You keep hearing, “The money is in the list, the money is in the list,” but are you really taking full advantage? Are you working on building your list?

There are some basic strategies you can use to build your list. You should always use a variety of tactics, so that your list grows as fast as possible, yet retains its quality. A nonresponsive list is no better than no list at all, yet requires more work.

The first thing you need to build is trust. If people don’t trust you, they won’t buy from you, even if they sign up for your list for a time.

So how do you build trust? Start by acting professionally. You don’t want to pitch product after product, with no regard for whether or not it is worthwhile. People do notice, and if they get disgusted with the junk you’re promoting, your name won’t help you sell.

You can also build your reputation by being an expert on your topic in forums. Take some time each day to participate in relevant forums. Ask questions, answer questions, and keep it honest. Don’t throw in a mention of your site when it isn’t relevant to the topic at hand.

You can also write articles. These are good both for posting on your own site, so that people get a feel for what you know and for distributing to article directories to be used in other sites and newsletters. Read the rest of this entry »

Few things in life are free, but traffic to your website can be one of them if you do some work to bring it in. Ok, so that’s a cost, in time if nothing else, but we’re talking about not spending money here.

Now, the trick with free methods is that they take a lot of time. However, they’re quite good for your site in many ways, and over time can make the search engines like your site better.

I do quite a few things to promote my sites. I submit them to directories. I have them in forum signatures. I write articles. I keep working.

Does it work? Yes. Fast? Depends on the topic. Some sites take longer than others because they’re so competitive. Others produce sales and/or income pretty quickly.

As I’ve said in other places, forums are a great way to promote your site when used appropriately. Don’t abuse them; take a look at the terms before you start posting. Some will let you promote your site in your signature and even as appropriate in posts while others allow no reference to your site whatsoever.

Link exchanges work if done well. Getting a quality link exchange is not always easy, however. Most link exchanges are simply from links page to links page. Some feel search engines discount these, and who can blame them? Many people will exchange links with just about any site, no matter the relevance. Visitors to their site won’t go through their little directory to find you. Read the rest of this entry »

Viral marketing is one of the most challenging ways to get traffic to your site, but when it works, it’s amazing.

A good viral product can bring you massive traffic, newsletter subscriptions and income. It gets forwarded by people to their friends through email. Once well launched, it almost runs itself.

One trouble with viral marketing is that many marketers don’t know quite what it is. They decide they want a product to be viral without any idea how it is to reach that goal. Viral is not always deliberate; sometimes it’s accidental.

Making a deliberately viral product is difficult. You can’t be certain that something you designed to be viral will actually work out.

It all starts with an idea. Maybe it’s a funny movie. Maybe it’s a useful tool no one else has thought of yet. Maybe it’s like nothing I’ve mentioned here. Keep in mind the kinds of things that people are likely to forward in email - jokes, inspirational stories and extremely useful online tools. The online tool is probably the hardest of these to develop, at least in my opinion, and the hardest “sell” as well. Read the rest of this entry »

There’s just nothing like that “where’s my DATABASE???” panicked feeling.

Yep, I had to deal with that today. It was a problem with the host, and several of my sites had no access to their databases this morning for about two hours.

Talk about a miserable feeling. Fortunately, most were pretty young sites with minimal traffic to lose, but that doesn’t make it much more fun. Nothing lost in the end, though, and now they’re all back online.

It did serve as a reminder, though, and I just finished doing backups of all my databases. I’d hate to lose them for real, after all. It’s one of those things that needs to be on my monthly calendar at the very least, if not weekly, but somehow keeps sliding off the chart. At least today’s reminder was a gentle tap, rather than the sledgehammer of finding the data all gone.

Backing up databases, if you use them, should be a routine thing you do. Just pick a date. Read the rest of this entry »

The life of an affiliate marketer sounds like a dream to many people. They think that it’s full of days on the beach, relaxing with the family, having fun. They don’t always understand the work involved.

Let me tell you about a normal day for me. I do affiliate marketing, running several sites. I have two small children, one 4 years old and the other is 16 months old.

I get up in the morning and get the kids breakfast. After that it’s off to the computer, to check email, stats and my forum. The email takes anywhere from a few minutes to an hour, depending on whether there’s anything that needs a reply or immediate work on a site. Stats take a few minutes, just to see how things are going.

The forum on my site can require just a little time or more than an hour, depending on what has happened. Maybe there were a lot of posts to review and respond as appropriately. Maybe a spammer hit in the night. I back up the forum regularly as well, dating the backups so that I have several on hand at any time, just in case.

As I enjoy making information based sites, much of my day is spent in writing for my sites. I have a number of topics I can write on so that writer’s block on one topic isn’t a problem. There are other topics to write on. These articles may be for posting on my site alone or they might be used to submit to article directories using iSnare’s service. Read the rest of this entry »

There are some tactics every affiliate marketer should be using on most, if not all of their websites. These tactics may help you to improve your sales.

The first thing is to have your own website to refer people to, rather than sending them directly to the product’s website. This gives you the opportunity to presell the items, rather than relying solely on the merchant’s website.

This allows you to focus on individual products or services. You can use it as a landing page for a pay per click campaign or optimize it for natural search engine results.

It also gives you the chance to build your opt in mailing list. Even if someone doesn’t buy from you, you’ll have the chance to sell something to them again if they read your newsletter.

Include a free report as incentive to sign up for your newsletter. Many people will gladly give their email address in exchange for a report on a topic they’re interested in.

Getting them to subscribe means that any given page has one of three possible outcomes: you get a sale or otherwise earn money, they leave without buying anything or they sign up for your newsletter before leaving. If you do a really great job, you might get both a sale and a newsletter subscription, so make sure it’s easy to get back to the product after signing up for the newsletter. Read the rest of this entry »

Just a quick note. Looks like there’s been an update, possibly ongoing. I’ve had several of my new sites gain PageRank, and a few pages drop just a little. The drops made sense, though - pages where I had no idea why they had gotten PR as high as they did.

I found a new free download today that looks like a pretty neat tool. It’s called Niche Browser, and that’s exactly what it’s meant to help you with - finding niches.

It’s a pretty neat concept, I think. It helps you to check out the competition in a variety of search engines, as well as eBay and Amazon. That can be pretty useful when you’re looking for ideas.

Obviously, this comes with the usual price for free software - your email address and a sales pitch. Pretty worthwhile product though, by the looks of things, so make sure you take a good look at it.

Watching the 5 videos that explain Niche Browser is very helpful. This looks like it’s really going to speed up and simplify quite a bit of research. I had a bit of fun just to explore it by going over niches I already work in.

You type a keyword phrase into the search bar at the top. By default, it searches Google, but you can choose other search engines easily. You can even search for relevant images, audio and video, along with blogs or news.

One of the really interesting features to me is the Around the House search. This lets you search for relevant products on Amazon, eBay, do it yourself projects and so forth.

You’ll find all kinds of places to research your niches you never thought of. I strongly recommend you download this freebie and enjoy.

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