HEALT & AFFILIATE$ $HARE

I found this article in Morenice forums (Thanks to nickname :ratnadewi)
I think it is good for us.

If you run an online business, you know that the single most important thing you can do after setting up your site is bring in the traffic. Your site could be the hottest thing to ever hit the Internets but it won’t do you any good if no one knows about it. Almost everyone who launches a web site wants to see their traffic soar and the hits coming in. The problem is that not everyone knows what to do and how to do it to be successful.
Everywhere you look it seems someone has some great master plan to help you bring traffic to your website. Everyone wants to sell you on some special technique or secret play to boost your traffic. The problem is you can’t always believe what you read on the Internet and you can’t always trust what other people say about gaining traffic. The only thing you can really trust and rely on is cold hard facts. You need to study what successful sites have done before and then take the same measures with your own to increase your traffic.

One of the best ways to begin when it comes to increasing your site traffic is to walk backwards. If you've never heard this phrase, it basically means to start at your end result and walk backwards from that goal to where you presently stand. This way you can see the steps that need to be taken to get you where you need to go.

If you want to succeed with bringing traffic to your site then you need to have a goal in place first. What type of traffic do you expect to see? What type of conversion rate are you hoping to get from this traffic? Basically what you need to do is form your goal and then formulate a plan to reach that goal. Find a site that has achieved the goals that you have for your website. Watch them, study them, analyze them and then track what they are doing to get where they are.
As you do this, you can begin to formulate a plan for your own site so you know how to get where you want to be. When you are forming your plan, do not think about "what ifs" or "maybes" and focus only on the facts that you know to be true. These are the only variables which you can control. Reapply these facts that you have learned and use them to increase your website traffic and you will be guaranteed success.

These are the most common and successful ways that high-traffic sites have gained their position on the web :

1. Search engines- This is by far the most common way to gain traffic to your site. If you have opportunity to view the log files of a popular website, you will see that they derive a large portion of their daily traffic from search engines. If you want to improve your performance with the search engines, you need to study and understand how they work.

2. Number of pages on your site- This one only makes sense when you think about. The more pages your site has, the higher your traffic will be. Think about it. If you have 5 pages on your site and every visitor looks at all 5, then that equals 5 hits per visitor. If 5 people visit, that equals 25 page views and so on and so forth. Having more pages will increase your search engine traffic.

3. Optimize all your pages- If you are going for SEO, be sure you optimize all of your pages not just your home page. This ensures that your site pages are coming up under multiple search phrases and not simply just your home page. This brings in more specific types of traffic and people who are actually interested in your site which will lead to a higher conversion rate. Better optimization on each of your pages will lead to more traffic and success.

4. Domain name- If you can get keywords actually in your domain name, this can increase your search ranking and traffic as well. While it is not always possible, it is very beneficial if you can pull it off.

5. Check your log files- Once you have launched your site, be sure to watch and study your log files to see what types of keywords people are typing in to find your site. These log files will show you what search engine keywords brought people to your site and often, you will be surprised at what you see. This will help you make changes to your site to increase the traffic based on those facts taken from the log files.

6. Link popularity- A higher number of incoming links will boost your search engine rankings as well. Remember that quality of quantity is best when choosing the sites you will link share with.

Now you know what methods will work to bring traffic to your site but you may still be wondering exactly how to do all of this. If you do not know how to use SEO and SEM and you do not have a full understanding of keyword placement and how it works with web traffic, it may benefit you more to hire someone to help you optimize your site for traffic. Paying an expert to do it right the first time will save you more in the long run than doing a poor job of trying to build traffic on your own when you don’t know what you are doing.

If you plan to do it yourself, make sure you learn as much as possible about each method listed above and the best way to implement them to be successful. Don't just trust the word of other Internet marketers. Look into the facts and find out the truth of what works and what does not and how things work. If you take a proactive approach with gaining traffic to your site, you will be more successful and will see the numbers that you want to be seeing.

In addition to these methods there are other ways of increasing traffic to your site. You can advertise on television, in magazines and on advertisements on the Internet itself. Word of mouth is also a great way to increase your traffic. If people like your site, they will tell more people about it so remember that a good quality site is as important to increasing traffic as all the other methods combined.

What is affiliate marketing?

Affiliate marketing has become one of the most popular and the most effective ways to advertise on the Internet. The premise of affiliate marketing is very simple.

For example :

A company, let’s say Clickbank, goes to another web site and asks them to place a banner or link to Clickbank on their site. Every time a user clicks on that Clickbank banner, visits the site and then buys any products in the Clickbank site, the owner of the original site gets a commission. It is as simple as that.

The history of affiliate marketing goes back to approximately 1994 with the trailblazing music website CDNow.com. They were, as far as most people know, the first site to pay other sites for directing Internet traffic to them. Internet giant Amazon.com soon caught on and became the site most associated with affiliate marketing. Today, the practice of affiliate marketing is used by essentially every major web site in the world to promote their stuffs on the internet.


Why affiliate marketing?

One of the reasons that affiliate marketing has proven to be so popular is that it is completely based on performance. In most cases, the company doing the advertising doesn’t pay a single cent to the site that is carrying their ads unless there is evidence that they have send some Internet traffic back to the advertising site. These are a mere example anyway.

There are other ways of doing affiliate marketing, like posting affiliate links in forum signatures, making videos with affiliate url plastered on it, social bookmark sites and many more. All these are done in order to generate traffic to the advertising site. If any of the visitors that came thru your affiliate link buys any products, you will get a commision for it.

Some advertising sites have paid the site hosting their link based not on the number of times an original IP visits through the link, but on the number of times the banner ad was “seen.” This method presents a whole host of problems since things like hit counts can be forged and there is no way to insure that just because someone visited a web page that had your logo on it that they even saw it or if they did, that they even knew what it was.

Other methods of affiliate marketing include paying only when a link is followed AND some kind of transaction takes place. This can be tough on the site hosting the link because the attention span of the average Internet user isn’t long enough in most cases to follow a link and then either complete a purchase, or fill out a form of some kind. The conventional method simply pays a host a commission for every time an original IP is directed to their site.

In a matter of only a few years, affiliate marketing has become one of the most cost effective ways to drive traffic to a site. Since, in most cases, both the advertiser and the host profit from the set up, there is no reason to believe that affiliate marketing won’t be a dominant advertising method well into the future.