Affiliate Marketing – Making your site known to the world.

To make your website profitable - you need to attract some visitors. While you can drive traffic to your site - either by paying for it or by looking for free visitors - gaining a top position on search engines will often result in higher revenue than manually driving traffic. What we want is converting visitors, in other words visitors who not only look but click and/or buy as well. Well targeted keywords – and the SE traffic they generate for you site - will convert into clicks or sales better than most traffic. Best of all, once you have a nice stream of search engine traffic it’s pretty much yours forever. A steady stream of free, well converting visitors is exactly what an affiliate marketer wants.

There are a lot of ways of improving your pages SE position, but the most important factor is inbound links. The reason why it’s important is because a page with many links pointing to it should be a page of interest. Why else would people link to it?

While this is very true in theory - most webmasters know this and are actively looking for more inbound links – the consequence is the inflation of the value of links in the long term. The number of inbound links needed for a top placement today, will most certainly not be enough in a week, a month or a year. The only way to compensate for this is to continually attract more inbound links.

There are many ways of getting inbound links, but the best links almost always are spontaneous. They get placed on relevant pages, surrounded by relevant keywords and are often not in competition with fifty other outbound links on the same page.

Although the very nature of spontaneous links makes them impossible to create, or even predict. You can try to imitate those spontaneous links when using services, such as buying or exchanging links, designed to improve your links’ popularity.

Vary your anchor text – If 90% of your links all have the same anchor text, it’s not too hard to figure out the nature of those links. If the anchor text is stuffed with keywords, odds are you won’t find your page on a good SE position anytime soon, it’s way too obvious. When you are buying or exchanging links, try to vary yourself as much as possible. Try to establish link exchanges with sites with similar topic. These exchanges can often result in increased traffic as well as improved link popularity.

Another way of boosting the number of inbound links is submitting your site to various directories. The number of directories is virtually unlimited, but manually submitting your URL to all of them is extremely time-consuming. The links you get from these directories are often of very high quality, so see to it that you are represented in as many as you can.

The more inbound links you have the better, but try to stay clear of shady link farms and the like. Links from such places will most likely not do you any good anyway, and if you exchange links with such sites on a regular basis you will probably get in trouble sooner or later.

If you can offer relevant, high quality links - you will stand a good chance of getting good links in return. Links NOT placed on a link page, but within a site’s content are generally the best ones, both for page rank and for attracting visitors.

Theo Swan - Writing about affiliate marketing and how to generate revenue online.

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