Building Traffic

You have to get traffic to your website. There are three ways to promote your web site, Free promotion, paid promotion, and get paid to promote. 

Free Promotion

This works particularily well if you have a web site that actually has quality content in it.  By this I mean, for instance The Gourd Reserve is all about gourd growing, crafting, and other aspects of Gourd arts & crafts. We have an email group, and online forum, and we are members of at least a half dozen other gourd related groups on the internet.  These groups are email groups, most of the have been Yahoo groups, which are easy to start up, and promote from your site.  When sending emails to any of these groups, we always use our Signature file:

(my name)
The Gourd Reserve
http://www.thegourdreserve.com
Affiliate Resources R Us
http://www.affiliateresourcesrus.thegourdreserve.com/

If there are 200 members in an email group, you probably won't get all 200 of them to visit, but you will get a significant amount of traffic from them.  Next, find other Gourd related web sites, (or whatever your web site is about), and exchange links with them, this will draw traffic to your site.  Then look for the top 100 sites and start one of these up for your web site.  This is all some of the best advertising you can get. Some email groups have 2000 members or more.  Some will not let you include links, but most do as long as you are not spamming in your emails.

One word about your web site though, Crafts are not the best paying in either advertising or in affiliate relationships, because most of the merchandise being promoted is low dollar and you only get a small percentage of that.  We advertise a range of art books through Amazon, and I don't make as much money promoting products there as I do writing articles, in fact I probably make more money on Adsense than on selling books, however it is still a little, and it more than pays for the web site hosting, so I don't leave it out.  On the other hand if you are an auto mechanic, construction worker, maybe you work in the field of education or cosmetics, these types of web sites have a much greater potential for generating a sizable income than do crafts.  Our suggestion is to create multiple web sites, make one of them significant, and just keep adding to the knowledge you are sharing with others. Don't force them to buy in order to learn something, give them a lot of advice and a lot of tips, but area's you don't know, or products you think are worthy, promote them.  If your products are a valuable asset to your visitors, then it is valuable to you.  Not because you will get a few dollars for it, but because people will respect your help and come back to you for more.

Paid Advertising

Google Adwords

Paid advertising also helps, especially when your web site is new and no one knows about it yet. The key to paid advertising is offsetting the cost.  If you are dealing with a web site that is going to trickle in a few dollars here and there, you want to keep paid advertising to a minimum, on the other hand if you are promoting popular items that are bringing in several dollars per sale, then you want to advertise high enough to draw the right kind of traffic, people that may be looking for what you specifically have to offer.  Do not send them to the top of a page that nhas their product buried somewhere in it, or at least have a link to that product at the top of the page.

Google advertising is a tricky area, if you are doing something that you think requires the use of paid advertising, then we highly recommend getting the book Beating Adwords! We purchased this book for a reason, Google has what they call quality bid keywords.  If you do not know what you are doing, you may find keywords that cost you $5.00 that others may be paying 10 cents for.  If you know and understand Googles methods of ranking your keywords, then you can go a long way to keeping your keywords in the competetive market without Google throwing you out of the race.  I appoligize, but these people did a lot of research to learn and share this information, and it would not be right for me to give their information away, that is called plegerism.  What I have shared with you so far and will continue to share with you is my own experience, and it is my experience on a website I have that a word I bid on for a non selling, educational site I had, had a keyword bid of $5.00, and frankly I was out of the race to even advertise that word.  I'm not trying to scare you, I'm just letting you know, some things are worth learning, and the price of education on internet marketing is cheap in comparison to entering college to learn something. If you are going to be successful, there are a few key things you need to know, and this is definately one of them.

Get Paid to Advertise

Actually this falls into the catagory of getting paid to write articles which we discuss in more detail how to make money writing articles and submitting them to online article sites.  It is not difficult, you don't have to be a professional journalist, all you have to do is have an opinion.  however on these sites, you can write and article and with taste, (and not blatant spamming), you can add a link to your web site which has products that relate to your article!  Once your article is accepted for publishing, you will get paid for the article,  and at the same time you will get a link to your web site.