Tips for increasing traffic to your website and affiliate programs

Generating Traffic to your Website and Products

It could be said that these are the affiliate tips and tricks that every new internet marketer needs to know when they decide to embark on a dream of becoming an affiliate marketer and setting up their own online business from home.

These traffic generating tips are broken down into the following categories to make life a little easier. They will not be going too in depth into each heading, but just giving you enough information in order for you to carry out your own research in your own time, but with at least a little direction so that you know what you're searching for.

They are more commonly known as foundational business building and can be divided into the following categories.Foundational Business Building will form the backbone of your affiliate marketing business.

Articles

Blogs and other means of social networking

Viral Marketing - written and video

Free advertising sites and Bulletin Boards

Backlinks from other sites

RSS Feeds and RSS Feed Aggregators

Search Engines

Newspaper Publications and other means of advertising

Foundational Business Building using articles

This type of traffic is meant to establish your foundation and solidify your spot on the internet. Foundational Traffic is more time consuming to do, but is extremely effective at delivering really qualified traffic to your affiliate business. The more you stick to doing it, the more stable your business will become for the long term.

Articles:

Article marketing is a way of marketing yourself as an authority online. When you are promoting your business products using internet based marketing techniques, you are able to redirect traffic online to your business website where you then make sales. Always remember to try and use an information capture sheet on your website to enable you to record the details of the visitors to your website. This is extremely valuable to add to your mailing list so that you are able to introduce secondary products to your visitors at a later date. Just keep building your list of prospective clients.

Try some of these ideas to start with. You will be provided with some websites later on to help you get started.

1. What is your business about ?

This is one of the most easiest things to write about because it is highlighting your core products and the business that you offer people. What can you do for them? Remember your aim is to add value and content.

2. What do you feel strongly about?

People like to read articles of interest from like minded people. There are many forums and discussion groups out there that rely on regular support to expand and maintain their reader base. It is often found that these discussions lead to business support and backlinks are created to and from each others websites. Remember its all about traffic to your website.

3. What are you passionate about?

It is always wise to choose a product that relates to your passion easily. This will enable you to speak passionately in your articles and discussion groups from the heart. It will also enable you to link with other websites that interest you.

There are many reasons for which you should create articles as a direct marketing technique, but the most common is probably for a boost in site traffic. You may not yet realise how much good this type of direct marketing can do, but if you focus on a couple of hours a day and get some great articles going, then you are well on your way to creating a great traffic driving machine, just from articles.

Remember that if you are already writing them for discussion groups, you may as well not duplicate the work, but save them to a section of your website called “other topics of interest” or the likes.

You may also want to add your websites’ hyperlink to the bottom of each article and submit them to e-zines websites for other website owners to use them as content. This will create valuable links back to your website giving you excellent search engine optimization by moving your pages up in rank to the first few pages for keyword searches by online users.

4. When writing your article it is sufficient to include your keywords in your article title in order to promote the ranking of your article in the search engines. It would be a good idea to include your keyword choices in about 2% of the total text of the article. The idea is not to spam the search engine with multiple keywords, but merely show validity of your article and the search engines will do the rest to promote your article to those searching for your keywords. Try and include the page reference of your article in your website or your blog. You can use a hyperlink to your article as a signature at the bottom of the article. This is a form of directing traffic to the rest of your website or products or blog.

5. Remember that if you are writing an article and it has the potential to send you qualified traffic, then why not copy and paste it to as many locations as possible in order to create suitable backlink traffic. Thus send it to the following as a regular course of your article writing.

Blogs and other means of Social Networking

Blog is a shortened word for web log. A blog is a form of an online journal wherein you get to write whatever you feel like writing about at that moment. If you have a blog that is both interesting and informative, you will find that a regular reader base will start to emerge as readers enjoy your writing.

The reason why a blog is such a great means to market your products and services is that you are able to reach a wider audience, build a community of loyal readers, interact with them, create market awareness and even enter into a bit of pre-launch hype for your products.

This clearly shows that a Blog is more than an online diary. Blogs work as a marketing tool because they are interactive. They allow you to share information with your visitors on a regular and personal basis. This method is also extremely beneficial for feedback as your visitors are able to leave a comment on your Blog. This communication process turns the Blog into a forum and discussion platform which allows you to showcase your expertise in a certain field and discuss your products and your business.

Most webhosts include a free blogging platform or choice of Bulletin Board style called phpbb which you can incorporate into your new website. You will find this in your CPanel (Control Panel). Use this Blog as a forum for introducing experts in the field that your product is sold or traded. This adds substance to your content and is looked upon by the search engines as beneficial to readers. Your Page ranking on the internet search engines will improve and you will be able to ensure that you stay in the top ten on the first page so that your customers will be able to find your site effortlessly.

As with your articles, you may wish to submit your blog entries for reference to the search engines which may generate traffic as people read your blog posts on other sites. Some webmasters may choose to use your articles as content. Make sure to include your signature in the form of your website or page address in the section provided at the bottom of a blogpost or article. This signature will send highly qualified and interested clients to your products and website.

Try out,

www.Squidoo.com

www.Hubpages.com

www.Wetpaint.com

www.Bumpzee.com

www.Quizilla.com

www.Experienceproject.com

www.Clipmarks.com

www.Blogowogo.com

www.Weebly.com

www.Tumblr.com

www.Terapad.com

www.Pownce.com

www.Jaiku.com

www.Usfreeads.com

www.Scribd.com

www.Slideshare.net

as a means to create extra signatures referring traffic back to your products. The search engines will credit your website with better page ranking as they find more and more sites with your website name on it as it shows qualification in your content written.

Viral marketing

Viral marketing is the internet term given to word of mouth type of marketing by those who have found interest in your articles or products and is by far the best method to increase exposure of your product. It stands to reason that a product you believe in is always the first one that you would recommend to friends and family. If you are writing sincere product reviews for your products in your blogging and article campaigns, you will most definitely have others on the internet placing great value on what you have written and thus receive many links to your page and indirectly boost your page ranking in the search engines for your product.

Video Marketing is a very cost effective way to get across ones business offerings and works particularly well when trying to explain something to an audience by enabling you to use visual aids in your explanation. If you produce an interesting, insightful or even humurous video clip, there is a strong possibility that it will go viral and create a buzz in social circles within a short space of time.This indirectly creates backlinks as people refer to it.

Try sites like

www.bliptv

www.video.google

www.revver

www.metacafe

www.vimeo

www.video.yahoo

www.youtube

Free advertising websites and Bulletin Boards

There are too many sites to mention and it would be easier to find those in your home town or area of your target market by just typing free classifieds into the search engine and adding your town name thereafter.

Backlinks from other sites

There are various companies who offer an exchange link system or often called reciprocal links which you can obtain to increase the number of links pointing back to your website. This is a means of search engine optimization and does help to a certain degree in increasing your page ranking in the search engine for certain keyword searches which will put you in the top 10.

See which back links your opposition have on their website and approach the same or similar companies for their assistance in linking to your site. They are not in competition and would wish to sell their own products and thus the more the merrier. You never know unless you try.

RSS Feeds and RSS Feed Aggregators

One often overlooked tactic is the use of a blog RSS Feed syndication. Simply put, every time you update your blog, a subscriber is notified by your registering the blog with a RSS Feed Aggregator.

There are many RSS Feed Aggregators online for you to choose from. The easiest blog or discussion template to use is probably the one that comes free with your website building package which is usually a wordpress blog platform. The platform has numerous plug in products available for free in cyberspace and a simple search will reveal these plug-ins which allow customization of the function and appearance thereof.

If you are using a wordpress blog, your feed address is simply;

www.yoursite.com/blogdirectory/feed

Where “yoursite” is the name of your website and “blogdirectory” is the name of the directory where your blog is located on your website.

This is a list of some of the more preferred RSS Feed Aggregators and they are all free to submit to. You will only need to submit your blog to them once and they will update automatically every time you add content to your blog.

Search engines

Please remember that whilst Google has over 200 million users on any given day, this is not the only search engine which is being used throughout the world.

For this reason it is wise to submit your website to as many search engines as possible in order to increase your traffic analytics to your site. Think Yahoo, MSN and so forth. The list is endless. Just Google Search engines and see what comes up. But remember that there are more pages than the first 10 results and you may want to go through them at your own pace. This is an ongoing process and you cannot be expected to do everything in one day.

Newspaper publications and other means of advertising

Your local newspapers. What can I say? Most affiliates have forgotten the effectiveness of your local paper. If you have not found a free advertising newspaper publication or classifieds website, you are missing out on a load of free advertising. A recent advertisement that was placed in my local paper netted a response of 250 people in the first hour. These were the replies by email, nevermind how many times the advert was read.

As Affiliate marketers we are fortunate to have so many diverse cultural backgrounds that the number of ideas we can imagine are boundless. Each and every community uses some form of publication that is extremely cost effective to run an advertising campaign. The fortunate fact is that in the past it was necessary to utilize full colour advertisements in an advertising campaign, whereas now we are able to utilize our websites for the glossy supplements and merely direct the consumers to our websites. You don’t need to be extravagant with your advertising budget to generate interest in your products.

I am honestly amazed at how few cars have their website address across their rear window or rear bumper in a world that’s crying recession. We need to think out of the box in this businesscalled internet marketing.How many of you can say that your blog or website is plastered on your car right now.Its cheap and free advertising.Go and do it.Now

Some additional info on forums and blogging platforms.Personally I prefer Hubpages.

Below are a couple of forums which you my wish to investigate as they are updated regularly and also follow trends in the industry as far as search engine optimization go.

maketingterms.com- Online Marketing terms and useful links

seochat.com – SEO forum and seo tools

searchenginewatch.com – search engine optimisation

alltop.com – a site focusing on current world buying trends http/:tools.seobook.com – a site on keyword analysis for your marketing campaigns

blogger.com – a free blogging platform

www.iblog.co.za – a free south African blogging platform

blogspot.com – a free blogging platform

twitter.com – the latest in social blogging media

There is a free site that you can join to get you started which goes through an entire marketing course in thirty easy to follow videos.

The site is called www.30daychallenge.co .There are some tools which will be advised to look into. You are not forced to buy anything, as with a little searching, you can find them for free. The site however is a good place to start as a resource for building the plan to follow in you marketing efforts.

If you found this article useful, please comment and rate it which will help other new folk to internet marketing to find it.

Well I hope you found this a little more enlightening than your usual affilaite marketing tips article and I wouldn't mind if you dropped me a comment to let me know what you thought.

Wishing you all the success in your online career.Go get em tiger.