Best Ways To Get Traffic To Your Affiliate Website

So, you've created a nice website on some topic and you have put some recommendations for products onto the site as well. Now all you have to do is sit back and wait for people to come buy through your affiliate link, right? Wrong! These days, with so many websites, you really need to do some promotion to drive traffic to your website. So how do you do this?

Paying For Traffic

One way to do this and see traffic immediately is to pay for traffic. The most common and effective way to do this these days is to use pay per click (PPC) programs like Google Adwords or Yahoo Search marketing. The basic idea here is that you create text advertisements that Google will show on the first page or two of search results for keyword terms on which you bid. Every time someone clicks on your advert, you must pay Google a specified amount per click. So, if you only pay 10 cents per click and it takes 100 clicks before anyone buys through your affiliate link, then you have paid $10 for advertising. But if your affiliate commission is $25 per sale then you have earned a net amount of $15.

Pay per click sounds good in theory and there are tons of internet marketing manuals out there touting this as the best way to get rich through affiliate sales. Unfortunately, it has become exceedingly difficult and much less likely to return a positive result than it used to be. Why? There are several reasons.

First, many advertisers are trying to advertise the same or similar products, so click price bids have gotten higher and higher. Perhaps a few years ago it was possible to bid on high-traffic search terms relating to dog training and get them for 10 cents per click. These days it is more likely to cost you one or two dollars per click.

Second, web searchers have become less and less likely to purchase through advertisement links, so instead of getting a buyer every 100 clicks, it may take 200 or 500 clicks.

Third, for whatever reason, there are many niches and product where buyers have always just less willing to buy. So, many people report 9and it has been my experience) that as an affiliate you may be successful with PPC only on one out of every ten products or niches.

The bottom line is that PPC is not a magic bullet for traffic and web income. In fact, in most cases it will cost you a great deal of money and may well never pay off. Is it possible to earn money using PPC? Sure. Is it easy or likely for new affiliates? No, not at all.

Getting Free Traffic From The Search Engnes

Instead of buying traffic, you are much better off in the long term by optimizing your website so that you get it free from the search engines. It used to be that you could tweak some HTML on your website and improve your search engine rankings dramatically. However, these days the only way to get really good search engine rankings is to get lost of backlinks to your website.

One good way to get backlinks to your website is to do article marketing. Write some articles and submit these to article directories. The key to article marketing is to write lots and lots of articles. Don't just write and submit 2 or 5 or even 10 articles. Write and submit 40 or 50 (seriously!).

While article marketing should be the backbone of your traffic efforts, you can greatly increase the effectiveness of article marketing using automated software tools that build links and distribute your articles to a wide range of other sites, giving you as many backlinks as possible. Software systems exist where you can get one way links from other websites related to yours, and you get a wide distribution for your articles with links back to your website. With the use of an embedded article spinner tool, you can even make each article unique so that each website shows its own unique version of your article. The search engines like to see unique content so your article marketing efforts will be much more effective with a tool like this.

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Comments

Fri, 16 Jan 2009 at 10:19 AM, by quality seo
Informative blog!Yeah best way to get back links is article submission. As you said getting free traffic from search engines is more worth then buying traffic.

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