Web Traffic=Visitors - Making the Most of Your Website Visitors

At this point, the building (or planning) your online affiliate marketing business is moving along nicely. You have selected programs, registered your domain name, secured web hosting services and now you are building your website.

Once your affiliate marketing website is launched you will start making money, right?

Right, that CAN be absolutely true. And if that is the result you are looking for, pay attention and study how to put all of these pieces together that are covered in this “Affiliate Marketing Basics” articles.

You can make money if you do some careful planning of the features on your website, make a narrow selection of a customer base, organize your promotions and prepare customer service tools. You can start announcing your affiliate marketing website services and products months before your website goes “live”. Building excitement around an upcoming event within your market segment is one way to generate interest in your affiliate product or services.

Exposing your domain name to potential visitors to your website might well be the simplest part of online marketing process. The right mix of informative content and graphic images linked to your referral id code are necessary components of your website. And at this point your visitor makes their first decision about your site: is this what they are looking for?

This is where the first part of “visitor retention” comes into play. You want visitors to explore your site, become interested in the products and services from your affiliate marketing programs.

But your visitor will have to leave your site at some point, and once they leave your site what can you do? Not too much, unless you have given them a way to interact with you.

To retain and keep in contact with your visitors once they leave your website, we’ll look at two of the most popular methods of interacting with your website visitors in the next article.

Michael Wise
eMarketProfitStrategies.com

Finding the Balance between Content and Graphics

Building your affiliate marketing business around your domain name is much more effective than using a general approach, like using the “affiliate done 4 you website”.

The more specific your focus, the easier it is to get your advertising message to prospective buyers.

Most affiliate marketing programs offer banners or text links embedded with your referral link that you can use on your website. Be aware that using these graphics is not always the best idea because they will cause your site to load slowly. If you want to use the “program” graphics, do some testing on your web site to see if there is a slowdown with load time.

What your visitors really want to see what new information you can offer them; what makes your site different from the other websites that they have visited. How well you meet the expectations of your visitors and deliver information that is of interest to them can have an impact on whether your visitor clicks your referral link or not.

The informational content of your website should be compelling articles about the products or services you are offering through your affiliate marketing programs. They should outline the benefits that the visitor will enjoy through its use.

Using highlighting to draw attention to the special features of your product or service, gives you the opportunity to ask your visitor to take action and make the click on your referral link.

Article headlines can be used to encourage the reader to continue reading, contact you, sign up for your FREE Newsletter or direct their attention to a specific feature of your affiliate marketing program.

Writing content articles is one of the best ways to target the market you want. There are a number of article submission services that will distribute your articles to other websites to be used as content, giving your site increased exposure on the Internet, which will increase your link popularity and in turn your search engine ranking. By submitting an article to these services weekly, you can rapidly build targeted visitor traffic to your site.

Never having done any “Article Marketing” myself, I purchased a good content program to learn a little more about it. Josh Spaulding has a product called “Article Marketing Domination” that I purchased and recommend to anyone who would like to learn more about this subject. Josh’s ebook steps through how to focus and strategically set up article marketing in order to rank your sales website high in the search engines. You can check out his product information and sales page here: Josh Spaulding’s Article Marketing Domination.

Michael Wise
eMarketProfitStrategies.com

Secret To Marketing Profits = Attracting The Right Audience

Website Design and Layout
Take your website design and layout cue from the audience you want to attract: if the product or service you are promoting is targeted toward pets, then your website should reflect this.

A good source for ideas and website information, Webmasters World at http://www.webmasterworld.com/ is a discussion group that offers real world experience on all the issues related to website design.

Developing the Picture of Your Business
From your side of the story, having an affiliate marketing business online can be compared to putting together pieces of a puzzle to produce a picture. The “picture” in this case is the image that comes to mind when your domain name information is displayed on a search engine listing.

Remember from doing our key word / key phrase research we developed a URL, domain name that contained our chosen key word / key phrase.

The easiest way to begin developing this picture is to create a unique website to promote each separate product or service you are marketing. Displaying a large number of unrelated affiliate links all on the same website can detract from your credibility and generally this approach does not encourage visitors to click your affiliate link. If your affiliate marketing program is focused on office supplies, your website content should be solely about office supplies.

Designing your website to be “search engine friendly” starts with understanding and applying the criteria that search engines use to create their index. Be careful here, because there is too much information available about this vital subject that is either outdated or can cause you problems.

One of the most trusted sources of working with search engines is Search Engine Watch, located at http://searchenginewatch.com/

Keep the viewpoint of your potential buyers in mind throughout this process. Remember, there are many other affiliates promoting the same product or service. You must exploit every opportunity to attract to visitors to your affiliate marketing website.

For example of “Windy City Widgets” can be used in the regional section of the search engines as well as the general index. This term “Windy City” is well known to the people who live in Chicago, and gives you an edge to reach them when they are ready to purchase their widgets.

Knowledge of your domain name or URL is your first marketing contact. On its own, it should be able to motivate a person interested in your product to your website. Visitors to http://www.saveyourmoney.com, already have an idea of what the website has to offer.

On the other hand, when someone visits your page from a search engine listing, they will see a brief description of your website content, which is generated by the “meta tags” on your web page.
The three pieces of information that search engines take from the source code of your web page to use in creating your listing on their index are:

· The title of your website
· The keywords
· The description

This information creates an expectation in the visitors’ mind that you must meet or else they will leave your site. Internet users are very smart, and a large number of them shop online regularly.

CAUTION: Getting visitors to your site using keywords that are totally unrelated to what you really have to offer on your site is a practice that is considered “black hat SEO” and can get your listing removed and banned from the search engine index.

As you begin building your affiliate marketing business, keeping your domain name as your focal point will prove to be very effective in all of your advertising efforts. The keyword that you use in your domain name should be used throughout your website content, as well as all of your online and offline advertising.

Your keyword usage should developed in a way that reads as we would normally speak or write. If you want to read some more on this, do a search on “Google Slap”.

Michael Wise
eMarketProfitStrategies.com

Cool and Awesome Domain Name - Go Get It!

Use the strategies covered in my previous post regarding key words and key phrases, use that information to develop a URL. They way I usually select a URL is:

1. Collect all the key words / key phrases that apply to the subject area I’m developing for the web site idea.

2. Go to a website that will allow you to check for domain availability - then start checking, putting in URL, domain names that capitalizes on the keywords AND would make a reasonable sounding web site name. (Usually I use GoDaddy for my domain checks - GoDaddy’s URL, domain name check will also give you more or additional URL name ideas).

Registering Your Domain Name
With your keyword list you can create several different domain names to check for availability to register. The simplest way of finding a reputable domain name registrar is to go to the source of registrar accreditation: the ICANN website at http://www.icann.org/ which has a listing of theri membership. You can go right to the list using this link:
http://www.icann.org/registrars/accredited-list.html, which has a listing of their membership.

Domain name registrations is one of the most profitable online businesses, the fee you will pay for this service can sometimes be included in a web hosting package as well. If you choose this option, make sure that you fully understand the web hosting features that will be provided will be sufficient to support your affiliate marketing website functions.

Once you have chosen a domain name registrar, you can check the availability of the domain names on your list and do not be surprised if many of your choices are already taken.

As you work through the registration of your domain name, you will begin to get an idea of the competition you are facing in the marketplace at large.

Locating Your Affiliate Marketing Website Online
Registering your affiliate marketing domain name is the first step in having an online business, now you have to find a reliable web hosting service.

Try to resist the temptation of using a free web hosting service. Most of these services require you to have advertising banners on your pages that will only confuse your visitor and may conflict with your marketing strategy.

Web hosting services do not have to be expensive. As mentioned earlier, there are many domain name registrars that offer service packages on web hosting and some even provide marketing tools like search engine submissions, website design and visitor traffic building software.

Choose your web-hosting provider carefully because your web hosting company is your silent business partner. Your website has to be accessible to Internet users in order for your business to make money. If your web hosting service goes offline, so does your business. Compare the features of the top web hosting service providers. Each of these links offer reviews of top web host providers:

http://www.top-10-web-hosting.com/

http://webhostinggeeks.com/

http://web-hosting-services.topchoicereviews.com/

Michael Wise
eMarketProfitStrategies.com