Insider Secrets Of Generating Traffic: The Fastest Ways To Increase Traffic
By: Byron Talley
Like any other business, for example if you're into affiliate marketing, you can choose different ways to reach the same goal - which is, of course, making money from it. Since your affiliate sales are made online, at some point early in your career, you will need to decide on the broad type of affiliate you'd like to be. You need to choose a "business model."
Business Models - What You Spend Your Time Doing
In effect, when you choose a business model, you're really choosing the type of "work" you'll be doing every day. In the beginning, that means building websites, and then using various methods to get the right kind of people, aka "traffic," to visit your websites.
Affiliates use a variety of websites and methods for getting visitors. They use four broad ways to do this.
1. Search Engine Marketing (SEM) - Paid and Natural
Paid search is often called PPC (Pay Per Click) advertising. This is probably the best-known method of traffic generation, with Google AdWords being the most popular. The goal is to make more profit on sales than it costs for those clicks. Here's how it works:
The affiliate places a bid with a search engine, like Google, on particular words (called "keywords") that people type into the search box.
The affiliate's ad then appears when people search those keywords.
If the surfer clicks on the ad, the affiliate has to pay the amount that was bid to the search engine for the click.
Paid search affiliates spend much of their time with the following tasks:
Researching the keywords to find out what people type into search engines when looking for products and services.
Setting up "campaigns," which will include writing ads, determining bids, monitoring a budget, and building the websites to which the visitors will be directed when they click on the links in the ads.
Natural Search - Natural search affiliates spend a great deal of their time on search engine optimization (SEO). SEO is a process that involves:
Researching all the keywords people use to search for relevant products and topics online.
Optimizing website code so the pages will naturally appear on the first page of results when people search those keywords.
Acquiring a vast number of incoming links from other relevant websites, which helps the site to appear higher and higher.
SEO is a very important skill that, while not difficult, requires patience. It often takes several months before Google will move a website up or down in its natural search results. Therefore, most natural search affiliates will borrow other ways to get immediate site visitors from the other business models.
2. Email
Email affiliates focus on:
Building lists of email subscribers ("opt-in lists").
Regularly sending their subscribers offers for affiliate products and services.
Email affiliates spend a good deal of their time on:
Efforts to acquire new subscribers, sometimes through paid ads, though often through many other methods.
Working hard to make sure their mailing lists are clean and compliant with spam legislation.
3. Content
Content affiliates enjoy presenting information online. They focus on:
Creating websites that provide free information (content).
Choosing website topics that are very niche-specific.
Attracting visitors through natural search engine placement.
Content affiliates spend a great deal of time and energy developing content, which means:
Writing or working with writers.
Building their sites.
Managing content.
Submitting articles to syndication directories.
Distributing press releases.
Sometimes building opt-in lists by publishing or re-publishing content in an ezine or online newsletter.
4. Community
Community affiliates are a little like content affiliates, since they utilize information - not advertising - to get visitors. But the community affiliate focuses on:
Working much more actively - and interactively - with online communities such as forums.
Developing a presence on social networks associated with Web 2.0.
Interacting with groups of other users online by:
Writing for blogs
Composing articles for news and social bookmarking sites
Participating in forums or communities
Business Models Are Flexible
Are these business models set in stone, the way a job description is? No, not at all! The choice of business model is up to you.
The merchant can't tell you which business model to use, although these can be one limitation: some merchants will forbid use of a certain business model. For example, some merchants don't allow email affiliates because they don't want to deal with legal or regulatory issues involving possible spam complaints. These restrictions are usually spelled out before you sign up for the program, or in the affiliate agreement you should review before you join.
And, as you've probably already guessed, affiliates often "mix and match" these models. One affiliate marketer might use a combination of natural search, content, and email lists to market products or services; another might combine paid search with a content website filled with product reviews.
The important thing to remember is that the affiliate business model you choose will have a profound impact on what you spend your time doing on a daily basis.
For example, if you hate writing and don't enjoy reading content online, you wouldn't choose a model that depends heavily on regularly updated content. Yes, you could hire someone to do all the writing for you.
But in the end, your success will still depend on how well written the content is, and how well it sells. The responsibility for that quality control will ultimately fall on your shoulders. And you probably won't enjoy coaching freelancers on writing, or reviewing and updating content every couple of days.
So instead, you might want to choose a business model that doesn't require frequent content development.
That might mean developing some websites that compare products in a chart or tabular format, with very short reviews and bullet points. You would only need to develop that content once, and update it only when product information changes. Then you would send paid search visitors to those web pages.
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About the Author:
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