reigned supreme, however today it is generally recognised that most website visitors suffer heavily from "banner blindness". Visitors have seen so many banners over the years that they are now subconsciously tuned out when looking at the website.

Much more effective in today's market place is the basic text link. Not surprisingly a link which is text only! These form the basis of advertising in many a Pay-Per-Click advertising campaign. Pay Per Click is the notion of paying only for visitors to a website that click on your link. Hence you will only pay for visitors to you website and not each time your banner or text link is displayed.

The two largest PPC engines are Google's Adwords and Yahoo's Overture services. PPC allows you to instantly drive traffic to your site without having to weight for your search engine optimization skills to be appreciated by the search engines.

Guaranteed traffic is a term used for relatively cheap traffic, usually purchased in bulk. The traffic is usually generated by a popup or popunder on another site, and in my experience has not proven very effective.

Traffic Exchanges

These tend to fall into 2 general styles. The first, ad exchanges are a reciprocal agreement, usually via a co-operative site to add a piece of code to your page(s) which displays adverts on your site. In return your site will be displayed on other members websites according to the individual co-operatives weighting factors.

The second, traffic exchanges, require you to browse websites presented on a central site. You are awarded points according to how many sites you have browsed and in turn these credits may be spent by promoting your site in the same way to other browsers.
Repeat Vistors

So often overlooked. You have done the hard work in getting a first time visitor to you site now get him to stay and later to return for more. There are various methods for making your site "sticky" these include:- including a newsletter and appropriate sign up form, supplying good content, either written by yourself or sourced from the abundance of free information on the net.

Such simple things as including contact details and appropriate use of autoresponders can make all the difference.

Viral Marketing

A rather flash title for a collection of techniques which are common sense but often forgotten. Such examples include:- writing your own articles, building communities via forums, offering free items/bonuses/competitions, producing your own e-book and issuing press releases.

If you are marketing your own product one of the most successful methods will undoubtedly be starting your own affiliate program and getting others to sell for you.

Competition

Not really a traffic category as such however careful analysis of your competition's website, traffic, links and ad placement can all be obtained if you are diligent. This market intelligence will in turn lead to further opportunities to drive visitors to your site.

After a while it all becomes just good fun!

Links are one of the key seo components and can generate good website traffic. Linking in general is one of the most double-edged tools since bad "links" might decrease your page-rank and good links will undeniably polish it and hopefully boost your hit-rate.

Unsure of what bad and good links are, many seem reluctant to submit articles in order to distribute links to their sites. Don't. Be reluctant that is. As always, all you need is to know the rules.

So, what are the worries?
Google penalizes multiple content
Bad links decimate your pagerank

The notion that Google penalizes multiple content is not based on fact. Even Google themselves point to the fact that what they penalize is multiple instances of identical content on the same site. No worries then.

They may however penalize sites that have identical content AND structures. Meaning if you have a domain that carries a content tree that is identical to any number of others, then you may feel the punishing touch.

That bad links decimate your page rank is fact. A bad link can be defined as one that has a lower page-rank than your own. Page-rank is affected by other factors too, but high page-rank links is one of the most important.

Still, the number of links is also important. – If you have few links, 5 of lower page-rank will downrate your own rank. – If you mass on reciprocal links (you get a link if they get a link on your site) you rank may be negatively affected since these have a taste of "link farms". A bad taste in a Google mouth. – If you have 4000 links to your site chances are they will be mixed quality, which is not bad. What will affect your page-rank and site status in this case is the

Total number of links
Title and text on links
Activity of links (traffic to your site)
No worries then. As long as you have thousands of links.

[NEVER pay cheap link submission services that offer to submit pure links to hundreds of sites. Those links are either trash or nonexistant. Money wasted.]

If you write a simple article of a single page about a subject that has attraction for sites that need content, you might be getting loads of traffic in no time. The formatting is important, so is the mode of including your links and what sites you submit to. Some sites are certainly better than others.

To generate a lot of traffic and get a lot of seological links you need to submit to a lot of sites (read many many many). What you need is a tool that does the job properly, quickly and has a massive amount of targeted sites it distributes your article too. There are quite a lot of submission programs and services out there. I would recommend you to steer away from the ones that offer too much, for too little. Simple organic logic

I personally use programs instead of submission sites since the latter give a limited amount of control and usually carry a higher accumulative cost.

For most good online marketers it took at least a year to get up and running to get successful. They had to budget their time and money well. Don't assume that putting a huge sum of cash into your business will bring you instant rewards. It is important to spend your time and money on several different approaches to see which ones generate the best hits. You need to remember to be persistent and spend your time and money wisely. When you fail to plan you plan to fail at your business. You want to find targeted visitors that are interested in what you have if you want to make sales.

Putting up a company would of course require a lot of things, to get straight to the point, you need a capital. To make money requires money as well. But of course, with the versatility the internet offers, there are many ways you could find that could help optimize the potential of your site or business in generating traffic.

While there are ways to jumpstart your traffic flows, many sites don't have the resources that others have to generate more traffic for your site. Well, you don't have to spend a cent; all you need is the proper mindset and a lot of eagerness. You also must have the drive and perseverance to do hard work and research to generate more traffic for your site.

How sweet it is to have more traffic for your site without spending a single cent. Now it's a sure thing that many sites have articles that offer tips and guidelines in how to generate traffic using only free methods. Because it is possible, you don't need to speed a single cent, it may take time, to say honestly, I'm not going to beat around the bush with you. You get better chances by paying for your advertisements, but at least you get a fighting chance with some of these free methods I'm about to tell you.

Take advantage of online forums and online communities. The great thing about forums and online communities is that you can target a certain group that fits the certain demographic that you are looking for. You can discuss about lots of things about the niche that you represent or offer. Another great advantage is that you know what you are getting into and you will be prepared.

With online communities and forums you can build a reputation for your company. Show them what you are made of and wow them with your range of expertise about the subject, with that you can build a reputation and build trust with the people in your expertise and knowledge.

You can also make use of newsletters. Provide people with a catalog of your products and interesting and entertaining articles. If you make it really interesting and entertaining, more people will sign up for your newsletter and recommend it to other people. The more people who signs up for your newsletter, the more people there will be that will go to your site increasing your traffic.

Another great idea is trading links with other sites. You don't have to spend a cent. All you have to do is reach an agreement with another webmaster. With exchanging links, the efforts both sites do will benefit both sites. Every traffic that goes to the site could potentially click on the link of your site and visit your site as well. This works well especially when both sites feature the same niche.

Write articles that could pique the attention of people that have interest in your product. Try writing articles that will provide tips and guides to other aficionados. Writing articles that provide good service and knowledge to other people would provide the necessary mileage your traffic flow needs.

Many sites offer free submission and posting of your articles. When people find interest in your articles they have a good chance of following the track by finding out where the article originated. Include a link or a brief description of your company with the article and there's a great probability that they will go to your site.

Write good content for your site. Many search engines track down the keywords and keyword phrases your site uses and how they are used. It is not a requirement that a content should be done by a professional content writer. You could do your on but you have to make content for your site that is entertaining as well as informational. It should provide certain requirements as well as great quality.
Generally, internet users use search engines to find what they are looking for. Search engines in return use keyword searching in aiding their search results. With the right keywords, you could get high rankings in search engine results without the costs.

All of these methods and more will drive more traffic to your site for free. All it takes is a bit of effort and extended man hours. Learn all you can about the methods depicted here and you will soon have a site with a great traffic flow without the usual costs that come with it.