Traffic Swarm - Free Traffic Generation

Here's another program for free traffic generation: Traffic Swarm.

For most of you people, getting high-quality targeted visitors to your site is probably one of the "toughest" things to do. It can be especially frustrating if you're getting just a trickle of visitors every day. Unfortunately high-quality targeted traffic is also very important. Getting a high conversion rate on your site is also important, but you need some sort of traffic generation to test your conversion rate.

Why is it so difficult for most small businesses and online marketers to get good traffic generation? Well, most popular site promotion strategies either take up loads of time, cost a lot of money, or are too risky.

This almost automated traffic generation system can send 1000s of targeted prospects to your site, every single day, absolutely FREE!

http://www.trafficswarm.com/go.cgi?444028

Would you believe that Traffic Swarm is:

-> 100% Free! - Always has been, and always will be
-> Almost Automated - 5 minutes to set it up, then forget it unless you are
visiting sites for credits
-> Targeted - you'll get only real, targeted traffic (members may be sometimes
only clicking for credits, so not 100% targeted)
-> "Viral" - your traffic will increase exponentially (referrals help out a lot)

Anyway, check it out ASAP. It's very large and you will benefit even more if you create your FREE account now. Go for free traffic generation at Traffic Swarm!

http://www.trafficswarm.com/go.cgi?444028

Affiliate Finances

Here's a link to check out from a member of the AssociatePrograms.com forum: Affiliate Finances. It has "practical advice for managing all aspects of your affiliate business." Check it out if you're wondering about stuff like taxes for affiliate marketers.

Making a Fortune on the Net with Affiliate Programs

Affiliate programs present a great opportunity. Affiliate programs can be very profitable, but you have to choose the right products or services to promote. And you have to make sure that those affiliate programs fit well with your current traffic base.

by Paul Majestyck

The World Wide Web could be considered a synonym for opportunity. Millions of Internet entrepreneurs are finding new ways to make money online, as the opportunities for building home based businesses online are growing everyday. Existing businesses are using the Internet as a vehicle for marketing their products and services online while at the same time brand new businesses are getting started with only a home computer and a determination to succeed. The general landscape of commerce has changed forever.

One of the most exciting developments of Internet marketing that is making many entrepreneurs rich is affiliate marketing. Affiliate marketing could be the future of marketing and replacement for much of traditional paid advertising because affiliate marketing only cost the advertiser when the advertising is effective. In any affiliate program there is a host web site and affiliates. Affiliates advertise for the host web site using banners, text links, and e-mails with embedded text links and when a web search surfer clicks through from an affiliate link to the host site and makes a purchase the affiliate is paid either a set fee or a commission based on the affiliate agreement.

According to Paul Majestyck of MakeAFortuneOnTheNet.com , "Affiliate marketing has proven to be so profitable that some people are making a fortune on the net solely through affiliate programs." These affiliates are basically advertising agents earning profits by selling other people's products and services. This means that the affiliate can concentrate on the primary object of generating targeted traffic and promoting affiliate products.

The potential for making money in affiliate programs is virtually unlimited but affiliates need to choose the right programs to maximize the chances of success. One of the most important aspects of choosing affiliate programs to promote is to choose products and services that would be of interest to the affiliate's current traffic base. For example, a webmaster operating a web design firm is going to be most successful promoting affiliate programs for products that would interest those who are building new web sites. Potential products and services to promote might include search engine optimization services, blog template design and implementation services, Internet marketing, web content and merchant account services. There is a much greater chance of making sales when the affiliate links are relevant to the market of the affiliate web site. A web designer is not going to have much success promoting affiliate links for vitamins or other unrelated products. It is all about targeting qualified prospects.

There is no doubt that affiliate marketing will continue to grow in the future creating even greater opportunities for entrepreneurs all over the Internet.

About the Author

Paul Majestyck is a successful ezine publisher and online marketer , who not long ago didn't know ANYTHING about Internet marketing...
However, within a very short time, launched his own website AND
learned how to profit from an opt-in list, pull in sales with
ezines, make money with Google Adwords and setup his own BLOG!
Visit:http://www.makeafortuneonthenet.com/main.html.
http://makeafortuneonthenet.com/blog/

More Free Advertising - FreeAdDepot

Before taking a try at paid advertising, you may want to do some free advertising. There are many different free advertising programs out there. This post will take a look at Free Ad Depot.

Free Ad Depot gives you free featured links and free classified style ads (look like Google Ads). Free featured links show on Free Ad Depot member pages. Free classfied style ads show on various pages owned by members.

Another free advertising feature is the ability to email downline members whenever you have the credits available.

How can you earn credits?

You can earn credits when you:

* place their free advertising code on your website and get clicks
* click on links in emails you get from other members
* signup new free or pro members

What can you use credits for?

Free members can exchange credits for targeted text ads, banner ads and exit pop ads. You can exchange credits for mailings to your downline members.

Pro members have the additional option of mailing to a random database of members.

Multiple ways to make money

Free Ad Depot gives you multiple ways to make money in addition to your free advertising efforts. If you join as a free member, you earn commissions when

* you sponsor pro members
* one of your sponsored members purchases a targeted text ad, banner ad, exit pop ad or member mailing
* you make a sale from programs that appear on your reseller page (with your id numbers)

As a pro member, you would earn more commissions from the first two points.

One day after signing up, I got over 100 credits from email link clicking and exchanged some for a banner ad. It's a free advertising program so why not give it a go?

Free Ad Depot - Free Advertising Program

Instant Buzz - Free Advertising Toolbar

In a previous post I mentioned Instant Buzz. But what is it? It's a free advertising toolbar that you download and install to IE or Firefox. It shows at the top and is not obtrusive. The toolbar displays ads in a text format with no pop-ups. As you surf with the toolbar enabled, you earn free advertising credits. These credits are used to show your own ads to other Instant Buzz members.

Instant Buzz brings you targeted visitors as only interested people click on the ads. As with any advertising, you have to make your ad stand out to get more clicks. There is an option to upgrade to pro, which includes a feature to use HTML ads. HTML ads increase your click-thru rate with better toolbar visibility.

Instant Buzz also has other ways in which you can earn free advertising credits. There are MailSpace ads and HyperSpace ads. MailSpace ads are shown on personal emails that you send out. HyperSpace are shown on web pages. MailSpace ads and HyperSpace ads are both optional.

How can you make the most with this free advertising toolbar?

You can earn more credits through referrals and building up streams. MailSpace ads are powerful and also include a small ad for
Instant Buzz itself. Also, take a look at the action plan and promotion tools provided to all members.

LinkExplore Review Summaries

LinkExplore is a link exchange software tool that automates the process of finding potential link exchange partners in specific categories and requesting for link exchanges.

Linking101.com's Link Review

Larry Sullivan states that LinkExplore "is one of the best investments you can make in your link building campaign. ... it is my opinion that the benefits and future potential earnings (from such things as better search engine rankings), outweigh the costs involved in getting and using LinkExplore. I want to thank Sumantra for a great product that really can make your link building grow quickly and effectively."

LinkExplore Product Review by Christine Churchill

Christine states that LinkExplore saves time and increases efficiency by automating something you're already going to be doing. Also, the documentation and ease of use are excellent. LinkExplore can also be used as a research tool. Imagine having access to a database of potential business partners or competitors.

A couple more points she mentions: there is no easy data export feature, and the data pulling may violate search engine terms.

Review of LinkExplore by John Bickerton

John states that "the hours spent finding quality links have been shortened by at least 75 percent. The monthly update of new sites willing to trade links is an especially useful feature of LinkExplore. It is easy to use and a very valuable internet marketing tool."

Some benefits he points out: HUGE database, generates HTML for links you need to add, automates sending emails for sites you want to link with.

Learn more about LinkExplore

Improving the Link Popularity of your site

Why would you want to go about improving the link popularity of your site? It's simple. Having a greater link popularity improves your traffic flow and search engine rankings. So with more traffic you can make more money online and make more sales as an affiliate. How you do go about improving the link popularity of your site?

This article shows you different methods to improve your link popularity, including some "not so good" methods like free-for-all pages. Other methods include giving away prizes and doing link exchanges. If you're doing link exchanges manually, then you know how long it takes to do that - finding the right sites, finding sites with link pages, finding contact information, updating your own links page, sending emails, waiting for a response... For an easier way to improve link popularity, look into an automated solution like LinkExplore.

By Sumantra Roy

Link popularity, i.e. the number of sites which are linking to your site, is an increasingly important factor as far as search engine placement is concerned. Other things remaining the same, more the number of links to your site, higher will be its ranking.

What is important is not only the number of links to your site, but also the types of sites which are linking to you. A link from a site which is related to yours is more valuable than a link from an unrelated site.

In this article, I explore different methods by which you can improve the link popularity of your site. I start with a method that you shouldn't bother using, then go on to the moderately effective methods, and then end with the most effective methods you can use to boost the link popularity of your site.

1) Submitting your site to Free For All (FFA) pages

A common misconception among many Internet marketers is that while FFA pages may not directly bring in traffic to your site, it will help to improve the link popularity of your site, and hence, will indirectly bring in traffic through the search engines.

Nothing could be further from the truth. Most FFA pages can contain only a certain number of links at a time. This means that when you submit your site to a FFA page, your site will be placed at the top of the page. However, as more and more people submit their sites to the FFA page, your site will be pushed down, and finally, when it reaches the bottom of the page, it will be removed.

Now, since you can bet that plenty of other people are also submitting their sites to the FFA pages, your site will remain in these pages for only a short span of time. Hence, in order to ensure that the search engines see your site if and when they come to spider the FFA page, you will need to ensure that you submit your site to these FFA pages on a regular basis - at least once a week.

Even if you used an automatic submission program to do it, can you imagine a worse way to spend your time and/or money? Furthermore, many search engines recognize these pages which only contains links to other sites as FFA pages and may completely ignore them. And while I haven't yet seen any evidence that submitting to the FFA pages will actually penalize your site, there is every possibility that this might happen in the future.

Hence, when it comes to FFA pages, my advice is simple: don't even think about them.

2) Starting an Awards Program

A moderately effective method of improving the link popularity of your site is to start an awards program. You can have web sites which are related to yours apply for an award from your site. The sites which win the award get the chance to display the logo for your award. This logo is linked to your site, preferably to a page which contains more information on the award.

If you publish a newsletter, consider declaring the winners in your newsletter. You can also perform a review of the winners' sites in your newsletter. This adds useful content to your newsletter and also gives more webmasters the incentive to apply for your award, since you may review their sites in your newsletter. This also gives them the incentive to subscribe to your newsletter to see if they win the award.

Make sure that you give awards to only those sites which deserve to win. If you give your award to sites which don't deserve it, your award will have little credibility, which will, in turn, hurt the credibility of your company. Furthermore, make sure that the logo you design for the award looks professional. If it doesn't, not many webmasters will want to display it in their sites.

3) Giving testimonials

This may sound a bit unusual, but giving testimonials for products or services which you find useful can be another moderately effective way of improving the link popularity of your site. If you really like a product, simply write to the company and tell them why you liked the product so much and how it has helped you. Chances are, the company will write back to you to thank you for your comments and will ask you for permission to display your comments in their web site. Tell the company that you have no problems if they publish your comments, but request them to add a link to your site along with the testimonial. There is every possibility that the company will agree since publishing the URL of your web site gives more credibility to the testimonial.

Of course, please don't go about giving testimonials to every company you can locate just because it will improve your link popularity :-)

4) Posting to Message Boards and Discussion Lists

Another moderately effective method of increasing the link popularity of your site is to post to online message boards. At the end of every message that you post, you can sign off by mentioning your name and the URL of your web site. If the message board allows it, you can even include a short promotional blurb about your site at the end of your posts. However, make sure that the individual messages that are posted to that message board are archived in static HTML pages (i.e. the URLs for the individual messages should not contain a "?"). Otherwise, the search engines will consider these pages to be dynamic pages and may not spider these pages and hence, will not be able to find your link.

Email based discussion lists which are archived on the web in static HTML pages can also be used to boost the link popularity of your site in a similar manner. In this case, the signature file that you use with your email program should contain the URL for your web site.

5) Starting a Link Contest

A good method of improving the link popularity of your site is to give away prizes to other webmasters if they link to you. The prizes that you give out should ideally be something which other webmasters will find valuable enough to want to link to you, but which do not cost you too much. For instance, if you publish a newsletter, and have unsold ad inventory, you can give away some free advertisements in your newsletter to the winners. If you sell a software (or an ebook), you can give away a free copy of your software or ebook to the winners, since it doesn't cost you anything to produce an additional copy of digital goods like software and ebooks.

Link contests work best if you run the contest on a continuous basis and if you declare new winners frequently. If you run the contest for a few months, and then stop it, the webmasters who had linked to you will all remove their links. However, if you run it on a continuous basis, and declare new winners every month or so, the webmasters will have the incentive to keep their links to your site.

Also, make sure that you require all participants to have a link to your site either in their home page, or in an internal page of their site which is linked to their home page. Also ensure that the page which contains the link is no more than two levels deep from their home page (i.e. it should not take more than two clicks to go from the home page to the page containing the link). If they don't do this, the search engine spiders may not index the page which contains the link to your site, and hence, may not find your link.

6) Writing articles and allowing them to be re-published

This is by far one of the best ways of improving the link popularity of your site, and one of my favorites. Whenever I write an article on search engine placement, I first publish it in my newsletter and then I publish the article in my site as a separate web page. I also submit it to the following article submission sites:

ezinearticles.com
ideamarketers.com
marketing-seek.com
WWIO
web-source.net

Many webmasters and ezine publishers frequent these article directories in search of articles. Submitting my articles to these directories gives them the opportunity of re-publishing my articles. While I have had some success with each of the above directories, by far the best among them is the ezinearticles.com directory.

Now, at the end of each article, I mention that people are free to re-publish the article as long as they include my resource box (i.e. my bio) at the end of the article. I always include the URL of my site in the resource box. This means that whenever someone publishes one of my articles in his/her web site, I have another site linking to my site. Also, many ezine publishers archive their ezines in their web sites. If they have re-published my article in a particular issue, I again get a link.

Writing articles is also an excellent viral marketing tool. As some webmasters and ezine publishers publish my articles, other webmasters and ezine publishers will read my article. Some of them, in turn, will publish my article, which will again be read by other webmasters and ezine publishers, some of whom will publish it... and so on.

Also, since only web sites related to mine would be interested in publishing my articles, all these links tend to come from related sites, which, as I mentioned earlier, are more valuable than links from unrelated sites.

Writing articles, of course, has another very important benefit - if you write good articles, it makes you known as an expert in your field. This helps to improve your credibility, which makes people more comfortable about buying your products or services.

Some notes about writing articles:

i) I have learnt through experience that some webmasters will publish other people's articles and will display the complete resource box but will not link to the URL mentioned in the resource box. In order to prevent this, you need to explicitly state that the article can be published only if the URL mentioned in the resource box is linked to your site.

ii) Your resource box should not be too long - it should be no more than 6 lines long, formatted at 65 characters per line. Otherwise, other webmasters and ezine publishers will hesitate to publish your article.

7) Submitting to the directories

This is by far the most important step as far as improving the link popularity of your site is concerned. As I mentioned before, what is important is not only the number of links to your site, but also the quality of the links to your site. No links are as important as links from some of the major directories like Yahoo!, the Open Directory etc. However, Yahoo! currently requires a payment of $299 per year in order to list any commercial site. Paying them $299 per year just to improve your link popularity is probably not cost effective. But, the Open Directory is free, and you should definitely get your site listed in the Open Directory.

Also, you should submit your site to as many of the smaller directories as possible.

8) Exchanging links with other webmasters

The single-most effective way of improving the link popularity of your site is to exchange links with other webmasters who have sites which are related to yours, but are not direct competitors. This is called reciprocal linking.

However, the problem with this method is the sheer amount of time it takes if you were to do it manually.

If you decide to do this manually, you can easily expect to spend hundreds of hours on this activity alone.

Here's what you need to do:

i) You need to use the search engines to find sites related to yours that are not direct competitors by typing in some keywords that are related to your site.

ii) You also need to find sites that link to your competitors.

iii) You need to visit these sites and see if they actually exchange links.

iv) If you decide that you want to exchange links with a particular site, you need to find out exactly how it wants you to link to it from your site.

v) You then need to manually add a link to this site in your site.

vi) Then, you need to find out the email address of the owner of the website and send the owner a personalized email requesting that he/she adds a link to your site in return.

vii) In many cases, you will not be able to locate the email address of the owner simply because the owner has not published any email address on the site. In that case, all the effort that you had put into evaluating whether or not the site is suitable for exchanging links will have been a waste of time.

viii) If you do manage to locate the email address, you need to send a personalized and customized email to the website owner.

ix) You then need to wait and see whether this site is willing to exchange links with you.

x) If the site is not willing to link to you, you need to remove the link to the site from your site. Once again, all the effort that you had put into evaluating the site, linking to it and sending an email to the owner will have been a waste of time.

You have to repeat the same process all over again for the next site that you want to exchange links with.

Obviously, there has to be a better way. And there is!

Luckily for you, I have developed a ground-breaking new software called LinkExplore that completely automates the entire process of exchanging links with other website owners, thus saving you hundreds of hours of your time.

I had originally developed the software for my own needs but later decided to make it available to other website owners as well.

Article by Sumantra Roy. Sumantra is one of the most respected search engine positioning specialists on the Internet. To have Sumantra's company place your site at the top of the search engines, go to 1stSearchRanking. For more advice on how you can take your web site to the top of the search engines, subscribe to his FREE newsletter.