Online Marketing Strategy

Online Marketing Strategy to help you make money with affiliate programs

List Building

This online marketing strategy is the most important step for making money long term. If you do not already have some type of autoresponder system you need to set one up. You shouldn’t pick the cheapest here because this service will be crucial to your online marketing strategy.

You can build your list in many different ways. One thing you probably should not do is try to shortcut the process and buy a mailing list. Although there are a few reputable companies that sell lists, many simply scour the internet for e-mail addresses and sell them for a profit. Unfortunately, most of the people on these lists have not opted in to be on the list. A few SPAM complaints to your ISP can get you shut down quickly. It’s better not to risk it and build your own list of customers. When you build your own list you know the person has opted in to receive the information you are offering.

Build your list from the traffic that visits your website. This method does require you to have a website in order to implement an opt-in form to build your list. Of course, if your affiliate program does offer a list management service then you can send traffic to the affiliate URL. However, most affiliate programs are going to check and see that you have a legitimate website when you sign up. You will have to enter your website URL in the signup form.

To make the most of your opt-in form on your website and get the most signups you should place it in your sales page text. It should be strategically located in the sales text after you present a problem. The title of your autoresponder email series should address the problem by offering a solution. In the example below, we will assume that I am selling a hosting package and I want opt-in subscribers to my email course for back-end sales.

Example: You can use the pre-built websites or build your own. Many people think that building a website is hard, but I can show you how easy it really is. Take my 10-day email course. Build a Website with Ease[signup form here].

You can also use popup or slide in forms on your site to get visitors to sign up for a free report or your course. One piece of advice I got recently from a teacher of online marketing strategy is to never use the words “Sign Up For My Newsletter”. This phrase has been overused so much that most people will equate that phrase with an online marketing strategy. They assume you are only going to try and sell them something without giving them any usable information.

Driving Organic Traffic

By driving traffic I don’t just mean any old traffic. I mean targeted visitors who are motivated and ready to buy. This type of traffic can and will make you money. You can use programs and techniques such as Google Adwords, blogging, article writing, and backlinks to drive targeted traffic to your website. GoogleAdwords is a resource offered by Google in which you can pay for your site to be shown when certain keywords are queried in their search engine. The problem with Google Adwords is that every time someone clicks on your link you have to pay Google. That means you better be tracking your return on investment. Otherwise, you may actually lose money if your visitors don’t convert to buyers.

The secret to using Adwords is not to bid high on popular keywords. Instead, what you do is find similar keywords that still describe your website, but are used much less frequently. These keywords will cost much less to bid on and will allow you to spread your money out over many different keywords. This allows you to get the most bang for your buck.

Blogging is another popular way to drive targeted traffic to your website. To get the most out of this technique the blog should be hosted on the same website as the sales page. The sales page then links to your affiliate product. Once it’s set up all you have to do is fill your blog with good quality content. As you write quality content you will still need to use an online marketing strategy to drive traffic to your blog. The old way of writing content and hoping people will find you just won’t work with the millions of other websites out there. You’ll need to use other techniques like social marketing and article directories to get visitors to your site.

I recommend writing your own content. This content should specifically relate to the subject of your affiliate program and or products. Once you have some content you will need to submit your RSS feed to the as many blog search engines as you can. This will put your blog out there for other webmasters to use as content feeds on their websites. Be sure you include an article author block so when your article is shared there is a link back to your website. This is a great way to get free organic and targeted traffic. Not only do people click those links but Google sees these links pointing back to you and. Backlinks are one of the many things Google uses to assign your page ranking.

Article writing is basically the same as blogging except the information in an article will need to have more useful content and be peppered with keywords that webmasters are looking for. After completing your article you will submit (syndicate) it to content sites as opposed to blog search engines.

Content sites are places where webmasters go to find specific content to offer their readers. If you are a good writer you may at some point build up a name for yourself and work out a deal with a webmaster to write for his site. His readers get great exclusive content and you get highly motivated targeted traffic.

Linking is perhaps the most widely used form of increasing traffic and page rank. However, if done incorrectly you could end up hurting your Google page rank and ultimately losing potential buyers.

Many people go and submit their URL links to link farms in an attempt to trick Google into giving them a better page rank. This does NOT work; in fact, Google will penalize websites for engaging in these activities.

The secret to linking is to find websites in your niche market which have a high Google page rank and contacting the page owner and ask for a link on their website. You may think that you would be helping your competition, and in a sense, you will be. But your competition will be helping you as well. It’s better to send exit traffic to a partner than just having them close their browser window, and remember it works both ways.

Reciprocal linking, Blogging and Article writing are great ways to bring massive amounts of high quality, targeted traffic to your website. Those parts of an online marketing strategy, combined with quality content and an effective sales page, can take your business to new heights. Adding an opt-in form to your site and building an email list will also help you make more money from your affiliate products. You can and will make money with this system if you continue to put forth the effort and don’t give up.