Articles are a powerful way to generate traffic, in addition to bringing you a whole lot of other benefits. When you post articles, you build credibility and trust which is very important for an online marketer. When readers believe what you have written, they don’t hesitate to click to your site and know more or sign up with you. You build a reputation with your niche market. When you are perceived as trust worthy, you also attract joint venture partners.

How do you write articles that will bring loads of traffic? Here are some tips:

• Your keyword rich articles must be focused to your niche market. Decide who should read your articles and write for them.
• An attention-grabbing headline with your primary keyword tucked into it is essential. People read the headline first, and if they find that it shows a benefit, decide to read the rest of the text. People love useful information, and you should write your title accordingly. Some suggestions are:
  • How to…
  • The complete guide to….
  • The truth about…
  • What you don’t know about ….
• Make sure your article has a proper introduction, flows well into the conclusion and states what action the reader should take after reading it.
• Your resource box at the end of the article is the most important component of your article next to the quality content. This resource box will have your contact information in the form of a link to your website. It must be worded in such a way that there is a call to action - depending on whether you want the reader to sign up for your ezine, purchase your product, claim a free report, etc. Your resource box is a lot like an ad so write it with care. Preferably use language your readers will identify with. You must include a benefit to encourage your reader to take immediate action.
• While there is no rule about the length of your article, generally about 500 words should be adequate. Don’t forget to include your keywords.

Articles are an efficient way to get back links and traffic to your website. If you already have a blog, you can always use your own content to write good articles and submit them to article directories. Article directories let you link back to your blog or website via the resource box so that they can generate traffic. Just make sure you have a headline that tempts the reader to get to the whole article.

One method to have your reader clicking to your website or blog is to post a part of the article and at the end, say “part 2 is at link” Your article must be divided at a point where the readers will quickly rush to your link to read the rest of it.

You can post your articles to your blog, your website and on forums. No Internet marketer can afford to ignore article marketing because keyword rich content is the single biggest traffic builder. Search engines love information in the form of articles especially if they are original and updated regularly.

Popularity: 92% [?]

Testimonials are a great strategy to pull traffic to your website and in list building. What makes them special? Testimonials come from the actual users, which gives them their authentic feel.

Buyers write testimonials when they are happy about using your product or service. They like to highly precisely what they liked about your product and how it benefited them specifically.

Testimonials from your customer help you increase sales. On the other hand, when you write a testimonial for another site and let them publish it, it becomes a good linking strategy as well. When you write a testimonial and have it published by a website that receives tremendous amounts of traffic consistently, your link is going to be exposed to all that traffic. You also gain link popularity.

Testimonials need not be confined to merchant sites. You can also write testimonials and have them published in ezines with your link.

By their sheer simplicity, testimonials make an effective marketing strategy and a list builder when used in the right manner. How do you go about it?

You can let your existing customers know you care about how they perceive your product or service by asking for feedback in the form of testimonials. Have a separate testimonial page linking to your products pages.

Every affiliate marketer can greatly benefit from unbiased testimonials. Here’s how you do it:

• The testimonials you use must produce measurable results. Its not enough to publish a testimonial that just rambles on about feelings. The testimonial must be specific about the benefits and results. This could be in the form of saving money (how much in what time); testimonials could also highlight your responsiveness to your customer, good presentation of product, promise of quality kept, etc. The exact info would be based on what your product is.
• Testimonials must be short and well worded. Long lengths of text are usually quickly browsed through without actually reading them.
• Ensure that you include information about the writer of the testimonial instead of a couple of initials. This will establish credibility. So, first and last name, city/state, website url if there is one, occupation, plus any other info that the customer feels comfortable about disclosing in public.

The thing about testimonials is that most people wont volunteer one. You’ve got to ask for them. And watch your list grow as you feature them on your website and elsewhere.

Popularity: 90% [?]

A lot of Internet marketers ask this vital question - which should we find first - the market or the product? So lets get this cleared right away. It is not only easy, but also sensible to find your market first. Only then, understand what they want, look for those products and offer it to them. if you find the product first and find that there’s no hungry market for it, then you have just wasted time and effort that you could have effectively spent making a profit.

Here’s how you go about finding well-established products that are profitable:

Focus On Niche Products

A search will reveal the ones that make the largest commissions per sale. But remember, you must also get the products that aren’t so competitive that everyone is trying to make money from it. Did you ask why? Simply because when there is fierce competition you will have to invest in advertising and promotion - which involves time, effort and most of all - cuts into your commission.

Competition is good - but there are plenty of products and markets you can focus soon. So look for hungry markets niche products with high demand and lesser competition. Niche marketing is the way to go, because you can cater to a specific need.

Find Good Quality Products

The advertisements and sales letters must be accurate in their claims of the product. Can you imagine great promotion - the product turns out to be bad - and you end up getting involved in refunds? The market will just dry up. One way to figure out the quality of the product is to check it out for yourself. The easier way is to read reviews online. Marketplaces like Clickbank where you can find hot niche products will also rank affiliate products, which in turn, will tell you about their quality.

Pick Products You Like

Choose it -

• If you loved it and experienced it
• if you see a lot of repeat sales

It means its good, there’s a hot market and the sales material works.

Bottomline - High Margins?

Is the money you will earn worth the effort you put in? Personally I recommend products that offer you a high margin. The more you make per sale, the better your profits. So look for an average commission of at least $35 per sale.

Does The Product Have A Great Sales Page?

The job of a sales page is to convert the visitor into a customer with accurate information. It should grab the visitor’s eyeballs, get them excited, feature testimonials and offer a refund, among other things. Look at the sales page - does it grab you? if it doesn’t, it is likely that it wont pull in customers.

The Affiliate Program For The Product Must Be Reliable

Prompt service, good products, regular payouts and good reviews are the hallmarks of good affiliate programs. Look for them. One of the best sources is Clickbank, an affiliate network.

Popularity: 41% [?]

In this article, I’m going to show you the best techniques to make money online that have little or no cost and produce fast results. So first off, here’s one that does not involve any cost at all.

Let’s get back to those keywords I talked about in an earlier article, “This Is How You Spot The Best Affiliate Opportunities“. Remember the information keywords? Here we’ll use the buzz factor to cash in on viral publicity. It is as simple as setting up a blog and putting AdSense ads on it. We’ll then use the information keywords to drive unpaid traffic to it.

The crucial factor here is the keyword’s buzz factor. Is it hot enough for people to spread the word? Usually, celebrity news, politics, sports, etc. are the kind of news bits that will work here.

After you have picked the buzz worthy keywords, set up your blog and add your AdSense code to it. You need to get your adsense ad as much exposure as possible - so that you get a great click through rate on your ads, thereby exploding your income. You must now add a blog post about the keyword you’ve chosen. Don’t worry, you can copy and paste the news item itself for the blog post. Add a small article that is informative, with complete details of the news item.

Now you need traffic - and lots of it. How will you get it? Use the power of social bookmarking sites like Digg, StumbleUpon, Reddit etc. These sites get awesome traffic that you want to cash in and that too without paying a dime. Create an account at these sites and submit your story as per the instructions.

Rather than do this manually, you have the option of using automation tools that can achieve this for you. We are talking about thirty minutes to AdSense income here, remember? Use these tools to submit your news items to plenty of social bookmarking sites and almost right away you will see floods of traffic targeted to your keywords. Make sure you read the site’s policy to avoid getting your item banned.

While you can create a new blog for each news item, it is better to post on one blog as it not only saves time but is also beneficial in terms of search engine optimization. Why lose search engine traffic?

To summarize, you can use high buzz high demand keywords to increase your AdSense income while leveraging the power of social bookmarking sites. You need to do this quickly and on time. If you delay, then you lose the power of the buzz factor of these keywords. Finding these keywords must be a continuous process and thanks to Google’s Hot trends it will be a matter of minutes before you zero in on your list.

Popularity: 38% [?]

Now, we see a variety of ways in which we can make some kind of money online, but what we need to do is find a way that actually catapults you to online success, one that is not only feasible, but legitimate and a big money-earner.

You have not one, but two ways to do this. Lets say you have a product that you created - this could be an ebook. You can publish this ebook attractively, promote it and sell it to make money. The crucial thing here is to get the right topic, and you could be making a lot of money quickly. But this sort of thing can take up a lot of time, energy and investment since you will have product development, setting up a website, stocking inventory and handling customer support. All this involves a lot of work.

Alternately you can sign up for an affiliate program. Affiliate programs are the easiest way to profit online - and they are very popular. You choose products made by someone else, and promote it for a commission. Advantages are:

• No product development
• No office
• No stock
• No customer hassles
• No capital

While you could actually do it all without a website, it is advisable to build one so that you can attract traffic.

But wait! What if the affiliate programs you sign up with didn’t bring in the commission you expected? Worse still, what if you were unable to sell your affiliate products because there’s no demand? Don’t despair! There’s a way out.

You must become what is called a ’super affiliate’. And believe me, it is the smartest way to work. Compare the advantages with simple affiliate marketing - as a super affiliate you don’t get involved in product development. You don’t even need a website. How simple is that? What you will do as a super affiliate is generate your earnings by identifying hungry markets and established profitable products that are already being marketed. The next step is generating traffic - not with your marketing efforts but through easy to set up advertising campaigns like Google AdWords.

To summarize - the best and the easiest way to profit online is

• Become a super affiliate
• Capitalize on existing resources in the form of established products and marketing models
• Combine them
• Enjoy profits

Popularity: 29% [?]

When you know how, it is not difficult to recruit and retain your affiliate army and reap the benefits in the form of huge profits. Building your affiliate army is all about recruiting them, activating them and keeping them motivated to keep up a steady flow of sales. So how can you inspire and motivate them?

You’ve got your affiliates. However, it’s a highly competitive world out there and you need to keep them enthusiastically promoting you as well as recommend you to their successful peers. Here’s how you motivate your affiliate army:

1. You’ve got to help your affiliates by giving them all that they need to be successful. Have a regular affiliate newsletter featuring tips. You could have a toll free number to provide them affiliate support with someone knowledgeable answering their queries.
2. Inspire your affiliates by demonstrating by example the methods used by your top affiliates to be successful. This must be a step-by-step method and simplified so that they can replicate them.
3. Recognize the affiliates who are doing well. A token gift would be a good idea.
4. Treat your affiliates as friends and phone them. They will be impressed that you care. Your top affiliates can turn into your loyal friends and supporters.
5. Ask your affiliates for their feedback to improve your affiliate program. Act on it.
6. Praise your super affiliates on your website and provide their affiliate links. They benefit with more traffic while other affiliates are inspired. It develops loyalty in the top affiliates.
7. Another way to build affiliate loyalty and motivate them is to recommend your super affiliate in email discussion groups. They will really appreciate you for it.
8. Make sure your affiliate receives the commission for a sale whether the customer visits the next day, the next week or even one year later. Customer tracking will make this possible. Set your ‘return days’ duration to a minimum of 30 days - the more, the better.
9. Think about paying lifetime commissions to your affiliates.
10. Allow your affiliates to earn special bonuses when they perform well.
11. Categorize your affiliates and consider paying the top ones special commissions.
12. Apart from commissions, you also need to work out residual commissions and two tier commissions. Referrals are valuable and deserve compensation.
13. Give your affiliates preferential treatment in discounted prices.
14. If there are multiple products, it is better to give your affiliates one link per product.
15. Make sure all your loyal affiliates get a mention from you at affiliate marketing conferences. They feel good.
16. Don’t ignore those affiliates who are not very active. Instead, ask them what the issue is so that you can fix it.
17. Drop by your affiliate’s sites and give them suggestions for more success.
18. When you add to your product portfolio, and a customer buys via an affiliate link give them credit for it. Your affiliates shouldn’t have to sign up each time a new product is added.
19. Let your affiliates be informed via email each time they make a sale. Give them the option of receiving these emails or turning them off.
20. Make sure you send a weekly status report that is easy to understand.
21. Pay your affiliates as often as you can. Give them the option of setting minimum payments.

Affiliates are your business associates. To keep your affiliate army performing well, it is important to motivate them and treat them specially.

Popularity: 16% [?]

So, you’ve done everything from building a dapper website to creating rich content. Members have started trickling in and you feel jubilant.

What should you do next? Sit back and gloat, or look for ways to multiply your income, easily and quickly? If you’ve chosen the latter, as I’m sure you did, I have the perfect solution for you: Viral Marketing.

Viral marketing is marketing that spreads news of your website at the same speed as a virus rushing unchecked and undetected on the Internet. It is quick, effective and easy.

• Attract search engines: Using keywords effectively has been the age-old formula for attracting people searching for information. However, there is a new twist to this old game. Instead of using keywords, use keyword phrases. These phrases should be two to three words in length, should explain your business aptly and succinctly and be placed in all the right places like the page title, meta description, alt tags, headers and meta keywords. Paid ads in important search engines are a very good way to attract traffic. Why pay when you can get it free? In the world of online business, walk-in customers are many but only a few of them convert to paying customers. To succeed, take measures to ensure that the maximum number of people visit your website. This way, you will get traffic large enough to attract that small percentage of buyers who will make you a handsome profit.
• Put up some free stuff: These days, you get to see so many websites offering free e-cards, free e-books or free web hosting. Why? Viral marketing, of course. A good free e-card will find its way to a large number of people. This will pull in more visitors and a few of them may browse through the paid section and buy. Do you see the logic here?
• Hold contests, games and quizzes on your website. For instance, you often see end-of-the-year poetry contests on several poetry websites. Every time an aspiring poet sends in a poem, a new prospective client is spotted.
• Spread the word: Did you know that the ever-so-common ‘Tell a friend’ link can double your traffic? Suppose you read something that you like, and you feel that a close friend or relative might benefit from the knowledge, what do you do? Tell a friend! There are other ways to spread the word. Be sure to add a link to your website in all your printed material. Send out regular ezines and newsletters.
• Blog it: Blogs are the easiest way to lend a human touch to your website. Blogs give you permission to speak about yourself, your values and your hopes. This allows visitors to get to know you personally. Blogs encourage new ideas and discussion threads, which will give you ideas for new paying products.
• Offer a discount: use an auction site to auction off a limited number of memberships at a reduced cost. This is a great way to pull in those people who are sitting on the wall. Even if customers don’t buy right away, your website’s name will register and stick.
• Exchange links: Search engines love websites that network. Solicit and offer links. This will boost your traffic almost immediately. Make sure that your website has a link resources page, which makes it easy for others to set up their links with you.

Following these techniques will help you build a flood of traffic. Once your traffic picks up, it is only a matter of time before your paid membership site starts grossing money.

Popularity: 15% [?]