Traffic is one of the most difficult things to get as an affiliate. How do you get it without wasting your money and how do you get traffic that actually converts into sales or leads? One thing is absolutely clear to any affiliate who gets started promoting products: it’s virtually impossible to make money without a substantial stream of consistent and targeted traffic. Some methods and channels are more effective than others. Let’s take a look at the most effective ways to get traffic to affiliate sites, without going crazy in the process.

Method #1 – Web 2.0 Marketing. What are these exactly? It’s a blanket category that includes everything from article directories like Ezinearticles.com to social and informative sites like Hubpages or Squidoo. These sites can be used to promote your site by building valuable and informative content and then linking back to your main site. If all goes well your web 2.0 properties will rank well in the search engines, get traffic and then you can help direct that traffic from your web 2.0 properties right to your “money” site. You can use these web properties to pre-sell the traffic and get them warmed up for a full on sales pitch, so in many ways this is superior to just sending paid traffic straight to a landing page or blog.

Method #2 – Pay Per Click Marketing. This comes in many different forms. You can purchase traffic through pay per click networks like Google Adwords or even purchase banner space on a site that gets traffic related to your audience or demographic. The idea here is to instantly get traffic, but you pay a premium for it. The only way to make this work is to earn more then you’re spending on traffic. The difference becomes your profit. In many ways you’re simply brokering traffic when you get into paid traffic sources but this is arguably one of fastest and most efficient ways to make big paydays online. Some of the most popular pay per click networks is Google Adwords, MSN Adcenter and Yahoo! Small Business Advertising.

Method #3 – Viral Reports. A great way to get more traffic and get attention that draws in even more traffic is to go viral. This is easier said than done, but once it’s done right it works for years to drive traffic. Depending on your niche write up a short PDF report you can give away on your blog or via mailing list and encourage people to give it away and distribute it. Throughout the report include links back to your site and maybe even an affiliate link. If you put effort into making a quality report that answers a lot of questions or solves a problem, you can expect the report to get distributed and draw in more traffic to your site.

About Author: Jason Acidre is a Marketing Consultant for Affilorama, an affiliate marketing training portal. They provide affiliate marketing education and advanced affiliate marketing tools for beginning and advance affiliates. You find Affilorama  on Twitter.

Photo Credits: oceandesetoiles

Originally posted 2010-10-20 06:55:58. Republished by Blog Post Promoter

One of the most popular things on the Internet today is blogging. In fact, if you notice the trends over the past few years, bloggers have gotten a bit of notoriety and attention even in the news. Bloggers are becoming quite an influential group in the news category and for a business, it has become very profitable.

Article marketing was once a way for people to bring information about a product or even for writers to bring attention to their other work. Today, many savvy bloggers are using article marketing online to direct traffic to their blog and reap the rewards that come with more web traffic.

This type of marketing is perfect for bloggers because there is already a lot of content on your blog that can be transformed into marketing articles. Just get some of the themes or topics that you have on the blog and extend them into longer articles that can be used on the article sites online.

Any business online that is selling a product must use marketing to get the traffic to the website. It is the same principle for bloggers. If you want the blog to get attention and be read by more people, article marketing is a perfect opportunity to bring traffic in a cheap and effective way.

Bloggers are usually pretty knowledgeable about the web and understand how to use advertising on their blogs to make money from the work that they are doing. Article marketing is just an extension of this knowledge. Creating keyword rich articles should not be a problem for the smart blogger.

The first thing that you should do is create a collection of articles for your blog. The articles should be centered around the content of your blog and a good starting number for articles is between ten and twenty five. The more articles you produce, the better your chances of creating traffic to your blog.

When the articles are prepared, you should submit them to the various article directories online and some of the publishers of ezines to get your work out there. These are the places where your articles will start to get some attention for your blog.

Keep going with your article marketing until you have hundreds or even a thousand articles out there in the various article directories. If you don’t have the time for all of this writing, there are article writers out there who can help you with the content.

Over time, you will see your articles bringing the traffic to your blog. The more articles there are out there the more traffic you will see on your blog. Articles will continue to work bringing in the traffic all year long. Keep putting them out there while you maintain fresh content on your blog.

It might take some time to realize the kind of traffic that you want, but over time, your blog will start to gain attention. Whatever your reason for blogging is in the first place, you will certainly be that much closer when you use article marketing to increase your traffic.

Photo Credits: {Guerrilla Futures |…

Originally posted 2009-06-19 05:29:02. Republished by Blog Post Promoter

If you want to monetize your blog, you have to ask yourself a series of questions, starting with what kind of blog is it, and do you have any readers? If you’re not getting readers at your blog, you might as well put all your money-making plans on hold. Even if you got the greatest pay-per-click program in existence with the highest rates (which won’t happen if you don’t have readers) you can’t make money because there’s no one there to click the ads. Generate traffic first, and then worry about monetizing your blog.

If you have a steady stream of traffic, then the best ways to make money from your blog depend on the type of blog you have. If your blog is a general interest blog, it’s probably harder to make money from that than a specialized niche blog. Of course, if you have thousands and thousands of readers, you can run general advertising for things people typically need like credit cards, mortgages, insurance and very general basic things.

If your blog is general interest, though, no one is coming to your blog searching for cheap insurance, the best way to refinance a mortgage, or a better rate on a credit card. They’re coming to read how you burned the cookies, your thoughts on today’s politics, and the latest celebrity gossip, or whatever you’re blogging about.

But if you pull in thousands of unique visitors over a month, you could still make some money from these kinds of advertisers because a certain percentage of them will click the ads, and a certain small percentage of them might buy. This is a hard way to monetize that requires thousands and thousands of readers.

If your blog is smaller and more of a niche blog, you have many more options. Lots of people use Café Press or other sites that will print custom t-shirts, mugs and items for you. You could have some principle of your blog, your logo, or some great concepts you created printed on these items and link to them from your blog.

You can use the mother of blog money-makers, pay-per-click ads like those through Google and Yahoo. Don’t just sign up and assume it’s all automated, though. You have to watch the ads that show up, the click-through rates, and your pricing. If the ads that are showing up aren’t targeted closely enough and aren’t getting good click-through rates, you’ll get less per click than otherwise .So watch your statistics and make adjustments as needed. These pull off your keywords, so be keyword focused when you write posts.

Affiliate marketing is a top way to monetize a blog, too. If your blog is about how to lose weight, for instance, you can promote a weight loss product or information that has an affiliate program. When people follow your link to that product and buy it, you get a commission. The more narrow your niche, the easier it is to monetize your blog because the people coming there are looking for specific information and products.

Photo Credits: borman818

Originally posted 2009-06-10 05:06:18. Republished by Blog Post Promoter

When it comes to writing in a blog, simply writing and assuming that traffic will come is not exactly the right way to go about things. If you want to learn how to get traffic to blog, then you need to be willing to take some extra steps to make your blog reader-friendly as well as search engine friendly. Here are some useful tips for learning how to get traffic to blog.

1 – Turn Your Blog Postings into Articles

This is one of the best methods by which you can promote your website. What it entails is writing articles and then submitting them to websites that serve as article directories.

What you want to do to get the most out of this process is to take the blog articles that you have already written, edit them to make them unique by adding headings, elongating them, changing the title and so on, and then post them to the best article directories on the internet.

Here is a great resource for article directories: http://ebizwhiz-publishing.com/write-articles/submit-articles.htm

Make sure that you are including a link back to your blog in every article that you post. Not only will you be creating buzz, but you will be creating more one-way incoming links to your blog as well.

2 – Create Buzz Around Your Blog

Creating a buzz around the concept of your blog posts and the topic of your blog in the local media and in online media is going to give your blog marketing endeavor a truly viral component, which is a necessary element of advertising and marketing a blog in this day and age. Here are some solutions:

• Create some form of controversy around your blog or around the topic of your blog.
• Distribute merchandise featuring the URL and the tagline for your blog, such as bumper stickers for example.
• Write out a press release on something newsworthy, tying it in with the topic of your blog.

3 – Capture Subscribers via Email

E-mail is one of the number one choices for communication for most people who are looking to receive information and news, and so reaching out to potential readers by way of e-mail is still a top method for marketing.

Use a free web service such as Bloglet so that you can manage your subscriptions. This will also allow your subscribers to manage their subscriptions as well in a single, simple interface.

If you are looking for more control over your list, use an auto responder system that will let you capture and then follow up with your subscribers.

4 – Create Solid Inbound Links using Related Websites.

The Related Websites plugin utilizes the traffic and resources of other blog to effectively multiply the traffic of your blog. Anyone can download and install it free of charge to their WordPress blog, which brings more incoming links to member sites. The full features of the plugin are available only to member sites which must be approved before they can receive a key. Level one access is also free and only requires that your blog meet Blog Traffic Exchange criteria. Paying level two members see more significant results and are given priority, but they too must first pass all level one membership criteria. Users of Related Websites enjoy quality traffic and build quality inbound links. It’s a win-win.

When you want to know how to get traffic to blog, the three tips should really come in handy. Implementing them is not difficult, but it really does have a huge impact on your traffic numbers.

Photo Credits: larskflem

Originally posted 2009-09-30 03:19:49. Republished by Blog Post Promoter

There are several million WordPress blogs that you can find on the internet, but unfortunately the majority of them are not properly optimized for search engines. This article is going to touch on some SEO tips for bloggers using WordPress to host their blog, because with the right tips it is easy for you to make your WordPress blog more search engine friendly.

Here are some SEO tips for bloggers using WordPress:

Make sure that your WordPress blog’s permalink structure is set up to be optimized for SEO. This way, whenever you publish a blog, the URL for your blog post will be optimized for search engines. Every time you publish a blog post, the post will have a permanent URL which is known as a permalink. The permalink option by default is set to something less than optimal, but you can easily change it to better suit your SEO needs. The most ideal website link for your blog posts is http://www.yourdomain/category/name-of-post. This will ensure that your blog post’s category and its title are going to appear in your URL rather than simply a page number.

Make sure that you install the All-In-One SEO Pack, or a similar plugin, which will allow you to better customize your blog posts for the sake of SEO. The All-in-One SEO pack is a plugin that allows you to add in custom titles, custom meta descriptions and custom keyword tags for your blog posts and your home page.

Optimize each of your blog posts for a lower competition longtail keyword. Do a little bit of keyword research before you choose a keyword to write about. Visit the Google AdWords Keyword tool and find a longtail (more than 2 words) keyword that does not have a lot of competition. Choose something with fewer than 10,000 searches per month and write a blog post about this keyword. Use different keyword phrases for each of the blog posts that you write, and make sure that you use the keyword enough times that search engines will rank you for it.

Make use of social bookmarking services in order to bookmark each of the blog posts that you make, such as StumbleUpon and Digg for example. There are a number of other services that you can use as well including SocialMarker and OnlyWire that will make it easier for you to submit your blog site to a number of different bookmarking services all at the same time.

Optimize not only your blog posts, but also your home page as well. Your homepage is likely going to get more traffic than any other one of your blog posts, so make sure that you increase the number of visitors to your home page as well as your individual blog posts in order to achieve the best SEO results.

Photo Credits: OliBac

Originally posted 2009-10-09 03:30:47. Republished by Blog Post Promoter

Many blog owners spend a good portion of their time trying to figure out how to generate traffic to their blog. This is especially true when it comes to a brand new blog that is not yet really rich in meaningful and effective content. Generating visitor traffic to your blog is an endeavor that is going to take some basic effort on your part. Thankfully due to modern technology, the task of attracting interested people to your blog is a lot easier now than in the past.

The most common online blogging platforms are WordPress and Blogger. Both have hosted blog solutions, but WordPress also has an open source solution for installing the WordPress platform onto your own domain name. If you put the following tips into practice, it is more than possible for you to begin attracting traffic to your blog as early as on the first day. Within 24 hours of creating a blog you can begin to generate traffic, and if the purpose of your blog is to sell a product, you could be making sales just as quickly.

1 – Every blog has an RSS feed.

By submitting your RSS feed to the most popular online feed services, you will be able to attract website traffic very quickly, especially if you are focusing your blog content on specific keywords that have lower competition in search engine ranks. All that you need to be able to do is to submit the URL for your feed to a wide range of different free services as soon as you actually have a live site to promote. Some of the most widely recognized feed sites are:

- Feedage.com
- Feedagg.com
- Feedraider.com
- Feedfury.com
- Feedsubmitter.com
- Feedest.com
- Search4rss.com

2 – Social bookmarking involves creating bookmarks for your blog.

Additionally social bookmarking is meant for displaying information about what your blog centers on and what it has to offer. It is important that you use social bookmarking responsibly rather than spamming these websites. Simply write a short post that explains in a little bit of detail why your site or product will interest the people that you want to visit it. There are a myriad of different social bookmarking websites out there, including but not limited to:

- Digg.com
- YahooBuzz
- Technorati.com
- Del.icio.us
- Propeller
- StumbleUpon
- Reddit
- Mixx
- Fark
- MyBlogLog

3 – Social networking, on the other hand, is a little different.

When you create an account on a social networking website, you put together a profile that allows you to connect with other people, creating powerful partnerships and even a fan following in the right circumstances. These networks and relationships will facilitate the capability for you to promote your sites and protects, although much more subtlety than through other sources. Here are a few of the most popular social networking websites:

- FaceBook
- MySpace
- Classmates Online
- MSN Groups
- Yahoo Groups
- Xanga

Photo Credits: 1

Originally posted 2009-02-04 18:25:52. Republished by Blog Post Promoter

While it may be true to say content is king when it comes to blog publishing, the truth is that writing your blog content is not by far the only thing that you should be focusing on when it comes to attracting a readership following. Quality SEO, or search engine optimization, is an important aspect of attracting a blog following as well. If you do not implement quality SEO on your blog, then your blog is going to remain as a well kept secret, where it would be all content and very little readerships.

Many bloggers may not be aware of it, but when it comes to tips for blog traffic, there are actually a number of SEO tips that are going to come in handy, allowing you to turn any ordinary blog into a site that is highly trafficked.

Strategic Keyword Placement -

Search engines like Google as well as Yahoo are ranking websites based on strategically placed keywords.

• Your title tag should incorporate your primary keyword in it in order to be ranked higher in search engines.
• The heading tags in your content are also crawled, meaning that your headers should also feature your top keywords as often as possible.
• While the images on your blog will be ignored by the search engines, the text descriptions that you use for your images will not be. Make sure that you use keywords in your ALT tags describing the images in your blog posts.
• When linking to other pages in your blog or to other websites, make sure that you use keyword-rich links because search engine spiders pay particular attention to the keywords that you use in your links.
• Make sure that you are achieving the right keyword count to preserve density of keywords. You should have a keyword density of about 3% for each of the content pieces that you write. Any more than this could be annoying to your readers, and any less will not impress the search engines that spider your blog posts.
• Incorporate as many keyword synonyms as you can as search engines are friendly toward them. Use synonyms for your most important keywords to limit the monotony in your keyword usage while optimizing your blog site further.

Linking to Obtain Ranking -

Establish quality links in your blog, especially links that are incoming from other websites. When you get competitor sites to link to you, this builds more authority for your blog in the eyes of the search engines. Try to get your site listed on other websites in your niche as well as directories and similar sites for more authority.

Search Engine Algorithms -

Different search engines are going to index and rank different websites based on unique algorithms. Most SEO tips for blog traffic are going to be common among all search engines but Google has its own unique algorithm that allows it to favor additional SEO tips as well, including sitemaps which are used to index websites and blogs. Using a robots.txt file is another popular methodology that will help you tell search engines what part of your website you want indexed and do not want indexed.

Photo Credits: baojr

Originally posted 2009-10-07 03:25:46. Republished by Blog Post Promoter

If you’ve got a blog with enough traffic, you might want to monetize the space by drawing in advertisers. If your blog is new, it’s going to be a hard sell to get people to want to advertise on your blog but you can do it.

Whether your blog is new or established, you’ll want to draw up a pitch. This should include a page that shows where the ad would be and how big it is. Even if you’re brand new, if you pitch to an advertiser they’ll need this information. Don’t worry about setting a price. You have no idea how valuable the ad space is going to be them yet, most likely.

Go to other blogs that have similar content to yours and make a list of the people who are advertising there. These are the advertisers you want to contact and make pitches to. They obviously buy ad space in blogs like yours, so they’re an easier sell than someone who might offer products or services that your readers can use but who don’t advertise in blogs.

You can do one of two things at this point. You can offer them free space for a limited time, say a month or two, or you can offer them ad space at a very low introductory rate.

Free Blog Ad Space: If it sounds crazy to offer an advertiser free blog space, consider how much that space is worth to them. If you’re a blog with high traffic, then just show them your stats and offer them a price. But if you’re new or you have low traffic, offering them a free short-term spot can entice them to try it because they’ve got nothing to lose.

Use a plug-in to track how many hits the ad gets and to track page views and statistics if you’re not doing that already. Then before the free time runs out, if the numbers look good enough then present the advertiser with those numbers and offer them a price to continue the ad.

Low Cost Ad Space: If you’d rather try a very low introductory offer, the principle is the same. You offer low cost ad space, and when the traffic starts to improve and their ad is getting more hits, then you raise the ad space rate. If the traffic is worth it to them, they’ll continue the ad.

You can actually increase your chances of gaining advertisers by really focusing the content toward those advertisers, making good use of keywords. By doing this, you can try one more approach.

Send people to the potential advertiser’s website without approaching them first. Use good keywords and targeted traffic to attract people who would want to click on that link. Track your statistics, and after a month or whenever the numbers are looking good, present the potential advertiser with the business you’ve sent them to show that you know how to send traffic to advertisers (and inherently they know that you could send the blog traffic to their advertisers instead).

Photo Credits: Arturo de Albornoz

Originally posted 2009-06-08 05:02:11. Republished by Blog Post Promoter

Many people start blogging and just assume their blog will have readers. They don’t promote much, just with a few social networking and bookmarking sites, and maybe with a few comments in forums. They just assume that if their content is interesting, people will come to their blog. Those blogs usually don’t last very long.

First, if no one knows your blog exists, who’s going to read it? Social bookmarking and things of that nature can help, but you won’t be able to attract many readers solely through those channels unless you have thousands of “friends” on each site or you’re famous already.

There are a number of things you can do to attract readers to your blog. Do them consistently while you’re writing good, interesting content and your readership will grow.

You can wait for search engines to index your blog-this happens automatically with search bots-or you can go ahead and submit your site to search engines. It can show up quite a bit faster if you actually submit it.

You’ll want to bring your blog to the attention of people who might be interested (without making it clear that’s all you want to do) so find places these people hang out, and get the word out. Let’s say your blog is about digital photography. You probably already frequent a number of sites and forums related to that topic. If you’ve already been posting or commenting in a related forum, that’s even better.

Make a few knowledgeable blog posts about the topic or reply to some other posts and include a link to your blog. This isn’t allowed on every forum, so know the rules. With most forums, even if linked signatures aren’t allowed you can put a link in your profile which you may be able to direct readers to. Just don’t drop in and post links.

Another top way to get blog readers is by writing articles about your topic and submitting them to article directories with a link back to your site. And don’t forget one of the best free advertising techniques for blogs or any website, your email signature line. Instead of just your name and your email address at the bottom of every email, add a link to your blog and maybe a very short description.

If your signature line is 12 lines long with 9 links, most people will overlook it. But if you have just one link to your blog it’s more noticeable and many people will check it out. You can go into your email program and add the link to your regular signature so it shows up automatically every time you send email.

Be sure that each blog post is title properly and contains some relevant keywords. Never title a post, “My boring Saturday,” and go on about how you couldn’t find anything to photograph. Make sure photography, digital photography, photography hobby or other relevant keywords are in the title and throughout the post. This makes it easier for web searches to find your blog and read it.

Photo Credits: montereypubliclibrary

Originally posted 2009-06-03 05:48:25. Republished by Blog Post Promoter

If you want to create an edge over many of the other bloggers on the web, then one of the best things that you can do is host your own blog. There are a number of benefits of hosting your own blog over having some other service host your blog. Here are ten of the most prevalent benefits.

1 – Professional Appearance –

Hosting your own blog gives your blog a professional appearance, because you can use your own domain name or website name and can host your blog on your own website. If you do not host your own blog, you will have a lengthy blog URL which will make it appear less professional and will make it more difficult for readers to recall the name and website for your blog.

2 – Design –

Another benefit of hosting your own blog is the fact that you have a lot more freedom regarding the design. When you host your own blog, you do not have to follow a pre set design but can design your own blog layout instead.

3 – Recall Ability –

By hosting your own blog, you can make your blog easier to recall among readers. What address do you think is easier to recall, http://www.blogsite.com or http://blogsite.blogger.com/~blogname? The easier your domain name is, the easier it will be for readers to recall it, and this is one of the greatest benefits for hosting your own blog.

4 – Content Control –

While there are not normally really strict guidelines regarding content, when you have your blog hosted by a blogging network, your choices in content can be restricted. By hosting your own blog, you can have much larger control over your content.

5 – Security –

By hosting your own blog on your own website, you can have more control over your security, and will be better able to protect your own blog rather relying on someone else to do it.

6 – Brand Promotion –

By hosting your own blog, it will be easier to develop and promote your own brand. Even if you are not selling something, hosting your own blog will provide greater individuality than what shared hosting can offer.

7 – Revenue Generation –

When you host your blog with someone else, you have less control over generating revenue. When you host your own blog, however, you have much greater control over how you generate revenue online.

8 – Growth –

While starting on a blogging network makes sense, if you want to grow your blog, you need to go independent. By hosting your own blog, you can create a much larger level of growth over time.

9 – Site Integration –

By hosting your own blog, you can integrate your blog with your website, rather than having to create a completely separate website from your blog.

10 – More Traffic –

Hosting your own blog will also allow you to generate more traffic, because your posts will be easier to find in search engines.

Photo Credits: 1

Originally posted 2009-02-01 05:05:36. Republished by Blog Post Promoter