Your site has to add some value to the equation. What this means is your site has to offer useful content related to the product or service offer. If your site is about gardening and your affiliate offers are for cable TV or some other unrelated product you are unlikley to be successful. On the other hand, if your affiliate offers are related to better gardening products or services then your conversion rate will be much higher.  

In addition affiliate marketing requires allot of web traffic. Generally the conversion rate (people becoming buyers) is low. In order to generate enough buyers to make money you’ll need to bring 150 or more visitors a day to your site. Don’t get discouraged though, there are many people making a decent living from affiliate marketing. Just know that there is much work to do to be successful.

The best tip I can offer is to align yourself with a good affiliate marketing network. An affiliate marketing network is a company that acts as market maker between advertisers who need affiliates and publishers who wish to earn revenue as an affiliate. There are hundreds of these networks, the largest of which are Commission Junction and Clickbank but there are many more that offer great service.

Many affiliate networks offer tips, guiadance and general help to their affiliates. If you are new to affiliate markering it is a good idea to align yourself with a network that provides assistance for becoming successful. Keep in mind that they are not going to train you or hold your hand. If you become to much of a burden on an affiliate manager they will not be so likely to be helpful.

There is plenty of free information on the web to help get you started in the affiliate marketing business. Here are some keywords to use for searching and finding information about this exciting way to earn income.

affiliate marketing, affiliate marketing help, how to become an affiliate marketer – I’m sure you can think of a few others.  

There are basically two ways to get website traffic. You can buy it, or you can get it for free. I’ve tried both methods over the years, and although the easiest way to drive traffic to your site is to use Pay Per Click marketing, I don’t recommend it. That’s because if you’re not careful you can spend a fortune buying website traffic and end up with a bad website ROI. I mean why buy the cow when you can get the milk for free? However if you prefer the easy way and you have spare money check out…

15 free traffic generation techniques that work:

1. Submit your site to the major search engines (Google, Yahoo, Bing) and to as many other search engines as you can. Before you do this however ensure your site has been properly SEO’d with relevant keywords/phrases.

2. Write 1-2 articles each week for 8 weeks and submit them to the free article directories. Be sure to include a link to your site after each article in the bio box with a link containing the main keyword used for your site. Each article should be optimized with the keywords your site is using.

3. Submit those same articles to email newsletter publishers in your niche. Even if you only get one or two of your articles printed a tremendous amount of traffic can be generated.

4. Find blogs related to your topic and leave useful comments with a backlink to your site.

5. Answer questions related to your site’s topic at answers.yahoo.com. Be sure to put a link to your site in each of your answers.

6. Join a handful of the most popular forums that deal with your site’s topic and become an active poster. Include a link to your site in your signature.

7. Write a press release about your site and submit it to press release sites such as prweb.com. If you are not familiar with press releases, take some time to do a little research: a press release is not written like an article.

8. If you are happy with a product or service you have used, write an unbiased testimonial and trade it for a backlink to your site.

9. Start a blog using WordPress, provide links to your site from each post. Submit the blog to the hundreds of free blog directories. This will get you plenty of quality traffic as long as you keep the blog updated.

10. Post ads with a link to your site on all the free classified ad sites you can find (such as craigslist.org). The best ones will allow you to post a live link. But don’t neglect the other ones. If your ad is well written, people will go out of their way and type your url in their browser. Off course you must post in the appropriate category.

11. Write an interesting email signature that includes a link to your site, and use it with every outgoing business email you send.

12. Start a page on facebook.com and on any other popular social media site you can find, always provide a link so visitors can go to your site. Building a fan base on Twitter is another good way to promote your business and gain traffic. Be sure to offer useful information to your followers and avoid blatant sales. Remember these are for socializing not selling.

13. Submit a video with useful information to YouTube.com, Squidoo.com, etc. You don’t really need any video producing know-how as a simple PowerPoint slideshow with some background music will do the job. Even short videos (3 minutes or less are best) captured with your cell phone camera can be submitted.

14. Search your main keywords on Google and see if you can exchange reciprocal links with related websites that come up in the top results.

15. Write an ebook or a short report (say 10 to 20 pages), or find a product with giveaway rights that you can brand with a link to your site. Then submit it to all the free ebook directories you can find online.

While all this sounds like a full time job, remember, you don’t have to do this all at once. Just pick the traffic item you feel best with and take action. Invest an hour or two daily working that traffic item. Once finished with a traffic item move on to your next favorite technique. If you work diligently at this, over time you will increase the free traffic flow to your site that will dramatically boost your bottom line.

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Here are 7 reasons why people buy:

1. Make Money
2. Save Money
3. Save Time
4. Save Effort
5. Improve Health
6. Increase pleasure
7. Eliminate pain

All successful marketing materials will appeal to one or more of these 7 reasons why people buy. To improve your sales success, make sure your content addresses as many of the buying reasons as possible.

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]]> http://blog.webhostinggoods.com/7-ways-to-increase-website-sales/feed 6 http://blog.webhostinggoods.com/a-different-way-to-market-your-site http://blog.webhostinggoods.com/a-different-way-to-market-your-site#comments Tue, 02 Jun 2009 20:25:32 +0000 admin http://blog.webhostinggoods.com/?p=83 I recently encountered a website that has peeked my interest in it’s chosen marketing strategy. You see this site spent zero time, zip, nada, on On-Page SEO. If you look at the page source you’ll find that the title tag contains the site Domain Name. No other meta tag related to SEO is used. If you look at the site content for a possible keyword or phrase you’ll find nothing that makes sense to the relevancy of the sites service or subject. There are no H1 tags or alt tags that use anything other than the Domain Name. The ironic thing is that the home page has a PR of 3 while other pages have a rank of 2 and the site is only 6 week old.    

Being an Internet Marketer I found this unusual. I mean to have a PR of 3 in six weeks without any regard for On-Page SEO is just crazy. So how did they do it? As it turns out the subject or niche of the site is article marketing. That got me thinking that maybe they wrote articles to promote the site. Sure enough, a Google search for the domain name pulled up scores of links to articles. Also a Google link:(Domain Name Here) query verified that at least Google is aware of the site.  

I found this of such interest that someone could ignore On-Page SEO but yet have the where-with-all to write articles that I just had to track down and call the site owners.  It turns out that the site owners are quite new (6 weeks) to the world of internet web design. They are still learning about SEO and to their own admission blissfully disregarded any SEO effort. However they are quite busy with the traffic generated by the written articles that they are in no hurry to do anything about SEO. Oh, and by-the-way, they have not spent a nickle on PPC advertising nor do they spend anytime analysing web traffic. Customers are coming to their site and they are busy writing articles for others.    

This case stands as a testiment to the power of article writing. Not only does article writing help with PR, it  provides direct links to your site by creatively developing a resource box with multiple links to your pages. So will this work for everyone, probably not. But I’d say if article writing is not part of your marketing strategy you are missing out on a lot of free traffic. Well it won’t be free if you have to hire a writer but if you are a writer, Cha-Ching, Freebe!

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This article provided by me. We invite you to visit the Web Hosting Goods Store for Internet Web Design, Web Hosting, and Internet Website Marketing Services.

In this example each of the links use the main keyword for the respective page as the link anchor text.

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No matter your reason, when you start a website, the first and most important fact you will discover is your site has little to no traffic. It is generally thought by novice internet entrepreneurs that all you need is a good website with a good product or service and you’re on your way to instant riches. Well this is somewhat true but the other important ingredient you need for success is “traffic that converts to sales”. This is where reality of owning and operating a successful website begins.   

Web traffic (potential customers) is the key to your internet success, without targeted traffic your site will not become the financial success you hope for.  New websites begin their existence by hanging out at the back of some very long and dark corridors somewhere in cyberspace. No one knows your new site exists, and no matter how hard a cyber-pilot tries, your site will never be known until some extra effort is put forth to give your site a name and place. 

To bring your site into the light of cyberspace here are five Internet Marketing Strategies that you can use, must use, to get the valuable web traffic you’ll need to be successful.

On Page SEO
SEO is the art of designing a site in a fashion that gives the site an advantage for obtaining free and abundant traffic from search engines. The number one aspect of SEO is selecting keywords relevant to your site. The keywords you select should be based on high usage, low competition and relevancy to your topic. When your site is properly SEO’d you can expect a boost in organic (free) traffic to your site. However don’t expect complete success with On Page SEO alone.    

Off Page SEO
To complement On Page SEO, an activity that goes hand in hand, is Off Page SEO. This is basically an action to obtain links from other sites. This is a crucial factor for SEO. Links from other sites serve two purposes. 1. Quality links say to the search engines that others think your site is useful so the search engines in turn boost your page ranking, boosting your page ranking results in better free traffic flow to your site. 2. Each link that exists in cyberspace to your site is a direct path to your site. The more links you acquire the higher your traffic flow becomes.

PPC
PPC or “Pay Per Click” is a web marketing technique that can quickly and easily generate the flow of targeted traffic to your site. As the name implies (Pay Per Click) is a method that costs money. Most search engines offer PPC programs, the biggest and best respectively are Google, Yahoo and MSN Live Search. While there is a cost to a PPC program there is no better or quicker way to generate traffic. If your site is new, it is wise to begin a PPC program while other free methods of generating traffic are developed. Once other free methods begin to bear traffic, dependency on a PPC program can be reduced or eliminated.     

eMail Marketing
As the name implies this is a technique of marketing your site by means of sending emails to potential clients. Your foremost issue with email marketing is that of obtaining a legal and targeted list of email addresses belonging to interested persons. If your site is new you probably don’t have a list. No problem however, a list can be bought. Do your homework, make sure a purchased list has valid names and addresses and is targeted to people interested in your product or service.     

Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate marketing is a technique that involves others in the sale of your product or service. The concept is that you solicit other websites that are relevant to your web business to advertise and drive traffic to your site. Of course to get others to do this there has to be compensation. You will simply share your profit with affiliate sales sites for their effort of sending traffic to your site. While you may not like the idea of splitting your profit, Affiliate Marketing can make you much more successful.

The internet marketing strategies listed above fall way short of complete explanation and detail. For successful implementation of these strategies you are urged to educate yourself completely with each idea. The key to your success is to not stop marketing once your site is active. By continually applying internet marketing effort you will continue to improve the traffic flow to your site and make that dream of instant success a reality!

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• Search Engines can bring lots of targeted traffic, but despite what many SEO Providers or other marketing service vendors may say, it’s not easy to get free search engine traffic. There’s 157,000,000 competitors with great page ranks that you gotta out SEO. 
• Oh but wait there’s PPC (pay per click) advertising; yeah right go ahead, hope you have lots-o-money that you don’t need. PPC does work if you take the time to do it right and keep up with the rising cost and effort. But to be successful with PPC your gonna have to work your butt off with no guarantee, and guess what folks, you may spend a lot of effort and money only to find out that the ROI is not there.
• Email advertising is one of the most effective site marketing techniques you can implement. However it takes a long time to build an opt-in email list. Oh and by the way you gotta have mucho traffic to build an email list. If you don’t your list is gonna fit on a piece of toilet paper.
• Banner ads are effective for some but yeild the lowest click-thru rate of the various site marketing techniques. Banner ads can cost a sizeable sum as well so real care needs to be taken to get your banners in front of an audience looking for your product or service.
• You can spend a lot of time exchanging links with those standard traffic exchange systems (link farms) but they generate poor results and in many cases don’t work properly. Have you ever tried exchanging links with webmasters of sites you think would make a good link partner. You do the research, find an email address, compose a great (your site is so good) email then wait for a response. Still waiting aren’t you?  
• E-Zine advertising can be a great source of new sales prospects but many people get so many email ads these days that response levels can drop before an ROI is achieved.

These Internet marketing techniques are generally thought of as the “better” ways to promote your web site. If this is the case, and our effort, time and money is not producing profitable results then how is a website owner going to succeed? Let’s face it, advertising online just isn’t as easy as some would have you believe. You can spend months and even years promoting a site and have little to show for it. Getting web traffic sucks!

What do you think? Leave a comment especially if you have some sure fire methods of generating traffic that have tangible and worthy results of time and or money.

Web Hosting, Internet Web Design, Internet Website Marketing