This is especially pertinent in social media like Facebook.  How many times do you think that people “like” something just because their friends do?  By and large, as social animals, many people just like the same things out of habit.

Great, but Does Conformity Do Anything for Converting Traffic?

Yes, in fact, it does.  If you play your cards right, the same reason people do what their friends do can apply to converting traffic.  You just have to convey somehow that these followers’ friends are clicking through to your sales page.

Let’s say, for instance, that you’ve put out a message on Facebook that “This website has the greatest stuff ever!” and provide the link.  People click on the link and see a phrase like “This is what they’re all talking about!” pointing to the link to your opt-in page.  A small little phrase like that will suck them into your list and sales page.

This Thinking Increases Upselling

One of the trickier parts of Internet marketing is upselling.  Most people don’t want to spend more than they absolutely have to for a product.  Sometimes, merely informing them of the benefits of buying the “platinum package” isn’t nearly enough.  A lot of people will just think, “That’s great, but the standard package does all I need.”

Now, try upselling to the platinum package by saying in so many words that “everyone is doing it!”  Even better, say, “Don’t miss out on the great stuff your friends (or competitors) are getting!”  Chances are, with a little bit of social pressuring, more people will cave in to the upsell than without it.

To a lot of people, 15 extra features simply aren’t worth the extra ten dollars to buy the larger packages.  Most people will simply settle for “good enough.”  However, with just a little peer pressure, the upsell is worth the extra 50 dollars as long as everyone else is doing it.

This is quite often how television ads work.  McDonald’s emphasizes that people all over the world are “lovin’ it” with the Big Mac.  7-Up shows how their soda makes a cranky celebrity “bubbly.”  You, too, can capitalize on this in 420 characters or less.

Multiple Traffic Streams Increase Your Footprint

Think of multiple traffic streams this way:  Imagine your website being the hub at the center of a wheel.  Each traffic stream—that is, each link—is a spoke in this wheel.  The more spokes you have, the more it accurately resembles a wheel.

The more traffic streams you have, the more chances a surfer has of finding your website.  Outside of the search engine results page, wherever you have a presence is an opportunity for a viewer to find you by you placing a link there.  While it’s certainly great getting a backlink off of a “relevant” website, it’s much easier to put them up yourself on social networks.

Why Social Media Networks are Great for Backlinking

There are several opportunities for backlinking on social media networks.  You can make a link in your profile, you can post it in a blog entry, and you can create fan groups for your business.  The backlinking doesn’t end there, though.

You can create multiple profiles to backlink to your website.  You can also make links to your other social media accounts to generate more interest in your products.  Also, once you start getting a solid reputation, other members of the social media platform may start backlinking to your site.  That’s when you know you’ve hit a goldmine.

Getting Traffic This Way Increases Your Search Engine Ranking

The effect that multiple traffic streams have on your search engine ranking cannot be understated.  The simple fact of the backlinks to your website looks good to the search engines.  This alone has a positive effect on your search engine ranking.

Let’s also add that the increased traffic that you will get from the multiple traffic streams will dramatically increase your search engine ranking.  Search engines rank websites significantly based on how much traffic they get, as well as by how many backlinks they get.

This, in turn, will increase the traffic to your website.  The relationship between your website and the search engines takes on a feedback loop that will continue to increase the traffic to your website.

Ultimately, the more places that you can be found on the Internet or in the real world, there are more ways people can find your site.  The more people find your site, the more people will be able to find your site.  This ultimately is the goal of every marketer, to get the search engines to favor your site over the others.

Your Business’s Website isn’t All that Benefits from Bookmarking

Because of this, not only can you link directly to your business’s website, but you can also upload links to your blogs, your submissions to YouTube, your ezine articles, and whatever else you have put up promoting your business! For everything you have posted about your business, you can post keyword-empowered bookmarks, share them with others, and check out what others have posted.

Social bookmarking websites include Digg.com, Mixx.com, and Delicious.com. These are the most advantageous to use, so use them all! It probably wouldn’t hurt to look for other social bookmarking sites to use. Remember, the more avenues you have to put up keyword tags related to your business, the more visible you are on search engines!

Of course, there does come a point where managing so many memberships will become cumbersome. Never fret; there are resources to handle this situation. AutoPoster.com can enable you to make semi-automatic blog submissions to over 50 social bookmarking sites. Incidentally, AutoPoster is a good place to search for more social bookmarking sites to include in your web empire.

Getting Free Labor for Bookmarking Your Blog Submissions

Another technique that you can use to maximize your exposure is to encourage your blog readers to bookmark your blog submissions. This can be done with a WordPress plugin called ShareThis. This way, you can employ your reader base to promote your business without paying them a dime. Talk about having free labor!

Some people might think this is a bit insidious. After all, aren’t these sites meant for social networking, making new friends, and seeing new things of interest? Consider this fact: Many online business owners do this sort of thing all the time. A little bit of time spent on nearly any social networking site will show you that businesses exist on them. MySpace.com is a major example. One of the intended uses of MySpace was as an avenue for musicians to promote their bands. Many other types of groups have caught on to this trend and have MySpace accounts for their groups. In short, there’s nothing wrong with advertising on social sites as long as your business is legitimate.

The possibilities are only limited by your imagination. The more work and thought you put into your Internet marketing campaign, the more you will get out of it. The basic idea is that the more websites you have linked together with your keywords and related to your business, the more exposure you will have. The more exposure you have, the more potential clients you have. It’s really that simple.

Tweeting About Your Blogging

The most useful thing about Twitter is that you can use it to drive traffic to your blogging site or your other monetized sites.  What it basically amounts to is that you Tweet something to the effect of “My thoughts on…” and provide a link to your website.  Your followers see this, and if they’re interested, follow the link.

Of course, this means that you have to have a list of followers on Twitter.  The great thing about this is that since nearly everyone has a Twitter account, you can just announce that you have one, and everyone that follows your other social media sites will follow your Twitter.  Some, because they already have a Twitter account, and others may create their own accounts to follow yours.

Are the Old Social Media Sites Dead?

Many social media platforms have tools that allow you to import posts from other media sites so that what you Tweet about on Twitter becomes a post on Facebook, Plaxo, Multiply, and so on.  Many people still want the older social media accounts so they can post longer blogs.

From this, it’s easy to see that your more established social media sites aren’t rendered useless by the new micro-blogs.  Some people actually abhor Twitter, just because they don’t want to write little mini-blurbs about their grilled cheese sandwiches.  When your Tweets are imported to these larger sites, you don’t lose the customer base that isn’t impressed by Twitter.

Listbuilding on Twitter—What to Keep in Mind

When you start listbuilding on Twitter, there are some things to consider if you want to impress your new followers.  You don’t want them to think you’re a “spammer.”  Don’t delude yourself. “Spammer” is a loosely given title that people give, and it doesn’t necessarily follow the technical definition.  If you’re a marketer, you’re at risk of being defamed as a spammer.

The first thing people look at when you make a friend request is your previous posts.  Twitter shows up to 20 of them.  A mistake that the actual spammers make is that they make a bunch of friends and immediately flood them with links to membership sites.  It doesn’t snag many users, and it gives marketing a bad name.

Instead, you can make a few small Tweets about your grilled cheese sandwich, your family, and then a link to your blog.  Do this a few more times, and you can start adding your other monetized sites.  The point is that if you start off on Twitter thinking that you’re going to make quick money, you’re wrong.  You have to establish trust with your followers in order to keep making money.

Maximizing Traffic — the Beginning Stages

If your plan for maximizing traffic lies in your search engine page ranking, you’re selling yourself short.  Page ranking works, but the wheels of Google often turn way too slowly to have a good start.  From the get-go your page should be optimized, but don’t hold your breath for that page one ranking to begin with or even getting indexed.

If you’re ambitious, you should be maximizing your traffic no more than a second after you get your page published.  Write about it in your blog, tweet all your followers, and update your Facebook.  If you have a mailing list already, tell them.  Spread the word far and wide since the traffic you’re already getting and the backlinks you’ve made will reflect on your page ranking.

Getting New Traffic to Your Site

Of course, it’s great that traffic from your already existing sources is going to your website.  Of course, who doesn’t want more traffic?  There are several ways of getting new traffic to your website.  Creating a new group and inviting all your friends on Facebook is a start.  If they join, Facebook will tell all their friends.  If they join, then Facebook will let all THEIR friends know and so on.  Make friends and influence people!

All this activity and hubbub about your site will naturally increase your page ranking on the search engines.  This is good for the long haul traffic.  Once you see that traffic is starting to come in from these sources, most of your work will be in changing the page content periodically.  It can be an informative blog, which makes content changes perfectly natural.  You can tweak around a few of the page elements.  The idea is to keep people coming back for more.  Of course, you should throw the occasional plug in for your ads.

Revenue Sharing—What It Is and Isn’t

Revenue sharing is a great way to make money off of your traffic without charging them anything.  I’m sure you’ve seen the banner and sidebar ads on a number of websites.  These are the source of revenue sharing income.  Basically, if a viewer clicks on these ads, you make a percentage of the income.

As I said earlier, you don’t tend to make a large percentage of the income from these links…not anything compared to an affiliate commission, anyway.  The plus side is that you make your commission whether or not your click through traffic converts.  Granted, conversions are what your “partner” is hoping for, but that’s not what you’re getting paid for.

Use the Software. Ditch the Domain Hosting.

You can start off one of two ways with affiliate marketing on WordPress.  You can either get a VIP membership, pay some extra money, and have certain restrictions on your marketing, or you can download the software and use it with your own domain hosting.  Truth be told, the latter is the better option.

The reason for this is simple; if you have your own domain already, then why pay for another?  Furthermore, if you have complete freedom to post what kinds of links you want on your own domain, why would you use domain hosting that doesn’t allow it?

WordPress Has More Static Pages and Plugins.

One problem of using Blogger rather than WordPress is that Blogger’s static pages aren’t immediately easy to create, whereas WordPress is pretty straightforward.  If you want your affiliate links to show up immediately on Blogger, you have to backdate your recent articles.  Only then will your blog posts be static rather than dynamic.  You can do that, or you can use several Blogger accounts for each link.

Simply put, WordPress has more plugins than Blogger does.  This can make your blog more interactive and all around more useful for your marketing strategy.  There are several so-called Blogger plugins created by independent programmers, but keep in mind that there’s a good chance that they won’t work.  They could even get your account suspended.

Affiliate Link Do’s and Don’ts on WordPress.com

As long as your blog isn’t overtly about affiliate marketing, you can use an affiliate link from certain affiliate programs.  The trick is that it has to be a “real blog,” so if you’re aggressive with your linking, you definitely don’t want to host on WordPress.com.

There are certain types of affiliate advertising you can’t do on WordPress.com, though you can do it to your heart’s content if you download the software and put it on your own domain.  That is, you can’t use AdSense or other dynamic contextual advertising on their domain.

They do allow links to “reputable” vendors such as Amazon, and if you’re making your own products and selling them on sites like Etsy.com, you’re okay.  Now, while many merchants are actually quite reputable, WordPress may not think so.  These rules are also subject to change, so it’s better to just download the software and put it on your own domain.

So, What Good is Blogger for an Affiliate Marketer?

Let’s go back to the beginning.  Blogger ranks higher than WordPress, right?  For the affiliate marketer, this makes Blogger great for testing the waters on a niche.  If things look good, you can scrap the Blogger account and start a WordPress blog.  If it doesn’t look good, you’re not out any money.

If you’re interested in creating a joint venture with someone, there are several benefits to consider:

Joint ventures increase website traffic.
Other than financial gain, joint ventures (also known as a “JV”) attract more traffic to your website, as well as your partner’s website. As you promote your project through your websites, blogs, or other promotional activities, people will want to get more information about all the people promoting the products.

Joint ventures are an effective way to build your lists.
The added benefit of having two or more names promoting a product is that you can extend your reach to more people online. Be sure to have an opt-in form on your blog or website so you can capture leads from the added traffic.

You may even want to interview your JV partner and post that interview as a podcast on your site. Then he or she can do the same and interview you and post the podcast. Podcasts not only showcase your expertise but also place a personality on a product. In Internet marketing, a good personality can have a lot of pull when it comes to listbuilding and sales.

Joint ventures allow you to split the work.
A joint venture can often be a huge undertaking. The good news is that you can split the work so you won’t have to carry the entire load on your shoulders. Some people opt for a 50/50 split in the workload; others may do a 90/10 split, with one person contributing more financial resources while the other does more footwork. As long as both parties are happy with the arrangement, JVs are beneficial to everyone involved.

Joint ventures are a great way to promote your brand.
Because of increased visibility, JVs can promote your brand as well as create a new one. Working hand-in-hand with a partner opens up many more doors than working independently on your own projects.

Once launched, a joint venture is a great way to earn passive income.
There’s no doubt that it takes a lot of elbow grease to develop your JV from an idea to a full-fledged product launch. However, once initiated, your JV can create a source of passive income for weeks, months, or years to come.

Joint ventures are a great way to team up with someone to create and launch a product. If you’re interested in using JVs in your affiliate marketing business, your best bet is to partner with someone you’ve known for a long time or with someone who has already experienced a moderate degree of success in affiliate marketing. For best results, you should team up with someone whose strengths balance your weaknesses (and vice versa).

Use Affiliate Marketing Forums to Increase Your Presence

Check this out. I just typed “affiliate marketing forums” in Google. There are 12,500,000 hits for that search alone. “Internet marketing forums” gives a return of 55,600,000 results. With all these available forums—and more—to get the word out about your product, there’s no reason why you cannot start building your list.

Use Niche-Specific Forums to Establish Your Authority

There’s no need to stick with marketing forums alone. Conduct a Google search to find forums full of people that are interested in what you have to offer. If you’re selling gaming software, join gaming forums. If you’re selling craft supplies, find a forum that’s compatible to your business. Niche it down as tightly as you can to build your authority as well as your lists.

Add Your Website, Blog, or Landing Page Address to Your Signature File

Once you join a community and people begin to know you, they’ll want to check out what you have to offer. Always add your website address to your signature file in the forum to attract visitors to your site. Some forums prohibit signature files but allow posters to add their website addresses to their profile page.

Don’t Rush in Like Gang Busters

One of the biggest mistakes new forum members make is to rush in and post dozens of times in the first week or two. That’s overkill and will annoy some of the more seasoned members of the forum. Because forum rankings are often based on the number of posts, some new members try to boost their rankings by posting as much as possible.

It’s better to just introduce yourself at first. Then, read some of the older posts to get a feel for the flavor of the forum as well as the personalities involved. It’s too easy to be offended by some of the stronger personalities until you understand where they’re coming from. They’ll also need time to get to know you.

As you get used to the community, feel free to ask questions. Also, give back and offer your own expertise. This is how you attract attention and gain credibility.

Once You Establish Authority, Consider Starting Your Own Forum

Many people like to start their own forums but be cautious. Starting a forum takes a lot of hard work and dedication to make it popular and to keep it going. You’ll also need to recruit moderators to set rules, police the forum, and put out an occasional fire when personalities clash.

Using forums for listbuilding is a fun and easy way to increase your visibility. The biggest problem with forums is that many people get addicted to the attention they receive from them and spend hours each day reading and posting in them.  Just be careful not to get so involved that you lose track of time and neglect your other duties. Otherwise, have fun and find a few forums that fit your personality as well as your business goals.

Squidoo is a community of users and a great platform for the affiliate marketer. Basically, what you do is create “lenses” or pages online, sharing your interests with others who share the same interests. It’s a great way to generate a buzz around your product, blog, or website.

Don’t underestimate the power of Squidoo. It’s one of the top 500 visited sites in the country and one of the top 300 in the United States alone. One year ago this month, there were 900,000 hand built lenses on Squidoo.

10 Ideas for a Squidoo Lens

You can create multiple lenses to promote your affiliate marketing business, but here are a few ideas you may want to consider:

1.    Products You Sell. Squidoo is a great place to create a lens about your products. If you want to be even more effective, write a review about each product. Don’t sell them. Talk about them.

2.    Books of Interest to Your Target Market. Every time you read a book that may be of interest to your target market, create a lens about it. What was good about it? Was there something you didn’t like? Do you recommend it?

3.    Post a Rant. It’s not just about selling. It’s about building connections. If there’s something you’d like to get off your chest, create a lens that rants. Have fun with it. People love controversy, and this is a good way to get more views on your lens.

4.    Post a Roast. Let people post stories about you. This is a fun way to poke fun at yourself and entertain your followers. Encourage participation from others.

5.    Entrepreneur’s Lens. Post ideas and new products or services and let others do the same. Create an inventors’ brainstorming lens and let the creative juices flow.

6.    Showcase your eBay Store. If you have an eBay store, create a lens to show people what you’re selling. Be open to questions that others may have about your products.

7.    Showcase Your Website. Don’t use Squidoo to do heavy-handed selling. Instead, write about your website and feature some interesting facts about your business. Let your sales page do the selling. Use Squidoo to direct traffic to your website.

8.    Reveal Your Passions. Use Squidoo to give people insight about the non-business side of your life. Because Internet marketing does not happen face-to-face, people tend to respond to interesting personalities that catch their interest.

9.    Spread the Word about a Special Cause. Give back to your community by creating a lens around a charity or other special interest you support. Don’t just showcase it; invite others to talk about it.

10.    Write a Blog Post. This is the perfect platform to create a blog about your product or service. Because Squidoo is an online community, people will find your blog based on their interests.

Using Squidoo to promote your affiliate marketing business is a fun way to showcase your products, share your talents, and generate conversation in the community. Use Squidoo to build a connection with your target market, generate a buzz, and grow your business to new heights.

One way that affiliate marketers use to attract visitors is to use Google AdWords. It’s an easy way to get impressions in Google, but it doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re going to get a load of traffic from AdWords.

What you DON’T want to do is quickly set up your AdWords account and hope for the best, nor do you want to attract tire kickers. You need to attract targeted visitors who will become buyers.

Here are three mistakes that people make when setting up their Google AdWords account:

Mistake #1: Unfamiliarity with Setting up a Campaign

Don’t rely on the default settings to set up your ad campaign. Your goal is to attract targeted traffic to your website, and you cannot do so if you’ve got the wrong types of traffic checking out what you have to sell. Be sure to adjust the settings so the right people will see what you have to offer.

Also, don’t run your AdWords campaign on a tight budget. You may not get the number of impressions you need to make a good impression in Google.

Mistake #2: Failing to Use Targeted Keywords

Do a little research to see what keywords are most effective in your target market. Use keywords that generate a lot of traffic but may not be readily used by the masses. In order to compete strategically, you’ve got to discover the gold in low competition, high-traffic keywords.

Don’t make the mistake of using the wrong keywords. Strive to get the desired result by avoiding keywords that may attract a lot of traffic but will not result in a single sale.  Doing so is like tossing money to the wind; it’s cold, hard cash that you’ll never see again.

Mistake #3: Being a Big Spender with Nothing to Show for It

One of the biggest mistakes new marketers make is to spend more on advertising than they earn from profits. Your goal is to generate a high CTR and earn more than you spend. This may take a little trial and error to perfect but be sure to spend a daily amount that you can live with.

Keep in mind that this is a learning process. Too many new Internet marketers get overly zealous and start spending tons of cash before they understand how their advertising dollars are working—or not working—in their favor.

Once you get the hang of it, using Google AdWords for getting traffic to your website is an easy and automated method for creating your online presence. While most people learn through trial and error, you may want to do some networking with other affiliate marketers to see how they use Google AdWords to increase their CTR.