One of the toughest parts of owning an online business is getting traffic to your site. Traffic is what drives sales and sales it what drives you to operate a business. Without traffic, you have no business. Consider your online business as a brick and mortar business located on the side of a major, busily traveled highway. There are literally thousands of businesses located along the road with fancy signs, flashing lights and in some cases people standing by the side of the road signaling their presence.
Looking at your business, located in a non-descript building with no widows and one unmarked door. It is painted a dull color and there is no sign to indicate the business is located inside this drab building and the parking lot be a little too small for anticipated business. There is no advertising in the newspaper, radio, television or the phonebook and as a consequence, there are probably no visitors roaming around inside the store.
Although the prices of whatever you are selling inside are significantly better that those offered by other sites, no one will ever know it because they do not know you exist. One of the favorite methods of inviting traffic to your store is the use of affiliate marketing. To understand the concept, consider advertising in print or broadcast media. You make up the ad and pay to have it published. You have very little to go on as to how effective the ad has been, but you paid for it just to get your name out. Think that you made one sale from an ad that cost a thousand dollars to post. A dismal return for sure.
Affiliate marketing is essentially connecting with other online business owners and having them put your ad on their site. You do not have to pay unless your ad produces revenue. Kind of like a pay for performance agreement. If the ad produces sales, you pay the site owner a percentage of the sale. If the ad does not produce any sales, you pay them nothing.
These other sites want to make money without having to warehouse merchandise or handle any of the shipping and payments. Their only work is putting your ad on their site and then promoting their site to get more visitors. The more sales they make for you, the more money they earn in commissions. The more advertising they do of their own site, the more visitors are sent your way to buy your products. This pay for production type of advertising, affiliate marketing is one of the fastest growing methods of earning money on the internet and allows even small businesses to establish a large marketing network with a bare bones budget.
Additionally, one of the algorithms search engines use is counting the number of quality links to your site from other sites. Every affiliate that posts your ad on their site is a link back to you and you do not have to trade links with them, making it more attractive to the search engines. This can also increase traffic direct to your site from search engine users.
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