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How to Drastically Increase Traffic by Building Links

Posted: 27 Jul 2019 10:00 AM PDT

There are countless tools and tactics available to help marketers reach their goal by improving the reach and traffic of their website. 

We want to take a look at one of the most important tactics, according to Google, that website owners should use if they're going to increase their search visibility and organic traffic. That's right; we are talking about building links on and off your website to help improve your views and engagement, which typically results in increased sales. 

Today we are going to take a look at the following information: 

  • The two types of links

  • How links can impact your traffic 

  • Tips for improving internal links 

  • Tips for building external links

  • How these links will affect your website 

Types of links 

There are two main types of links we are going to talk about today, internal and external. Internal links are essentially how you're going to hold the "webbing" of your website together. Links on your site should all connect and branch across every page if you want to see increased traffic. The way you link on your website can have a significant impact on your SEO, more on that later.

When you work to get your links published outside your website, you're establishing external links. External links have their benefits, including expanding the reach of your content, generating leads, and growing your social media profiles. 

How links impact your traffic  

Your marketing goals and current website status are going to determine where you need to improve your link building strategy. Internal and external links both have a positive impact on your SEO, but for vastly different reasons. 

Internal links help Google crawlers index your website. Google's algorithm can determine the relevancy of your website based on how easily the crawlers can navigate throughout your site. There's a reason that 97% of businesses who blog get additional website traffic. Their blog content helps flesh out the "webbing" of the website and based on your keywords. Your internal links can help establish the intent of your posts – which is another major deciding factor when Google ranks sites. If Google deems that your site is worthy of appearing on the tops page for your keywords, you can bet that your website will see a sharp increase in total visitors. 

If you want to expand your audience with external links, you have to target off-site places. We are going to take a look at some of the places you can build external links, and what to avoid when creating these links. When businesses link externally, the goal is to usually build social proof by sharing their content on social media platforms for potential customers, or the process involves working with another business with similar, though not identical, goals. The result is your website will show up in front of prospects even if they are not searching for your keywords, which builds your reputation with Google and improves your traffic.

External linking tips 

There are plenty of websites that allow guest posting opportunities to those who have experience or knowledge on a topic. If you want to improve the odds that you'll have a strong relationship with the business you partner with, try to look for someone who is either in your industry or operates part of the time within your niche.  

In other words, look for websites that have a similar audience to your business. There are usually opportunities for businesses to guest post on one another's site as a way to spread brand awareness and bundle products or features. For example, an email marketing service provider may want to partner with a website hosting website since you can't have one without the other. You'll want to include links to your most valuable and relevant blog content when creating external links on other websites. 

Another way to build external links is through social media. You should try to post links to your content consistently on all of your profiles. The more times you link to your posts, the more likely they are to get shared, which helps you build reliable external links. Similarly, you may want to work with an influencer that will help share and promote your content. 

One more tip on external links, never, under any circumstance, should you buy backlinks. There's a good chance that you'll see a surge in traffic that looks and feels authentic, but before long, the "effect" will wear off, and your traffic will generally fall back to its old position. More importantly, if Google catches you buying links, they can punish your website and reduce your reach. 

Internal linking tips 

We mentioned earlier that it's essential to have a blog on your website for internal linking purposes. In case you're not familiar, there is a way to build your internal links in such a way that it makes your content easier to follow for Google bots, and can help improve your ranking on the keywords you select. You can accomplish this goal by creating cornerstone content on your blog. 

Cornerstone content, or landing pages, are the longest blog posts you'll have on your website, and they are generally jam-packed with links to other posts on your blog. You can create this type of structure by starting with a broad topic, marketing, for instance. Create one long piece of content about marketing where you link together past and future articles in a tree-like structure where the truck is your cornerstone content, and all the internal links are small articles with specific content, similar to branches stemming from the trunk. 

Much like a tree, you should also trim and prune your internal links over time. There's a good chance that your cornerstone content will remain mostly the same. However, you may need to make changes to the sub-articles within the content every year when new research or information comes out on the topic. 

Try to be mindful of the number of links you're using on each page, and the context/relevancy of the content to the link you're adding. Some marketers have trouble finding a balance between content length and the number of links, and this may differ slightly depending on your niche and audience size. Generally speaking, quality links mean more to Google's algorithm. After your website has been up and running for four to five months, and you're small to medium sizes, consider adding around 40 high-quality internal links per month. 

Bottom line

Link building is time-consuming and is going to require plenty of patience and skill. As you practice building internal links and making connections for external links, you'll find that there are plenty of opportunities available to improve your traffic with your link building strategy. If you follow these tips and watch your customer metrics, link engagement and partners, you'll be able to develop a killer link strategy that will help your website grow.

How to Make a Profit from Your New Affiliate Marketing Business

Posted: 27 Jul 2019 09:30 AM PDT

Sure, it's not the golden goose that it once was – the days when one could snap their fingers and see solid profits are over. Just like any other field, as soon as heavy competition set in, various rules started to gain prominence, and the market took its own shape. Today, it's still pretty easy to get started with affiliate marketing, but you need to have more persistence and dedication if you want to see good results in the long run.

How it works

The basic idea is similar to selling products on commission. You advertise specific products or services, and whenever someone makes a purchase (or subscription, or the equivalent action) through your links, you get a cut of the profits. Sounds simple right? The truth is that it's anything but. While the basic principles of affiliate marketing are relatively easy to understand, there are various intricate details in this field that can take a lot of time to wrap your head around.

Getting started

With that in mind, patience is going to be your number one savior in the first few months of your attempts to get rich through affiliate marketing. It's very likely that you won't see any good results in the beginning, even if you're using proven approaches. Remember, if someone knows how to make money through affiliate marketing, they likely won't share their secrets with others – they have no inclination to do so. So don't just blindly trust "success schemes," and carve out your own path.

If you have a closer connection to people who're directly involved in this field though, definitely have a chat with them and see if they can't give you any tips. Just try not to nag too much.

Picking a niche

Your choice of niche is going to be perhaps the number one factor that determines how well you're going to do later on. The two extremes on this spectrum are extremely popular niches and those that barely get any attention outside of tightly specialized circles. Both have their ups and downs.

Choosing a niche that's highly popular usually means having plenty of potential customers and easy access to lots of information about the products you'll be selling. At the same time, it can be very difficult to stand out in the huge crowd of competitors that you'll be surrounded with.

On the other hand, if your niche is highly specialized, it can be quite easy to get noticed. There probably aren't too many other people promoting the same kinds of products, to begin with. But once you've made a certain number of sales, that's pretty much if – you've exhausted the bigger portion of your potential target audience!

Choosing a network

Another important factor in your decision should be your choice of affiliate programs. Your network is basically the middleman between you and the companies you're promoting. Sure, you can go and seek out affiliate programs on your own, negotiating the terms with each company separately. But working with a good network can simplify that process to a great extent, and all at the cost of a small percentage of your sales.

There are several established networks on the market, but it's hard to make a concrete recommendation without knowing your intended niche. Some networks work far better than others for specific types of products and services. Try to align your choice with that in mind. Also, networks don't have to be mutually exclusive – if you can see benefits in several different ones, then just make an account at each one.

Setting up new sites quickly

You should make it a habit to bring up your websites quickly and effortlessly if you want to see minimal hassle in your affiliate marketing. This is probably going to be your biggest bottleneck down the road, and it's something you should sort out as early as possible. If you don't have the technical know-how to do this on your own, make sure you have connections to good specialists who can get the job done on a reliable schedule.

Explore some technologies that can automate the process as well or even parts of it. There are various bootstrap solutions for standard websites out there, and they can work very well for your needs with just minimal adjustments. However, as you progress through this field, you'll likely want to start experimenting with your own finely tuned solutions for better results.

Tracking your results

Speaking of results, one of the most important things about your success in affiliate marketing is to have an objective overview of how well you're doing. It can be easy to get overly excited by one big sale and ignore the fact that you're still in the red. If you want to ensure that you're always seeing the big picture and aren't ignoring any important details, then put some tracking in place early on, and follow up on the data you're collecting from it.

Modern technology can make this quite easy in multiple aspects. You can collect a lot of information about the behavior of users on your websites, the searches that brought them there, and various other points of interest. You can then feed that data to analytical systems that can go through it and identify patterns that you would never have spotted on your own. You'd be surprised by some of the findings that will come out of that.

Exploring new grounds

Sooner or later, you're going to start entertaining the idea of experimenting with different new fields. Once you've exhausted most of your options in your current niche, this is a pretty standard occurrence. And it's fine – as long as you to it in a controlled manner and understand the implications. Don't just branch out randomly. Try to align your new choices with what you're doing at the moment. You should harness the momentum you've got going right now as best as you can.

Different promotion approaches

You'll eventually also realize that different products require a different approach to their promotion. Sometimes you might not be able to handle that on your own. For example, it's difficult to switch from promoting something on its own website in a serious, business tone, to posting jokes and memes on social media. Both are valid approaches for their own specific products, but not everyone is cut out for each style of communication.

With that in mind, try to build some connections with people who can handle that for you in a reliable manner. Some look down on the idea of working as a social media manager, but there's a good reason this kind of occupation has become a real thing in recent years. Many companies are in active need of specialists who understand the unique nuances of each social media platform.

Tweaking the small details

And even though your perspective will continue to grow with the size of your business, you should never lose track of the smaller details. There will always be various minor things that you could tweak with great success, and it's important to keep toying with them in a controlled manner to fine-tune the machine that you're building. Sure, making broad strokes and setting up new campaigns in a few clicks can be fun. But if you lose focus of these smaller details, you're going to suffer in the future, and you're going to miss many potential opportunities.

Adapting to changing market trends

Which brings us to our last point. No market stays the same over time, and this goes double for affiliate marketing. You can expect to see some major changes in relatively short periods of time here, and you should make it a point to keep track of them and adapt to them as best as possible.

It might often seem like these are small details which you shouldn't even be bothering with. But in many cases, the effects can stack up quite fast, and you might start to notice some significant differences in the performance of your campaigns after some time. If you fail to keep up with market trends, you can't expect your current system to keep working as well as it does now. And it can be very difficult to adjust things later on when you realize that you have a problem. The number of points that you'll need to address will simply be too significant.

Bottom line

Affiliate marketing is still a great field full of opportunities. However, the barrier of entry has gone up a bit in recent times, and it's not as easy as it used to be to jump in and start seeing good results. But as long as you're persistent and know what you're going for, you should be able to profit quite nicely from your experiments with affiliate marketing. In fact, you might even eventually reach a situation where this is your main source of income. But until you get there, you'll need to be extremely patient and keep calculating your every move.
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