Generate Website Traffic

How to do this..

[steveoracle]

Hi All

I'm a newbie to affiliate marketing and am looking for tips to get traffic to my site. It's an online mall. I'm paying around £5 per day for google adword and am getting around 100 hits per day. Obviously I want more than this but don't really want to spend more on adwords(unless it's worth it)

Any suggerstions aer very welcome

Steve

[chrisgarrett]

Build up your site content, you can use it for adwords landing pages and SEO

Have you read Bretts traffic bible?
[webmasterworld.com...]

Also, read up on the tips in the adwords forum
[webmasterworld.com...]

My main advice is to make sure you have tracking in place so you know what is working to give you sales and develop lots of targetted keywords, you can use them for both SEO and adwords.

[rfung]

$5 a day isn't bad, are you getting your money's worth out of those 100 clicks(i.e. sales)? if you are, and it's a positive ROI, then you could even increase your ad budget...

just a thought.

[chrisgarrett]

£5 is more like $10 :)

Agreed though, ROI is the test and will give you an idea what you need to do

[steveoracle]

Is there usually a delay between sales and my affiliate network updataing my balance? I'm getting a reasonable click through rate but very few sales. My ROI is negative but my adwords have only been active for a while.

How long should I wait to see a return on my investment?

Steve

[rfung]

I think the general consensus is 3-7 days, but your gut and your pocket will help you with that decision :)

The logic goes that if you can't break even in 7 days of PPC, then you won't do any better in a month. Unlike putting up a website that may or not increase in traffic as SE's find and index it, PPC is a pretty straight forward business and will tell you right away if it works or not.

[kempozone]

Most affiliate programs update in real time. If you are new to AM, give it 3-7 days to test campaigns as rfung advised. Personally, my campaigns usually run 1-2 days before I make any decisions.

kz

[brightspark]

Don't dump those campaigns just yet! Pause them after an initial burst if they aren't showing sales straight away, but keep an eye out for delayed sales.

Your punters may be looking at other sites and doing some research for those higher value items before coming back to buy.

[webmastertexas]

Well you could just build up content and let word of mouth spread. Of course that took my site 3 years, but then again, I never had to pay a cent of advertisement, and it was always just a hobby until last year, when it started making money. :)

[WinWayne]

Online wall? What type? If it is all-in-one type of mall, I think the business model has flaw. It used to work, not any more. You have better off on the mini-sites. I used to (still) have a site of online mall of many items, it did not make money at all. I have much better luck with the mini-sites, go figure.

--Wayne

[rfung]

Actually you're correct - online malls are so 2000.

SteveOracle: did you build your own 'mall', or are you using some sort of ready made template provided by another company?...

Mini sites will tend to perform better IMHO.

[chrisgarrett]

Are your PPC keywords generic or specific? More specific terms may get you less traffic but better ROI?

[shri]

>> online malls are so 2000.

Note to Jeff Bezos. Amazon is so 2000. ;)

[rfung]

The ashes of all the dotcoms that crashed and burned were pretty nutritious to the forest related sites :)

either way, I seem to recall once before i knew what AM was I signed up for some online mall where you could create your own storefront with a mysubdomain.theirdomain.com type of arrangement. I wonder if they're still around...

[shri]

The modern day online mall is working really well for me.

We took the Amazon model and worked it into a small niche. Customer comes in, places and order and we send it to the supplier. We collect the funds and pay the supplier on a 30 day basis at wholesale prices.

We do the setup, integration and never allow the customer access to the back end. Works fine for customers who want to be online but do not have the knowledge or capabilities. Neeless to say .. everything is done for a fee and the legal / service agreements take a while to negotiate.

[WinWayne]

Online mall IS the thing of past, what i refer to is all-in-one shopping mall (everything down to the kitchen sink type), not the good startup business to say the least. There won't be another Amazon, this is winner-take-all. There have been (and continue to have) many amazon-clone book sites, but they come and go. In addition to the name brand (natural traffic) and hugh client list, the most valuable asset Amazon has, which sets a barrier no others can cross, is the millions of book reviews on their site. You can have the $$ in the world to build a site as big and as popular as Amazon, but still years behind on their intellectual properties, not to mention they sold 32 items every second the past holiday season.

There won't be another eBay either, as soon as a little auction sites get bigger, eBay will buy them. You can join the game, build an auction site, sure enough, eBay will knock on your door if your site ever reaches their radius.

Specialty or nich stores online will continue to be a better startup option.

--Wayne