While there are many ways to drive traffic to your website while running your affiliate marketing business. It’s interesting to note that most affiliates are still gunning for the same old methods that are rapidly losing their importance and effectiveness as far as getting highly targeted traffic to your website. Consider these obsolete (or almost) methods of generating traffic:
Article marketing
Head over to the warrior forum (which I am not a very big fan of, anyway) and you will see mentions of article marketing as a great method to drive traffic to your affiliate sites. The news: It isn’t. What’s gaining traction and popularity now is guest blogging – the good, old, method of writing relevant and insightful articles for other bloggers for free.
Article marketing encourages nonsensical, crappy, and totally junk articles to work for your business. If you are serious about your business, you don’t want to do article marketing this way. Period.
Buying links (or anything else for that matter)
Buying your way into link building is not going to work. Google looks down hard on websites that horde up links by accepting payments. You may buy tools if you want to be more productive, have someone else produce content for you, make someone design professional graphics for you, etc. Don’t make the mistake of buying links think that it would increase your authority. If there’s one way of link building, it’s manual.
Spinning articles and rewrites
Customers on the Internet are evolving slowly. They can discern from ‘awesome’ and ‘crappy’ content. I still see many affiliate marketers spending money on having articles re-written from originals, using PLR articles, or using spinning software to produce hundreds of articles from a few original ones. None of these will work.
Article writing and blog posting is the job of humans. Even if you create a computer with artificial intelligence, it can never write an article as good as the one that comes from the heart. Get out of this rut. Spend the money – the dough that you’d have spent on the spinning software or on re-writing articles – on producing original ones.
Over emphasis on SEO
It’s hard to get away from the vice-like grip SEO has over affiliate marketers. It’s not surprising since 87% of the users on the Internet use search engines to find what they seek. Yet, it’s important to get away from the grip. Don’t be obsessed with one single way of generating traffic. SEO is just one method of generating traffic; there are a lot more ways to do that.
Don’t spend tons of money on SEO software. Pick only important software. Use wordpress plugins for SEO that are free to start with. Further, don’t obsess with keywords in your articles. In case you didn’t know, it’s hard to compete with most keyword sets today. It’s the long tail of search that’ll finally fetch you traffic. The long tail will happen as long as you stay focused and write great content within your niche.