We have all heard of the saying “which came first, the chicken or the egg?” and exactly the same principle applies to Affiliate Marketing.
Which comes first the traffic or conversions?
What ever we are promoting we need the offer to convert at the end of the day or we won’t make any sales, but the big problem is if we don’t have traffic then we cannot test the conversions accurately.
So I guess traffic wins out in the chicken egg race.
There are many traffic sources which can bring you loads of traffic, but it’s not just traffic we need. We need targeted traffic for our offer, because if you are promoting Giorgio Armani shoes there really is no point driving traffic from a forum that is about left-handed golf clubs for midget’s.
This is where search engines come in “Google Love”.
Search engine traffic is still by far the most targeted traffic you can get to your website. Even though Facebook is getting very good at demographic and psycho-graphic targeting, they are still a few years away from having the precision and buying intention that good search engines have today.
You see a person updating their profile, spying on their neighbor or playing Farmville has very little buying intention when spending time on Facebook.
However on the other hand someone who goes to Google and types in “24 hour locksmith New York” is most likely locked out of their house or car in the middle of the night and desperately needs a service to help them get in.
These are exactly the people we want to target because their buying intention is very high and we can target our web page and offer very specifically to these people through search engines and that is why SEO is and will be for a very long time, one of the most powerful ways to market online.
How?
The Search Engines are changing and evolving all the time and if you are going to get the most out of your campaign then you need to continually educate yourself to stay ahead of the competition.
One of the biggest mistakes when doing SEO is getting your site to the first page or position and then leaving it. There are always going to be other people out there optimizing their sites trying knock you off the top and if you stop it won’t be long until your rankings start to slip.
The other thing is you will never rank number 1 for all your keywords because there are so many out there that people type in, that you haven’t found yet. Apparently some researchers claim that up to 75% of searchers done are unique, meaning they have never been typed in to a search engine before.
Crazy I know.
The point here is that there will always be more search engine traffic that you can tap into, with the exception of having a small local business where people have to travel to, because people will only travel so far for a haircut and there are going to be a lot less keywords to target than if you were promoting say, music where it is a very broad market.
Getting Back To Education…
One of the best techniques I teach my students is to take the keyword data from your analytics account and put it in a tool like market samurai rank tracker. Then focus your link building efforts on any keywords where you are ranking between position 2-15, because you will get the best bang for your buck.
A study done by Cornell University shows that the top position in Google gets 56% of search traffic while position 2 gets around 13.5% and position 3 only 10%, while the rest get to fight it out for the remaining traffic.
As you can see boosting your site from position 2 or 3 to 1 is the 80/20 of SEO (biggest results for the least effort) and you need to do it on a monthly basis to maintain your rankings and boost the keywords that are almost there.
Considering you have your on-page SEO sorted out in many cases you only need a few back links with the correct anchor text to move from position 10 into the top 3 and Samuel covers this in more depth the strategies he users to do this, plus how to rank sites faster and even how you can put your SEO on autopilot in Samuel’s latest SEO course SEO Mumbo.
I have viewed all the course details and modules for SEO Mumbo and found that their were tactics in this course that we were not even aware of and have started using in our own SEO strategies.
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