While there are ways to jumpstart your traffic flows, many sites don’t have the resources that others have to generate more traffic for your site. Well, you don’t have to spend a cent; all you need is the proper mindset and a lot of eagerness. You also must have the drive and perseverance to do hard work and research to generate more traffic for your site.

How sweet it is to have more traffic for your site without spending a single cent.  Now it’s a sure thing that many sites have articles that offer tips and guidelines in how to generate traffic using only free methods. Because it is possible, you don’t need to speed a single cent, it may take time, to say honestly, I’m not going to beat around the bush with you. You get better chances by paying for your advertisements, but at least you get a fighting chance with some of these free methods I’m about to tell you.

Take advantage of online forums and online communities. The great thing about forums and online communities is that you can target a certain group that fits the certain demographic that you are looking for. You can discuss about lots of things about the niche that you represent or offer.  Another great advantage is that you know what you are getting into and you will be prepared.

With online communities and forums you can build a reputation for your company. Show them what you are made of and wow them with your range of expertise about the subject, with that you can build a reputation and build trust with the people in your expertise and knowledge.

You can also make use of newsletters. Provide people with a catalog of your products and interesting and entertaining articles. If you make it really interesting and entertaining, more people will sign up for your newsletter and recommend it to other people. The more people who signs up for your newsletter, the more people there will be that will go to your site increasing your traffic.

Another great idea is trading links with other sites. You don’t have to spend a cent. All you have to do is reach an agreement with another webmaster. With exchanging links, the efforts both sites do will benefit both sites. Every traffic that goes to the site could potentially click on the link of your site and visit your site as well. This works well especially when both sites feature the same niche.

Write articles that could pique the attention of people that have interest in your product. Try writing articles that will provide tips and guides to other aficionados. Writing articles that provide good service and knowledge to other people would provide the necessary mileage your traffic flow needs.

Many sites offer free submission and posting of your articles. When people find interest in your articles they have a good chance of following the track by finding out where the article originated. Include a link or a brief description of your company with the article and there’s a great probability that they will go to your site.

Write good content for your site. Many search engines track down the keywords and keyword phrases your site uses and how they are used. It is not a requirement that a content should be done by a professional content writer. You could do your on but you have to make content for your site that is entertaining as well as informational. It should provide certain requirements as well as great quality.
Generally, internet users use search engines to find what they are looking for. Search engines in return use keyword searching in aiding their search results. With the right keywords, you could get high rankings in search engine results without the costs.

All of these methods and more will drive more traffic to your site for free. All it takes is a bit of effort and extended man hours. Learn all you can about the methods depicted here and you will soon have a site with a great traffic flow without the usual costs that come with it.

We have got to admit to ourselves. Most of us are into it for the money. We are not going to waste our time and effort just for the fun of it. Many sites would not wait until hell freezes over just to see their profits. While there are some who takes things lightly there are always those who would rather see profit any given day.

It is common knowledge that without traffic we have no business. Like any business, without any customers you don’t get sales. Traffic represents all the people that gets a chance to see what you have to offer. The more people who see your products the more people there would be to buy them.

Nobody puts up an E-commerce site that doesn’t expect profit. We have a startup capital that needs to be regained. With a consistent traffic, we at least have a fighting chance to achieve that probability. Monetizing your traffic would optimize your chances of making the best out of it.

Making Money out of your Traffic

The best and most proven method of making a profit out of your traffic is using advertising. The internet generates hundreds of thousands upon hundred of thousands of traffic everyday. Most of them are searching for something. While some are just looking for information there is also a good percentage that is looking for something that they need.

The internet has proven to be a very reliable source in finding what was deemed to be a very unsearchable product. The internet has made the world a smaller place; you can advertise a product from the depths of Istanbul and still find a buyer from the center of Philadelphia.

Generating traffic is not an easy task. You have to contend with a great number of sites to generate a good number of traffic flow. But if done successfully this could open up a Pandora’s Box of possibilities. One of the benefits is monetizing your traffic flow.

So, to get to the core of it the more traffic you generate the more likely you are considered as a desirable, desirable, in a sense that a good traffic flowing site is easily convertible to profit. Basically traffic equals profit. Advertising is the name of the game; with the good advertising scheme you can use your traffic flow to your advantage.

When you have good traffic you have a good number of potential customers, customers that are willing to pour money into your coffers. Other than that these are also traffic that can be redirected to sponsored links that are willing to pay you for a sizeable portion of the traffic that you have generated.

This scheme is called “pay-per-click”. With every click a visitor of your site makes on an advertised link you will be paid. The more traffic you generate and the more clicks that happens would spell to more profits.

Affiliate Programs

Another method of monetizing your traffic are affiliate programs. You can link up with other tried and tested sites and online companies and monetize your traffic by having a percentage of sales generated by traffic coming from your site.

The basic idea is, traffic generated from your site will go to another site that can offer a product that you do not carry. Many programs can keep track and make records of transactions that was made possible because of site linkage.

When purchases are made by customers that was led by your site to their site you get a percentage of that sale. Affiliate programs would give you the benefit of monetizing your traffic without the actual need of carrying or promoting a certain product.

There are so many ways and methods to monetize your traffic. All it takes is a bit of hard work and the desire to successfully launch a profit-earning site. The internet is a veritable source of information, many tips and guides are offered everywhere in how to monetize your traffic and make your site a good profit earner.

JZ

This latest update has brought mixed fortunes for my sites, some coming out of the “Sandbox” and some going in, but most significantly after a period of 7 days without a sale on Clickbank, the last three days have seen commission of over $250 on a variety of products from a variety of sites, some that have never produced before.

I really hope this update is the turning point for my most significant sites and brings some much needed consistency to my Clickbank sales.

Anyone else seen some significant change in PR or site ranking?

Don’t forget PR does not actually mean you get high ranking on searches.

A whole industry around SEO has developed from SEO Companies who work on a massive scale on behalf of large corporations, to SEO Gurus on the Web to Google Employees like Matt Cutts.

Until now Google have been fairly quiet officially about SEO and instead insisting that webmasters and webdesigners create sites for the visitors not for the Google Robots.  But on the 13th November 2008 they released their Google Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide as a sort of “SEO for Dummies” ebook.  It was originally intended as an internal guide for Google Employees, but they have just released it via the “Webmaster” section of Google.  The Link above and in the sidebar will take you directly to the pdf to download.

When I first started reading it, I thought that I knew it all, but towards the end there were several (still basic) things that I had never heard of.  I recommend everyone reads it as even if you think you know it all, it never hurts to get a refresher from the horses mouth.

Let me know if you learnt anything, drop me a comment.

JZ

If you are looking for a keyword rich domain in a particular niche you can simply search for the keywords on the Adwords Tool, this will give you lots of variations and tell you how many times they were searched for. You can download the list of results into a .txt file.

You then copy the list of keywords from the .txt file and paste into the godaddy bulk domain tool. Don’t worry about spaces as godaddy bunches up the words.

You can select which TLD (top level domain) you want to search for i.e. .com .net .org or .co.uk etc (you can select more than one but I would search for .com, then .net then .org etc but it depends what you want the domain for.)

Godaddy will then tell you which keyword domains are available. I was surprised how many keyword rich domains were still available in quite a competitive niche. One .com was available that had over 50,000 monthly searches.

I have found that sites with good keywords domains, particularly .com domains naturally rank well and with a bit of good SEO and backlinks can get very high in the Search Engine Results.

If anyone has any questions about this, please drop me a comment.

James

I was using a wordpress.com free blog called makeaffiliatemoney.wordpress.com to start with and then realised while it was good for SEO and ranking, it was very limited in terms of design and flexibility.

I downloaded the wordpress.org kit and loaded it up to my host and transferred over the posts and comments from the old blog.  this really is very easy if anyone is thinking of doing it.

I then visited UniqueBlogDesigns.com who created blog designs for the likes of Shoemoney and John Chow.  I had a look around and found that they offer this MMO Theme for free which includes all the features I need, including a rotating ad feature which is common on Money Making Blogs.

I really like the “out of the box” look, it is very Web 2.0 and I would recommend it to anyone.  I will consider a unique logo/header, but it serves my purposes just fine.  It is fully customisable and I will add a few more widgets to allow you all a better experience.

James

Part 1

The first thing I must tell you is that Affiliate marketing is not “easy” and you probably won’t make hundreds of thousands of pounds overnight.  I have been testing and trying different things for over a year now, just on Clickbank products.

This is going to sound like an advert, but until I found Nichechoppers I really was just playing around with it.  Norb provides amazing graphics and assistance with all of his products, just check out his everLoss product at the moment and show me another publisher who will give you a ready made minisite with such amazing graphics.  All you need is a domain, a web hosting account, a basic html editor (notepad works if you don’t have cash) and then ftp software to upload a ready-made site already SEO optimised.

If you literally have no money, try squidoo or synthasite.  Synthasite will literally allow you to have your own site with no adverts whereas Squidoo is covered in Adsense ads.  An example of one of my squidoo pages is http://www.squidoo.com/efficient-planet

I produced this very quickly using affiliate materials from several publisher sites.  It is simple and to the point with cloaked affiliate links to the publishers sites.

An example of one of my synthasite pages is http://10minuteforexreview.synthasite.com which I created as a landing page for PPC adverts.  The bonus with doing this with synthasite is that you will also rank well in search engine results if you have good website titles and good content.

In my opinion this landing page looks very professional but was made just from content provided by publishers.  You will note that the affiliate links I have used in this example have not been cloaked and include a “tid” that tells me that the hops came from adwords traffic.  This allows me to track conversion rates.

I hope this gives a few examples of how to start affiliate marketing for free, also known as BUM Marketing.

In Part 2 I will explain a bit about Article Writing.

Any more questions, please write a comment.

James

I had to make a few changes to a couple of my websites tonight as I had noticed some had been dropped by Google completely, I don’t mean just slipped a few pages, I mean not indexed.

One of them is The Forex Brotherhood which was riding high for “forex brotherhood” terms. It was a holding page and list builder during the pre-launch period and the end of August. Then I decided to redirect it with a hoplink to the Forexbrotherhood.com site, so when someone clicks on theforexbrotherhood.com it goes to the official site. I did this using a php redirect script on the index page.

This worked fine for a while and the site still ranked well for my keywords for several weeks giving me lots of hops and a few sales.

Then suddenly Google updated and the robots then found nothing, no meta tags, no content, no keywords etc etc. All of the links I have built obviously still remain, but they mean nothing if google finds nothing on the site. DOH!

I have reverted to a landing page with some keyword rich content and a list builder. Lets hope Google finds it again quickly and I can get back to where I want to be on the SERPS.

So my tip is, do not use php redirect on the index page if you want it to rank in Google, if you just want to use it as a direct link for ezine or adwords etc then fine, but I want search engine traffic too.

This might not be news to a lot of experienced marketers, but if one of you learns something then I am happy enough.

JZ

I also have another confession to make. I once bought the Rich Jerk!

To be fair, it was about 2 years ago, I needed a 5th sale and also a VISA sale to release my first CB cheque and it was only $9.95. I also got 75% back in commission!

I did actually read the ebook to find out if he was for real or just a hyped up load of junk. The reality was most of what the ebook has to offer is very much the basics of affiliate marketing, website development and SEO. There are no secrets, in fact most of what is in the book is available on the internet at digital point or nichechoppers, you just have to go and find it.

I am not sure whether anyone is actually promoting this now, but he was trying to sell the website/company at one point last year, according to Shoemoney the “empire” was up at $8m to avoid bankruptcy, but I don’t know if he actually sold up.

I love this site which is a parody of the RichJerk, http://www.youreapoorloser.com. This has been done by someone with a great head on them, apparently it is getting 10K hits a day, I wonder how many sales?

Any more confessions folks? Post them as a comment I would love to hear them.

Signature links are a valuable commodity on DigitalPoint and other forums which have the “do-follow” setting activated. They can provide direct traffic from people drawn by the Anchor Text, but more importantly for me they are links respected by Google that improve the Search Engine Results Position or SERPS.

There is an almost daily debate on DigitalPoint about whether forum signature links are good or bad and whether too many too quickly can damage your rep with Google. All I can tell you is that they have always been great for me, I have had sig links on my own profile ever since I could and more recently I have bought links from medium level posters.

I do believe the theory that too many links, too quickly can actually go against a site so I have not looked to buy from high post count members. I focus on buying at least 6 months from members with between 1000-2000 posts and who are averaging 5-10 posts a day. I have actually made what I consider to be good deals, I bought one link for 12 months from someone with 1800 posts for just $40 and this week I bought 3 links and an avatar from the same person for 12 months for just $12! They only have 400 posts at the moment, but that is still more than I have!

I verify all my sites with Google’s Webmaster Tools as this is the only way I am aware of that gives you the accurate number of links Google has trawled and one of my Forex sites is currently showing over 2500 links, almost all of them from digitalpoint. I assume if they were worthless then they wouldn’t list them!

There are risks involved with relying on either your own or another member’s sig links. The biggest threat is that you or the person you bought from gets banned by dp, when you are banned, even temporarily, then your signature is removed and therefore your links are not displayed and picked up by search engines.

You also have the risk that someone you bought links from could remove the links, especially if they got a better offer from someone else, this should not happen if they worry about their reputation or “itrader”, but I keep checking back to see that the people I bought from don’t remove the links. You must check that the links are correct and that they haven’t just put up your anchor text with their link.

The best way to protect against this sort of thing is to check their history, check their itrader and reputation. You will also get a feel for them by sending a PM to discuss the possible trade.

DigitalPoint have various rules about sig links, I have quoted them here for convenience, in case you are not aware of how they work and the minimum requirements to have one.

Our system has automatic signature guideline enforcement. Currently the restrictions are:

Up to 250 characters
No more than 3 lines
No more than 4 links
Images are not allowed
Adult links are not allowed
Signatures and live links within posts are not available to users until they have been a member at least 7 days, have positive (green) reputation and have at least 10 posts.