Away for a while

It’s been a while since I wrote something for this blog and the main reason it’s actually not being as profitable as I would have hoped.

Besides, I’ve been really busy in the last few days with a lot of work, so the blog was the last thing I was thinking about.

Getting Free Traffic: Forums

There are forums that cover multiple topics, likely including your niche market. Users on those forums will be constantly asking questions about that topic and this is where you can come in. First of all, place the link to your website on your sig on those forums.

While posting a link on the post itself can (and will) be considered spamming, thus causing you to get banned in that specific forum and losing customers, if you have it on your sig, there will not even be a problem if you OCCASIONALLY say something like “Check my sig for more information”.

If you’re paying attention, you’ll realize that to be successful posting messages you need to get users free information. Here is the part where you can have 2 different strategies:

1 – Be helpful, answering forum messages online and ask users to check your website every now and then for more information. You must answer the question in the thread you’re in, so that users know that you’re pretty knowledgeable in that topic and see you as an expert. If they do, you pretty much got guaranteed visits.
2 – Do some research on the most common questions on the forum and then create an e-book which answers those questions and give it out for free. Yes, for free. Of course, you need to get something out of it, right? To get that e-book, just create an opt-in box, so that those users are now part of your list.

You don’t need to be an expert to get good free traffic through forums, just be careful not to spam!

Getting Free Traffic: Joint Ventures

Using joint ventures is one of the most gratifying ways of getting good traffic. First of all, you’ll need a product or service to sell. You’ll then use an affiliate-like strategy. Get that product out and split the revenue with the ones that are getting you sales.

Sure, you won’t make as much money as you would by selling it by yourself, but you’ll be saving a lot of time needed to promote it. It’s likely your ‘partners’ sell a lot more than you do and that’s fine, as long as you get sales.

With a joint venture program you are actually expanding your audience, as your product will reach a lot more people, which means more sales, and more income. Some still have doubts about this method, as they feel that they’ll be ultimately losing money. This is NOT the case. In fact, you can sometimes double the income you would get, especially if your listings aren’t too big or your website doesn’t get those many visits.

It’s an easy, effortless method of making more money online if you already have the product, it’s just maximizing the amount of profit you get. It’s so easy that the first time you do it, you’ll wonder how was it possible that you didn’t do it earlier!

How do you start a joint venture? First of all, you should contact some affiliate marketers that promote products in your niche to try to get them to sell your products. If they accept, then you’ll send them a review copy and the amount of revenue you’re splitting. After that, it’s up to them to sell it! At first you’ll in fact need to contact those affiliate marketers, but as you develop new products, it’s actually common to be asked a joint venture by them!

Search Engine Submission Services

Best traffic comes from search engines, as it’s a free source of traffic that’ll get you costumers which are looking for something you’re providing. Having your website on the search engines can be, however, pretty hard.

Some companies are using this to create services (paid services, that is), which will submit your website to search engines for a fee.

There are 2 things you need to consider here:
1. Most search engine traffic comes from a couple of websites – There are hundreds if not thousands of search engines out there, but most traffic will come from only a couple of them (Google, Yahoo, MSN, etc.), so submitting to hundreds of search engines will not get you a significant amount of traffic increase.

2. Sometimes search engines de-index your pages – This means that from time to time you’ll have to re-submit your website.

Now, you may think: are these submission services worth it? This is something that will depend. Search engine’s robots will crawl your website from time to time and if there are enough backlinks (links from other websites to your own website), you get indexed. The more backlinks you have, the better ranking you’ll get.

There are innumerous techniques of getting backlinks, but you should always aim for quality. Links from high ranked websites will get you more ‘points’ to the search engine ranking.

The question remains: is it worth it to get other to submit the websites? Is it even worth it to submit the websites yourself? If your website is SEO (Search Engine Optimized), then you shouldn’t need that, as you should start ranking up with no need to pay extra. However, if you’re struggling to get your website on search engines (not ranking high, just on the search engines), you should give it a try.

Getting Traffic Fast: Newsletter

Another great way of getting visitors to your website (and even more important: have them come back for more) is through a good newsletter.

But what do they should have? Well, it’s simple: promotions about products. You can include articles, discounts and exclusive products, which are sure to attract users to click.

Your best option is to link the user to your own sale page instead of an affiliate, so they can find out more about the product if they want to. This will also help you find out what’s working and what’s not. If you can study the traffic you’re getting and the conversion rate, you can stop promoting products which aren’t bringing you income in favor of new products.

You can also use these types of messages on mailing lists. Imagine some of the results you could be getting just with a good newsletter. You have 10k users, let’s say only 10% clicks your link, which would be 1k. These clickers, which already know the product are guaranteed to have a pretty good conversion rate, so depending on the product, you could be making a LOT of money with almost no effort (after getting the subscribers, that is).

You could also be using the newsletter (or some other type of course or free e-book) to gather new subscribers to your opt-in lists. Even with a low conversion rate, you’ll be getting a lot of subscribers, so it’s all worth since these subscribers list are likely one of the most important ways of really getting a good amount of sales online.

Getting Traffic Fast: Subscription List

This is probably the best and most effective way of marketing online. This method is basically users allowing you to send them marketing e-mails.

As users will be signing in on a list voluntarily, this method doesn’t fit as spam and so it is allowed by both affiliate networks and e-mail service providers, so there won’t be any trouble for you. The great thing about these lists is that they aren’t all that expensive and allow you to keep making sales with new products without the need to always start from scratch (unless you’re looking into a new niche).

The main problem to some affiliate marketer is HOW to get users to sign up. There are several answers which comprise the most varied strategies, but the one I found to be the best is by giving something for free. Basically you drive costumers to a page in which they can get something for free if they sign up to your mailing list. This method even allows you to profit right away, by presenting an OTO (One time offer) afterwards for a product at a discount price.

What you write on the e-mails you’ll be sending is also something you need to be careful about, as you’ll get different results with different writing methods. The way you approach the ones that read the e-mails can get you significant differences in the conversion rate. One of the methods that is regularly used is to build suspense over an upcoming product, which usually results in a greater amount of sales.

There are a lot of methods of improving those rates, in fact, but to use this method, you’ll need a service that can provide you a way of sending the e-mails and managing your list.

There are several services doing this nowadays, but I can tell you that no-one is as good as Aweber. The problem with most of these services is that the failure rate of your e-mails (the % of e-mails that don’t reach their destination) is too small for the service to be effective. From experience, Aweber proved to be the best, with really low failure rate (usually less than 1%).

Good luck building those subscriptions lists.

Getting Traffic Fast: Articles

Writing articles is an interesting way of getting traffic to your website and making sales. People are looking for information about a lot of things. When you’re writing an article, you should try to give answers, but not all of them.

The ideal method of writing articles is give enough information to solve an immediate problem, but make it so that the reader will feel they need to know more, and to do so, visit your website.

The main advantage about this particular type of traffic is that it is completely free (unless you want to use mass submitter to a number of article directories to ‘spread the word’) and get you directed traffic besides building useful backlinks for search engines.

The cool thing about writing articles is that you can indeed get great quality backlinks and the traffic you’re building, even though there’ll be a spike in the beginning, is going to keep on bringing users to the website, and that constant flow of traffic is something that you need to be able to let things develop without always needing to attract new users.

There are a lot of article directories on the internet, and they cover all the topics your niche may be in, which will guarantee a lot of targeted traffic (amazing for affiliate marketing sales).

You could be thinking: if it’s that easy, why doesn’t everyone get good results with it? First of all, it’s not easy. I mean, it’s easy to write an article and put it online, but it’s not easy to write a GOOD article that will drive amazing amounts of traffic to your website. Second of all, it takes time. You need to research on the subject you’re writing and that takes a good amount of time.

We’ll later discuss a lot more about article writing, but for now we’ll move on to subscriptions lists.

Getting Traffic Fast: AdWords

There are a lot of ways of getting traffic to your website, and one of the most popular one is Google AdWords. The advantage of using Google’s advertising service is that it’ll drive really targeted traffic to your website. What this means is that users will only visit your website if they are really interested in the topics you talk about.

What this means is that unless your ad isn’t good (doesn’t get to the point of your website), using this method for traffic will guarantee a good conversion rate. It is in fact many affiliate marketer’s main source of traffic and conversions. There is only one problem: money.

Setting up an ad on AdWords is sure to cost you a lot of money, especially if you’re considering using really crowded keywords. This makes the keyword search really important to find keywords that won’t cost you as much.

Google AdWord’s ads are displayed on little rectangle boxes on thousands of websites and millions of users will see them. Now, you may be thinking: If I’m paying a lot, and AdSense users are getting paid for it, can’t they scam me? Well, the answer is simple: no. Google provides some of the best cheat detection systems, and if Google finds out a user is making fraudulent clicks, then they’ll get all the money back.

The flexibility of its ads and all the control you have over everything that’s happening. Keeping track of it is really important as in this method, you can both win and lose a lot of money.

Getting Traffic

After building a really nice website, it won’t help you just having it online. What you need is traffic, obviously.

There are several ways of getting traffic to your website, some more effective than others. There are two things you need to consider when getting traffic to your website, and it is based on 3 things: effectiveness, time consumption and price.

The ideal source of traffic is effective, doesn’t consume any of your time and it’s cheap (possibly free). The closest you can get to this is through organic traffic, which comes from search engines. It’s completely free (unless you’re paying someone to submit your website to these search engines, which I find to be a waste of money as you can get equally good results by letting the spiders get your links) and it gives you really directed traffic which means higher conversions. The only problem is time. It is a method that can take a while to get good (or even decent) results unless you know how to properly build it.

The free options are always limited in terms of effectiveness and won’t get you much traffic unless you spend a good amount of time with them. That is why some prefer to pay for the traffic.

You may be wondering: why would you pay for it if you can get it for free? The answer is very simple: it’s really effective (if you’re using a service like AdWords, people will only click to your website if they’re really interested in the content you’re providing) and doesn’t consume any time at all (ok, you need to setup the ad, but that doesn’t even count).

Next we’ll go into some of these melhods for best results.

Top 10 ways of increasing your conversion rate

If you’ve been around long enough, you’ve probably been victim to scams. Even if you personally haven’t, I’m sure that at least you’ve gotten a lot of spam. This has made surfers much more aware.

When you’re selling something, it’s all about credibility. The surfers who are used to buying products online will ask questions to test it. On the other hand, affiliate marketers should do their best to anticipate those questions and answer them even before they’re asked. This is why you should by all means seem credible. How can you boost that credibility? Glad you ask:

1 – Honesty: When you surf online, sometimes ads get your attention. If they do, you probably will click on them and I’m sure that you’ve gotten disappointed by them. False advertising drives customers away from your website, and will also make you lose money.
2 – Knowing the product: This is very important. Owing the product will mean that you’ll have a lot of information about it. Your product reviews will stand from the others, and that’ll boost your credibility.
3 – Ask for feedback: Got a happy costumer? Ask them to write a testimonial about the review. Maintain the interaction as it’s really good for the business.
4 – Promote quality products only: High refund rates hurt not only your reputation, but also your revenue. Promoting high-quality products means that those rates will be lower.
5 – Keep the design simple: If there’s something people hate is website that make their eyes hurt. If your design is slick and simple, your sales are sure to be better.
6 – Respect your costumers: Everyone hates website music, pop-ups and broken links. Avoid them and costumers will be happier.
7 – Be available: Make it easy for customers to get in touch with you. Have some sort of contact page or form so that they can ask you things about the products.
8 – Stay in touch: Frequent updates help boost sales as they build a good relationship between the customer and the affiliate marketer. Just make sure those updates aren’t spam.
9 – Don’t ignore anyone: Some affiliate marketers make a big mistake: If they feel the customer isn’t going to buy the product they just ignore him. Fight for the sales, help them as much as you can and even if you don’t get that sale now, it’s more likely the customer comes back and buys something.
10 – Freebies: Everyone loves them, and if you provide good, free products, your reputation will sky-rocket, as will your sales.

Gaining your costumer’s trust isn’t hard, just be trustworthy!