Lets start by giving the Traffic Snowball a name.

The starting point with every website is the domain name and now there is a wider choice than ever with the introduction of NEW domains (.info & .biz)

So what is the difference and which do you choose?

Basically, for the moment .com still rules. If you are not using “.com” address, then you are losing your hard earned visitors. Everyone remembers “.com” before “.net “, it’s that simple. Even most web browsers, if the extension is not entered, will default to “.com”.

A credible and serious business must have its own domain name that is relevant and appropriate to the nature of the business. For example let say the business is “Johns Widget Store” A first and natural choice choice would be johnswidgets.com.

However, you do not need to register ONLY one domain name. You can register as many as you want and point them to the same web content (we’ll come back to this point later)

For example, you can LOAD the domain name with “keywords” which are relevant to the nature of the website.

By registering “KEYWORD RICH” domain names you are going to help skyrocket your search engine rankings! (That’s right just by using keyword saturated domain names you can drastically improve your search engine rankings… really it’s that easy!)

“Keyword Phrases” are now a HOT opportunity… a catch phrase alone can generate a giant source of traffic to your website.

Why? - Because it is catchy!

Not only are these phrases catchy but they can also boost your search engine rankings. Search engines love url’s that are saturated with keywords!

So, think of all the keywords and keyphrases for your product/service/website and put them in your URL.

Load the domain name with your best keywords to get ranked higher in the search engines. Then have it redirect to your main site or use it as a “doorway” page (as we talk about later in the article) to get a much higher ranking in the search engines to forward traffic to you.

Here are example URL’s that will pull great in the search engines ……

www.computer-discount-software-store.com, www.computerdiscountsoftwarestore.com

Notice that I gave the above example with hyphens and without hyphens… it is a little known fact that search engines prefer URL’s with hyphens and visitor prefer them without so make sure you register both!

Also there are the country code domains. For example a url ending in .co.uk would be a first choice for businesses operating in the UK.

As general rule of thumb it would be wise to buy both the .com and the country domain to start. There are only a few companies that are registering the 67 character domain names, and even fewer that are reliable companies. When you come to register your domains (s), you should consider using a domain registration service with at least the following facilities:

- Real-time modification of web forwarding
- Real time modification of url masking

Its important that if you are going to register a few domains for the purpose of creating doorways to your main site that you have the ability to forward the domain using an interface and you are able to modify this at any time in real time.

Some companies provide the forwarding free of charge and may also include a masking service which would be useful for keeping the new domain name visible in the browser whilst serving content from the redirected domain name. URL masking could be used for a variety of purposes but its important that there is a facility to add META tags to the masked domain name.

A domain service that provides URL masking with meta tags would be preferable than using one that provides only standard redirection as the masked domain will be more sensitive to search engines.

In this section I discuss the 6 steps you will take to quickly, easily and inexpensively get started in your affiliate marketing business.

Quickly & Easily find High Demand Topics

The topic you choose should both interest you and have high consumer demand. You already know what interests you, but how do you find out whether a topic has high demand?

Well, the first place I check is a free tool call the Overture Search Term Suggestion Tool. It is located at:

inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion

At Overture Search Term Suggestion tool, you simply enter a term related to your site and it will show you:

• Related searches that include your term
• How many times that term was searched in the previous month

So, let’s assume for a moment that you are a mortgage and insurance broker who suspects that insurance might be a good service to sell online.

To find out how many people are looking for insurance online, I typed in the word ‘insurance’ and discovered that the keyword ‘insurance’ had been searched for 971,914 times at Overture and its search partners in just one month!

That’s almost a million people! Wow!

As I consider any term that receives 50,000 or more searches in a month a subject with good demand and potentially viable, insurance looks like it might just be a winning topic for an affiliate web site.

Find High-Profit Potential Products & Services

Once you’ve determined that your topic is in high demand, you need to find out now is whether there are merchants selling related products and services online, AND how much commission they pay.

For that, I go first to Commission Junction.

Commission Junction is an ‘affiliate network’ that puts merchants and affiliates together. They refer to merchants as ‘advertisers’ and the affiliates are called ‘publishers’.

To see all the merchants with products and services at Commission Junction, you’ll need to set up a free account.

To do that, go to Commission Junction, then click on ‘Solutions’ near the top right- hand portion of the page, then go to the left side of the Solutions page and click on ‘CJ Marketplace’.

At the very bottom of that page and you’ll find a link for the application process. Where it asks you to supply a URL, just enter yahoo.com or geocities.com if you don’t already have a web site.

Once your account is set up and you’ve logged into the Commission Junction interface, click on ‘Get Links’, and select ‘Advertisers’ in the drop-down box beside the word ‘Search’ near the top of the page. Next, type in the word ‘insurance’.

My search came up with 51 merchants. Your results may be more or less depending on whether merchants have been added to, or dropped from the network.

In choosing merchants, you want to select those with the highest EPC ratings and commissions.

What is an EPC Rating?

3-month EPC: 3-month EPC (earnings per 100 clicks) shows how well an advertiser converts Web site visitors into commissions, over a three-month period.

7-day EPC: 7-day EPC (earnings per 100 clicks) shows the average commissions paid to publishers for every 100 clicks, over the past seven days. Use this number to see the most recent EPC trend for advertisers.

So how well did our insurance merchants do?

Zurich insurance had a 7-day EPC rating of $250.88. That means that affiliates are earning an average 250.88 for every 100 visitors they send to Zurich Insurance.

Wow!

Now what about those commission rates?

Well, at the Good Sam Club, if the customer completes a form and becomes a member, Good Sam will pay you $5.00. That’s JUST to fill out a form.

And if they purchase an Emergency Road Service package, you’ll get paid $15.00.

Not bad!

You can find even MORE merchants at the following affiliate networks:

„ Linkshare
linkshare.com

„ BeFree
affiliates.befree.com

„ Clickbank
clickbank.com

Cheap Sources of Site Content

Because we want to leave the selling job up to the merchant, an affiliate’s job is to ‘pre-sell’ their merchants’ products.

To pre-sell, you need site content.

Content consists of articles and endorsements that explains how your visitors problems can be solved by using the products you promote. In most cases, webmasters write their own endorsements for the products they promote.

However, if you aren’t inclined to write product endorsements, you can:

„ Find Free Content
„ Use Merchants’ Ad Copy
„ Pay for Content

I like looking for free content first.

Staying with our ‘insurance’ topic, I searched Google for the terms “Free Articles”+ “Insurance” and found the following articles listed at legalwhiz.com:

• “How to Save on Title Insurance Costs”
• “Understanding the Terms of Your New Loan”
• “Common Sense Mortgage Tips!”

In many cases, the author will allow you to use his work on your site if you include credit to the author and a link back to his site.

This is even MORE effective when the author has an affiliate program and you can make money from that link.

To get approval to use the article, you’d simply email the author a request, and they will usually be very happy to have you use their articles on your site.

Another way to get free content is to use what the merchant makes available to their affiliates.

For example, here is an email promotion that Corey Rudl gives his affiliates to promote his very popular ‘Insiders Secrets to Internet Marketing’ course.

Dear Friend,

This e-mail is extremely urgent so please read the entire thing… I would feel terrible if you missed out on this because you did not get my e-mail in time.

I just got an e-mail from Corey Rudl and he said there were only 150 copies left of the new version of his best-selling Internet marketing course, The Insider Secrets to Marketing Your Business on the Internet, that includes the $952 in FREE bonuses!

Chances are, as you read this, a lot of those 150 copies are already gone.

Just to recap my last e-mail, Corey Rudl is literally “the” guru of Internet marketing… he’s grown his online businesses to over $7.6 million in online sales last year and he gets over 1.8 million visitors to his web sites every month!

And in the new version of his best selling course he is going to show everything from step-by-step instructions you can use to start your very own Internet business in as little as 48 hours to how to build a top-selling web site… for less than $100!

No matter how small your budget is, Corey shows you the cheapest ways to build a web site that sells!

He is going to show you where to find hot products (in 20 minutes or LESS!) that you can start selling TODAY! These in-demand products will sell like hot cakes, no matter what your experience!

Corey will even reveal his personal rolodex with 100s of FREE and cheap online tools, resources, and software that you can use to automate your web site (and save yourself at least 35 hours every week)!

And if that’s not enough, he is going to even reveal, for the first time, some of his most advanced strategies like how to get #1 rankings in the search engines and get tons of free traffic from the “Big Guys” like Google… and his secret to writing sales copy that increases sales by 400% (or MORE)!

Like I said before, I know these strategies are going to make my business tons of extra money in 2004 and as my subscriber I want to make sure you experience the same rewards, so go to…

www.marketingtips.com/t.cgi/3885

… if the page is still there, this means you made
it in time and he still has some copies of his course with the additional $952 worth of FREE bonuses!

So please hurry! And if you have any questions, just let me know.

All the best…

As you can see, that copy is written in the first-person, so it looks like it is coming directly from you. Use merchant copy judiciously however, as your credibility will take a beating if your subscribers and visitors have seen the exact same copy in other newsletters and on other affiliate sites.

Lastly, you can have articles written for you, sometimes very inexpensively.

To find ghost writers on the net, check out some of these sites:

• Guru.com
• FreelanceWriters.com
• Elance.com

Once you have organized your content, it’s time to start putting you’re your site together.

The Fastest Way to Build Your WebSite

There are 3 steps to quickly build your website. They are:

1. Register a Domain
2. Domain Hosting
3. Buy Template

Domain registration is painless, and CHEAP. Go to Godaddy.com where it will cost you 8.95/year for each domain. You can get them even cheaper when you register for more than one year.

Here are two good, yet inexpensive, hosting services that I recommend.

• GoDaddy.com - $8.95/mo.
• HostRocket - $9.95/mo.

The quickest way to build a website is to buy a template. Here is a list of some of the best template sites I’ve found to date:

o 4Templates.com
o BigWebmaster.com
o BoxedArt.com
o DollarTemplates.com

My personal favorite is BoxedArt.com. You can download as many templates as you want from Boxed Art, all for only $49.96 for six months access.

Once you’ve placed your content in your template and sent it to your web host, it’s time to join affiliate programs.

Sign-Up for Affiliate Programs

Go back to Commission Junction or the site where you found products you want to promote and sign up for the merchants’ affiliate programs.

The reason you build your site before joining the programs, is to have a site to show the merchant. This demonstrates that you are indeed serious about selling their product, and will almost guarantee your acceptance into their program.

Get Oodles of Traffic Today!

After placing merchant links on your site, it’s time to let the world know about your site.

Although I discuss ‘29 Ways to Market Your Site’ in the Super Affiliate Handbook, my favorite way to bring visitors to my sites is by using cheap Pay- Per-Click search engine advertising.

The primary benefit of PPC’s is that you can drive targeted traffic to your site quickly, instead of waiting months for the search engines to list your site… if they ever do.

Just a few of these include:

• Google.com
• Overture.com
• Enhance Interactive
• Findwhat.com
• Kanoodle.com

Pay-per-clicks allow you to bid on terms or keywords that are relevant to your site. In our insurance site example, the Overture Search Term Suggestion Tool produced a list that included terms like:

car insurance
insurance
health insurance
life insurance
home insurance
affordable health insurance
travel insurance
renters insurance
insurance quote
car insurance quote
insurance lead

You should be able to find and bid on HUNDREDS, if not thousands, of terms in any category you choose. The more keywords you list your site under, the more exposure your site will get.

I HIGHLY recommend that you use PPC’s to advertise your site. I get returns of 2, 3, 4, and sometimes even FIVE dollars for every dollar I spend advertising my site.

So, let’s summarize again the steps that it takes to build an affiliate site…

„ Find a HUGE Market
„ Find Products & Services
„ Collect/Create Web Content
„ Build Site
„ Market Site
„ and… Enjoy the BIG Kachings!

So much information is on de web, its mind bogglin’. Thankfully we have search en’ines to sift through them and catagorize them for us. Unfortunatly, dere is still so much info that even with dese search en’ines, its often a painstakin’ly slow process (somethin’ comparable to death for a hacker) to find exactly what you’re lookin’ for.

Lets get right into it.

I use google.com as my primary search en’ine because it presently tops de charts as far as de sites that it indexes which means more pertinent info per search.

1. Page translation.

Just because someone speaks anoder lan’uage doesn’t mean dey dont have anythin’ useful to say. I use translation tools like de ones found at

babelfish.altavista.com

and

world.altavista.com

to translate a few key words I am searchin’ for. Be specific and creative because dese tools arent de most accurate thin’s on de planet.

2. Directories.

These days everythin’ is about money. We have to deal with SEO (search en’ine optimization) which seems like a good idea on paper until you do a search for toys and get 5 pornsites in de first 10 results. Usin’ a sites directory will eliminate that. You can narrow your search down easily by lookin’ for de info in specific catagories. (PS google DOES have directories, dey’re at: directory.google.com)

3. Here are some tips that google refers to as “advanced”

A. “xxxx” / will look for de exact phrase. (google isnt case sensitive)
B. -x / will search for somethin’ excludin’ a certain term
C. filetype:xxx / searches for a particular file extention (exe, mp3, etc)
D. -filetype:xxx / excludes a particular file extention
E. allinurl:x / term in de url
F. allintext:x / terms in de text of de page
G. allintitle:x / terms in de html title of that page
H. allinanchor:x / terms in de links

4. OR

Self explanatory, one or de oder… (ie: binder OR joiner)

5. ~X

Synonyms/similar terms (in case you can’t think of any yourself)

6. Numbers in a range.

Lets say you’re lookin’ for an mp3 player but only want to spend up to $90. Why swim through all de oders? MP3 player $0..$90 The 2 periods will set a numeric range to search between. This also works with dates, weights, etc

7. +

Ever type in a search and see somethin’ like this:
“The followin’ words are very common and were not included in your search:”

Well, what if those common words are important in your search? You can force google to search through even de common terms by puttin’ a + in front of de denied word.

8. Preferences

It amazes me when I use oder peoples PCs that dey dont have deir google search preferences saved. When you use google as much as I do, who can afford to not have preferences? They’re located on de right of de search box, and have several options, though I only find 2 applicable for myself.

A. Open results in new browser
B. Display 10-100 results per page. (I currently use 50 per page, but thats a resolution preference, and 5X’s de default)

9. *

Wildcard searches. Great when applied to a previously mentioned method. If you only know de name of a prog, or are lookin’ for ALL of a particular file (ie. you’re DLin’ tunes) somethin’ like *.mp3 would list every mp3.

10. Ever see this?

“In order to show you de most relevant results, we have omitted some entries very similar to de X already displayed. If you like, you can repeat de search with de omitted results included.” The answer is YES. yes yes yes. Did I mention yes? I meant to.

11. Search EVERYWHERE

Use de en’ine to its fullest. If you dont find your answer in de web section, try de group section. Hell, try a whole different search en’ine. Dont limit yourself, because sometimes en’ines seem to intentionally leave results out.

ex. use google, yahoo, and altavista. search de same terms… pretty close, right? Now search for disney death. Funny, altavista has plenty of disney, but no death…hmmm.

If you’ve read this far into this tutorial without sayin’, “Great, a guy that copied a few google help pages and thinks its useful info” den I will show you WHY (besides accuracy, speed, and consistancy findin’ info on ANYTHING) its nice to know how a search en’ine works. You combine it/w your knowledge of oder protocol.

Example:
Want free music? Free games? Free software? Free movies? God bless FTP! Try this search:

intitle:”Index of music” “rollin’ stones” mp3

Substitute rollin’ stones/w your favorite band. No? Try de son’ name, or anoder file format. Play with it. Assumin’ SOMEONE made an FTP and uploaded it, you’ll find it.

For example….I wanted to find some Sepultura. If you never heard them before, dey’re a Brazilian heavy metal band that kicks ass. I started with this:

intitle:”Index of music” “Sepultura” mp3 < — nothin’
intitle:”Index of música” “Sepultura” mp3 <– nothin’
intitle:”Index of musica” “Sepultura” mp3 <– not good enough
intitle:”Index of music” “Sepultura” * <– found great stuff, but not enough Sepultura

At this point it occurs to me that I may be missin’ somethin’, so I try:

intitle:”index of *” “sepultura” mp3 <– BANG!
(and thats without searchin’ for spellin’ errors)

Also try inurl:ftp

I find that * works better for me than tryin’ to guess oder peoples mis-spellin’s.

The same method applies for ebooks, games, movies, SW, anythin’ that may be on an FTP site.

I hope you enjoyed this tutorial, and I saw that recently a book and an article was written on de very same topic. I havn’t read them as of yet, but check em out, and get back to me if you feel I missed somethin’ important and should include anythin’ else.

intitle:”index of” “google hacks” ebook

Ps. I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again… BE CREATIVE.

You’ll be surprised what you can find.