I’m currently working on and tweaking a twist of an affiliate marketing method that I think should do pretty well. I will update on how it goes if it does live up to my expectations. :)

Haven’t put out anything too interesting on here for some time now, so thought I should throw up something short but something that will help you.

Traffic is money.

If you cannot get traffic, you cannot make money.

The problem when starting a new site… is that search engine traffic (which is the highest quality) is difficult to get quickly, especially if you are starting out altogether (due to a variety of reasons – Google sandbox, not knowing how to keyword research, wasting time building useless links, high quality websites as competition… etc).

Once you experiment a little, you’ll find yourself being able to get search engine traffic within a week after your website goes live… something I’ll probably cover in a future post. However, for now… let’s concentrate on the next best thing.

Social traffic.

I’ve been experimenting quite a lot with social traffic over the last few months, and made a decent amount of money off it too.

Read nearly any blog and they’ll usually tell you one thing – social traffic is worthless. They don’t tend to click ads, stick around for long or anything else.

The thing is, most of these things think from the perspective of getting traffic to an internet marketing related website… of course social traffic is worthless (if you want to make money, not friends) for IM-related websites.

For OTHER niches though, social traffic is pretty damned good. You’ve all heard of Facebook Ads, haven’t you? Myspace recently came out with their equivalent.

People would not be spending money if they didn’t convert. And here’s how you can benefit from social networks to send your brand new websites a stream of traffic.

This works incredibly well in celebrity / sport niches. This tactic was also going to be part of an information product I was thinking of launching to you guys… however, I’m not sure if I will be after all. I don’t really like promoting IM-related products. :razz:

What’s the trick? Facebook groups!

I’ve not tried this on Myspace, as Facebook works fine for me… although Myspace traffic tends to be a little denser, this should work well on there too.

Let’s pick a hot topic… at the moment, a hot topic is Transformers-actress Megan Fox.

Nothing difficult here, all I did was type her name into Facebook Groups. As you can see, there are over 500 groups… the first with more than 15,000 members between them. All of which are groups with people interested in Megan Fox!

Here’s what you do. The example below is for celebrities, but you can do this for any niche you want.

1) Buy generic domain, depending on your niche. Getting one that’s pure generic will be impossible, and you might not get a .COM… but look to see what you can get. For example, TheBestCelebPics.com (no idea if that is available). Install Wordpress with decent looking theme.

2) Search Google for popular actor / actress pictures. Create post on your new blog with 5-10 of them, with appropriate credits if needed. You could also purchase a cheap celebrity photo pack, it is up to you.

3) Promote on Facebook groups by posting on the group’s wall. Something like – ‘Hey guys, I’m a fan of XYZ and just created a post with XYZ pictures on my website. Check it out!’. Don’t be too spammy, and don’t worry about keywords etc. You can build links while you are doing this, however this will provide you an initial surge of traffic after you’ve just started your site. Aim for the biggest 10 – 20 groups of your subject.

4) CONVERT your visitors! Hit them with a CPA offer (free iPod email / zip submit works well). Or, put in an email subscribe form with a custom title – for example, ‘Subscribe via email for more Megan Fox pictures’. You get the idea. It’s all about adding value to your site, and having subscribers definitely helps.

5) Rinse, repeat times the amount of popular celebrities (or whatever niche you choose) there are. Streams and streams and streams of traffic. You should generally see around 200 – 2,000 uniques per celebrity if you do it well enough. Remember, this will take you less than five minutes per post, so it’s a VERY good return relative to the time put in.

I don’t expect too many of you to do this as people don’t tend to take action. Make sure you test this out on other social networks, as there are tons of them… if you wanted to be really creative and live in a cool country, you could even dominate your country specific social network. Good luck! :)

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