If you've read our previous article, The 3 Things You Need To Make Money With Online Affiliate Marketing, you already know something about needing a product and a web site and related capabilities like an autoresponder.
Now we'll investigate Targeted Traffic, the last thing you need to make money online.
Traffic that is screened for a particular niche or topic is called Targeted Traffic.
Targeted Traffic is perhaps the thing that stops or slows more prospective Online Marketers than any other single thing.
It's very true that a web site lives and dies based on its traffic.
For a Vanity Site, the traffic volume may not really matter much, but for a site that is to generate income, traffic volume is of colossal importance.
Not just any traffic will do, as a huge volume of people interested in golf clubs won't do you any good if you are selling dog training products.
How to generate Targeted Traffic Like so many other things on the internet, there are a lot of methods that can generate high quality Targeted Traffic.
Though some are so-called free methods, none are truly free.
You pay one way or another.
If the method is free, you can bet it will cost you a lot of your valuable time to implement.
If you don't directly implement yourself, you will end up paying someone else to do it for you.
On the other hand, the various paid methods are easier to understand for some people.
Paid methods of generating Targeted Traffic include Pay Per Click (PPC), Pay Per Action (PPA), and Pay Per Impression (PPI) or Pay Per View (PPV).
Each has it's own specific costs, benefits and detractors.
Each of these requires you to pay for the traffic based on the method used.
With PPC, every time a user clicks on your ad, they get transferred to your desired page (like your squeeze page) and you pay a fee ranging from a few cents to perhaps a dollar or more for the most popular key words.
PPA can sometimes provide a better initial return but you are more limited in scope.
For example, you may be paid every time someone clicks on your link that sends the user to a sign up page for the Retailer's product.
This may pay you directly for the action, but you lose the ability to capture the customer for your own list.
PPI or PPV are methods that are blind to you.
Because you pay on the number of times your ad appears (or is "impressed" on the visitor), you don't have an good way of determining if the vendor is providing you with accurate statistics, or whether the ad appears in a good position on the page to be readily seen and acted upon.
All you have is the total cost and the number of people that visit your squeeze page or commissions you receive..
With good tracking, you can at least develop rudimentary conversion rate.
Your conversion rate for any campaign is extremely important.
Without good tracking you cannot properly determine the conversion rate, and if you don't know the conversion rate you cannot determine which methods are paying and which are trying to send you into bankruptcy.
The importance of the list cannot be under-emphasized.
If you send web surfers directly to the Retailer's sales link, you may get a commission on perhaps 1% of the clicks, based on a reasonable response rate.
On the other hand, if the user instead signed up for your newsletter (and your FREE offer of a report or eBook you use to entice them) you may get 80 or 90% of the visitors joining your newsletter (list).
Let's say you get the same response rate of 1% when you send out your first email, so you have a net response rate of 0.
8% or 0.
9%.
While this would look like a lower commission than the direct link method, you might capture another 1% next week when you send a follow up message to your list, thereby generating another net response of 0.
8% or so and now your ongoing total is 1.
6% to 1.
8% not the 1% of the direct method.
You can see that a well filtered list can generate ongoing income over time that can multiply your initial efforts.
This is true of clicks from both paid and "free" sources.
We've run long again, so we'll pick up with our next article, "Free Targeted Traffic For Your Online Marketing Web Site"