Keeping your traffic until they buy something – sounds good, doesn’t it? Once you have some traffic flowing, it’s good to keep that traffic within your “group” of sites and/or pages until they are ready to visit one of your affiliate or product links. I like to use a few different ways of keeping the traffic around, until they have seen a lot of solid, helpful information which also contains my affiliate marketing.

I thought I’d go over some some methods that could be used to increase link popularity, for the newer readers here who might be new to this whole Search Engine Optimization thing.

Link popularity is something that the Search Engines use to determine how “important” your page is to the person doing the Search. They use this, along with a lot of other things, to decide how close to the TOP of the pages returned, under a search, your page should appear.

You’re starting out and one of the first things you’ll be sorting out is finding a place for all your projects to live. For most of us this means finding some hosting and a domain name.

As you read webmaster forums you’ll probably be aware that webmasters who have been in the business more than a year will likely have a number of domain names. But do YOU really need to get lots of these things when you’re starting out? Definitely not. The webmasters with lots of domain names, like you, probably started out with one name – and made a lot of pages to go on there. So let’s look at how to maximize ONE domain name.

It doesn’t matter if you are a mom building webpages at the family computer after the kids have gone to bed or an old hat who has incorporated; there is one thing that labels us all. We are all executives of our own small businesses. When I say executive, I mean it. We earn that title a hundred times over our mega-corporate counterparts because we have to wear so many hats just to get through the day. Our businesses depend on us alone. We have to do so many different things to effectively manage our two most important assets that we are truly ‘Jack’s of all trades’. Today I am going to talk about our number one MOST important asset: Time.

I wanted to write something today for everyone who might have been in this business for a few months but are finding it tough. I’d hate to think that anyone was out there pulling their hair out in frustration and wondering why nothing they tried was working out for them. I’ve been in that position myself a lot of times (before there were places to seek help, like this site) so I’d like to offer a few suggestions if you’re there now.

Getting help.

I was wondering what to write about in the early hours this morning but I found that a healthy dose of rather strange spam in my email today held the answer. The subject to one of my emails read:

“Reanimate that dead fish!”

You’ve got to admit that it’s intriguing if nothing else and I hope that this is a new breed of spam. But I figured that we’d look at what to do with one of your sites when it’s time to reanimate it. The sales might started to run flat, traffic might have dropped, and this is a major site that HAS to pull it’s own weight. So what do you do…?

Some people will label you no matter what your intentions are, but the majority of webmasters reading the boards will judge unknown, known, and newer webmasters by how they behave on the boards — both in their writing and how they choose to post.

Like many things in life it isn’t always what you say, but when you say it, where and how. After all, if webmasters haven’t done business with you, corresponded via ICQ/IRC, met you in person, or talked to you in on the phone, then what other way can they determine if you are someone they might want to do business with?

About the most important step in getting sales as a webmaster is to show the right ads to the right people. I call this matching it all up, but you could also call it niche marketing or matching your products to your content. If you visit most sites you’ll see ads related to the kinds of things you’re reading about.

For example at searchenginewatch.com, you’ll get ads for software that promises to improve your ranking and other search engine related products and services.

Once you have built several websites, and they have been online for some time, it’s not a bad idea to check up on them once in awhile to make sure there is still a decent amount of traffic going to these older sites. A lot of the link lists drop your sites after a few months when they are cleaning out their links. A lot of search engines from time to time seem to drop listings too.

I wanted to get back to basics for the new folks here and look at TRAFFIC (people coming to your site!) Whether you’ve got a new site that you’re unsure about, or some ideas that you want to test out, unless you get people TO your creation – you’re never gonna make a cent.

There are a lot of ways to generate traffic in this business – way more than I can cover in one post here but I think I can give you an idea of the different areas you’re going to be facing if you’re just getting started…

So I was sitting here thinking what I could write to help some people this week and I came up with an idea for an article that might serve as a useful tool for some folks. On the next few screens (or sheets of paper), depending how you like to read, I want to go through the ESSENTIAL skeleton that your site should have if it’s to have any kind of success on the market today. What I’ve complied is a TEN-point checklist that you should hold up to your site and see how it compares. The first point is…

I’m sure you have heard people mention, private link lists, or private traffic pumps, or private website directories. These private sources of traffic can be used to target and filter your traffic, through your sites, and right into your affiliate program’s sites.

What is a private link list?

It’s simply a site you will setup to list all your sites on, to keep the traffic flowing through them, until the site visitor finds something they are really interested in.

One of the terms that I’ve picked up, from working the search engines where you have to pay to get traffic, is “traffic campaign”. I really like this name because it encompasses more than just ’submitting’. Many webmasters find when they start out that they submit sites and then BANG! They hit a wall. The traffic does not start to flow.

If you build it, they will not come…
If you build it AND submit it, they still might not come!

One thing that I always recommend webmasters do in order to succeed and help secure their place in the future of this business, is to get into a hefty amount of research. One of the best forms of research, that’s always proved invaluable to me and that I couldn’t have made my money I have without, is to check out the sites that are already out there.

Do you have a regular schedule of doing backups? Think about the files not only on your local system but the server. Yes, I know your host probably has a backup system, but why tempt fate? Make sure to backup locally (on your hard drive) any text databases that you use on the server. Here’s a list that webmasters might run down for their websites and local machines: