There’s no such thing as a free lunch. So make sure you scoff at anyone who tells you something is “free.” If you receive traffic from some place and it costs nothing, but you had to spend 300 hours to generate it, was it free? No, at worst, you could have earned minimum wage for those 300 hours. That is—at worst—it cost you 300 hours multiplied by minimum wage.
At best, you could have been doing something productive with your business that would have earned you ten times more than minimum wage during each of those hours. So don’t listen to this “free traffic generation” nonsense. Even traffic that comes from search engines has a cost – and that’s your time.
Now, with that caveat in mind, there is such thing as relatively cheaper traffic. If it takes you very little time to optimize your search for the search engines—and the result is considerable “organic” search engine traffic—well, great; you should generate traffic through search engine optimization.
In general, traffic that comes from search engine optimization does actually turn out to be quite cheap. In exchange for the time it takes to create some relevant content, use the proper tags, and exchange a few links, you could get a steady flow of several hundred visitors per day to your site.
If your wage is the only cost, this will be relatively cheap in comparison to pay per click traffic, which could cost you several dollars per visitor.Other than simply being cheap, organic search engine traffic is also good for a number of other reasons. One obvious reason is that you do not have to spend time monitoring the flow of organic SEO traffic for fear that you will exceed your budget.
With PPC, you have to constantly check your Adwords account and other PPC accounts to determine how well your ads are performing. This is not so with organic search engine traffic. And the less time you spend thinking and actually generating traffic, the more you profit per visitor. If you spend your whole day watching statistics and you think you’re in profit – then you’re not adding your own wage to the equation.
Another major benefit to using organic search engine traffic is that it tends to convert better. In fact, many experts would argue that it converts much better than links from “sponsored” sections – even if they are on a search engine.
People tend to be considerably more skeptical of anything that looks like an advertisement. In contrast, if your site comes up as the first non-sponsored result on Google for a particular keyword, you will gain enormous credibility for that fact alone.
Last, there is one other major benefit of organic search engine traffic: high rankings tend to beget high rankings. That is – if you maintain the top position for certain keywords on Google, there’s a good chance sites will start linking to you, as you will be considered an “authority” on your topic.
This will solidify your top ranking and also improve your ranking for other keywords. In this sense, high search engine rankings can beget high search engine rankings.And there you have it: there are several major benefits to using organic search engine traffic over popular alternatives, such as pay per click traffic.
Even though organic search engine traffic isn’t truly “free”—it costs your time at the very least—it may be considerably cheaper than other forms of traffic generation. Not only will it covert better than “sponsored links,” but it may beget future traffic; and will cost comparatively less.
Getting high rankings in search engines might seem like a completely impossible task. In fact, you might ask how you—a person with relatively little money and few resources—can outcompete large, well-funded corporations when it comes to search engine ranking.
Is it indeed possible at all? Or is it simply bait that shovel-sellers use to trick you into purchasing a product? “Yes, you too could rank #1 on Google in 24 hours!” We’ve all heard this line and similar ones.
I have good news for you: obtaining top rankings on Google isn’t really something you could do overnight. And that’s a good thing. Otherwise, other marketers could use the same trick to get ahead of you easily. Instead, getting top rankings on search engines is a slow, but rational, process. And the whole process starts with the creation of your affiliate site.
You might not realize this initially, but creating an affiliate site—as opposed to selling all of your own content—gives you a number of distinct advantages over people who are selling their own products. First, it allows you to quickly create an entire site around a much focused topic. Why is this important?
For one simple reason: the more narrowly focused your website is around a particular topic, the better it will rank on search engines. If, for instance, your site is a conglomeration of 35 different sales pages on totally unrelated topics, you will not rank well. If, on the other hand, your site only contains information about cranberry sauce, then you are likely to rank very well on keywords related to cranberry sauce.
Now, in addition to affirming the above (that affiliate sites can rank well in search engines), it is also important to emphasize that you should limit the scope of your site insofar as it is practical. Additionally, while you might sell products you created yourself, you should use content that you created (or hired someone else to create).
Articles scraped from directories and copied-and-pasted salesletters are duplicate content and are unlikely to help you perform better on the search engines.However, with that said, there are a number of ways in which you can quickly generate information about affiliate products that you couldn’t do otherwise. One popular way to create content for affiliate sites is to create a “top 10 product” section, where you can include reviews on the best CB products for that particular niche.
If you haven’t actually used the products, you don’t have to claim that you did. All you have to do is summarize points in the salesletters (and explain that this is what you are doing) and paraphrase testimonials. This will allow you to give visitors the short version of the salesletter, which will count as unique content for your site.
Other ways to improve your search engine rankings include things such purchasing massive amounts of unique, focused, relevant content (i.e. articles, reports, etc.) and uploading them to your site.
For instance, you could do keyword research on your topic, find keywords that receive a lot of queries (but do not have a lot of sites returned on Google), and hire a ghostwriter at http://www.elance.com to create an article optimized for each.
However you decide to generate traffic for your site, keep this in mind: you cannot get a top ranking in Google overnight. It simply doesn’t happen. You can do it, but it will require work. And when you finally do get that spot—and the traffic starts rolling in— you’ll be happy that those 24-hour tricks are myth, rather than reality.
If you want to make more affiliate sales, you have to ratchet up your traffic-generation efforts. There are a number of ways in which you can do that. You can send out solo mailing ads, you can use pay per click advertising, you create banner ads, you can post on forums -- et cetera.
Of all these avenues for traffic generation, search engine optimization may be one of the cheapest in terms of the amount of time and money it will take per visitor generated. One of the biggest bonuses to SEO-generated traffic is that it continues to flow in without any additional work and money.
With that said, you are probably familiar with the many routine ways of generating traffic. You know about using tags, using keyword optimization, submitting articles to directories, getting back links, etc. This is nothing novel. You’ve tried these techniques and you’ve either gotten results or not).
At this point, what you’ll want to do is find a couple of feathers to put in your cap – a few truly novel SEO techniques that you can use to boost your results. With affiliate marketing, you have a number of interesting options. I will discuss some of them in the remainder of this section.
Let’s start with “Niche Marketing on Crack”: http://www.nichemarketingoncrack.com/. Sound interesting? This is a new method from Internet marketer “Andrew Hansen”; and it offers a far more realistic, far more credible explanation of how you can generate traffic as an affiliate product marketer.
Now, unlike most big launch products you’ve probably seen, it doesn’t offer a plan for making a million dollars. And this is perhaps one of its best features. Rather than giving you the “big plan,” it tells you how to make small sites in a short period of time that will make you a small amount of money each year. One of the strangest things about this product is that the claims are unsettlingly reasonable.
Additionally, it teaches readers how to become successful and replicate that success dozens of times over through a fool-proof system.Rather than giving readers an opaque set of directions or a laundry list of Internet marketing banalities, it gives readers a clear, step-by-step set of directions that walk you through the entire process. Andrew claims that his girlfriend and her mother were able to replicate his success—were able to make sales consistently with these sites—with no prior knowledge of Internet marketing.
But that’s not all. In addition to using Andrew’s strategy, there are a number of other methods you can use to generate traffic for little or no cost through search engine optimization. For instance, you create a forum on your site; and encourage people to post. Not only would this help to encourage repeat traffic, but this would allow your visitors to generate content for you, which search engines would rank and attribute to your site.
You could also use scripts to collect data and arrange it in certain ways on your site. For instance, Mr. Rat’s Amazon product feed (which you can find here
http://www.mrrat.com/scripts.html) collects information from Amazon and then displays it on your site according to your own specifications.
You could purchase or create scripts similar to this that automatically collect product information and display it in a unique way. Google will take not of this next time they rank your site; and you are likely to see an improvement in your search engine ranking positions as a result.
When it comes down to it, you have many options for improving your search engine ranking positions; and doing so can often be much cheaper than using pay per click sources of traffic. So integrate some of the aforementioned tips into your arsenal and put them to use generating traffic.