If you ask people with knowledge of the Internet how one might go about making money online, a common reply might be "Try affiliate marketing." Affiliate marketing has a reputation as a way of making money easily and quickly, a notion that many people quickly discover to be folly. In theory, all you need to do is create a small Website that sings the praises of a particular product and wait for your visitors to come to your site, click your link and buy. If that happens, you earn a commission.
But what if you have no visitors to your Website?
The single most common question in affiliate marketing forums on the Web is "How can I attract visitors to my Webiste?" It's easy to build a site and easy to say nice things about a product, but if you have no visitors to your site, you will make no sales.
Here are a few tips as to how you can draw visitors to your site who are interested in your products:
Learn about search engine optimization, or SEO. You can pay a company to "tweak" your site so that visitors can find it in the search engines, but it isn't too difficult to learn how to do it yourself. A quick search of Google will lead you to a number of Websites that can tell you how to optimize your site for the product you are selling. It isn't possible to emphasize search engine optimization enough. The primary factor in people being able to find your site in a search engine is whether or not the engines think that your site is "about" the right topic. If your site is about auto repair, but you have text that mostly talks about tools, the search engines may send the wrong visitors to your site.
Use links to your site in your signature block on forums devoted to online marketing. As a bonus, you will learn more about marketing from such forums. There are perhaps a hundred of them on the Internet, and each one represents a great opportunity to learn and get links to your Websites.
Submit articles to article directories on the Web. There are hundreds of them out there, and you can include a link to your site in each article you publish in what is known as a "bio box." These articles can quickly propagate around the Web, leading to hundreds or even thousands of links for you.
Create pages at sites such as Squidoo or Hubpages, or take out a paid advertisement at USFreeAds.com.
Each of the methods described above works a little bit, but collectively they do a very good job of making a site more "visible" to people who might be interested in seeing it. By employing all of these methods for each site you build, you should be able to generate a reasonable amount of traffic to your site. As an added benefit, all of these methods are free and none of them are too difficult or time consuming to employ.
Traffic is the lifeblood of any Website. Without it, your site might as well not exist.
Copyright 2008 by Retro Marketing. Charles Essmeier owns Online-Moneymaking.net, a site devoted to
making money online as well as
other sites with information about
working from home opportunities
