Part 3
- Insert advertising
- Driving Traffic
- Ongoing maintenance
I hope you have done your homework, because this is the part where we are going to bring it all together and get you making money.
Insert Advertising
Hopefully by now you’ve gotten your site up, loaded up some content and gotten approved for a few affiliate networks. If you’ve done that – awesome job! Next you are going to insert the advertising. There really are a ton of ways to do this, but I am going to offer up a few easy ways to have professional looking ads included in your site. Remember that the style we are going for with this method is that you and your site are portrayed as an authority on a given topic. As the authority, you’ve discussed products that you use in your given area of expertise. You are going to recommend individual products and either supply a text link, or a picture link. As mentioned before, you should test this out and see which gives you the best results – it really will depend on what you are promoting.
Let’s say I was interested in watches and wanted to talk about a specific brand – Oris. I would definitely use a picture ad as I am talking about something that is very visual as higher-end watches definitely have a strong aesthetic component, so showing the product makes a lot of sense. Here are two different ad formats that I might use:
AMAZON.COM AFFILIATE AD EXAMPLE
If you signed up for the Amazon.com affiliate program, you have immediate access to the widgets section where you can create an ad widget like the one above and customize it to suit your needs.
POPSHOPS AFFILIATE AD EXAMPLE The above is an add from Buy.com through the Commission Junction affiliate program. I used PopShops.com to create the ad box. You can open up a PopShops account for free! They do have paid options if you need more than one store, but you can simply start out with one and see how it goes from there. Both of the above options allow you to create stores which would be multiple items on a single page, but I need to caution you against just throwing up a storefront to make money as that usually is not a winning proposition unless you’ve got a ton of traffic and built some brand recognition – that is why you start out here and grow! However, this doesn’t mean you can’t integrate a store within your website as a separate page (don’t make it your homepage) with lots of products. After I recommend the above Oris watch, I could write something like:
“I love this watch, but Oris makes a lot of cool watches to fit just about any taste. Take a look at this Oris watch page I created and look at all of the different options they have to choose from.”
That isn’t really a hyperlink, but if it were it would link to my page that looked like this:
GOLDENCAN AFFILIATE STORE EXAMPLE
The above store is from the site GoldenCan.com and you can make dozens of stores like that – all free. They do take every fourth click for most of the merchants, but it is a small price to pay for the great service that they provide.
As you can see, you have great free options that look good and can be extremely effective if used properly. There a quite a few paid options as well, but I am trying to get you going with as little out-of-pocket cost as possible. If your business takes off and you need a more robust application with more options, then I would recommend you check out Datafeedr – it is a great program.
Driving Traffic
This is of course the biggest issue for everyone starting out a new website. First of all, I want to say that you need to stay away from those services that send xxxx amount of traffic for a set amount of money. That traffic is known in the industry as junk traffic for a reason. Junk traffic can have its uses, but mostly for gray/blackhat purposes. If you are going to pay for traffic, you should do it through Adsense. Be careful though, Adsense is a money-sucking hole if you don’t know what you are doing.
So what about free traffic? This is where I think you should start and if you are diligent, you will see visitors and you will start making sales without paying a dime. So how do you get this free traffic? You again need to think like a buyer – or maybe let me stretch this out – more like a participant in the area of which your website is based upon. What do I mean? If you are interested in coin collecting – what kind of sites might you visit? Well, Ebay for sure to check out coins for sale. But what if you wanted to interact with other coin collectors to talk about coins? There is a not so secret source of traffic that savvy marketers use to make a very good living from – and that is forums. Forums are a great source if income – I have made a lot of money from forums and definitely feel it is one of the best places for a new marketer to start. If you want to find a good forum, you can visit Big-Boards.com and find a lot of different forums. Of course you can simply do a Google search with your website subject and the word “forum” next to it and you will be easily able to find a lot of great forums.
So what do you do if you find these forums – how do you make money. Opportunities will come in several forms, but one of the easiest ones is to utilize a signature with a link to your site. Not all forums allow signatures, so make sure you find some that do. People in theses forums are interested in the subject, so the traffic is targeted. Targeted traffic is what you need. One million non-buying visitors is not worth one buying visitor – that’s the simple truth. Get your link in front of people interested in your subject, and you will get traffic. If your information is of good quality, you will find your site having repeat visitors – more opportunities for them to click on your links and buy a product.
I guarantee that somebody is going to read this and say that the forum method doesn’t work. I guarantee that they don’t know what they are talking about. The fact is this is not that easy, because you need to be active in order to get your site in front of a lot eyeballs by doing a lot of good quality posts that add value to the forum. But continue to do it and you will see results.
Another thing that people do when promoting in forums is to PM people when they say they are looking for something. Make sure this is not against the TOS of the forum though. An example would be that you are on a Hummel figurine collecting forum and someone is looking for a particular figurine. You could PM them and tell them how much you like that figurine too. Let them know you have a Hummel figurine site and that you sometimes run into hard to come by items and that you’d keep an eye out for the item. Ask them if they wouldn’t mind stopping by your site and letting you know what they think of it. This will of course get a visitor, but if they find items that they like, they will be very likely to click on the pictures and maybe buy through your affiliate link.
Forums are just one part of your overall traffic strategy – but an important part – don’t skip it. More traffic can be obtained from other interactive sites such as blogs related to your topic, yahoo groups, Twitter, and Facebook groups. There are tons of ways to get targeted traffic. The trick is to get in front of people and interact – don’t act like a big ad for your site. Interact as someone who is interested in the topic, and “oh yeah, I love xyz topic so much I started my own site”…..you get the picture?
Do the above things and you will get traffic. Most people won’t – that is why they will fail. There is no real secret to traffic – it takes focus and action. Focus on the above methods and take action and you will drive traffic to your site – 100% guaranteed.
Ongoing Maintenance
Ongoing maintenance is important, but very simple. You need to check your site from other computers and browsers to make sure it looks okay, keep your WordPress plugins up to date, continue to post to related blogs-forums-Twitter-Facebook, and most importantly you need to continue to add new content to make your site interesting and continue to climb in the search engine rankings.
New content is the most important thing that you need do in terms of maintenance and you should add new content on a weekly basis. The search engines love new, unique content and this will help you to get higher rankings in the search engines which will result in more “organic” traffic which is traffic that will come without having to do any direct promotion. This is what you want to work towards, but it does not come overnight. Keep it up though – the benefits are incredible.
Summing It Up
That is it in a rather long nutshell. I left out a ton of stuff. If you are interested in getting more in-depth information and finding out about things I didn’t have room to cover in these three posts, please sign up for my free 7 Part Money Making Blueprint where I will share a lot more of the tactics I use to build my sites, get them optimized for the search engines, and drive traffic that buys what I am selling. Sign up now:
