Forum Moderators: buckworks
1. how to attract targetted traffic.
2. how to optimize a website for search engines.
3. how to improve convertion rates.
4. how to write a good sales copy.
Obviousy these are wide topics. knowing all will take some time, and I don't have the time. So I want to concentrate on one topic at a time. Master it, and move on to the next. but the catch is, I want to also make money while mastering this topics. So which do I start first that will contribute the most to enabling me succeed in affiliate programs. Hope I made myself clear enough. Or to put it in another way. Given these four topics, and given that you have a website that is not doing well interms of affiliate commissions, which of these four topics would you start with in order to reverse your fortune.
Assuming time is of the essence: I'd make sure the site is well organized, full of rich content, and validated first.
I'd then bone up on SEO/SEM and go back and make sure the content, titles, tags, and linking are all set up to get the most bang for you buck at the SEs.
Then I'd move on to the actual promotion and conversion.
It's really hard to seperate the 1st two as they really go hand in hand. If you can afford the time, learn all you can about the SEO stuff while working on the content and then you can reduce the amount of time you'd spend going back and rewriting/reorganizing the site.
Your job is to get as many visitors as possible, and get as many of them as possible from the "entry" page to the "success" page. Typically this will imply the shortest possible journey, 1 or 0 clicks (0 clicks, entry page = success page, probably a bannerfest) from entry to success.
In some cases a longer journey is required to establish and build credibility before success is likely (high-ticket ecomeerce site, for example). In other cases the journey IS success (information only site)
IMO, the thing to do is to begin by looking at conversions, how do you get visitors to fulfill your success criteria? Put in place measures to maximise your current traffic (principally because you can get instant feedback; on a high traffic site, you might be able to road test 3 or 4 different "pitches" in a single day).
Once you are happy enough with that, you can attack your entry pages, making them more attractive, and populating them with relevant content, related to the specific search term(s) that you expect to be driving traffic (ie for general informational type search phrases, deliver informational content. For specific, "buying mode" type searches, present content related to the model searched on for instance).
Only at this point would I worry greatly about driving traffic in quantity, commencing a massive link-hunting campaign etc
Does that all make sense, or would you like me to expand on it?
