7 Ways To Drive Traffic To Your Affiliate Business Website

We all know that in the core of it all, traffic is the most essential thing to a successful affiliate business. Aside from ensuring that you have a great product to sell, it would be time to get to the nitty gritty of things, generating traffic.

If you already have a site and you want think that you're not getting the traffic that you're supposed to be getting, then its time to get yourself moving to learn deep into traffic generation methods. My suggestion is that you should stay focussed on 1 or 2 methods and use it or them on a regular basis to drive potential customers to your affiliate business website. To help you out in generating more traffic for your site, here are some 7 ways to increase your traffic. They have been proven to work:

a. Invest in good advertising with search engines

Google Adwords, Yahoo Overture and MSN Adcenter provide great advertising schemes. They assure you of targetted traffic. However, before you add any ads to these online advertising avenues, you have to learn to do research on popular keywords. It is an art and requires some studying. However, the time and money spent will be well-worthed the effort. While some would shy away from spending money to increase traffic, it is imperative in this case to do so because Adwords, Overture and Adcenter is the top surefire way to increase your traffic.

b. Exchange or Trade Links with other sites

Exchanging links with other sites will benefit both parties from the efforts both of you do to enhance your sites traffic. When one site features another sites link, they could provide one another with the traffic one site generates. The efforts are doubly beneficial because it would seem like both of you are working to generate more traffic. The more links traded with more sites the more traffic could be expected. One good traffic exchange site is Traffic Swarm and through my Google Analytics data, Traffic Swarm has helped me to generate a considerable amount of traffic to my affiliate business website.

c. Use Viral Marketing

Viral marketing allows you to spread the word about your company and product without any costs or if ever low costs only. This is a marketing method that can be quite sneaky; you can attach your company's name, product or link to a certain media such as a funny video, entertaining game, an interesting article or a gossip or buzz. With this method, people get infected with the creativity and entertainment of the medium that they will pass it on to many people. With the popularity of Youtube and Facebook, Blogspot etc (where Youtube videos can be attached), this method of marketing is definitely a powerful tool.

d. Use proper keywords or keyword phrases for your sites content

Search engines look for certain keywords that they would show in their research results page. In doing so, having the right keyword and keyword phrase is a high requirement in ranking high in search engine results. One tool that you can use to do research on good keywords can be found on Goodkeywords Dot Com. You could write your own content or you could hire someone to do it for you.

e. Write Articles that can lead traffic to your site

This is a strategy for the long term. Now, what do I mean by that? Articles do not generate fast and immediate traffic to your affiliate business website. However, article marketing is one the BEST ways of driving targetted traffic to your site for the long run. Once your article is published, it will stay online indefinitely. Since you'll also be able to link your site within the "author's byline" section of your article, this means that the link to your website is also sitting out there, waiting for an interested someone to click on it.

f. Join forums and form online communities

Forums are great sources of traffic for your affiliate business website. Once you have established a good reputation for yourself in the forum group, your signature file be a advertisement tool for your affiliate business. It is important that you look for a related forum pertaining to the affiliate product that you are selling to participate in. There is no need to post about your business or be pushy in any way. Just be helpful and offer good advice.

g. Get an identity on Social-Networking Sites

Social Networking Sites provide incredible opportunities for boosting your traffic. Although some sites differ in fucntionality, they all have large enough feature sets to allow you to create "outposts" or "hubs" that you can use to advertise your main site. Also, you will be able to offer some unique content by taking advantage of the different tools provided at each site. Examples of these sites are Facebook, Myspace, Friendster, Squidoo etc. With so many sites available, you are spoilt for choices.