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Not too long ago, it used to be easy to generate traffic on the Internet. Initially, there was the World Wide Web so you created a website. You put your content on the website and collected emails from people that would opt-in for a FREE report, guide, or newsletter. You then promoted an offer to your email list and generated profits. Way back then, the Internet was easy however today there is a lot more noise than there used to be and a lot more places people can go. You need to be where your audience is. If they are all over the Internet in different places, you need to be there too. This post will review the five sources of traffic on the Internet for you Affiliate Business. Source 1. The first source of traffic is eMail. Many say email marketing is dead however it is still quite alive. Universities were the first to get the Internet out there. Having an email address from a university used to be a sign of being on the leading edge however some universities are not even giving out accounts anymore. Why? Because the generation now going through the University just don’t care for email anymore. They care about Instant Messaging, texting, and these types of things. They think email is too long, too slow, not responsive enough, and really kind of boring in many ways. Even though Generations Y and Z consider email passé, email is important to many segments of the market. Many prospects of your target market are responsive to email. You should work to grow your email list, communicate with people by email, and respond to people by email because so many people are using it. Email has been around a long time and it is not going away, any time soon. If you track what Facebook is doing, they are actually integrating email, text, and chat into a single entity. It is where things are going. Email must be part of your plan but it should not be the only strategy in your plan. Source 2. The second source of traffic is from the Search capability on the web. Search still happens; the web still happens; it is a great destination and it is simple. What does the web want? How does one website appear higher than another website when it comes to search? It all comes down to what the web wants and that is relevancy and recency. Relevancy is how well the content on a website relates, or is relevant, to the search. The web wants the one website about a certain topic to come up number one. The number two website about a certain topic needs to come up number two. If you want your website to come up for a certain term, be relevant for that term. The web also wants recency. What does that mean? When breaking news happens, people want to know about a specific event. If a train crashes, people do not want to go read a Wikipedia entry about the railroad industry; they want to know what just happened. So the web wants relevancy and the web wants recency. You have to put those two factors into your web content strategy in order to be found by the search engines. Google, as one of the leading search engines, is making it harder and harder to cheat your way into high search engine Page Rankings. Google is looking for things that happen naturally. If you were suddenly to start a website that had thousands of articles and hundreds of comments and different pages linked to different places, Google knows that is not natural. This is not the way things work so it flags it and your website will not show up in the search engine results. You have to release new content on a regular basis so that you can become recent. You have to have natural growth, regular growth, and consistent growth so that you can have the hallmarks of relevancy and recency. Source 3. The next source of traffic is Video and it is an interesting beast. When the Internet started, video was a pipe dream. It then became possible if you had massive systems and massive bandwidth; now it is incredibly possible for anybody who has a halfway decent connection. When you talk about video on the Internet, you have to talk about YouTube as they are the 800-pound gorilla. In a world of 800-pound gorillas, there are still other options and you need to decide what you are going to do inside and outside of YouTube. YouTube has exceeded the hallmark of two billion views per day. They are now having regular three billion view days. It is amazing how well and how tremendous these guys are doing. Thirty-five hours of video are uploaded every single minute of every day to YouTube. That means that YouTube gets more video in 60 days than the three major U.S. networks got in their first 60 years of existence. Millions of people are now auto-sharing their videos. If you see a video and you like a video, the chances are good that you will share it with somebody else. If four million people are sharing, that is another four million people engaged with the video. You can see how big this gets. Technically, YouTube is the number two search engine in the world. However, when the YouTube listings popup in the number one search engine in the world, who is really the number one search engine in the world? It is, of course, YouTube. People are looking for videos, finding videos, sharing videos, communication with videos, so what do you need to do? You have got to have video content about you and your business and that video content has got to be findable. This is another source of Internet traffic. Video drives a tremendous audience and it is getting bigger and bigger all the time. Source 4. The next source of Internet traffic, Social Media, is very important. You need to be involved with Social Media because you need to be where people are and whether you believe it or not, people are online a lot more of the time than you think. The numbers on social are absolutely staggering. Social Media has a way of getting through the chaos and cutting through the clutter and that is why people like it so much. Facebook tops Google for weekly U.S. traffic. More people are going to Facebook than are going to Google. If Facebook were a country, at the time of this post (circa Feb 2012) they would be the world’s third largest country. Another interesting fact is that over 250 Million of these people are accessing their Facebook account on their smartphone. If I ask you if you trust your peers, chances are you do. Peers are based on trust. According to Socialnomics, 90% of the people trust their peers. So what do you want to do as an affiliate marketer online? Do you want to place better ads or do you want to influence peers? I am sure you would prefer to influence peers and that is one reason why you want to use Social Media as a source of traffic. Source 5. The last source of Internet traffic discussed is Apps. For some people, the idea of apps is terrifying. It does not matter if you understand it or appreciate it, the app economy is very real. Millions of apps have been created and hundreds of millions of apps have been downloaded. Think about it for a minute as an app makes a tremendous amount of sense. For example, I don’t want to go to a website about topic X if I can get all the content about topic X encapsulated and enclosed into a specific app. For example, why do I need to go to Facebook if there is a Facebook app that gives me everything I need or obtain from Facebook? So, do you need an app? Most likely most everybody does not need an app. However, you need to think about your business and the strategy for meeting your prospect where they are and on their terms. If your target market uses a Twitter app on their smartphone versus going to the Twitter website or if they search Facebook from a Facebook app instead of the web-based version of Facebook, then you need to get an app as your audience, your target market, is going to communicate with you via an app. If your target market wants to buy your product and they don’t just surf the web anymore, you have to think about having an app as the customer is always right. In closing, remember, the Internet is chaos and chaos is not a business model. You need a high-level strategy that covers all the five sources of traffic on the Iinternet that you should use to generate traffic for your affiliate business. I Hope You Enjoyed the Article and I Trust You Found It Insightful! Let me Know What You Think.
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