What is Search Engine Optimization?

Traffic generation via SEO or search engine optimization is one of the least understood, yet effective traffic generation strategies in online marketing these days.

Are you using a website to promote your online business?  (If you said no, stop right here and go set it up NOW – your online business is useless without a lead capture/landing page!!!)

If so, you may have found yourself a bit frustrated – to say the least! – by how difficult it can be to generate targeted traffic to your website.

Many marketers launch websites (or just use their company duplicated site, which is also a huge no-no) with the “build it and they will come” mentality, thinking that simply having a site is the key to successful traffic and lead generation.
Unfortunately, no matter how much time or money you have sunk into your online presence, building a website is not enough.

In order to make your website truly work for you, you need to use search engine optimization (SEO) to get targeted traffic to your website

Search engine what?…
Q:  What is search engine optimization | SEO?
A:   Search engine optimization involves generating traffic to your site through being ranked high in search engines for your chosen keywords.

Q:  Why should you care?
A:   Search engine optimization robots look for keywords , and having them in your content will help your site to achieve a position high up on the search result rankings.

Think about the last time you did a Google search.

How many pages of results did you look at to find the information you wanted?
Chances are you didn’t look past the first page or two of results. If you are on page 4 of Google you might as well not exist.

The same is true with the vast majority of internet users — if they don’t find what they’re looking for on the first page, they usually either give up or try a different search phrase.

There are several good SEO keyword tools I use Wordtracker  to find keywords relevant to your business and generate more traffic for your site via search engine optimization.

Spend some time finding out what people are searching for in Google and other search engines… and use these keywords in your content.

This includes not only the text of your website, but also your image tags, title tags, and page descriptions.
It takes quite a bit of time to use search engine optimization to gain more traffic for your site — time that you would probably rather spend talking to prospects.

HOWEVER, by properly optimizing your site for search engines, you can generate targeted traffic much more effectively — and spend your time capturing email addresses through your autoresponder like Aweber, instead of hunting for those leads.
 

Affiliate Marketing Network Program

For people looking to make money online affiliate marketing is one of the most popular methods to achieve this.You are essentially selling other people’s products by driving traffic to a merchant’s website.If a customer who clicked from your site to the merchant’s then buys a product you get a commission.

You don’t have to deal with the customer at all.Shipping and customer service is handled by the merchant.

Now you can go from one merchant to another and see if they have an affiliate program but that would take too long.

Much better to go to an affiliate marketing network program company who gather together a large number of merchants on one site,and you the affiliate marketer,can search for businesses who operate in the niche that interests you.

Then you sign up for that merchant,grab the HTML code for that merchant and put it on your website or blog.

Now the big two in affiliate marketing are

Commission Junction
and
Clickbank

which both have a huge amount of merchants to choose from.

Clickbank tends to offer more digital products such as ebooks and software whereas CJ offers physical products.

There are two others I use right now they are:

Affiliate Window

and

Buy.at

both of which are UK based so tend to have mainly British merchants.

I recommend you start with these big players first.If you really get into a niche,then do a Google search using ” xyz company+ affiliate program” and you should find if that company has such a program.

The alternative is to go to the company website and see if a program is offered.Sometimes you have to go into the site map to find details as the merchant is  looking for people with above average determination!

For more advice on affiliate marketing go to Mike Klingler’s Marketing Mergewebsite.