Traffic Building - How To Increase Web Site Traffic And Your Profits Exponentially

What do you feel any internet marketer's most burning question might be?

How can I make more money this week?

How much is my advertising bill going to be this month?

How can I get more subscribers?

How can I start creating more profits online?

How can I increase my web site traffic?

Whether you are a newbie or a veteran internet marketer, you have asked yourself those kind of questions more than once, right?

You think, if you could just get more traffic to your web site, you could make more money, at least enough to cover the advertising cost again this month, but it just never seems to get better for you the more web site traffic you get the more your advertising costs are, and you just never seem to quite make enough money without a constant struggle.

So How You can Increase Your Profits without Spending more!

Let's say you have an affiliate product that retails for $47.00, and you hope to sell 60 next month for a total of $2820 sales, you will get 50% commission paid within 30 days of each sale for $1410 cash flow.

You estimate that 2% of the sales page visitors will actually buy your product.

Your past experience shows that Google PPC Ad may send 2% of the ad views to your capture page or sales page .

You will need 150,000 ad views to send 3000 visitors @ maximum of $0.47 to generate the 60 sales worth $1410 to you just to break even.

Here is one way to increase your profits when you can't increase web site traffic for whatever reason?

- You don't own the product so you cannot change the sale price.

- You cannot change the 50% commission unless you find a different product

- If you can just sell 10 more units, you will increase your cash flow by $235 or 16.6%.not bad

Oops! Hold on a second

It just cost you another $235 for the 500 clicks to get the 10 more sales, so that didn't work too well.

What if you could figure out how to get those 60 sales from 2000 visitors instead of 3000.

That is only a 1% change in the conversion rate:

60 sales/2% conversion = 3000 visitors

60 sales/3% conversion = 2000 visitors

Your profit would now be $470 instead of $0 or just breaking even!

1% improvement in conversion rate results in an exponential increase in profits of 470% in this case.

The point is most internet marketers always focus on increasing web site traffic rather than improving the results they are getting from the traffic they are already have.

Don't ever let anybody tell you it can't be done, it's not easy but it is absolutely possible.

Improving conversion by only .5% in the case above would have yielded more than 200% increase in profits ($235)

Sales Results are measured in profits, not by increase in web site traffic!

If you want to learn more about how web site traffic impacts creating profits online, click here now: Traffic Building

How you can learn the art of creating profits online quickly, visit here now: Creating Profits On-Line

Leo Hanes is an experienced full time internet marketer, that writes extensively on the topic of traffic building and creating profits online.

The Most Cost-Effective Traffic Generation Tactic

Targeted traffic is the life-blood of any online business, without which, any online business will eventually go to the wall. Generating targeted traffic to their websites is also one of the greatest nightmares of any online business owners.

There're a myriad of tactics that online business owners can employ to drive targeted traffic to their websites, but the most cost-effective one is undeniably that of "building an army of affiliates".

This can be achieved by implementing what's called an affiliate program. An affiliate program is undoubtedly the best way to increase website exposure, sales and profits.

For business owners, if you sell products that have a medium-to-high profit margin via the internet, you'll be much more profitable and successful if you start implementing an in-house, two-tier affiliate program for reasons which I'll delineate in a moment.

Affiliate Program Defined

What's an affiliate program?

An affiliate program is a marketing initiative, a sort of performance-based advertising, whereby the affiliate promotes the merchant's products/services, and in return and depending on the type of program, the affiliate receives a commission from, or shares revenue with the merchant for delivering sales, leads or traffic to the merchant's websites. The affiliate can be paid a flat fee or a percentage of the transaction.

It's a mutually beneficial business relationship, and is also commonly termed as associate, reseller, referral, or partner program. A case in point is Amazon.com which is amongst the first to launch an affiliate program on the internet.

How Does An Affiliate Program Work?

In a typical affiliate program, affiliates normally promote the merchant's products/services by placing graphic links, text links and/or banners from their websites. They also advertise in ezines, send endorsement letters to their list of opt-in subscribers and customers via emails and/or autoresponders to drive traffic to the merchant's websites.

The merchant leads the referred visitors through the selling process, closes the sale, processes the payment, fulfills the order and handles all customer service issues. The merchant also tracks the affiliates who send him the traffic via an affiliate software. If a sale is closed, the merchant calculates and pays the commission to the affiliates as agreed.

Types of Affiliate Program

Affiliate programs can be broadly categorized into various types as delineated below, and they can be either single-tier or two-tiers.

You can also either implement and manage the affiliate program yourself or outsource it to third party managers such as Commission Junction, LinkShare, etc. My suggestion is that you run your own affiliate program in-house as it is more cost-effective and profitable to you in the long run. By running your affiliate program in-house, you'll do away with the start-up costs and percentage of revenue to be paid to third party affiliate program managers.

1. Pay-Per-Impression

Pay-Per-Impression is a type of affiliate program where the affiliate is paid by impressions. Everytime a banner or link is displayed to a visitor at the affiliate's website, it is counted as an impression. The affiliate is normally paid a few cents per visitor, and the commission is calculated based on per 1000 impressions or CPM.

2. Pay-Per-Click

In this type of affiliate program, the affiliate is paid everytime a visitor clicks on the links or banners displayed at the affiliate's website through to the merchant's website. The compensation to the affiliate normally ranges from a few cents to a few dollars per click.

3. Pay-Per-Lead

As the name implies, the affiliate is compensated by every lead it generates for the merchant such as a visitor filling-up a form at the affiliate's website.

4. Pay-Per-Sale

For this type of affiliate program, the affiliate is only paid when a sale is closed. This is the most cost-effective and profitable type of affiliate program and is the one that I recommend for reasons as delineated below.

Benefits of Affiliate Program

1. Increased Brand Awareness

An affiliate program will increase your brand awareness. Building your brand requires mass exposure, and as such, an affiliate program is ideal because of your network of affiliates. As your name, logo, and products are being promoted by your affiliates all over the internet, it inevitably increases your mindshare and brand awareness.

Amazon.com is a good example. It builds its brand identity initially via its affiliate program. Amazon.com is able to do so because of its vast network of affiliates. Its ten of thousands of affiliates is more than willing to promote its products because it benefits them as well in terms of the perceived credibility by associating with and promoting Amazon.com's products.

2. Higher Search Engine Ranking

Search engines place great importance on the quality as well as the number of websites that link to you in determining your website ranking. A well designed affiliate program will dramatically increase your search engine link popularity because of the number of affiliates who link to you. This in turn will boost your ranking resulting in more traffic to your website.

In addition, with greater visibility in the search engines, both organic and paid listings, your brand identity will be further enhanced.

3. Extremely Low Advertising Costs and Risk

Your advertising costs is limited to what you pay to your affiliates when a sale is closed. Your affiliates literally do all the marketing and bear all the costs of advertising. Even when they spend money on advertising promoting your products and not making any sale, it doesn't costs you a dime because they're only paid on performance, that is, only when a sale is closed.

Therefore, it naturally follows that your risk is also extremely low. Your risks is only limited to the cost of your affiliate software and your time.

4. Increased Leads and Sales

An afffiliate program can literally grow your leads and sales exponentially. This is especially so with a 2-tier affiliate program when affiliates begin to recruit sub-affiliates. The increase in the volume of visitors to your website will give your website conversions a further boost. That means sales, with next to no effort on your part. Sales you might never have made without your affiliates referring them to you.

Furthermore, you can profit from these customers by selling to them over and over again with back-end sales. You've indeed gained additional customers for life, not forgetting that your affiliates themselves are also your potential customers.

As you can see, an in-house managed, two-tier affiliate program is undeniably one of the most cost-effective and profitable traffic generation tactic for both big and small businesses.

Think about this...

... You simply can't lose because you don't invest much money up front except for your time and the cost of the affiliate software which in most cases is rather low, and which you can easily make it back within a very short period of time.

Instituting an affiliate program is definitely one of the most powerful ways of marketing online, and is undoubtedly also a win-win relationship for the merchant and its affiliates.

About the Author

Copyright 2005 by Larry Lim, MarketingSphere.com

Larry Lim, a Singaporean, is the Founder of MarketingSphere.

A marketing strategist, Larry dishes out highly effective marketing strategies, tactics and tips that will enable you to start and grow your business on the Internet.

To read more of Larry Lim's articles, visit his Internet Marketing Strategy and Article Search Engine Directory websites.

The Truth About Driving Traffic to Your Website

Many prospective business owners believe that driving traffic to their online presence will be a piece of cake. "After all, the internet is connected to the whole world so I should have no problems making millions" they say.

Unfortunately they are in for a big surprise, the truth of the matter is that it is simple only to someone that properly educates themselves on the matter. By that I mean that if you spend the time and energy to educate yourself about bringing visitors to your website online, it will eventually seem easy.

This has been my experience with driving traffic to my website. The whole idea of having a website and bringing visitors to it was like speaking French to me in the beginning. It was just so difficult and I felt like giving up many times, I decided to educate myself, I read everything I could find about driving traffic to a website.

I experimented with many traffic sources, bought all kinds of courses and listened to countless hours of audio on the matter. The more I read, learned and applied what I learned; the task I thought was hard became easy.

The key to driving traffic online is not in the quantity of the traffic but the quality. You want to learn how to drive traffic that already wants what you have to offer. This is the best feature of the Internet, you can "fish" for the prospects that are already in search for your product or service.

This will make the task of driving traffic to your website very easy, this is the truth to driving traffic to a website online.

I wasted 17 months trying to drive profitable traffic to my website, but you should not do the same. Instead click here to get a copy of my "Quality Traffic Report". In it I will show you my results after testing Content Marketing vs. Google pay per click, you can use the results to start driving profitable traffic to your website and also increase your opt-in rate. visit http://www.qualitytrafficbuilder.com/traffic

SEO Basics - Link Building

After the role of content in SEO, it is now time to focus on the other equally important SEO tactics. The second most important strategy is link building. As the name suggests, link building is all about building back links to your website. More the number of links to a website, the better it is considered to be by search engines. If you are new to the concept of link building, then here are a few pointers for you to get started.

What is link building?

Every website is rated by search engines using several parameters before it is listed on the results pages. The position at which the website is listed depends on a lot of factors and the number of quality links that come into the website is one of these factors. So, as part of search engine optimization, SEO experts will create a network of back links to your website using legitimate link building methods. This will help your website achieve a much stronger position in search results pages.

Illegitimate link building methods

When link building became one of the key factors affecting the position and ranking of a website in search results pages, then some 'smart' websites started to offer link exchange services. As the name suggests link exchange services worked by exchanging links. Website A would link to website B in exchange for a link back to A. This method worked initially and this prompted some people to go one step ahead and start link farming. A link farm is a huge database of one way links. When you join a link farm, your website will immediately get 10000 back links causing your ranking to surge.

When link farms came into the picture, the quality of search results started to suffer. Websites that had little or no relevance to the term searched for by the users started to gain top positions in search engines, courtesy these illegitimate SEO techniques. So, search engine developers went back to the drawing board and modified their search algorithms. Link farming is now considered to be spam and any website that participates or joins a link farm is banned for three years from leading search engines. So you see, you'll end up doing more harm than good.

Legitimate Link Building Methods

Alright, so how do you build back links using legitimate techniques? There are many ways to do it. But they all lead you back to the same old tried and tested method.

1. Build a quality website: There is no denying the fact that quality always helps. If you have a superbly designed website or have the best content in the website, then other webmasters will automatically link to your website.
2. Article Marketing: Most people undermine the effectiveness of Article marketing. But for me, it is the most powerful form of free internet marketing. You write articles or get them written by a content writer and then distribute it over the internet. Everybody needs quality content on their website and when they get it for free, they will never hesitate to give you a link back to your website. Do ensure that the resource box at the end of the article contains a link back to your website.
3. Forums: Once again, you can do this yourself with a fair amount of ease or hire a professional who can do it for you. Online forums are like a professional beehive seeming with contacts. All that you have to do is start interacting with people. So how do you build the links? Well, the forum board will let you create your own signature which will show up at the bottom of every post that you make. This signature can contain a coupe of lines about you or your business and a link to your website. Start making quality posts and you will have quality links building up.
4. Blog: If you don't know what a blog is, then you have probably woken up after a decade in suspended animation or were away hibernating in a cave. Nevertheless, a blog is one of the best ways to build back links. Keep updating the blog frequently and you will have a network of links in some time.

The key is to build quality links from quality websites. Remember, the link popularity of the website that is linking to your website also matters. So accept incoming links only from quality websites that will help you.

Sanjay is a freelance content writer. He likes to twiddle around with words and ends up weaving out readable, compelling articles ! To peek into his world of articles, visit http://www.sanjaynair.com now!