Virtual Affiliate Trainer

It may have worked for Kevin Costner in Field of Dreams, but if you've been on the internet for any amount of time you'll know that this certainly doesn't apply to your website!

For a website to stand any chance of success you have got to implement a number of strategies for driving traffic to the site and converting that traffic into sales.

Now conversion strategies are a massive topic alone and I'm not going to touch on this here. So lets work on the premise that you have a web site, you have an excellent offer being promoted by strong sales copy and the product that you are selling to your customers is great.

So what you are really looking for are ways to increase the traffic to your site.

Now one of the ways to do this is through having your own personal sales force - in other words affiliates.

And the beauty of having a great team of affiliates promoting your web site is that you only pay them when they make a sale.

This lens will focus on increasing the traffic to your website by leveraging the power of your affiliates.

Once you have that sussed you can sit back and let your online sales force drive your sales onwards and upwards!

One of the keys to getting the right traffic to your market is to ensure you've done your market research.

There is no point driving lots of traffic to a site, no matter how you achieve that, if its not relevant. For example you may find a search term that has a high number of searches each day but if that search term is around golf and you are selling products on dog food then you're unlikely to convert any visitors should they get to your site (unless your golfer has a strange craving for Pedigree Chum!)

So the first thing to do is to put yourself in the shoes of your customer. Think about what they might type into the search engines when searching for information that your website could provide.

So lets take an example to do with Mountain Biking - a topic close to my husband's heart. The obvious key word would be "mountain biking" but this is such a broad term it could create visitors looking to buy a mountain bike, wanting information on how to ride one or even those looking for mountain biking holidays. So although its a good place to start you need to get creative and come up with more ideas.

There are a couple of good free sites on the internet that can help you create lists of keywords.

Have a look at the list below for places to start your keyword research.