Gadooney.com

One of the recurring themes here is the good, slow, and steady approach: write good content, write something every day, and good traffic will inevitably follow. That honestly and truly is all you need to do to make money in the world of affiliate marketing, as long as you’re consistent, and do it over and over and over.

But it’s definitely hard, especially with newer sites that aren’t fully indexed in search engines, as we’re hard-wired to want to see results from our hard work, and we want to see them now, not in weeks later and especially not a couple of months from now. ‘Tis a perfectly natural reaction, and I’m still prone to it myself. The natural question, then, is whether or not there are things you can do to generate traffic to your websites now, while waiting for your good, juicy content to get indexed in search engines.

Happily, the answer is yes. But I’ll immediately qualify it, before touching on a few ways to generate traffic. Like anything affiliate related, always consider the time premium. You’ve only got so much time to spend on your site. Be ruthless about how you spend it. Always ask yourself if you’re better off creating more content, as that should be your primary goal. Always. Good content will always trump any other technique or activity. Always.

So how do we generate traffic to a brand new website? Well, our first consideration should be to narrow that down, and ask how we can generate good, focused content to our sites. You could stand on a street corner and shout “Visit my site bluewidgets.com!” at every passerby, for ten hours a day, and that would actually create some traffic, as some people would be curious later when they got home and type in the URL, to see what that idiot on the street corner was shouting about.

But that’s pretty crappy traffic, as you didn’t pre-qualify them at all, and have no idea if they’re interested in blue widgets at all. It’s also not an efficient use of your time, as the handful of curious people that check out your site simply isn’t worth the ten hours you spent shouting on the street corner.

So we not only want to generate traffic, but we want to pre-qualify it, so that the visitors are more inclined than the average surfer to respond to the content on our site. Got all that? Okay, now let’s dive into the first of several ways to generate traffic to our new website.
Generating Traffic from Forums

One of the best ways to generate traffic to a new site is to find forum sites that are related to the topic of your site. In this day and age, pretty much any popular topic you tackle for an affiliate site will have existing forums out there, where people are discussing and debating various related topics. Just do a Google search on “blue widget forums” to find them, or something similar.

Most forums allow you to include a signature line with a URL in it. Check to make sure that the forum you found allows that, as it’s pretty crucial. If they do, you’re in luck. Register for the forum and simply wade into discussions, and create a signature line that has the URL of your website in it. Be sure, too, to put your signature URL to good use. This means varying your link phrase to reinforce important keywords on your site, and not always using the same default signature line.
If your site is about blue widgets, a natural link in your signature line would be “Blue Widgets”, with the entire phrase linked to your website. Set that up and post a good bit using it. If your website is for people looking to buy blue widgets online, another good link phrase would be “Blue Widgets Online”, with that linked to your site. Post for awhile with that, then switch it to “Buy Blue Widgets”. Mix it up, as variety in incoming links to your site will help you more in search engine results than all of the links being exactly the same.
Don’t be blatant about plugging your site and avoid the temptation to take short-cuts like just saying “I agree with JoeBob.” and nothing more. To get the maximum impact you need to build up a certain amount of trust factor, so that it appears that you know what the hell you’re talking about. Other visitors to the forum are much more likely to click through your signature URL on your posts if you appear to be an expert than if you’re an idiot or obvious just trolling for clicks.

Forum posts won’t generate tons of traffic but it’s generally fairly targeted, and most posts don’t expire, so the links will continue to work for you long after the post has been made. Not all forums are created equal, too, so it takes some experimenting to find ones that work well for your site. If you’re spending a lot of time on posting and seeing very few clicks, then it might be time to reassess, as far as whether or not you’re spending your time wisely.

I’ll continue this thread tomorrow, with more examples of good traffic sources for new sites.

One question I’ve gotten a lot is what FTP software I use for moving files back and forth to websites. While using WordPress as a CMS can ease a lot of the FTP load, it can’t completely eliminate it, so you’ll have to get familiar with FTP software at some point in your affiliate/webmaster career.

WS_FTP is probably the most prevalent FTP software, lots of people love it and swear by it, and I’ve used it in the past and been very happy with it. It’s got lots of nice features, bells and whistles, the whole nine yards. WS_FTP is easy enough for beginners to use but it’s also got some nice features for power users, too. The only hitch is that it’s not a free product, and will run you around $60.

I currently use FileZilla, which is a free, open-source FTP program. Very easy to install, and while the interface takes a bit getting used to, it’s worked perfectly for me and I have had no complaints whatsoever. I’ve seen some complaints by power users that it can’t handle more advanced functions that WS_FTP can, but if you’re only occasionally moving files, changing permissions, etc., it can definitely handle that, and it’s hard to beat the price.

Lots of people swear by SmartFTP, which is another popular free FTP program. I haven’t personally used it, so no direct experience with it, but this one gets nods and thumbs up from many folks out on the Internet tubes.

January turned out to be a pretty crazy month, with all sorts of suddenly jumping up and demanding attention. I’d hoped to crank out tons of content but I ended up spending more time switching sites to the new dedicated hosting plan than anything, which was necessary and a good thing moving forward but doesn’t produce much in the way of visible results.

Below are the monthly numbers for assorted metrics such as content created, traffic, and income. I originally intended just to report that stuff for this site but I realized pretty quickly that it made more sense to look at all of my affiliate sites as a whole. Since much of the affiliate marketing gospel I preach here is to diversify and work on multiple things at once, it seemed silly not to report on the collective efforts.

I’m also lumping in results from my poker blog, which is going to skew things a bit, as it’s been around for awhile and generates traffic and income accordingly. I went back and forth on whether to include it, but I’d rather this be an accurate journal of what affiliate marketing can do for you, over time, than a selective account that includes some of my sites, but not this one, or that one.

As far as the sites I’ve currently got in the active hopper as of the end of the month (in addition to this one), here goes:

• Cisco Certifications
• Flip Thy House
• Oddsnark
• Patio to Pool
• Pig Iron Malt
• Science Fiction Robots
• Sound of a Suckout
• Vroomchatter

Across all those sites, I posted 165 pages of new content, for an average of a bit more than 5 new pages a day. I’d like to bump that number up in February, but I can live with it as a baseline, as I’ve already touched on the fact that January was a bit of an anomaly, as far as everything going on.

As far as traffic, the sites collectively got about 25,000 unique visitors for the month of January. That metric is out of whack, though, because the poker blog and Oddsnark skew it heavily, since those got about 95% of that traffic (and a lot of the traffic is junky in nature and not targeted nor good, but that’s another ball of wax). Moving forward, I’ll be able to pull better month to month traffic numbers for each site, but switching hosts makes that hard this month, as I wasn’t smart enough to capture all of the old data before making the switch.

Here’s a breakdown of affiliate income for the month:

Google Adsense: $73.98
Text-Link-Ads: $65.00
ReviewMe: $50.00
Commission Junction: $201.79
Direct advertising buys: $300.00
Partnerlogic (poker affiliate program): $441.45

Total income: $1,132.22

Expenses for the month were as follows:

Dedicated server hosting with HostGator: $175.00

Domain name registration: $80.00

Total expenses: $255.00

Net affiliate income for January: $877.22

Which is both good and bad, as far as the bottom line. It’s nice to make money, but the bulk of the profit came from my poker blog. If I simply looked at the new sites I’ve launched, it’d be a much skimpier profit, like $100 or so. To be fair, though, almost all of my efforts on new sites have been focused on building sites that are focused on search engine traffic, and those won’t start bearing fruit until they get out of the sandbox and are fully indexed in assorted search engines.

Overall, I’m fairly satisfied with how January went, but there’s definitely room for improvement in February. I simply need to crank content out and fight the urge to launch new sites or fiddle with existing ones. I also need to be a bit more mercenary about my time, as the schedule is going to get even more hectic if I’m also fixing up a house to flip on the side, in addition to all my other schemery.

Okay. No more new sites. Seriously.

I managed to pretty much immediately break my no-new-sites-focus-on-what-I’ve-got-in-the-hopper vow and launched a new house flipping site (still very raw, so pardon the mess), as our offer was just accepted on an investment property, which I’ll hopefully be rehabbing and turning around for a profit in a pretty short time span. I’d planned on keeping a log of my efforts in that arena, largely for myself as a tool to track expenses, personal labor invested, etc., but my scheming mind realized “Hmm, why not just do it as a public blog and incorporate ads and what-not, as surely people are searching on such things, with Adsense advertisers in place.”

I’ve been really happy with the NASCAR news site so far, both in early Adsense results and in its general rounding into shape. Not so happy with myself as far as letting some projects linger on instead of just finishing them and being done, but such is life sometimes in the affiliate world. Well, no, I need to be better about setting hard deadlines, and sticking to them, instead of falling back on the mantra that as long as I’m working on content of some sort, for some site, it’s all good.

It’s not necessarily a bad thing, but I end up shorting myself on at least some psychological happiness of wrapping up a project, stamping it done, and moving on. I’ve gotten pretty used to the notion of keeping many juggling balls in the air simultaneously, but there’s no law writ in stone that says I must work that way, especially when I find myself muttering “Man, it’d be nice to finish something up, instead of always feeling as if I’m slacking off in this area, or that area.”