Traffic Building and Link Building for Affiliate Sites

We discussed about Search Engine Optimization for Affiliate Sites in our last issue of No Cost Affiliate Marketing Digest. In this issue, we will move into one of the important elements of building an affiliate site, which is to build traffic and links for your affiliate sites.

Personally, I would say that traffic and links come hand-in-hand. I don’t care about dofollow or nofollow and I don’t care about Google Page Rank of the sites I am going to use to build links and traffic.

Social Media and Web 2.0 Model

The Internet is moving towards a social era. This means that you will need to do more than hard selling to get your visitors to flash their credit cards. But on traffic building and link building for affiliate sites, the social media and Web 2.0 movement actually open up a wide opportunity for affiliates.

Thus, when you are applying social media marketing principles (interacting, solving problems and be yourself) into your traffic building and link building efforts, you will not only be able to get more traffic and rank higher in the search engines, you will be able to brand yourself and your site as well.

Proper Anchor Text Link Usage

If you are taking notes, you should jot down a big capitalized ANCHOR TEXT LINK and circle it up. The fundamentals on how to rank for a specific keyword really boils down to the anchor text that you use for the links pointing back to the page that you want to rank higher on the search engines.

For those who are new, anchor text is the text you use for a hyperlink. For example, the anchor text for this "affiliate marketing" link pointing towards http://www.affboom.com will be affiliate marketing.

You should know by now that what are the keywords that you should rank for from the keyword research and marketing viability research guide that I have provided. Now, when linking back to your affiliate sites, use the keywords as your anchor text after building a search engine optimized page following the search engine optimization for affiliate sites guide that I have provided.

6 Major Sources of Traffic and Links

Below are some sources or methods that I use for traffic building and link building. Yes, they are ranked in order according to the effectiveness and the results that they have brought me personally.

Article Marketing

If you don’t have an account at EzineArticles yet, you should get one immediately. Also, you should sign up for an account for almost all the directories listed on Article Marketer (do note that a large % of directories listed are junk sites, join those that have a similar format/script to Article Dashboard).

Get yourself a new email address and figure out a pen name. Why? If you are going to tap multiple niches as an affiliate, people will not believe that you can be the best in everything. If you want to be real in certain niches like me for affiliate marketing, some article directories allow you to use multiple names under one account.

Another tip here is to use the same password for all the article directories registration but they must be different from the password that you use for other activities. Why? As you move on, you may want to outsource your article submissions to other people and this will help to make their work easier.

The basic idea will be to write articles and submit them to all these article directories consistently. So how about the duplicate content thingy that has been around for quite some time?

Personally, thanks to a tip by Jaime from Affiliate Xtreme, I believe that duplicate content DOES NOT have much effect on your traffic building and link building campaigns.

However, if you are skeptical, you can always use JetSpinner, which is an FREE online tool to spin your articles. The articles will not be rubbishy because you are the one inserting the variables of your articles. JetSpinner will  be spinning one article into many articles that are partially unique.

Content Submissions

For content submissions, I use Squidoo and Hubpages. Content submission is a little different to article marketing as contents include articles, images and videos. Do not throw your articles away after using them for your article marketing efforts as you can use them for content submissions as well.

You should do content submissions because these sites have high search engine authority and they tend to rank well on major search engines. Apart from this, you can also earn some side income as Squidoo and Hubpages allow you to place Google AdSense, eBay Partners Network ad panels, Kontera ads and more on your pages.

Forum Marketing

First thing first, forum marketing is not forum spamming. Go register for an account at some of the active forums in your niches. Hold back from posting anything apart from introducing yourself. Be humble and don’t sound like you are the best expert around when writing your introductory post.

Use something catchy in your forum signature. It can be something like “want more forex trading tips from me? Check out…” or “Connect with me to get more forex tips at…”.

Try providing solutions and helping people out. People will take notice of you and check out your affiliate sites that you put up in your forum signature if you are seen by others as an expert and if they want more content from you.

If the forums have sections where people share their stuffs (photos or blogs), try to complement or post your constructive criticism so that these people will later support your statements in the forums.

Directory Submissions

If you asked me, directory submissions are mostly for link building rather than traffic building. There are tones of directories out there which include both paid and free ones.

Two of the popular premium or paid directories will be dmoz.org and Yahoo Directory. However, getting listed on these directories will either take you a lot of time or a lot of money. To semi-automate your whole directory submission process, you should get Directory Submitter which costs ABSOLUTELY NOTHING.

Submit your site to the free directories only if you are just starting out. I find that paid ones does not have any significant benefits compared to those that are free.

Social Bookmarking and Social Content Voting

When people like the contents on your affiliate sites, they can vote or submit them to social bookmarking sites like del.icio.us or social content voting sites like Digg. There are two approaches that you can take to build traffic and links for your affiliate sites using social bookmarking.

The first method to leverage these social media properties is to submit as many content of yours to these sites. You can use tools like Social Marker to automate the submission process. This method will get you little traffic and the primary aim of using this method is to build tones of links. You might be labeled as a spammer or had your accounts terminated if you do this excessively.

Other than that, you can take the social approach as well. This process will take some time because you must participate in the community of these social sites. Apart from your own contents, you must also vote and submit quality contents of others.

Build friends and relationships by voting or bookmarking the items that people share with you. Results will take some time to show but once you are an authority on these sites, consistent links and traffic shouldn’t be a problem.

Video Marketing

People try to get themselves away from video marketing, mostly due to the fact that they are shy to show themselves or to present their voice for the “scrutiny” of the Internet community.

You can create videos that are related to your niche. Videos can be created to show the steps of a process, explain pertinent facts regarding your niche and notify your community about the recent happenings that are related to your niche.

Then, save your time by uploading your videos across a few popular video sites using Traffic Geyser or Tube Mogul.

If you are using a pen name for a niche or you are not ready to reveal yourself on the Internet, you can always do a screencast using softwares like Camtasia or CamStudio. Include Power Point presentations in these videos and your own voice or hire a professional voice talent to cover the points.

Social Networking

From my experience, this is perhaps the hardest way to build links and traffic. Using sites like MySpace, Twitter and Facebook to market your affiliate sites for FREE, the niche that you are in should be the one that you are passionate about.

It takes time to interact with people and most of the time, people dislike the presence of marketers on these platforms. Form a bond with fellow hobbyists, provide value to what they are discussing and recommend your contents occasionally. Golden rule to remember here is not to spam.

Your Own System for Traffic Building and Link Building

You might have learned tones of methods to build traffic and links for your affiliate sites from various resources out there. Some may be effective for you but not showing results for others.

Thus, you should constantly try out new methods and at the same time, develop a system for your own affiliate marketing venture. A system for traffic building and link building will smooth out the outsourcing that you might plan to incorporate into your venture later on as well.

If you think that the above contents provided value for your affiliate marketing strategies, kindly subscribe to Aff Boom RSS Feed for more affiliate marketing tips that offer value with no fluffs and no fillers using the form below.

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Related Affiliate Marketing Tips:

• Search Engine Optimization for Affiliate Sites
• Market Viability Research for Niche Research | No Cost Affiliate Marketing Digest
• Step-by-Step Presell Copywriting for Affiliate Marketers
• Keyword Selection for Affiliate Sites: Make Money or Branding?
• 7 Types of Content for Affiliate Sites

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