Should You Use Traffic Exchanges To Promote Affiliate Products?

Well, you pick out a product to promote from a popular affiliate program. You start a blog, write articles and the traffic doesn't seem to come fast enough for you. You do a search on how to get traffic to your website or blog and you somehow come across a traffic exchange website. You get excited, believing you are own your way to getting visitors to your site to see what you have to offer them but there is something you have to do. You have to visit other people’s websites in order to get traffic to yours.

The owners of the traffic exchanges want you to believe that it is a great and easy method to get traffic to your site but is it really worth the effort? I have a simple answer for you, no! Your effort will be wasted.

I will explain. Traffic exchanges are sources of junk, invalid, and worthless traffic. The members generally have the same goal as yourself, getting visitors to their sites. Many of them are not honest and they will be surfing 3 or 4 traffic exchanges at a time, not even taking a minute to look at your site. Is this the kind of traffic you want? Certainly not. You shouldn’t even become an affiliate if you're going to use traffic exchanges because you'll never make one red cent.

Google don't even recommend traffic exchanges.  Read it for yourself àUsing Traffic Exchange Programs.  Google knows where your traffic is coming from and Google won’t take you seriously when they see that traffic is coming from a garbage website. So my advice, don’t even bother with traffic exchanges.

Also members of those sites are more than likely promoting stuff as yourself or worst it could be malware that can affect your computer….and I know you don’t want that.

Even buying credits is bad because money is wasted, and there will be no conversions. Plus as a member you're getting cheated because if you sign up for free you'll have to visit 2 websites to get one visitor to your website. Sounds much like the USA paying 2.4 cents to make the penny if you catch my drift.

Let me tell you a short story. When I was still kinda new to affiliate marketing, I joined a few traffic exchanges and I was a member for about month. I got a couple of viruses, one which was a Google redirect virus and the other was malware. I didn’t even know what the heck a Google redirect virus was and didn’t realize I had it until a few days later. The malware I knew about immediately and it took me a long time to remove the virus from my computer.   The redirect virus was removed after I downloaded software to remove it, which was a pc cleaner care after a long search using another computer because this virus completely took over my searches.

With that being said, I’m here to warn you to avoid using those sites like the plague. I've learnt my lesson. Matter fact using these sites is the lazy way to traffic. In order to get traffic to your sites you have to work at it. Build trust and a following and give Google what it wants to get traffic you want.  I hate to say it but it would be better to get a bunch of kids to visit your site and offers than dead broken traffic from an exchange.

If you're serious about affiliate marketing, then you need to be serious about how you want to refer people to your website.  Don’t refer them through junk or spam websites.

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How To Build Your Own Website And Get Ahead

One of the best ways to increase your income in affiliate marketing is to build your own website. I know affiliate programs in most cases provide affiliate websites with your own unique link but the problem is everyone has that same website and Google will only index the main website which belongs to the vendor. Having your own website is a great way to set yourself apart from other affiliates who may be promoting the same products as you are. You can use a free or paid domain. Paid is a little better, but if you're on a budget use a free one in the beginning.  Read this news article below. It provides great info on creating your own website.

                   


Get ahead: how to build your own website
Author: Karson Stimson the director of Melbourne-based e-commerce agency WeAreDigital.

Q. What are the key steps to setting up a website?
A. First of all, define why the website is going to exist - do I want this to sell or promote my product or services, build a community, get content out there, capture customer details, or drive people to my store? The next point would be defining what we call user scenarios - being clear about the things people need when they come to your website, to make it usable and functional. If they need to find one of your stores, you would ensure that it's very clear where to click for locations. Read More

Content Marketing To Boost Affiliate Profits & Sales

Content marketing is a great way to build trust and relationships with your prospects and to eventually make money online. As I said in a previous post, you have to give people what they want, build trust, and show them you are an authority and you can boost affiliate profits and sales. Providing quality content is the way to do it. I list a few sources below that you should read about content marketing.


Content Marketing: A Matter Of Trust And Sales


ADOTAS- Today's Information Age has transformed prospects into savvy researchers and confident buyers. They are hungry for content and are finding plenty of online and offline outlets to satiate their appetites. While ti may be true that more knowledgeable prospects are more difficult to sell to, providing them with the valuable, authoritative content they need to help solve their problems will position your company as an authority in the field. It will also build trust with your prospects and ultimately make it easier to sell your products and services and to drive revenue. Continue Reading


This article is telling big companies the can increase sales by changing to content marketing campaigns. This will help them gain authority in their niche. Everyone is researching companies now before they think about making a purchase. As the saying goes people have to see an ad at least 7 times before they make the purchase or before they realize they need your product or service. It is really important to use content marketing to boost affiliate profits and sales because it is often much more competition than if you were selling your own products. Yet it is still competition when selling your own because other people/companies can have similar products as yourself.


Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn And The Anatomy Of Content Marketing [INFOGRAPHIC]


Did you know that 60 percent of Twitter and Facebook users are more likely to recommend a brand that they follow? Or that word of mouth is the primary factor behind up to 50 percent of buying decisions? Read More


People are using Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn as an outlet when it comes to product promotion. People trust their friends more than they trust a stranger who they never send or even heard. So you may want to start thinking about promoting your brand on one of these sites and build relationships/friendships with others. Then maybe your friends will start to share your products or website with their friends.


Now is the time for credit unions to turn to content marketing


A report from AYTM Market Research found that Americans are increasingly interested in working with credit unions, which could result in content marketing potential for these organizations. Read More


Even credit unions are encouraged to used content marketing to bring more people to their establishments.


The Business Plan: Your First and Most Important Content Marketing Asset


Some would have you believe that the business plan died with the advert of the "launch and learn" era in the web/mobile space. Continue reading


People are not reading business plans like they used too, especially when people need money for an idea from an investor. Investors want to see how much money you made on your own. And to make money on your own you need to add content marketing to your blogs to promote your great idea. 


Content Marketing Math - Which Organic Searches Metrics Count?


It's pretty easy to measure the success of one blog post, whitepaper, video, etc. Most people would look at metrics like visits, views, rankings, inbound links, conversions, so on and so forth. However, how do you measure the effectiveness of an entire content marketing campaign for SEO? Read More


See how important content marketing is becoming. Content marketing is very effective for boosting your SEO and search engine rankings. People are learning more and more that they can type in a simple keyword and find out information in an instant. Content marketing of good quality is vital to every business, online or off. Content marketing builds trust and relationships and should be used in every business that currently exist today. You have to make the decision on what you are going to do for your business today.

Url Shorteners Causes Email Marketing Campaigns To Be Blocked!

One of the best ways to promote an affiliate product is through email marketing campaigns.  But if you are using url shorteners, you are taking the risk of everyone on your list not receiving your emails. Affiliate marketers have been using url shorteners for years to take a long ugly link and turn it in to a shorter link. But affiliate and internet marketers are not the only ones that use link shorteners, spammers and scam artists do too.

See scammers and spammers want to remain anonymous and they don’t want people to know who they are so they abuse link shorteners.  They don’t want people to know their actual websites either. This is bad because in affiliate marketing or any business you have to build trust. When you have the bad guys using url shorteners to email people from fake emails addresses, doubt starts to form in everybody’s mind including the people you are sending your email campaigns to.

Email providers are now blocking emails that use these services to shorten the links to prevent scammers from sending unwanted emails. In this attempt, they are also blocking your emails which mean your subscribers are not getting the emails.

I’ve had folks send me junk mail with links in them and the links go to crazy websites which can harm your computer if you’re not careful. People know this and won’t even click on the link if they are not sure what website it goes to anyway.

The best way to solve this problem is to send emails in HTML version instead of plain text only. Or you can just put the link to your site so people will know where it is going. Trust is the key to any business anyway so let people know where the link goes. The best thing you can do for your business is to stop using url shorteners for your email campaigns and better your chances of converting your subscribers to buyers.

31% Of Website Traffic Can Harm Your Business

If you are wondering why your traffic may not be converting into sales it could be because 31% of your website traffic is non-human, which can be dangerous to your business. Incapsula, a cloud based security firm, did a study on 1000 websites to find this out. So what could it be, bots that steal customer information such as credit cards and email addresses.  It can also cause your website to crash.

If you rely on Google analytics, you may be missing the dangerous non human website traffic.

Not only can this be damaging to your business, but it can cause you to have a bad reputation and rank lower in the search engines.

Some of the ways you can prevent this from happening is to avoid buying website traffic. Most sources of website traffic come from bots or automated software to make it appear that you have visitors when in actuality it is fake traffic. If Google sees this, and they will, you will rank lower or even be unindexed. Also if someone was to hack into your website, you could lose trust from your audience or loyal visitors. And if you allow comments, you should always check to make sure people are not spamming your comments box by promoting their products. This can be in the form of humans and bots. Also competition can use software to spam your comments box.

This is truly something you should watch out for if you want a successful affiliate marketing business.     

Related Article  

Google Over Optimization Penalty: Too Much SEO

Google is more and more serious when it comes to providing relevant search results for grandma. Google is getting ready to penalize websites owners for too much SEO or over optimization. Also if you use too many keywords you will suffer. Matt Cutts was talking about this recently.

Reasons Google is doing this is because they want to give websites with better content and those who can't afford SEO experts a better chance to rank higher in the search results. Bing is a part of the action as well.

How can you avoid being penalized, by focusing more on providing very good quality content. If you already do this, then you shouldn't be affected. But if your primary focus is always on keywords or SEO, you got a chance to make some changes before this takes effect in the next few weeks or so.  

I just said in a previous post you should be giving grandma what she wants and Google will give you what you want. If you are one of the ones who always provides good quality content on your sites and blogs, you should be fine. This is for more targeting people who just focus on their rank rather than providing helpful content for others. And if you exchange a bunch of links this can affect you as well. So you should be less focused on SEO and put your mind in quality mode.

Related News Article # 1

Related News Article # 2

Traffic To Blog: Help Grandma Find Your Blog

Traffic is an important lifeline if you want your internet business to thrive. The question many people want to know is how to get traffic to your blog or website. This is the biggest problem for most people and there is something you can do about it.

Google is always changing; there was recent news that Google changed its search engine again so that it brings more relevant and helpful content to their users. See Google is protecting people from frauds, and scams, and the other junk that people pollute the internet with everyday.

Also another reality we all have to face: Google don’t give a rip what you want or think. You know who Google cares about, grandma. Google wants grandma to be delighted when she visits your blog or website and that is all they care about. If grandma don’t like your blog, Google won't like it either. It is very important you give Google what it wants and what grandma wants and maybe, just maybe you’ll get what you want, which is traffic to your blog.

                                                                         

I say maybe because it is all up to what you put on your blog, so you better make grandma happy if you want traffic to your blog or websites.

These are some of the questions you need to ask yourself if you want traffic to your blog:

• Is your blog providing helpful, interesting, or funny content?
• Does your blog protect grandma from scams?
• Would you feel comfortable using your credit card on a blog like yours?
• Can grandma navigate or get around on your blog pretty easy with no issues?
• Will grandma use her credit card on your blog?

See you got to know the answers to these questions before you get even a trickle of traffic to your blog. It is important you see to it that grandma is comfortable with using your blog and you got to make it interesting for her so that she will stay on your blog. See Google knows how long someone stays on your blog and this will either make or break your blog.

There are just some sites that Google loves and some they hate. You want to be the one they love. If you got Google’s love, you got traffic to your blog. It’s a simple as that but still can be difficult if you don’t know how to do it.

Having good quality content is important, but it’s not good enough. And in order to get steady traffic over time, you’ve got to build trust. Trust with people and trust with the search engines, and of course, good ole grandma. How do you build trust, one good way is linking to an authority site, but it has to be relevant to what your blog is all about. And you can’t just do it once; it has to be done several times in several blog posts. This technique can bring in an awesome amount of traffic if you do it right. 

See Google will start to trust you because it will think you have something in common with the sites that have high authority. So if you link to a news story within your post for example, over time you will get some traffic due to a higher ranking of your blog or site.  Problogger gives you 10 Ways to Improve Blog Traffic in 30 Minutes or Less and they offer great things you should be doing to get traffic to your blog. You can click on the word Problogger and check it out.  

Another thing that is very important is writing on topics that are interesting and target people who are likely to share your content. If your audience shares your content, this can bring more traffic to your blog. Seomoz talks about this on their blog and they give you 21 Tactics to Increase Blog Traffic and they have incredible information too. 

You may also want to look into sharing more of your blog post with social media sites. Mashable did an article about how Pinterest drives more traffic to blogs than Twitter. Many people are sharing content and liking it on social media sites you should be doing it also. When people share your information Google sees this and they will trust you because everyone will share your url with others which mean traffic to your blogs.

One of the very best ways to insure traffic will come to your blog is to pick the right niche from the beginning.  Lee Odden recommends you find a niche that will solve big problems your business solves for customers. This is very good advice and will better your odds of getting that traffic to your blog.  

Another thing you should consider is getting a listing with Alexa. If you are serious about getting traffic to your blog or websites, you should really put some thought into this one. You will increase your chances for blog traffic because they provide tools to site owners. 

Use Facebook to advertise your business. There are many business that use Facebook to market their brand.   News channels, store chains such as Macy's get traffic through Facebook. Macy's have an awesome fan base and almost 5 million likes! 

Another way to insure you get traffic to your blog or website is to make sure you optimize it. You gotta make sure you use the right keywords on your sites and blogs, money keywords at that. Money keywords are the words that's going to be the bread winner for your blog. 

All of these tips I'm sharing with you will help grandma find your blog; but you still have to make sure you give her what she wants. Remember, whatever she wants, Google also wants and every one of your visitors will want it too. You should aim to be the go to blog, where you are linking to the hot and latest info and everyone will love you for it. This will entice people to share your blog and this will be the way to get traffic to your blog for years to come. You just have to keep updating your blog often so that traffic will come and most importantly people including grandma, will stay on your blog and Google will love you so much. 

The Lies People Tell To Rip You Off In A Biz Opp

Starting a business, whether online or off can be an exciting new venture to anyone who is sick of their 9-5.  Anyone who is new to starting a biz opp needs to beware of the lies people tell in an effort to rip you off and take your money. This can be for affiliate marketing, MLM’s or multi level marketing, buying a course or an ebook to help you make money, or anything that involves you to spend money to make money.  In this post I am going to tell you the lies people tell to rip you off, and most of these are based on my own experiences in trying to pick the right business.

Starting more than ten years ago, I was told lie after lie and lost money in the process. People introduced me to their MLM business opportunities, I got bogus emails about ebooks that will help me to make money online, I also had people tell me they could help me start a business for a fee. Yet when I decided to try some of these biz opps nothing panned out. I was broker after I tried. 

I’m going to share the lies people tell.  Some of them are very crappy, tired, and played out.

Multi Level Marketing (MLM)

I’ve joined a few MLM’s in the past.  One of the biggest lies I was told was the price you pay to join will go up soon and we can’t promise this price will be the same next week, or month.  This is the way MLM reps get you to sign up fast. They are taught to manipulate you to sign up because you may change your mind if you go home to think about it. When I signed up for Pre-Paid Legal, they told me I had to pay before 2pm on a Friday or I may have to pay a higher price. The beginning of the next week, the price was still the same which was $72. I felt like I had been tricked because I was. As a matter of fact, the price was the same for the next several weeks before it went up. When I started to promote this business I learned they actually had a heads up on when the price was going to change and I felt even more fooled. My advice to you is to never join any program under pressure. I don’t recommend joining any MLM programs period.

The next lie these people told me was they didn’t make money off of me when I signed up. Actually they do make money. See they are taught to build their downline and you are a part of their downline so they do make money off of you in the long run, not right then and there. You are at the bottom and they want to keep you there. You are taught to build your own downline so you can make you and your sponsor money. So you are mainly building their business and you have no control in how you want to run your biz in any MLM.

The next lie these people will tell you is they want to help you be successful. They only want to help you because it helps them. And in actuality they don’t help you, they leave you hanging. Oh and if you happen to build a downline and some one in your downline surpasses you, you will no longer be able to make money off of them and guess what, you upline will still make money off of the person you brought on the team.  The reason is you have to stay ahead of your downline in order to make money off of them.  This is why I say they keep you at the bottom; they truly don’t want to help you get to their status. It’s the only way to make a lot of money.

The more I learned, the angrier I got so I quit the business. I did not want to be in a business telling people lies just to make money. And if the product/program was so great why lie. All MLM companies are liars and cheaters and you should never want to be apart of it.

The crap they used to tell me made me mad. These are some of their “pick up lines”:

·         If we can do it, you can do it

·         You need this program or product

·         You have to follow the system to be successful, it’s the only way

·         Ask your friends and family to join

·         There's money to be made for everyone

It’s nothing but lies, and you have to find out a great deal of this stuff after you join. Also you pay for every meeting/briefing you attend and bring your prospect to. It’s like a cult. Once again don’t join any network marketing, MLM’s or multi level marketing program. These are the lies people will tell you and you will be disappointed.

Ebooks and Online Courses

The next lies people will tell you are involving eBooks or online courses. Some are legit others are not. You don’t have to buy a book or attend a course to make money in any business. Some courses you definitely don’t have to join because if you look long and hard enough, you will find out how to make money and other helpful info by searching the web. If you want to get a more relevant search, type what you are searching for in the search bar and put it in parenthesis.

Sometimes people don’t have the time to do searches so buying an ebook may be easier for them. This is ok but you do have to beware of the lies people tell to rip you off. Not all books or courses are created equally.

The first lie people tell is they made several hundreds of thousands of dollars in their first month of business.  To me this is to hyped up and it is not likely people will make this kind of money in that short of time. Heck if people have done it, everyone would quit their jobs and do it to. 

The next lie people tell is their product helped a ton of people. Now some folks do have products that do help lots of folks, but it's only a small percentage of people. The majority put out crappy products that don't help no one. These are the ones that tell lies to get a buck and they don't care to help others.  

The best thing to do is to look past the lies people tell. Do research on the author of the program, course, or book and find out what they have done to make money. Also the best indicator the product is good is if they are giving you free advice in the form of a website, blog, or article providing you helpful quality content. If their information truly helped you then consider paying for their books, course, or program.  I recently attended a webinar that I paid for and found it to be very helpful so there are definitely some helpful ebooks and courses out there.

Also if you run across an affiliate who is selling a product, be careful because they can tell lies also. They same applies to the affiliate, if they don’t offer a good blog or website, don’t purchase anything through them. Only do so if you feel they helped you and they have a good site or blog. See through these lies people tell and don’t spend your money unless you want to. Don’t believe the lies these people tell you.

I hope this post help you today. I didn’t talk much about affiliate marketing, but I felt I should create a post about the lies people tell to rip you off in a biz opp because you can be ripped off in affiliate marketing as well as all businesses, and if someone need some help, this post is geared towards helping them see the light and keep their hard earned money. People tell some amazing lies just to make a buck off of people and it doesn’t have to happen. People need to be educated so they can see through the lies people tell.

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