Step 5: Traffic Generation and Monetization

There are countless ways of driving traffic to your web site. There are free ways or paid ways. There are time-tested and proven ways as well as new ways that are constantly popping up on the Internet, especially with the evolution of the Internet. There are also online or offline methods in which you can drive traffic to a web site.

Some popular ways to generate traffic will be via blogs, forums, social networking sites, social bookmarking sites , article marketing, video marketing, Pay-Per-Click advertising, StumbleUpon, TV ads, direct mailers and emails etc. There is no limit to how creative you can get when it comes to marketing your Internet business online!

I cannot possibly explain all the possible ways to drive traffic to your web site on this page. So now, I can only give you 2 great ways to drive traffic to your affiliate business web site, and they are:

1. Video marketing

Video marketing is another great way to generate good traffic to your web site. These are some of the things that you can do with video to drive traffic to your site:

~ Create a video and upload your video for everyone to share on the Internet.
One way of doing it is to create a video using your digital camera or video recorder and put it on extremely high traffic web site such as YouTube or Google Video to tap into their traffic and ’steal’ some for yourself!

In your video, remember to put a link back to your own web site. I believe you may have seen some really interesting video in action which can generate hundreds or even millions of hits within days of going online. If you are able to do this properly, you can get great traffic to your own web site or blog. Nevertheless, this method is only good if you are more technical-savvy to create and edit your own videos.

~ The alternative way is to find very popular or high traffic videos and give your comments on the videos. If you have already noticed, on many video web sites, you are allowed to leave your comments on a video, or even to create a new video by yourself in response to an existing video that you see on the video sites. When you put a comment on a video with high traffic, you can potentially tap on those traffic if your comment has been seen by a video viewer on the web site. Include your web site address on your comment and this allows people to be exposed to your web site address, and if they click on it, or if they are interested to find out more about your web site, they may launch a web browser and surf to your web site. There you go again, free traffic going to your web site.

Some of the most well known video sites are youtube.com and video.google.com.

2. Forum marketing

Another free and effective way to generate traffic to your web site will be the use of forums.

As you should already know, a forum is an online place where you can meet like-minded individuals with interest on the same topics. Traffic to a popular forum can be a lot and this is where you can leverage onto a forum’s popularity and tap into some of those free traffic to your own site.

But how do you do that, you may ask? Well, there are a few ways that you can ’steal’ some traffic from a forum legally.

~ One way is to start up your own forum if you know how to. Yes, start up a forum for yourself and attract traffic to your site. Usually forums are targeted at certain topics and everyone in a particular forum is usually interested in the same topic. Plus the fact that traffic are usually repeated traffic, which means that a forum user will return to the same forum over and over again in order to participate in the forum discussions.

~ The other way is to find forums that are relevant to what you are doing for your site and be a forum member there. Signing up for a forum is usually free, so join the forum community that you are interested in and be part of the forum. Join in the discussions whenever you can and do provide useful and valuable information or advice to the forum community there. If you can build up credibility and a solid reputation for yourself in the forum, then at will even be better.

So now, you are asking “Yes, I understand you, but how do I get traffic to my site from the forum?” The answers are simple, and there are 2 common ways you can steal traffic from the forum that you are in:

a) Below each of your forum posting, you can include a forum signature below your post. A forum signature can often be a hyperlink to your web site or just a statement that you want to put across to your readers. Whenever someone sees it, there is a likelihood that someone may find it interesting and click on your forum signature. Most forums should allow a forum signature as many forums software allow a forum signature to be set, unless the forum owners or administrators disable this function. A popular forum discussion/thread can have many new and repeated views by forum visitors and you are exposing your forum signature to them. This increases your visibility online and increases the chance of someone clicking on it and going to your web site.

b) The other way is to write or indicate your web site link in your forum postings. You may be asking someone to review your web site or give you some comments on your web site. Or maybe you have provided some useful information on your forum post and you can re-direct them to another web site whereby they can find more information on what you have posted. For example, the visitors may get a free report on another web site when they follow your link. However, when you are doing this, be careful of what you are doing because if you are doing advertising blatantly without providing any real value to the forum community, you may be banned by the forum administrators.

This is another free, proven, time-tested and popular way of driving traffic to your web site. Try this out and do this consistently, I guarantee you will see results.

Now you have everything you need to be in a lucrative Affiliate Marketing business. However, the most critical component that you must have is the systems/mechanisms/models to convert all your traffic, mailing list, site contents, expertise etc into money, into cash.

Without this, all the costs involved in getting your domain name, hosting, autoresponder, traffic etc are all losing you money. You need cash and you need enough of those cash to make yourself profits in order to sustain your Internet business and make yourself some good money online! The primary aim of being in an Affiliate Marketing business is to earn money, earn profits!

There are also many ways for you to monetize your Internet business depending on what you are doing for your online business. You may be selling something of your own, selling someone’s else product via affiliate marketing, building enough traffic and convert those traffic into cash using traffic monetization systems like Google AdSense, Bidvertiser, Kontera and Chitika etc.

For a start and for the purpose of this web site, I will only focus on doing Affiliate Marketing for your new Internet business because this is the easiest way to start making money online without having to worry about product creation, copywriting, sales conversion etc. When you have advanced yourself to the next level, you can adopt multiple monetization models for your Internet business to develop multiple sources of online profits.

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