When it comes to traffic generating, many affiliates and other website owners tend to get stuck in a comfortable rut. We often use a small number of favorite techniques and rarely venture beyond them.
I’m hoping this report will encourage you to look beyond the techniques you’re using and try a few new ones. By using a wider variety of techniques, you’ll attract new visitors from new places.
The wider you cast your traffic net, the more you future-proof your online affiliate marketing business. You probably won’t use EVERY method listed here. Choose the ones which best suit your affiliate site, your skills, your interests and your temperament.
Traffic tip #1
You MUST have high quality, unique content if you want long-term, free search engine traffic. This is the most important tip of all. Sadly, it’s one which many website owners ignore. Provide LOTS of information-rich, keyword-rich, useful content for the search engines and humans to find.
You know that search engines are being clogged with junk at an alarming rate. The other day, we came across a marketer who was boasting that he owned more than 20,000 blogs – and he’s not the only one. Consider the scary effect of this exponential increase in low quality Blogs and websites. Old, large, well established sites will inevitably become more and more important and trusted by the search engines. Owning a large, well established, high quality site is a very solid investment in your future. These days, even Google’s webmaster guidelines advise affiliates to publish “unique and relevant” content.
If you spend time thinking of ways to provide truly USEFUL content that people will talk about, you’ll automatically end up with lots of free, one-way links to your site as people recommend it without even being asked to do so. We’ve been building information-rich websites ever since we created autosurfmonster.com . This method has worked extremely well for us and continues to work very well. If your website helps solve people’s problems, they’ll love you for it.
Traffic tip #2
Keep ADDING fresh, relevant, useful content. According to Google, about half the 2.5 billion searches done a day at Google are for unique, one-off phrases. The more pages you build full of on-topic material, the better the chances your site will be found. When it comes to keywords, think big. You want your site to be found via THOUSANDS of different phrases every month. Then you can lure that traffic to your best money-generating pages or to your newsletter sign-up page.
Also, search engines prefer fresh sites which keep gradually adding new content. Don’t let your site go stale. “Our own rule of thumb is this: Add a minimum of 1 article per week, 2 preferably. Adding an article daily is euphoria and adding 1 every six hours, well, that’s the best.”
Traffic tip #3
Choose a memorable domain name. If you’re launching a new site, choose a name people will remember easily. Ask yourself: “Will people remember my domain name?” Try to choose a name which won’t be confused with similar names. You don’t want people typing your competitor’s domain name when they’re trying to find your site.
NameBoy.com has a handy tool to help you choose domain names. Also, you can find a surprising number of good deleted (expired) domain names at Whois.net. Both those tools are free.
Traffic tip #4
Buy the wrong domain name, too. If you think people may confuse your domain name with a similar name, try to buy that name, too. A good domain name registrar will make it very easy for you to redirect one domain name to another.
Traffic tip #5
Make your domain name easy to read – especially if it’s a .NET Which of the following is easier to read and understand? www.whiskybeach.com or www.WhiskyBeach.com See how using a capital letter at the start of each word makes the second domain name easier to read – and easier to remember.
Whenever you mention your domain name anywhere, ALWAYS present it in its most readable form. A good place to start doing this is in your email signature file. If you’re unfortunate enough to have bought the “.net” version of a domain name because someone raced you to the “.com”, help people to remember your site by writing it like this…
Example.NET
Being MEMORABLE helps you get more repeat visitors.
Traffic tip #6
Use appropriate keywords in your image file names. searching for images. We are not sure how valuable those visitors are, but we didn’t have to do anything very special to get them. Google Images – http://images.google.com – makes it easy for people to search for graphics online.
To take advantage of this, when choosing the file name of an image on your site, use an appropriate key phrase, for example, “book-ends.jpg” if you’re promoting book ends.
Here’s a tip we just discovered… When we searched in Google Images for “book ends” we discovered that the very first search result was for a page which did NOT contain a graphic of book ends! Instead, the page contained a “book ends” LINK to a book ends graphic on a second page. It if suits the design of your site, you may want to experiment with this technique.
We are not sure how much use traffic to images is, but if it’s ADDITIONAL traffic you can get simply by choosing image file names carefully, it’s worth having.
Traffic tip #7
Do REALLY SERIOUS keyword research. If you want to get LOTS of traffic from search engines, you need to find out the exact phrases which people are typing into search engines. There are free tools available for this, but they’re not nearly as useful as the more comprehensive paid tools.
For example, if you’re using the Overture keyword tool for your research, be warned, its results can’t be trusted. The Overture tool shows you the SAME number of searches for all these searches:
bikini girls
girls bikini
bikini girl
girl bikini
bikinis girl
girl bikinis
This is obviously nonsense. The Overture tool is useful to give you a quick rough guide, but NOT for, serious research.
“The harder it is to discover a certain search phrase (getting traffic), the less competition you will have in the SERPs (for that search phrase). If a keyword research tool is free and popular, how many competitors will you have for the phrases you discover there?”
Traffic tip #8
Try this page titles experiment. Here’s a good way to increase your traffic. Go to Google and type any phrase into the search box. Look at the titles of the websites in the top 10 rankings. Which ones catch your eye and tempt you to click on the link? Some are dreadfully stodgy, boring. Some are merely a long list of keywords. Some are good. Some are junk. Good titles are written for search engines AND humans.
Now look at the titles on your site. Start with your most important pages. Rewrite them to make them more eye-catching.
Now go to Google and do a search of your site like this…
site:example.com
Study the page titles. If you own a large site created over many years, you may be horribly embarrassed at just how BAD some of your page titles are. Do you want to find some examples of good titles? Simply go to Google and do some more searches. Don’t stick to your industry.
Type in all sorts of different phrases and study the titles that appear in the top 10. You’ll soon be brimming with ideas on ways you can improve your page titles. Checking how enticing the information is in your meta description tag can help, too. Some search engines display this information in their search results. If you have a well established site, you may have written many of your page titles and meta descriptions years ago when you knew less about marketing than you do now. If so, it’s time for another look at them.
Traffic tip #9
Organic SEO – a few key points. Search engines are getting cleverer all the time. You can try to outsmart them but to us it makes more sense to work WITH them.
They’re gradually getting better at sifting out low quality websites and ranking them poorly. So build high quality websites containing genuinely useful material that other people want to link to.
The basics of good search engine optimization are fairly simple. Here’s a very quick summary:
· You need to make it easy for a search engine to figure out the topic of your page.
· Find appropriate keywords or key phrases and use them in the title, in the page heading, in the introduction, throughout the article, in the meta description, in alt tags, at the end of the article, in links on the page, in bold or italics, and perhaps in a list on the page.
· Use key phrases in your file names, for example: keyword1- keyword2.html.
· Use synonyms and word variations naturally throughout the page.
· When linking to your pages, use appropriate keywords in the anchor text (the words people click on). Do this for links throughout your site, and also on other people’s sites which link to yours. Vary the anchor text.
· For internal links, it’s better to use text than graphical links.
· Create a logical navigation system so that humans and search engines can easily find the content on your affiliate marketing site.
· Get links from other sites to internal pages as well as to your main page.
Traffic tip #10
Submit to the main directories. The more high quality links you have to your site, the more impressed the search engines will be. Start with major directories such as…
Yahoo!
DMOZ.org