Lesson 5: Quick & Easy Traffic Generation
Before you can start making money with affiliate campaigns, you need to be able to drive targeted traffic through your affiliate links. There are many ways to do this, and this section focuses on FREE techniques, so that you are MAKING money – not spending it!
To start, you will want to develop enough content to power up a variety of promotional campaigns.
Content is the #1 most important component of a successful affiliate campaign, because it warms up readers and pre‐sells the products you are promoting.
The more content you have, the better, but you’ll be able to start generating traffic through your affiliate links with only 10‐15 short and targeted articles.
The key to creating powerful article content is to keep it focused and relevant. You want the article to provide important information about the topic you are focusing on, while leaving the reader hungry for more.
Make sure that you weave targeted keywords throughout your content, including within the title of your article itself and in the first few paragraphs of your article.
That way, you are not only able to capture attention from targeted leads but you’ll also be able to make sure that your content is quickly indexed and ranked within the search engines based on your primary keywords.
Here are the easiest ways to generate fast traffic through your affiliate links and skyrocket your affiliate income!
Article Marketing
One of the easiest ways of launching an affiliate campaign is by using article marketing directories.
With article content, you can simply submit it into the larger article directories and within minutes of being approved, can begin to see traffic flowing to your landing pages.
In exchange for providing them with free content, you get to include some text and links in a section at the bottom of each article called a resource box.
There are a few important ingredients to creating high performance Article Marketing campaigns that maximize the overall effectiveness of your marketing efforts, while ensuring that you receive the most exposure possible from each article that you submit into the online directories.
First, writing an article on just any topic isn’t going to yield the results you’re looking for, if you haven’t first conducted keyword research to identify what your target audience is actively looking for, and the exact keywords and phrases they are using to be able to locate content on your topic.
This is fundamentally one of most critical elements of a successful article marketing campaign.
The closer you are able to target your prospective customer base with well written articles that incorporate primary keywords, the more traffic and exposure you will be able to generate.
Think about the possibilities if you carefully evaluated a niche market, creating keyword swipe files of highly relevant terms and phrases and incorporated them into your content.
Not only will this help you position yourself within the search engines, but your visitors and readers will be exceptionally targeted!
Each article should be between 300 and 600 words in length and provide useful information that your target audience would find appealing.
The greater the number of articles in circulation, the more exposure you will receive, however you always want to focus on producing high quality content, rather than just on the quantity that is being distributed between these networks.
EzineArticles.com is the biggest, most popular, highest‐traffic article directory. They have tremendous authority in Google, and articles often rank extremely well, so they can get a lot of traffic.
As long as your articles are structured so that you are providing solid, useful content with a link back to your website showcased within the resource box, article marketing is a simple and effective strategy to generating prime traffic.
Another important thing to keep in mind is that you should always use anchor text within your resource boxes, rather than a direct link to your site.
Anchor text will help you rank for many different keywords rather than just your website URL itself.
Here is the HTML code to use in your resource box if you want to use anchor text rather than a direct URL:
<a href=http://www.yourdomain.com” > Your Anchor Keyword Here </a>
You would replace yourdomain.com with your domain URL and include a relevant keyword phrase in the anchor text.
The most important thing to remember is that you need to create a compelling Author’s Resource box as this is the area where you are able to include a link to your website and direct readers to explore your own personal site.
Since the space allocated is quite limited, you need to focus on using a strong call to action that prompts the reader to click your link and visit your website.
The best way to go about creating your Author’s Resource box is to think of it as a short commercial, where you are given a very limited time to explain the benefits and highlight the most important features of your product or service.
In addition, if you offer a freebie or giveaway within your Resource Box, rather than a direct pitch (such as directing your reader to download a free report or ebook by visiting your squeeze page), you will instantly maximize your articles performance in terms of driving targeted traffic to your websites, as well as in building relevant mailing lists of potential buyers.
Here are a few things I successfully featured within my article resource boxes to generate traffic and build a list of responsive buyers:
- Free Reports
- Free Ebooks
- Free Scripts
- Free Content (PLR, MRR)
- Free membership (even trial will work)
There is also yet another reason why article marketing is such a lucrative method of generating traffic to your website.
Since articles are available for re‐print, where webmasters can use your content on their websites and communities, (as long as the Author’s resource box is left intact), you will also be able to build additional back links from the websites that feature your content throughout their network.
Here are the top five article marketing directories that I personally use for all of my campaigns:
- www.EzineArticles.com
- www.GoArticles.com
- www.ArticlesBase.com
- www.ArticleCity.com
- www.ArticleDashboard.com
You can always choose to save time by hiring an Article submission service to automatically submit your articles for you. One popular resource is available a SubmitYourArticle.com
Ezine Advertising
Advertising in newsletters can be a cost effective and very powerful method of spreading your affiliate links throughout the market very quickly.
When purchasing ezine (or newsletter) advertising, you always want to try to purchase "solo" ads, so that you are able to broadcast an article tied in with your affiliate link, without having to compete with other advertisers.
Here is a partial list of ezines that offer solo advertisement spacing:
- www.soloadsonly.com
- www.bizopzine.com
- www.probiztips.com
- www.rent‐a‐list.com
When contacting newsletter owners to promote within their broadcasts, you want to find out how many subscribers they have, as well as how many times they'll run your ad.
You also want a good idea as to their overall open rate, and whether there are specific days where they've seen a higher response level.
To find more ezines to advertise in or to find ezines that are targeted towards non‐IM niches, consider the following directories:
- www.directoryofezines.com
- www.ezinelocater.com
- www.ezinehub.com
Feeder Sites
If you want to push your marketing message out to your niche market quickly, and absolutely free ‐ you'll want to turn to feeder sites.
Feeder sites are free remotely hosted web services that allow you to create simple websites or web pages, such as Squidoo, available at http://www.Squidoo.com, who provides a free "hub building service" to anyone wishing to create a content rich web page.
Feeder sites are such a popular method of building targeted traffic campaigns because of how quickly they rank in the major search engines.
Since these websites are deemed "authority sites", they're already ranked high in engines like Google.com, and so by creating your sub‐page on their server, your page will be discovered by search engine spiders, and ranked very quickly.
When creating your Squidoo lens, be sure to take advantage of the various modules that you can include on your page, and place a prominent link back to your main affiliate content page as well!
In addition, break up you content into short articles, and avoid linking to any related products until after the initial launch is over, since your focus is on funneling this traffic through your affiliate link to the products order page.
For each feeder site, upload 1‐2 keyword rich articles and spice up your pages with images, videos and use built in modules or plugins whenever possible.
When you've finished creating your feeder pages, ping each URL to get the traffic pumping in. You can do this with either Pingomatic.com or PingGoat.com
Here are the top feeder site resources to help you get started:
Blogger: www.Blogger.com
Wordpress: www.Wordpress.com
WikiDot.com
This is a great way to get your sites ranking in the search engines quickly is by creating an account at Wikidot.com
Weebly.com
Create free websites and blogs, switch designs instantly, and features a drag and drop interface, Weebly helps you rank higher in search engines especially Google.
WetPaint.com
Wet Paint features free wiki based websites that allow you to start your own social website instantly. Very good site for backlinks and ranking.
LiveJournal.com
Another free blog platform that will allow you to customize it from top to bottom including free themes and modules.
Social Marketing
You can generate a lot of traffic to your website, with establishing a reputation within your niche through social networking communities. While this traffic strategy does take a bit of time, you will find it incredibly easy to set up and manage your accounts and campaigns.
There are literally hundreds of different social networking websites available online, with the most popular communities being:
Facebook.com
With Facebook, you can interact with those in your market by adding them as a contact, but you can also generate exposure a number of other ways from within the Facebook community:
Facebook also offers an internal advertising channel, where you can set up PPC or CPC campaigns. Facebook offers extensive customization options including the ability to define your advertising schedule, as well as target specific segments of your market based on gender, age and even location.
You can create your advertisement by visiting
http://www.Facebook.com/advertising
You can also begin generating exposure by creating a “Facebook Fan Page” that allows potential customers and subscribers to join your fan page, and receive instant updates and alerts each time you publish new material to your page.
Ning.com
With Ning, you can create your own private or public social network, allowing members to view article content, resources and tools posted to the community channel. You can also limit visibility only to members, encouraging visitors to join your social network prior to gaining full access to your material.
Twitter.com
Twitter is the leading social network and information portal online.
You can quickly establish an online presence, generate targeted traffic and even build a mailing list by submitting regular broadcasts, growing a following and using free tools including http://www.SocialOomph.com to schedule automated broadcasts that are sent out to everyone who chooses to follow you.
Other Social Networks Include:
- Digg.com
- MySpace.com
- Linkedin.com
- Xanga.com
- Friendster.com
- Zorpia.com
