David Fiske A subtle blend of affiliate marketing and web development

I've been going through recent posts on A4U looking for information on traffic generation. Besides link exchanges and search engine optimisation, I come to a blank when I am promoting a site. Sandis (A4U) from www.moreniche.com came up with these suggestions:
 
SEO

Checked and double checked! When I build websites, two things are at the forefront of my mind: SEO and accessibility.

PPC

Dabbled in but I'm not really winning. I'm obviously picking the wrong phrases and my landing pages are usually dire.

Joint Ventures

Not sure about this one. CAN YOU HELP? If you are part of a joint venture, contact me and let me know why it's good. Also contact me if you are looking for a joint venture partner ;-)

eZines

This splits into two: my own and other people's. Promoting to my own email list is an idea but I have a relatively small sized list on a topic that is irrelevant to most of my affiliate efforts.

The alternative is buying adverts in other people's ezines. This is certainly a possibility but it doesn't rank highly with me. There is no long term gain unless some of the readers become repeat customers.

Article Distribution

From the hundreds of emails I get on a daily basis, this is the one thing that comes around time and time again. Write some articles and distribute them.

I did this with one site a while back and as we speak, I have 55 free backlinks. Net benefit is very little. However, I suppose that if I write 10 articles, I could have 500 back links. And if they were juicy articles, they could become very popular.

Press Release Distribution

Did this once and as a result, I keep getting spammed :-(

I suppose this would be a good idea so long as the website is unique, or has a unique angle. I would doubt it if a standard affiliate site could make it into a newspaper but you never know...

Ebay as lead generation tool

This is an interesting point. Take a look here and you will see masses of websites being sold. So there is a possibility to sell a website to someone and perhaps sell more to that person or hope that person refers people to you.

The alternative is selling an ebook which explains something relative to your site with exclusive members-only content on there.

Social Bookmarking / Web 2.0 Sites

A script like Scuttle means I could have my own del.icio.us running in 5 minutes. Infact, Scuttle is del.icio.us compatible so you can transfer bookmarks between them.

But who is going to use Dave's Bookmarks (apart from me)? With social bookmarking sites ten to a penny, why bother? Surely the same can be said about social networking sites like MySpace?

Banners (networks/exchanges)

Usually I place a banner or two on my websites for affiliate programs. I just don't have the room to promote a banner exchange banner. Plus, I cannot control who shows my ad or who's ad shows on my site. So I could get a gold banner on this blog for instance. Relevant? No.

Link Exchanges

My preferred method of traffic generation though I would love to create a buzz and get enormous amounts of backlinks.

Forums

This really depends on what type of forum it is. I've got some links in my A4U signature but that results in getting a lot of affiliates and not a lot of paying customers.

Given the time and a bit of patience, I'm sure I could post a dozen posts in several forums but I'm not convinced of the overall benefit.

Paid Text Links

In my opinion, these offer short term gain only. And seeing as Google is clamping down on paid links, probably not a wise option.

Word of Mouth

Another quite difficult one as it relies on having something newsworthy to promote. People don't just tell other people about websites unless there is something different about it. Take a look at the links I provide in this post. They are all relevant and provide background reading. I don't link to things that hold no value.

Video

I've not branched into podcasting or videocasting but would like to. I'm not sure my face is pretty enough for video though!

Affiliate Program (your own one)

Nice idea. I suppose this could work on affiliate sites such as Compare Sat Nav but essentially that creates a cash back type website - that's something I'm not interested in.

But if I were to sell a physical product or an ebook, I would make sure an affiliate program was added as a number one priority.

Offline print ads

Too expensive.

Video/TV ads

Too expensive.

Cross Promotion

I'm unsure at what this is but I interpret it as promoting my websites on each other. I already do this and an example is on Compare Sat Nav - it promotes My Breakdown Cover.

Blogs

I prefer this one over forum posting but the issue of no-follow means there is no Google benefit. The other search engines should pick it up though.

Ebook distribution

So long as there is a good idea behind it, I'm sure ebooks could work. Mind you, I hate the ones which contain affiliate links - which is exactly what I would be creating :-(

Peer-2-peer usage for pdf/ebook distribution

Not keen on this one as it devalues the ebook somewhat.

Video: Lego Bubblegum Sorter