More Search Engine Traffic Means More Money
Wednesday, October 31st, 2007In my first post, I showed you that blogs make money because they bring in more search engine traffic than just a static website. Having fresh content and evidence that your site is popular rewards you with a higher position in the search engine results page.
Traffic is the one of the crucial ingredients to having a profitable business ? and blogs can give you that.
But there is another critical requirement.Simply having a blog full of postings and comments will not make you money.
Imagine opening up a sporting goods store in your town. You place an ad in the newspaper. This ad hits a resonant chord and pulls in hundreds of people to your door. The problem is that your shelves are bare.
As this scenario illustrates: you need a product to sell. Maybe you have a product in mind. Perhaps you have a business already. Perhaps you are looking for a product or products to sell.
In this posting, I am going to address this last possibility. You want to make money online but have no product.One solution to this problem is something called affiliate marketing.
What is affiliate marketing?
In a nutshell, affiliate marketing is selling other people?s products and getting a percentage of the sale. There are thousands of people online with products they want to sell. These people are willing to give you anywhere
from 2 to 75% of the price, if you bring them new customers.
In many cases, the person with the product has a website that you can use. So you don?t have to have a website. The site has sales copy designed to convert a visitor into a customer. This is the third essential component of a thriving business. Having products and attracting traffic are critical but it is just as important that all those visitors go from being shoppers to buyers.
The person with the product also has a method already for in place for making the financial transaction as well. So once you bring a potential customer to the sales page, your job is over. If a sale is made then you are sent the money on a regular basis.
Obviously not everyone going to a sales page purchases what is offered. It is quite likely that the person selling the product has collected statistics showing what percentage of visitors actually buys. If that number is high, you can make some good money.
The good news is that becoming an affiliate is usually free.
All you need to do is get an affiliate ID ? which is actually a unique link that you put in your blog at the end of every post you make.You will see such a link at the end of this article.
So by now, you might be wondering what it takes to set up a traffic-pulling blog.
In the next post I will write about this important subject and get into some of the details of how to drive more search engine traffic to your blog.