The Best Way to Enhance the Value of Your Web Site & Generate Revenue?

[tedsudol]

Hi,
In reading what different people on various forums are saying it seems the best way to go when you buy a domain name is to put up a web site, develop a stream of income. And the traffic that comes will over time enhance the value of the site when you decide to sell.

So I have been looking at various ways to accomplish that. One of the methods that has been recommended is affiliate programs. In looking at the different affiliate program they either give you a web site with your code that you refer people to or place some code to put a banner on your page. If you set up your domain to to forward to your affiliate page how will the search engines view traffic that comes to your page. Will it be counted as coming to your page or the referral page?

It doesn't seem to me there is a way to just put the code for their site on your domain (of course with your code for commissions) and have people come to www.yourdomain.com rather than www.yourdomain.hisdomain.com Is there a way or isn't it important?

One of the domains I recently grabbed was nichedigger.com with an idea to use it as an affiliate site for one of the keyword programs. In researching the various keyword programs on clickbank Keyword Elite seems the best in terms of gravity and success other affiliates have been having.

I think the problem I have with Google Adwords is that I'm really starting out with no email list so I need to find ways to drive traffic to my sites to make that pay. So far the Google Adwords have been paying a fraction of what parking at Sedo was for CapeCodBeaches.info I thought that maybe putting a link on that paid more per click would help out.

I've read different ways to generate traffic. None of them seem to work that well. One of them was with these sites that pay by sending visitors to your site in exchange for viewing others sites. There supposedly was a way to automate this whole process. When it didn't work as claimed the vendor bailed. I worked with it and got it working in a half baked sort of way. But even though it sends traffic to my site I think it's just automated robots looking at other automated robots sites. No live eyeballs. And no sales.

The other thing I tried a becanda product that was recommended. It is an automated poster that posts on thousands of free ad sites and it does do that. However its a lot of work and activity signifying nothing. I have statcounter on all of my sites and it shows no sales coming from all of those hundreds of thousands of ads. I don't think its poor ad copy or poor copywriting because the same ads on Craigslist do OK.

Craigs list has been OK in getting people to the sites. The only problem is that if you place more than ten ads at a time they get flagged and removed within a few minutes. If you place less than ten they will usually last a few hours. So if your idea of generating traffic is to be constantly placing ads on Craigslist (until they ban you completely - which they have done to others) I guess you could boost your numbers. I even purchased one of the Craigslist autoposter tools that is supposed to get around Craigslist restriction against placing two duplicate ads up by adding random bits of nonsense text. But it didn't seem to make a difference in how long the ads lasted.

What do you feel is the best way to generate some traffic to my web sites?

All the best,
Ted Sudol

[daniel]

Hi Ted -
Welcome to the forum and good post and topic! You have a chance of winning our contest that ends in a few days

I have found a few good tips for getting traffic to my websites. Some of the most easiest ones is by simply posting links to my sites in some of the busier forums. A link to your website in your signature helps as well. I am not that familiar with the Craigs list tricks, never really went down that path. Many people have mentioned it recently. I generate a lot of traffic by offering my products for sale at Clickbank. For only $49 you can list your products for sale. Now, you have their entire army of affiliates promoting your website. In addition, you get listed in their MarketPlace and this generates tons of clicks.

Regarding email marketing: The quickest way to build an email list is by giving away one of your products or ebooks for free. Simply setup an autoresponder and require your visitors to enter an email in return for your free ebook or product. Now you have an email that you can use to build a a slow relationship with your prospect. Over time, you can begin to offer them new products etc.. I would be curious to hear more thoughts and feedback on the subject.

Dan

[nielsencl]

You can drive traffic to your site from other places or you can attract traffic by having a good site with as much content as possible. No matter what kind of site you have, it should be optimized for search engines. If you don't optimize it you are missing out on all the traffic that you could have working for a long time. It may not be a huge amount depending our your site, but it will help and the "cost" of the traffic is pretty low.

[charley]

No matter what kind of site you have, it should be optimized for search engines. If you don't optimize it you are missing out on all the traffic that you could have working for a long time.

How does the .info extension fare with search engines?

I have some with high overture keywords.

[tedsudol]

Hi,
Thanks to all for your help. Dan when you say that you've generated lots of traffic by placing products on clickbank are those products you've devoped or products for which you have resale rights?

As far as growing an email list by offering a free product how do you get those initial views to the site to sign up in the first place. I can set up a free autoresponder for my domain with my hosting company. I'm sure it is the same with a lot of hosting companies. Yet I notice a lot of marketers use an autoresponder service like aweber. Why is that? I've used a commercial autoresponder in the past and was very disappointed with their deliverability. It seems like they are a lot more likely to get banned by an ISP even if they are following all of the rules because the ISP sees a boatload of emails coming from one place and just closes off the spigot until they can check it out.

Nielsencl you suggest optimizing your site. Ok you use the right keywords, check keyword density, and optimize it. Then what it the next step. Submit to the search engines using an automated search, hand submit, wait until the search engines find you or something else?

Thanks again to all for your help.
All the best,
Ted Sudol

[daniel]

Ted
Most of my products listed on CB are my own products. Most of the IM folks use a service like aweber for various reasons. Aweber offers a high
deliverability rate compared to your own server. They also include all types of templates for optin forms, etc.. You also do not put yourself at risk for spamming and getting your own server shut down.

[nielsencl]

Nielsencl you suggest optimizing your site. Ok you use the right keywords, check keyword density, and optimize it. Then what it the next step. Submit to the search engines using an automated search, hand submit, wait until the search engines find you or something else?

Well, for the style of optimization that I do, I first do the keyword research, then optimize the site, and then submit. I don't worry about the keyword density.

The reason I don't is that I follow this simple formula: Use as many different keywords and phrases as possible both in the tags and the on-page content. Just make sure that you use good English, and stay within normal limits for things like the title tag (about 70 characters).

Once the site is optimized, the search engines that spider will find it, but you should submit to the others that won't and of course to directories. Submit to as many places as possible. Submit by hand or hire a service since there are some ones that are quite good and very cheap. Submission software can work, but it is not as effective and if done incorrectly can be a waste of time. WHAT you submit is important. Start with a good DMOZ-style listing and make sure you follow the rules of the site you are submitting to. If they have a comments field or a place for a note, THANK THEM!

Most people think directories "owe" them a free listing, and that's not true. On the other hand, some directory owners think you should PAY THEM to take your listing. I think that a good listing has value and is a fair exchange between site owner and directory owner.

There are lots of other things that you can do like link building, but if you just do what I described you should have good results. The three things that are all important are:

Keyword research
Optimization
Submissions

If any of these are not done well the results will not be as good as they can be.

[SylviaVictor]

This thread is great. Could anyone tell me whether there are any other Forums on this topic?

[nielsencl]

Well, of course there are. I'm sure there are many I don't know about.

I would do some searches for the things you are interested in and add the word "forum" to the end and you should find many to check out.

[sharrychrist]

Nice Stuff!!