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just seeking a little advice on affiliate start up success...
I launched a brand new affiliate site about a month ago. I do not have very much in terms of start-up money for advertising, but i feel my site is well built and visusally appealing. Generally a really good site with a targeted market, easy to browse set up, and unique gimic. Despite the fact that im confident in the actual site i have created, i have not really figured out how to generate any traffic. And it's not that im not generating sales from the traffic...im just really not generating any traffic - the number of click throughs on my product links and the number of site visitors is verrry low. From what i have researched, im doing all i can with keyword optimizing my pages at creation of page level.
I have paid for the general search engine submission, and put a small amount into PPC(which honestly hasn't generated a single sale). In fact all my sales have come from word of mouth/organic promotion - even fliers at the local Junior College message board has done me more than anything i've figured out online. I have built the myspace page as my target market is younger(girls/women 16 to 35)...but i personally haaate myspace and anymore its such a mess in terms of hacking/junk spam/and pretty much complete lameness(pardon the term, but i really do haaate myspace) :) ...i really dont think myspace is worth much in traffic at all.
I know after a month it's very early and i haven't really given my site time to filter through any of the internet, yet i admit i do feel a little discouraged as im not sure what else i can do on little or no budget to generate traffic. If anyone has a little more advice? New ideas? I know that google adwords seems to be the universe of everything...but i've been a little turned off at the idea but alot of what i've researched....and once again - it isn't really cheap and definately not free :)
soo...any advice for a newby? much appreciated!
I launched a brand new affiliate site about a month ago. I do not have very much in terms of start-up money for advertising
Okay you sound like you are in a fairly similar situation to the one I (most of us?) was in when I started out.
but i feel my site is well built and visually appealing.
If you step back for a second and ask yourself how often you visit a site a second time because you found it visually appealing the first time you stumbled across it, you'll immediately see why visuals are, at least at the beginning, just a distraction. Visual appeal is a nice frill, but a ugly site on a popular topic will beat a pretty site on a dull topic every time.
That's not to say that once a website has a good-looking front-end it's not a positive thing, but you shouldn't expect any traffic at all, just because the website looks good.
The online medium is not the same as the offline medium. Visuals are very important offline, because they are often the first thing to catch someone's eye when they are scanning the magazine shelves. Ask yourself how people look for websites and what is the first thing to catch someone's eye when they are looking for websites.
Despite the fact that im confident in the actual site i have created, i have not really figured out how to generate any traffic.
Just as in offline business, if you create a product which you think is a good idea and then try to create demand for it, you will face an uphill struggle. This can be pulled off - the Segway Personal Transporter is an example - but it generally takes a lot of marketing spend and a lot of clever hype to succeed.
Far better to find a genuine unsatisfied demand and then meet that demand. On the web this translates into writing a website that people want to find, not writing a website and then having finished it, starting to think about how you will generate traffic for it.
Content is King is an ineloquent and horrible old cliche but very often it's spot on. If you are looking for search engine traffic then first find out what hordes of people are looking for and then put your site in their path. That's easier said than done and a lot of aspiring webmasters go about it by using keyword tools. They might work, but they are crude tools and - at best - you'll know for a fact that many others are using those tools as well.
One strategy which I found worked very well in the beginning was to write broad and shallow coverage - that is to say: I wrote a little about as many different sub-topics as possible which fitted under the umbrella of my main site topic. Once I had a wide enough array of topics I could see which ones were the most popular and focused then on covering those popular topics at a deeper level.
If traffic is what you need, I would highly suggest using link marketing as an effective strategy. I have a friend who is getting approximately 8,000,000 hits per day with this method. It took him several months, but it was worth it.
I just started using the same strategy. Check back with me in a few months. I'll let you know the results. Anyway, start by googling "Link Marketing."
Good Luck
Ron
