Preparing your website follows the same concept. You want to make sure that things are neat and tidy. Make sure that your navigation follows a logical sequence. Make sure that you have plenty of good content, and that everything is spelled correctly.

You also want your visitors to be able to participate in your site – to take action. Look at each page, and determine what type of action your visitors can take. Do you have a forum or blog? Do you conduct polls or surveys? Do you have a subscribe box for your opt-in list on every page of your site? Make absolutely sure that your website is ready for company! Also make sure that your pages lead your visitors to take the action that you want them to take, no matter what that action may be.

That is the first and most essential step of traffic generation. If your site isn’t pleasing and welcoming, any traffic generation activities you do from this point on are wasted! Take the time, and put forth the effort to make your site as good as possible – and learn to look at it from your visitor’s point of view!

After you do this, make sure that you are using all of the best known Search Engine Optimization techniques, such as making sure that you have clean HTML code, that you’ve used your keyword effectively, that you have keyword rich text links and alt tags, and that the title of your website, in your HTML code, has your main keyword or phrase as well. Take some time to explore SEO techniques, so that you can draw natural search traffic as well.

Once your website is ready for company, you are ready to start inviting that company. You do not need any special tools for traffic generation. What you need is your computer, an Internet connection, your mind, a willingness to do the work, and knowledge. That’s all it takes.

Homework Assignment:Make absolutely sure that your website is ready to receive traffic. Do you have an opt-in page? Do you have a subscribe box on every page of your site? Look at each page, and determine whether there is enough content, and if there is an action for your visitors to take on each page. Make sure that your site is optimized for the search engines.

Affiliate marketing began just four years after the world wide web was launched, originally popularized by well known companies such as CDNOW or Amazon.com. Google’s Adsense is also a very well known type of affiliated marketing, but is not really considered as true affiliate marketing as the adverts usually centers around the theme of the website they are displayed (known more as contextual advertising.) Google does not also directly sell a specific product, but generates money in other ways.

Affiliate marketing is highly cost-effective, and in effect costs both the advertiser and the affiliate nothing, while having the potential of bringing in a very large form of income for both parties. While pay per click (or cost-per-click) mentioned above can present a risk to the advertiser, the cost-per-sale (CPS) system has very little or no risk at all for both parties, and is therefore preferred.

First where do your ads show up?  In Google they show up across the top or the right side.  The top ads are are generally in a lighter background to separate them from organic results.  The advantage of using PPC is to force your site to be seen even if it doesn’t have Organic Rankings.  It is important to understand that even with organic ranking you can produce far more sales using PPC in conjunction with it.   A report from Atlas stated that if you have a PPC ad you are likely to make “2 sales” and organic linking “1 sale”, having both you make “4 sales”.  While I haven’t seen this myself, it is a reliable source and I’ll take that to heart.

Google forces you to bid for positions, but they do not tell you what you need to get into the top spot.  They use some level of black magic to determine who gets top slot.  They look at Ad Copy, Landing Page, Bid and Click through rate.  Now if you have a high CTR and high quality others you will actually pay less than your “Bid”.  Also you can big less and get higher position.  It all gets convoluted, but you need to make sure you have a high Quality Score in Google and you’ll reap the benefits.  (post questions on adwords if you have any and I’ll answer the best I can)

So now you’ve placed your bids, you can choose to have ads show up on Google, their search partners or in their content network.  The content network is by far their largest audience, but it also their more dangerous place for click fraud so if you are going to use it, watch it very carefully and you can restrict certain sites from displaying your ads or you can chose to show your ads only on certain sites by url/placement.  But unfortunately many good quality sites that have adsense do not have this option turned on (TURN IT ON!).

A couple of key items are to make sure you have a strong ad, and strong url to send people too.  Many people working with affiliate marketing will try to send people to the same url. So now they are all competing for the same property.  (Google, Yahoo etc will only allow one ad per url to appear).  Later on I promise I’ll go over landing pages, url’s and ads for ppc and other advertising.  My experience is very different than most so hopefully people will gain some knowledge.

Key things to keep in mind, you’re shirt needs to stay on  your back you need to MONITOR your campaigns or you will lose a LOT of money.