Getting Traffic For Affiliate Programs
One of the easiest ways to make money online especially for “newbies” or new internet marketers is by selling other people’s products; since it’s much easier than creating you own product. There are many outlets that host different programs that can fit into whatever niche your website is in. But the two most used to find affiliate programs is ClickBank and Commission Junction.
There are many people that make their living online just by promoting affiliate products, but some will still struggle with selling anything. But what separates the huge money earners from the “strugglers”? The answer is simply one word…….TRAFFIC. You need to get as much potentials buyers in front of your offer in order to make any sales. Where most people stumble is not in the time and effort they put into their promotional efforts but in how they choose to promote the product.
Before we look at some ways to get traffic to something you’re promoting, we have to look at the important concept of preselling. The concept is simple, if you just show somebody something once and say buy this, they are less likely to even consider the offer than if you have had some prior relationship with them. Building that gap between you “the affiliate” and them “the buyer” is like building a friendship, one based on trust and honesty.
Having An E-mail List
The best way to create that trust in buyers is by establishing an email list where you give them useful information on a regular basis. Many affiliates miss this important step in creating that trust in buyers and preselling. You must also only recommend products which you feel will be useful to others. Don’t just sell something because you know it will make you money. And you must be honest with people. Give your honest opinions about the products and don’t overhype or hard sell.
Organic Listings
One way to introduce a product to somebody is by having relevant content on a website or blog and placing links to the product within the body of the page. This not only aids in the preselling approach but the person is more likely to click if they find the information/offer might be useful.Now to boost the effectiveness of this page would be to try and show up in the organic listings in the search engines. The organic listings are search results that show up in the search engine after you type in a word. They are more heavily clicked on by surfers than sponsored links and ads. To show up in the listings you have to do some search engine optimization (SEO) techniques on the page. To find out more about about SEO, take our free seo course.
Pay-Per-Click
If you have a little money in your budget for marketing, utilizing pay-per-click search engines can be beneficial to getting traffic for your affiliate program. This type of advertising is most popularly done on Google or Yahoo! Search Marketing (once referred to as Overture). You can use it to either drive visitors to an email list (where you slowly build them up to your affiliate offer) or send them directly to your affiliate link. Try as much as possible to do the former.
If you do the later try to cloak the affiliate link which might look like this www.product.com/aff?123 to something looking more professional. You can buy a domain with a similar name to the affiliate offer and then redirect the page to your affiliate page. You can do this using the options for the Cpanel of your webhost or by including a bit of code. You can also make the redirect from a site you already own from a page like this www.mysite.com/recommends/product
To get codes for redirecting urls CLICK HERE.
Article Marketing
A short cut to getting listed in the search engines is by writing articles. If the keywords you write about are not highly competitive and the article site has a high pagerank you can generate a listing in the search engines from posting your article in their directory. Make the article related to the affiliate offer and include a link to your affiliate page in your author signature box. Some article sites frown on placing affiliate links in your articles, so you might have to have links to another page you own that has the affiliate offer listed.
Social Bookmarking
Utilizing social bookmarking (SBM) sites or establishing a Web 2.0 strategy is an easy and cheap way of getting traffic to your affiliate page. There are many sites now on the internet that allow you to bookmark pages that you like for free for future reference. But don’t just bookmark your affiliate page alone. That won’t work. Try and get some content related to your affiliate offer like articles and blog posts, have a link in it to the affiliate offer and then bookmark that page. Utilize sites like Digg, Del.icio.us, Reddit, Furl, Spurl, Twitter and many others. (At the end of each of my posts there is a link to a bookmarking tag. Click on it and see a list of sites I’m talking about.)
But don’t just stop there! If the program is popular utilize Squidoo and HubPages to write reviews about it. People sometimes search for the terms “productx review” or “buy productx” and if you write about it on one of these sites you can score high in the search engines for those keywords. You can also search for less competitive keywords related to the product and create pages on the two sites mentioned before related to them. And of course include a link on the page to the affiliate program you promote.
But don’t just stop there!! Further bookmark the mini-pages you’ve created on Squidoo and Hubpages on the SBM sites. And even more, link to each content you create about the product to another page about it. Say for example you wrote an article, have a product review on Squidoo and have a content page on HubPages.com, link from the HubPage to the Squidoo page to the article. In that way you provide relevance to each site and by interlinking you have a better chance of ranking well with more than one page.
To learn more about becoming a better affiliate read the FREE report Affiliate XFactor. Where a super-affiliate goes through some techniques he used to generate a $40,000 Clickbank affiliate pay check in 72 hours selling a $77 ebook. Find out more here http://www.addtrafficnow.com/recommends/xfactor.html
Summary
In summary, utilizing some of the more effective traffic generation methods can help in making affiliate sales. An important concept to remember is that the buyer must be presold to the offer to maximize conversion rates. Apart from the more popular website promotion methods utilizing a Web 2.0 strategy can be influential in gaining more traffic for affiliate programs.
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Enter SEO Contests and Sharpen Your Skills
One way to learn more about SEO and sharpen your skills to use later in your online promotions is by entering SEO contests. This is usually hosted by experts in the field to create buzz about a topic or website or for analytical purposes. Besides generating attention it can be a great learning tool for beginners (newbies) and also be done for fun and to get great prizes.
The folks over at SEONoobs.com recently launched a contest about 3 weeks ago for SEO newbies to rank best for the phrase “Yicrosoft Directory”. It’s a 30 day SEO Challenge to see who can come out as the #1 organic listing for the keyphrase “Yicrosoft Directory”. The contest ends March 4th so it might be too late to enter and win but by just looking at the listings for “Yicrosoft Directory” in the search engines you can get an idea of the methods that people are using for their SEO campaign.
In case you wonder why they used that keyphrase; Microsoft recently put in an offer to Yahoo! to buy out their company and merge it with Microsoft for a cool $44.6 Billion. Seems the main reason they did it was to try and compete with Google in the search engine arena. Yahoo! looks to have rejected the offer so far. Of course all this has created a buzz around the internet with different websites and videos. People have been even created mock logos as to what the company might become. Maybe MicroYahoo or Microhoo? Who’s to tell? In case you missed this bit of news here’s a report of it http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xDrDITVJMls&NR=1
Typing in the contest’s keyphrase in Google returns some 52,000 normal results and 21,100 results in anchor (meaning the phrase was put in quotation marks ie “yicrosoft directory”). But whichever way you look at it the contestant who leads (as of this posting), owns the site Yicrosoftdirectory.net. The next two rounding out the top three are Garrysoft.com and Yicrosoft-directory-online.com. Doing a quick check in Yahoo! tells me what I knew would be the main reason for these people leading the list. And the answer is one word folks….LINKS.
Breakdown of Top Five Contestants
SITE PAGES INLINKS
Yicrosoftdirectory.net 21 677
Garrysoft.com 11 2,470
Yicrosoft-directory-online.com 10 252
Yicrosoftdirectorygirl.com 25 1,330
Gh-yicrosoft.info 14 271
But why are the second placed and fourth placed listings not listed better? A quick look shows that the number one site has a lot more content (21 pages) than the 2nd placed. Ok…I hear you ask….So why does it still beat out the fourth placed site. Simple. The content that is on Yicrosftdirectory.net is a lot more optimized for the phrases “yicrosoft”, “directory” and “yicrosoft directory”. In fact it lists itself as a directory (probably gaining more reciprocal links from this method) accompanied with great content that repeatedly has “yicrosoft directory” in title tags and headers. It also is getting links from a more diverse set of sites (not just one site, like some of the others). And I didn’t check this but more than likely the links they received from sites have better authority and page rank according to Google
Why not check out this for yourself?…….Go to Yahoo! and in their search bar type in link:www.thesite.com (replace “thesite” with whatever site’s name is listed) and analyse the listings you see. It will give you an idea as to what to do for your own SEO promotion. Go ahead…….have some fun with this SEO thing
P.S. The reason I used Yahoo! to check the links is because they usually show a more accurate look of backlinks for most sites, once they’ve been indexed.
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