Getting Started

affiliate marketing

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Getting Traffic To Your Offers

Networking

Look for new customers on chat rooms, blogs, newsgroups, complementary sites, associations and special interest groups.

Multiple Streams

Can you take advantage of several types of online advertising using a combination of a newsletter, content website and e-mail campaigns. Do some research to see methods will work best to driving traffic for your offers.

Search Traffic

Get your website listed on basic search engines and directories. Don't let yourself get over focused on optimizing your website for one search engine.

For more information, check out our section on how to submit your site to search engines for free.

Search Engine Optimization

Probably the most important way to drive quality traffic is to have good rankings on search engines. Make sure your content is current and you use keywords throughout your text that will reflect what your webpage is about.

To increase your ranking within some of the major search engines' search rankings, especially Google, you need to have as many links to your site as possible so spend some time writing to other webmasters and ask them if they would like to have a link exchange with your site.

Check out our section on search engine optimization for more tips!

Paid Search Ads

If you are not getting listed high in search engine rankings yet, consider using paid search engine advertising. This will allow you to bid a set rate for the keyword searches you want your ad to show under. You only pay when a user clicks your ad and visits your site.

Check out our section on paid search ad for more information on how to get started.

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Selling vs. Pre-selling

What would you say if I told you that you don’t want to sell? Your job as an affiliate is not to sell. Your job is warm your visitor up for your merchants by pre-selling.

When you offer your visitors great content that they value and respect they will click-through the links you offer, arriving at the merchants site in an open-to-buy mindset. It’s this pre-sell that will increase your click through rates and boost your conversion rates. These two factors are what ultimately determine your income.

Your site’s click through rate can vary from 1% to 20%. Obviously you want to maximize your click through rate so you can maximize profit. If your click through rate is low you will want to improve one of three things:

Quality Traffic: How are you getting visitors to come to your site? If you are using search engine advertising, perhaps you are bidding on the wrong keywords or your ad doesn’t accurately represent the content on your site.

Relevant Links: If you are using link exchanges, are you linking with sites that are similar to your own? If not you most likely will not get quality visitors/traffic.

Site Design: Is your site easy to navigate? Does your site have original content that users will want to read? Is your site visually pleasing?

Site Content: How do you introduce the merchant or client offers? Do you feature special offers or sales? Do you showcase recommended merchants? Do you offer ratings or user feedback?

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