Website Promotion - Keyword Research

The site building is over. We've built a corker of a site that we just know is going to convert like crazy. But nothing is happening because we don't have any traffic.

At this point many people sit on their hands expecting the traffic to just magically flow. The "I've built it so they wll come" kind of thinking. But it's not going to happen.

So how do we go about getting this valuable stuff?

First of all let's examine the time factor. Everything in affiliate marketing revolves around time. It takes a lot of time to build a decent site. Time to write content on it's own can easily take two months for a novice, a month to build it and we are three months down the line with no traffic - and no revenue. In addition to that you are facing the very real possibility that the affiliate program you are running with may not payout for another three months after your first transaction and so even if you magically raked up a load of highly targeted traffic for your site then it's perfectly natural to go for nine months without seeing a bean for all your hard work.

This is why so few affiliates make it to the big money.

So what I am interested in is how can we get maximum results for the least amount of time invested in promoting our site. This is not because I don't want to do the promotional work. It's because I want to know that the stuff I do is actually working and by working smarter I can get far more traffic for my effort.

For example I happen to know that approaching other webmasters for links to a brand new site is going to be valuable time wasted. For a site that's a year old it's worth the time invested but for a new site it's not. Why?

Many webmasters are blinkered and confused by what they read. Many take what they read on a forum as gospel. The sheep do what sheep do, they wander around in herds being led by he latest fads and sayings. Did you know that gaining reciprocal links is bad for your site? Complete bollocks. Getting free directory links will get your site banned from google. Utter tosh. And so on and so on.

In the end the webmaster who reads forums to death will suffer from the inability to make any decisions. They descend into a spiral of inaction believing anything they do is going to harm their site.

And so when you ask them to exchange links with your fresh virtual estate they'll reply that you don't have any PR and they are not interested. So it's not that the approach is wrong. It's the ill informed decision of the webmaster with a PR4 site that get's in your way.

The problem here is twofold.

Firstly you don't have any PR to trade with. Whether you like it or not and whether it's right or wrong PR is a currency to trade with. If you don't have any it's going to be nearly impossible to persuade other webmasters to exchange links with you. You may get a few successes but your time invested in what you gain is going to outweigh the results you achieve.

Secondly the process of exchanging links in this fashion is massively time prohibitive. Even if you had a PR6 site 9/10 webmasters bin your email and you are pissing in the wind.

The uneducated webmaster doesn't realise that whilst the site wanting to exchange links does not have the worthless PR they are seeking what they are passing up is the opportunity to exchange links with a site that is going to have big traffic in the future and that would be a worthwhile investment. If someone is working their arse off on promoting a site and doing a good job it makes sense to get in early and get a nice link placement with them before they get into the position of being picky.

So how else do we gain links to our new site?

A good way is to distribute software or an application or module for a CMS that has an embedded link and give it away free. But as we are beginners here it's not an option.

Out of all the ways of gaining links we need to focus in on what actually works and how we can apply it in the shortest timescale possible.

Most SEO companies take the shotgun approach and hope that something sticks. They'll do some directory submissions, write and distribute a couple of articles, try and gain a few links here and there, do a dmoz submission and submit to the major directories and eventually they will get there.

The paradox with link building is that it is a grind in the first instance. You have nothing. You only have the great content you have written.

However once you build momentum then the scales start to tip in your favour. The further up the rankings you go the more requests for link exchange you get. If you've used any type of software in the past for finding link partners then you'll know that they always start off searching the top 30 or so results in the top search engines. So to begin with you have nothing and then once you make the top 30 the situation reverses and you no longer need to go seeking links - they come seeking you.

This is why you break down an affiliate offer into a manageable niche that you can dominate for years to come.

So the question is what can we do to gain those valuable links in the first place that will propel us up the rankings with the minimum amount of time invested in gaining each link?

There are two ways:

The first is to submit to all of the free directories.

The second is to distribute articles.

But which is going to provide the most bang for the buck? How do we know that once we have done our submissions we are going to get a result? How do we separate out the wheat from the chaff?

Well, that is really the point of this website and over the next few days I'm going to examine exactly how we come up with a plan to make our newly built cash machine start functioning as early as possible.

I have a few ideas and we really need to do a split test to establish which method works best so I'm going to open up a new project to do this. We'll take two domains of similar age and size, promote one with the first method and the other with the second and that will give us a clue as to what actually works.

Then we can come up with an action plan for future cash machines.