There is one hard and fast rule in generating income for your website: A steady flow of website traffic. If no one goes to your site, it hardly bares a chance of generating an income. Many sites have tried and failed in doing so, and these results to the sites demise. It takes money to maintain an income generating site; it also takes money to make money. 

BUT, it doesn’t take a whole caboodle of cash to generate website traffic for your site.

Ever wonder how does big hit sites drive traffic top their site? Most of them are spending tons of money to drive the traffic to their sites, investing in many advertising campaigns and different forms of marketing schemes and gimmickries. This is all worthwhile because, well, they are what they are now, high earning, big hitting websites.

You don’t have to do this if you don’t really have their resources. There are many ways to generate low cost website traffic without having to spend what you don’t have or can’t afford. Many people have banked on high cost methods and have ended up losing their shirt over it.

Here I present to you the Top five ways to generate low cost website traffic that could help your site a whole lot. Even if you only get a small percentage of successful visitors in to client ratio it still works especially if you get a high number of website traffic.

Exchange Links

This is a sure and proven method. Rarely would you see a site where there is no link to another site. Many webmasters are willing to exchange links with one another so that they could produce more public awareness about their sites. You’ll soon see and feel the sudden upsurge of the traffic coming in to your site from other sites.

A major prerequisite in exchanging links with other sites is having the same niche or content as the other site. They should share a common subject so that there is continuity in the providing of service and information to what interests your target traffic.

Exchanging links also boosts your chances of getting a high ranking in search engine results. It is common knowledge that search engines ranks high sites that have inbound and outbound theme-related links. With a good ranking position in the search engines, you will generate more traffic in your website without the high costs.

Traffic Exchange

This is like exchanging links but on a different higher level. This may cost a bit more than exchanging or trading links but could be made cheaper because you get to earn credits. You can use those credits when viewing others traffic, while you earn credits when someone views yours.

Traffic exchange services are the viewing of another’s site or page. This is done vice versa where a site can use your sites contents and so can you to his or her site. You both benefit from each others efforts to generate traffic. The other sites visitors can go to your pages and know more about your site as well as theirs. Once again the public awareness of your sites existence is boosted.

Write and Submit Articles

There are many e-zines and online encyclopedias in the internet which provides free space for articles to be submitted. If you want to save costs, you can do the articles yourself. There are many freelance writers who are willing to write for you for a small fee, but to save money, it is wise to do those articles yourself.

Write articles that are themed along with the niche of your site. Write something that you have expertise on so that when they read it, they can feel your knowledge about the subject and will be eager to go to your site. Write articles that produce tips and guidelines to the subject or niche your site has.

Include a resource box at the end of your article that can link them to your site. Write a little about yourself and your site. If you provide a light, information-laden and interesting article, they will go to your site for more.

Make a Newsletter.

This may sound like hard work because of all the articles you may need to use to build a newsletter but on the contrary, this is not so. There are many writers and sites that are willing to provide free articles as long as they can get their name in on your newsletter. This will also provide free advertising for them as well.

As your newsletter gets pass around, you can widen your public awareness and build an opt-in list that can regularly visit your site.

Join Online Communities and Forums

This only requires your time and nothing else. You can share your knowledge and expertise with many online communities as well as your website. You can get free advertising when you go to forums that have the same subject or niche with your site.

Share your two cents and let them see how knowledgeable you are with the subject. As you build your reputation, you also build the reputation of your site, making it a reputable and honest business that could be frequented and trusted by many people.

Affiliate marketing can be a great way to make money. Finding a niche market with products and services you trust and believe in is the first step to success. There are tremendous affiliate programs which offer you an abundance of tools and materials to promote and market their products. However, what you do with those tools and materials is entirely up to you. You can be just another affiliate or a super affiliate.

What Is A Super Affiliate?      

Technically speaking a super affiliate is someone who generates a significant amount of profits for the products or services they represent. A super affiliate can make a healthy living from their affiliate business alone while a standard every day affiliate may need to supplement their affiliate income with, gasp…a 9-5 job!

Benefits To Being A Super Affiliate

The most significant benefit to being a super affiliate is the income. Many super affiliates make six figures simply promoting the products and services of others.

Additionally, if you’re one of the main contributors to a company’s affiliate program they’re going to pay attention to you and your needs. You may receive a higher percentage of sales you may receive first shot with new marketing materials and programs and you’ll get the support you need when you need it.

Here Are A Few Steps To Become A Super Affiliate:

Step One – Commit to publishing content every single day. Content has proven time and again to be the best sales tool available to affiliate marketers. Nothing, not even strategically placed ad copy works as well as providing quality content that pre-sells any product that you’re promoting on your website.

Possible content includes:

* Autoresponders.

* E-newsletters.

* Blogs posts

* Social networking via forums, social networking sites, and chat rooms

* Articles

* Press releases

Step Two – Track and test. Make sure you know where your prospects are coming from, what motivates them to click through and what information they read and respond to – then give them what they need. Tracking and testing is the only way to hone your affiliate program into a smooth running, money making machine.

Step Three – Use the provided marketing materials and be willing to take it a step further. Many affiliate programs do a great job of providing their affiliate with ready to marketing materials including:

1. Banner ads

2. Buttons

3. Email copy

4. Articles

5. Free promotional reports

Use the materials your affiliate manager has provided. It’s been tested and developed for results. That being said, be sure to create your own content too. Even as an affiliate you are your own company and your website needs to reflect your personality and brand. Building a community around your website and providing valuable content is a sure way to create a following that trusts you and your credibility – which will result in click throughs and affiliate sales.

Step Four – Pre-sell. The good news is that your job as an affiliate is to pre-sell products and services. Pre-selling means your content, whether it is a review, article, tutorial, course, or blog post, speaks honestly about the products and services you promote. Pre-selling is about providing value to your website visitors and prospects, making them comfortable with you and your authority to generate interest and a click through to the company website, where the selling happens.

Step Five – Follow up. Just like your affiliate manager follows up with you to see how you’re doing and what you need, follow up with your prospects. A great way to do this unobtrusively is to create a lead list by providing a newsletter visitors can subscribe, a free report, or any number of products in exchange for an email address and the permission to contact them with valuable information and special promotions.

Being a Super Affiliate is the only way to go if you want to build a successful affiliate marketing business. Find products and services you trust and believe in and then create a strategy to share information to your target audience. Test and track your efforts, focus on providing value to your prospects and leave the selling to the companies you represent. Helping others live better lives, without having to provide the products or services personally, is a great way to make a living.

One of the most incredible strategies ever to be incorporated with online advertising is article marketing. It has proven to be the most cost-efficient and most effective of them.

By the term itself, you probably would know what this kind of marketing is about. By writing articles that are content-rich, you will be able to reach more people online. Not only that, you will be able to project a credible image to those who may have chanced upon your articles.

With the internet now reaching world-wide market, there is a higher possibility of you getting the attention and interest of potential customers. This is what article marketing can do. If you have not been using this in your business, you are missing more than you know.

How does article marketing work?

Here is a guided tour on the step-by-step process of article marketing that will guide you on your way to achieving the kind of articles needed for your kind of business.

To start with, you need to premium a quality, informative and 300 minimum word article about a certain topic related to your business.

For example, if your business is about family living, you can write an article that delves on how to spend more quality time with families. Never write about something that is not even closely related to your niche.

After you have the content written, you can now include a resource box at the end of the article. The resource box is basically a brief summary about you, your business and with a link that goes right to your website.

Putting a link to your site in the resource box would is making it possible for many people who would get to read your article. This could essentially result to a large amount of new traffic to your site.

Then it is time to submit your articles to as many article directories you can find. Over the Internet, you can find various article directory sites. There are paid and free sites.

If you are on a budget, you may opt for the free submissions being offered. But if you have money set aside for your article marketing, paying for the submission sites is also a wise move. 

Whenever somebody reads your article displayed on directories, the link that leads to your site is prominent enough for the readers to be able to check them out once they find your article interesting. This way, there is a big probability of you gaining more customers whenever find what they are looking for in your site.

There is also a chance that your article would get picked up by a printed publication, and the readership of the same would get to know the products or services which your business offers.

You should know that article directories are being displayed on various websites. They are seen by millions of people all over the world. This apparent visibility also makes it easier for search engines to index them.

The technique behind article marketing is back linking. Back links are links to your websites that you have somehow displayed on sites with higher page ranks. To put it simply, your site is basically sharing instant success with the sites you are linking to.

Getting indeed by search engines can be a long and trying process. Oftentimes, the result takes days or months before being acknowledged. There are even cases where, after waiting for a long time, the result you will be getting is not the one you expected. This is the main reason why Internet marketers have resorted to back linking. You cannot get this instant online recognition in the shortest of time and without too much effort anywhere else.

You can always hire a ghostwriter to write your articles for you if you cannot write your own articles or do not have the time for them. The price rate for writing articles is from 3 to 10 dollars.

With all the advantages being presented by article writing, there is no doubt why this has become one of the most often used Internet marketing strategy. 

Search engines are internet venues where billions of people congregate to search for information. The most prominent search engine giants are Google and Yahoo. The kind of traffic these dot-com companies receive per hour is phenomenal.

So naturally, companies would gravitate towards placing their links and sites in an attempt to garner more visits to their web sites.

In order to maximize ranking and placement, companies have used tools such as search engine optimization or SEO. Search engine optimization is the method or process of improving a web site’s ranking in a search engine listing.

Legitimate search engine optimization practices focus on the improvement of a page’s ranking in the search engine list by improving site content, usability and using legitimate method of promotion through web phenomena such as viral marketing.

Search engines all use complex algorithms in keeping their relevancy in the web and to keep illegal and abusive search engine optimization methods from prospering. However, “black hat” SEO users will always be around so it is expected that search engine giant such as Google and Yahoo will continue to make more complex algorithms to filter the garbage out.

Search engines display different kinds of listings on a result page. The more common ones are pay-per-click (PPC), adverts, paid inclusion, and organic listings. Of all these listings, SEO concerns itself foremost with organic listings for a variety of keywords. This can increase the quality and quantity or visitors to a desired web site.

Organic searches are searches conducted by web users in a search engine that is free from solicitations. A study from Jupiter Media stated that 5 out of 6 commercial online purchases came from organic searches versus paid online ads.

This has made SEO much more in demand in creating revenue for companies as SEO is not a paid ad but a method of intrinsically improving content.

Here are a few tips on improving content for a much more improved result in organic searches:

1. Expertise. Follow your strengths. Sites you set up must be on subject you consider yourself an expert on. People can smell an amateur a mile away.

2. Plan the site. A good layout for the site can improve usability. This in turn will not unnecessarily aggravate the browser.

3. Research. Check out the competition and see what they have set up. See what works and what does not. If possible try to communicate with users in forums and get feedback on what should or can be improved further.

4. Decide on important keywords. Decide on the most important keywords to use for your sight. Include these keywords in the metatags, copy page, page title, and file names.

5. The Search Engine is your friend. Make friends with your search engine and don’t give it a hard time. Being nice and friendly to it will make its job easier to serve your site up to your target audience.

6. Focus. Focus on the topic at hand and nothing else. The rule is one topic per page.

7. Join the directories. Directories are repositories of knowledge done by human hands while search engine are huge databases collected by mostly machine methods. The relevancy of your page when joining the right directory may shoot through the roof. Of course, make sure you know what you are talking about.

8. Start a linking campaign. A most effective SEO method. This is a must to do. Ask your allies, strategic partners, friends and acquaintances to place your site’s URL link on their sites. With a short description this can draw traffic from other sites and increase exposure. Google especially ranks the importance of its sites by the number of sites linked to it.

9. Repetition is the key to victory. Keep repeating the above tips, supporting and increasing what works and killing what does not as fast as possible until the desired result is achieved.

In the world of search engine optimization, content matters a lot. If a site has amateur or worse falsified information, fewer and fewer browsers will want to visit it. They will even spread bad news faster than good news so expect a garbage site to be ignored even in a week’s time.

It is worth cataloging the basic principles to be enforced to increase website traffic and search engine rankings.

•  Create a site with valuable content, products or services.

•  Place primary and secondary keywords within the first 25 words in your page content and spread them    evenly throughout the document.

•  Research and use the right keywords/phrases to attract your target customers.

•  Use your keywords in the right fields and references within your web page. Like Title, META tags,  Headers, etc.

•  Keep your site design simple so that your customers can navigate easily between web pages, find what they want and buy products and services.

•  Submit your web pages i.e. every web page and not just the home page, to the most popular search engines and directory services. Hire someone to do so, if required. Be sure this is a manual submission. Do not engage an automated submission service.

•  Keep track of changes in search engine algorithms and processes and accordingly modify your web pages so your search engine ranking remains high. Use online tools and utilities to keep track of how your website is doing.

•  Monitor your competitors and the top ranked websites to see what they are doing right in the way of design, navigation, content, keywords, etc.

•  Use reports and logs from your web hosting company to see where your traffic is coming from. Analyze your visitor location and their incoming sources whether search engines or links from other sites and the keywords they used to find you.

•  Make your customer visit easy and give them plenty of ways to remember you in the form of newsletters, free reports, reduction coupons etc.

•  Demonstrate your industry and product or service expertise by writing and submitting articles for your website or for article banks so you are perceived as an expert in your field.

•  When selling products online, use simple payment and shipment methods to make your customer’s experience fast and easy.

•  When not sure, hire professionals. Though it may seem costly, but it is a lot less expensive than spending your money on a website which no one visits.

•  Don’t look at your website as a static brochure. Treat it as a dynamic, ever-changing sales tool and location, just like your real store to which your customers with the same seriousness.

Every affiliate marketer is always looking for the successful market that gives the biggest paycheck. Sometimes they think it is a magic formula that is readily available for them. Actually, it is more complicated than that. It is just good marketing practices that have been proven over years of hard work and dedication.

There are tactics that have worked before with online marketing and is continuing to work in the online affiliate marketing world of today. With these top three marketing tips, you will be able to able to increase your sales and survive in the affiliate marketing online.

What are these three tactics?

1. Using unique web pages to promote each separate product you are marketing. Do not lump all of it together just to save some money on web hosting. It is best to have a site focusing on each and every product and nothing more.

Always include product reviews on the website so visitors will have an initial understanding on what the product can do to those who buys them. Also include testimonials from users who have already tried the product. Be sure that these customers are more than willing to allow you to use their names and photos on the site of the specific product you are marketing.

You can also write articles highlighting the uses of the product and include them on the website as an additional page. Make the pages attractive compelling and include calls to act on the information. Each headline should attract the readers to try and read more, even contact you. Highlight your special points. This will help your readers to learn what the page is about and will want to find out more.

2. Offer free reports to your readers. If possible position them at the very top side of your page so it they simply cannot be missed. Try to create autoresponder messages that will be mailed to those who input their personal information into your sign up box. According to research, a sale is closed usually on the seventh contact with a prospect.

Only two things can possibly happen with the web page alone: closed sale or the prospect leaving the page and never return again. By placing useful information into their inboxes at certain specified period, you will remind them of the product they thought they want later and will find out that the sale is closed. Be sure that the content is directed toward specific reasons to buy the product. Do not make it sound like a sales pitch.

Focus on important points like how your product can make life and things easier and more enjoyable. Include compelling subject lines in the email. As much as possible, avoid using the word “free” because there are still older spam filters that dumps those kind of contents into the junk before even anyone reading them first. Convince those who signed up for your free reports that they will be missing something big if they do not avail of your products and services.

3. Get the kind of traffic that is targeted to your product. Just think, if the person who visited your website has no interest whatsoever in what you are offering, they will be among those who move on and never come back. Write articles for publication in e-zines and e-reports. This way you can locate publications that is focusing on your target customers and what you have put up might just grab their interest.

Try to write a minimum of 2 articles per week, with at least 300-600 words in length. By continuously writing and maintaining these articles you can generate as many as 100 targeted readers to your site in a day.

Always remember that only 1 out of 100 people are likely to buy your product or get your services. If you can generate as much as 1,000 targeted hits for your website in a day, that means you can made 10 sales based on the average statistic.

The tactics given above does not really sound very difficult to do, if you think about it. It just requires a little time and an action plan on your part.

Try to use these tips for several affiliate marketing programs. You can end maintaining a good source of income and surviving in this business that not all marketers can do.

Besides, think of the huge paychecks you will be receiving…

Social bookmarking is a simple and fast tool used by internet marketeers to promote a website and market it in relevant circles. Social bookmarking also a method for Internet users to share, organize, search and manage bookmarks of web resources. Descriptions can be added to these bookmarks in the form of metadata or tags. Social tagging allows you to add keywords as metadata to the shared content.

All these contents can be viewed by people through bookmarks arranged by category, tags or via search engines. The site is linked to various social networking websites, blogs and forums in order to generate quality and quantity one way inbound permanent links and get high ranking with major search engines

What is the Benefits Of Social Bookmarking

 Improves Search Engine Rankings

Submitting articles with back links to your web site and bookmarking your web pages will help it to rank high on search engines. High ranking on search engines means high traffic on your web site.

Helps To Increase Traffic

It is a boon for online businesses. If you want to promote your web site, becoming a member of social bookmarking web sites can be really helpful. You can regularly submit your articles to them. But, make sure to include back links pointing to your web site. This will help to improve traffic to yours.

Let us understand how it is made possible. Most sites allow their members to rate the content. If members like your articles, they will give it high rating. High rated articles are bound to catch attention of more visitors. As the number of people visiting your articles increases, the volume of traffic will also increase. If you keep submitting quality content periodically, the members are likely to follow you, which will increase the popularity of your business.

You cannot only publish your articles, but also bookmark interesting and key pages. This will give direct publicity to your web site. However, you should make sure that content should be interesting and latest to keep the interest of members alive.

Improves Visibility

If you become an active member of social bookmarking web sites, you can bookmark or submit content related to the theme of your site. If people like your content or bookmarks, they may interact with you. Thus, it gives you a platform to interact with people of similar interests or people working in same industry. It allows you to expand your networks, which will immensely help you to expand your business. Network will also help in word of mouth publicity of your services.

For submitting links to Social bookmarking web sites, you will need to create individual accounts. Also, you will need to participate actively in updating bookmarks to reap the Search Engine Optimization benefits of this process. If you cannot spare time for all this, it is best to hire a Social Bookmarking service that will submit your web pages and articles to major sites like Digg, Delicious, and Squidoo.

Below are the Social bookmarking sites that you bookmark it manually

http://bookmarks.yahoo.com

http://myweb.yahoo.com

http://www.google.com/notebook

http://favorites.live.com

http://www.digg.com

http://mystuff.ask.com

http://www.technorati.com

http://del.icio.us

http://www.stumbleupon.com

http://www.netscape.com

http://www.reddit.com

http://www.meneame.net

http://www.fark.com

http://www.ilike.com

Automated social bookmark and recommended website

http://Bookmarking Demon.com