The Top 10 Traffic Sources for Affiliates…

There are many different ways to drive traffic to your website. I find it best to break these down into categories and focus on mastering just one source at a time. My favorite is pay per click search traffic because it is so fast and predictable, but there is certainly a place for other sources as well. Keep these in mind when thinking about the business that YOU want to build:

Free Advertising - Research and Locate places online to place free ads or otherwise direct free traffic. This can include: free classified ads, safelists, link exchanges, traffic exchanges and forums. This is not my favorite because it involves alot of time and manual labor. However, this type of work can definitely be outsourced. You just need to carefully analyze cost vs benefit here, but the problem is that results from this effort are difficult to track.

Pay Per Click Advertising - Definitely my favorite: extremely fast traffic source, dependable, expandable, and trackable down to the keyword. The downside of course is that there is a monetary expense here. If properly researched, managed, and analyzed that should NOT be a problem though.

Purchased Action Advertising - Purchasing traffic from another source: website, blog, e-zine, etc. After pay per click, this is the next best area because it is also somewhat dependable and definitely trackable. The downside is that it is not quite as targeted as paid search, and you are reaching a passive audience instead of an active one.

Article Submission - This technique has many advantages. It is free to do your self (but will cost precious time) but can absolutely be outsourced. You can leverage the writing here to also go in an e-mail newsletter, or refurbish and put on a blog, website, or in other article directories. People coming from here are pre-sold also. And, this can be a helpful SEO source as well.

Blogs - When you go deep in a business, you’ll want to build up a large blog. This is a great source to monetize and grow free SEO traffic (as search engines love them.) Additionally, however, it is also a great thing to add to a landing page to increase your Google Landing Page Quality Score, thus lowering your costs. In addition, many times as you build out a simple 3 post blog to start things out, you’ll notice free traffic starting to flow from Yahoo and MSN.

List Building - For a long term business, this is a key component. People many times will not buy on a first visit, but need to be warmed up and exposed to something repeatedly (some studies say as much as 9 to 11 times on average) before they will take action. Building rapport and trust through an autoresponder system that only needs to be set up once but can work for you forever, is THE tool to do this. E-mail marketing has taken a hit due to the emergence of spam, but if you break through your customers attention and build trust, your e-mails will be looked FORWARD to. Most importantly, you can create literally push button profits when you e-mail an offer that you know will honestly benefit the people on your list.

SEO - This is one of the most complicated, misunderstood, and sought after methods of marketing online. It has all the advantages of paid search (targeted, active audience) without the disadvantage of having to pay for the traffic. If you look at things on a cost basis, having a top 3 listing for a popular phrase and getting hundreds to thousands of free visitors per day is worth THOUSANDS of dollars everyday. The HUGE drawback here is that it takes time to build a presence, and results can shift dramatically and unexpectedly.  (That means this method is NOT a true business, as pay per click and list building ARE.) Due to this drawback, SEO should be a SECONDARY method that comes AFTER an optimized PPC campaign. (Well, at least outsourced shortly after entering a market and learn the “money” keywords.)

Networking - Getting to know other successful business owners in your niche and partnering with them. Also known as Joint Ventures. In this way, in a sense, you have NO competition. Instead, what you thought of as competitors are now future partners!

Auctions - Don’t forget about E-bay! (Or craigslist) This is a great way to capture people’s attention and send them to your affiliate offer, blog, or website.

Social Media - Obviously Facebook, Youtube, and Twitter can be huge traffic sources. This method builds trust and credibility like NONE of the other methods can. However, in terms of business building, you need a business to be built and optimized at least from PPC before it should be exposed in this medium. This is the way of the future and will be central to all internet businesses within a few years.

Not to scare you off, but how many of these 10 strategies does a successful internet business use?  Well, if it is built and optimized with PPC, why wouldn’t it use ALL of these? The fact of the matter is that in most (but not necessarily all cases) it will. The key is having a methodology and using profits to outsource the manual work. (So, don’t let the vast amount of work you see here discourage you off, other people will help you out!)