Forums are a great way to drive targeted traffic to your site, but you must tread lightly when you’re using forums as a traffic source. Make sure that the forum is on the same topic as the site/product you want to drive traffic to. If it’s not, you won’t get anywhere.

Once you find a targeted forum, you can’t just go in and spam the forum without posting any content first, because nobody will trust you. They have to know that you’re a real person, that you know what you’re talking about, and that you are taking the time to contribute to their forum.

Forum Signature

You’ll want to join the forum and introduce yourself, set up your signature with relevant sites, and start answering questions and making worthwhile posts. If you do this, and offer genuinely good content, you’ll generate quite a reputation, and people will visit the links in your signature.

Don’t just copy and past the cookie cutter advertisements from the affiliate program you’re marketing, or the opportunity you just joined. Be creative; spend a little time developing some catchy link text, and then people will click to your site to check it out. If it’s boring, or they’ve seen it over and over and over, they’ll ignore it.

In-Post Advertising

Then, when a topic comes up where you can mention your website as a resource, do it. But make sure you say that it’s your website, because there’s nothing worse than hearing someone talk all about this website that they found, and how good it is, and then claim to have nothing to do with it when they actually do. Same with if you’re listing your affiliate link, tell them it’s your affiliate link, and list the regular URL too. This will add to your credibility, because now you’re not just pitching the product to make money, you’re giving them a valuable resource. Most people will follow your affiliate link and give you credit for the sale. If you’re honest and genuine, people will reward you for it.

DO NOT only post in topics where you can advertise, though, because then you won’t build any kind of relationship with the forum; you won’t have their trust. Post your thoughts, your answers, your questions, everything. Help them, work with them, and seek help from them. This relationship will prove invaluable time and time again.

This is a great mystery to a lot of people, and it really shouldn’t be. In fact, it’s quite easy. First, you have to make sure your site is optimized for the search engines to visit. If you know HTML, this can be very easy. If not, this will be very hard (so go learn HTML!)

What You Really Want To Hear

Ok, now lets talk about what you really want to hear – how to get those coveted 1-10 rankings for your keywords. The first thing to do in order to raise your site rank is target specific keywords. I say specific, because you need to target “keyphrases,” meaning more than one word keywords. Some people use the words interchangeably (me included) so just ignore one-word keywords altogether. You will waste your money if you shoot for these, because chances are, there are other, MUCH larger companies who already have you beat, and will continue to have you beat unless you’ve got a bottomless wallet.

Meta Tags

Title and Meta tags were once the only things you had to have on your site to get listed well in the major search engines. The spider would come to your site, check out your Meta tags, and you’d be listed for your keywords. Although it’s not that easy anymore, meta tags are still very important.

There are 2 Meta tags that you will want to have on EVERY page. First, the keywords tag: <meta name=”keywords” content=”your keywords | second keyword | like this”>

Note that I separated them with the pipe symbol – | – that keeps your keywords separated while still allowing the search engines to tell them apart. You can also use a comma, but the pipe symbol is generally accepted as a keyword delimiter.

Next, the description tag: <meta name=”description” content=”The description of the page is what will most likely show up in the Search Engine results”>

You’ll want to use full, understandable sentences, and try to get your keyphrases into it if you can. The description shouldn’t be more than 100-200 characters long, or it will get cut off and the end won’t be seen by anyone.

Finally, the title tag: <title>Your Keywords | Second Keyword | Like This</title>

The title tag should be much like your Meta keywords tag, but it will be displayed on the browser’s title bar, as well, so make sure you use capital letters, and don’t include any misspellings.

I want to stress, however, that Meta tags are NOT the “instant solution” that many people are looking for in SEO. (They used to be, but the search engines put a stop to that) In fact, there is no single “instant solution” besides paying the search engine to put you on the first page. You have to take many other factors into consideration to get the top spots.

Content Is King

Search engines love content, and the best way to “optimize” your site is to provide valuable, original content at regular intervals. Your visitors will love it, and come back again and again; and the search engines will love to visit your site and find more quality content for them to index.

What you can’t do in your content is an old SEO trick called “keyword stuffing.”

Keyword stuffing used to be a very effective SEO method called keyword stuffing, but keyword stuffing was worthless to your antikeyword stuffing visitors, because the anti-keyword stuffing readers couldn’t read the keyword stuffed content very well, because of the keyword stuffing. This keyword stuffing method quickly became outlawed by the anti-keyword stuffing search engines because keyword stuffing wasn’t valuable to their anti-keyword stuffing searchers who didn’t like keyword stuffing.

You get my point, putting keywords or keyphrases wherever they can possibly fit is pointless, hard to read, and it will get you banned from the search engines. It’s even worse to have keywords listed over and over and over and over on a page, as that provides absolutely no content value to a reader.

Instead, use keywords in your copy where you would normally use them in conversation. This will make for the best readable, informative content for your visitors, and the search engines will spider and index your pages. A few more or less keywords in your content won’t make much of a difference in your ranking.

My rule of thumb is to always read my content before uploading the page to determine if I’d be happy reading it if it wasn’t on my site. That gives me a good indication of whether or not my visitors will enjoy reading it. If I don’t like it, my visitors probably won’t, either.

That Was Time Consuming…

This is a very great way to move up the Google SERPs, no “expertise” required, just good old-fashioned hard work. It will take some time for Google to re-index those pages and realize that they have a link to you now. And it will take even longer for your visible PR to go up. (I’m convinced that Google modifies your “real” PR daily, if necessary, and only updates the “visible” PR on the toolbar every few months) Be patient, get links upon links, keep adding great content to your site, and you will jump up in the SERPS by leaps and bounds.

I’m not going to go into this much deeper, but I will point you toward a great resource for SEO information (I mentioned it earlier, too). Go to Search Engine Optimization Made Easy and you can download a free copy of SEO Genius Brad Callen’s “Search Engine Optimization Made Easy” ebook. He is the mastermind behind the SEO Elite software, which I HIGHLY recommend to anyone who wants to get higher search engine rankings.

Affiliate programs have been around for basically as long as the Internet has been popular, and they’re still going strong. Why? Because they work for everyone involved. Vendors get the traffic and sales they need, while advertisers can direct their clients to a certain product and make a (sometimes very large) commission per sale.

There are thousands, if not millions of affiliate programs available on the ‘net, but not all of them are good. The first thing to look for is how well the company is doing. If you can determine that the product(s) is/are selling like hotcakes, this may be something you want to get involved with.

give you a real-world example, I didn’t get the chance to promote Jason Potash’s ArticleAnnouncer program before it launched, but because of the HUGE publicity of the product, I have made about $1000 – $1500 in the past 2 months promoting it, and I haven’t had to do much at all. I researched the product, got reviews from people who had used it, and decided to promote it myself. I’ve driven about 500-1000 people to the ArticleAnnouncer site, and I’ve made 6-10 sales. That’s not too bad, considering I haven’t done anything other than drive traffic there. (I’ll fill you in on how I did that in a bit)

Finding Affiliate Programs

Finding affiliate programs is very easy. You can join PayDotCom and Clickbank for free, and browse through their marketplaces to find products that have programs running. Those two sites are where most of the affiliate products I promote come from.

Other sites have their own affiliate programs. You can find these by going to Google and typing in “your niche” +affiliate. That should find a decent amount of affiliate programs for you. If for some reason there are not any affiliate programs, but you know it’s a good niche, then perhaps this is the perfect niche for you to create your own product and launch your own affiliate campaign! I very highly recommend both sites listed above as affiliate program managers. Clickbank has been around for years and has thousands of registered affiliates, while PayDotCom.com is newer and includes better affiliate management tools. I’ll discuss product creation soon.

Hiding Your Affiliate Links

After you choose a product to promote, there are a few things you can do. You’ll probably want to start by just driving traffic directly to the affiliate site. You can do that anywhere you can put a normal link your webpage, forums, PPC engines, blogs, etc. (All of these will be discussed later in this book) But you won’t always want to show people your affiliate link, because some people will sign up for the affiliate program then replace your ID with their own, effectively stealing the commission from you.

Well, then how do you hide your affiliate link? There are a number of ways to do this.

The first way is to set up a “redirected” URL. I use and recommend Mike Filsaime’s PowerLink Generator. The video on his page is a firsthand look at his product, and what it can do for you. Pay special attention to the tracking features, because that’s HUGE. In order to succeed in IM, you’ll want to track everything! The PowerLink Generator makes it very quick and easy to track your affiliate campaigns through a central spot.

You can also do these redirects by hand, if you want, by adding the following to your page header section: <META http-equiv=”refresh” content=”5;URL=AffiliateLinkHere”> and replacing “AffiliateLinkHere” with your affiliate URL. When someone visits that page, they will be redirected to your affiliate program. For the sake of compatibility (so old browsers don’t miss out) you should include a standard link in the body of the page as well. Doing it this way makes it harder to track your campaigns, though, so it’s not as effective, in my opinion (plus you have to do all of the redirects by hand)

Another way is to register another domain name (through any of the services listed above) and have it “forwarded” to your affiliate link. This allows you to give people a link like

http://www.GetThisProduct.com and when they type it into their browser, they are sent to your affiliate link. I have used this option to make thousands of dollars in affiliate commissions that I probably wouldn’t have made if people knew they were typing in my affiliate link.

Finally, you can use a “Link shortener” service, like TinyURL.com. This service will allow you to change a url such as:

http://www.xxx.com/affproduct.php?aff_id=1252 into this:

http://www.tinyurl.com/

It’s also quite powerful for hiding your affiliate links, because the user never sees the actual affiliate URL. However, most people won’t be nearly as apt to click on a tinyurl.com link as your own /Recommends link.

Do I Just Send Traffic To My Affiliate Link?

There are many ways to promote affiliate programs, actually. The easiest way is to just direct traffic to your affiliate link, and hope the vendor’s sales page is enough to sell them. But if this is all you do, you’re leaving money on the table.

I highly recommend creating a “name squeeze” page so you can add subscribers to your email list, and I’ll discuss these in more depth later. Just keep in mind that if you’re promoting an affiliate program, you can send them to a name squeeze page first, have them sign up to receive a free ecourse or something similar, then send them to the sales page of the product you’re promoting (by redirecting them to your affiliate link – you can do this with the major autoresponder companies, which are also discussed in the Opt-In Email List article)

Offer A Bonus

Everyone loves free stuff, so if you can offer a bonus of some sort, like an eBook, a report, or an eCourse, do it. Even if you have to write one of the above, it should be worth your time, if you take the time to do it right.

Writing A Report Or An ECourse

If you’re using a name squeeze page to collect emails, offer them a free report and/or a free eCourse as a bonus if they sign up. That way, even if they don’t buy that day, you can have your autoresponder send them emails with valuable information to convince them to buy.

What do you need to do to write these? It varies from niche to niche, but the way I do it is I purchase the product, (usually from someone else’s affiliate link, as most affiliate programs don’t allow you to purchase from your own link) then figure out some answers to common questions and develop some tips that I can give about it. I put that into a 7-day or so ecourse, and pitch it on the name squeeze page. The extra sales I make from doing it this way far outweigh the initial expense of buying the product and creating the report/eCourse.