How To Work From Home & Make Money On The Internet – Part 4/5

How To Work From Home & Make Money On The Internet Series
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>> Click Here For Part 2
>> Click Here For Part 3

Step Three: Drive Traffic

This step addresses “Where and How” you make sales. Essentially, you’ve got to get your offer in front of your target market somehow, and that means driving traffic to either a landing page or a sales page.

If you’re working as an affiliate, you can choose to drive traffic to a landing page on your own site, where you collect names and email addresses for further follow up. You can also just link people directly to the merchant’s sales page with your affiliate link.

Product owners can also place a landing page in front of their sales page, but most merchants tend to just embed opt-in email capture forms onto their sales pages and/or use pop up windows for collecting leads.

The important thing to note, though, is that visitors don’t usually buy a product on their first visit to a sales page. A majority of visitors either leave the site or hand over their name and email address to get more information about the product.

Now, the question is: where are these visitors going to come from? The goal is drive targeted, market-specific traffic to the offer, right? Therefore, you must have a way of generating that type of traffic.

The way this is done is through various means of both free and paid online advertising

Some Methods of ‘Free’ Advertising

> Articles
> Viral e-books and videos
> Forum signatures
> Email signatures
> Free classifieds
> ‘Tell-a-Friend’ scripts
> Traffic sharing networks
> Press releases
> Social networking

Some Methods of ‘Paid’ Advertising

> Pay-per-click advertising
> Banner advertising
> Buying text links or link swaps
> Affiliate programs
> Advertising on Internet radio or podcasts
> Joint ventures

Keep in mind that the “free methods” aren’t completely free in the strict sense, and the “paid” methods don’t always involve money. The price you pay for ‘free advertising’ is in the time you spend using free tactics. Meanwhile, techniques such as joint ventures typically involve some kind of trade in resources between business owners.

The important thing to note here is that all of these methods can be executed in such a way as to generate targeted traffic.

In the case of articles or press releases, for example, you write your content so that it is optimized on market-specific keywords/keyphrases. The goal with this is to have your content get some rank in the search engines for the terms your market is searching on.

Content methods are among the time-tested and proven traffic generating tactics, but there are also super-effective tactics you can employ by taking advantage of social networking and viral media.

For example, let’s say you create a video that is branded with a link to your website. You can upload it to sites like YouTube, Revver and iFilm as well as the video-sharing sections of sites like Myspace.

Your video, along with your website URL, will potentially be seen by thousands of people.

It is a little harder to achieve precision market targeting with that method. However, if your video generates enough interest, you’ll grab some relevant traffic just due sheer numbers.

You’re probably wondering by now just how much traffic you need and how easy it will be to make sales? In order to answer this question, we need to look at follow up and conversion.

The End of Part 4.

Tomorrow we will cover the final piece of the puzzle is follow up and its impact on conversion. Do remember to let me know your feedback about this article by commenting below.