Jeff Johnson’s www.UndergroundConfessions.com Affiliate Marketing and Product Creation Part 8 of 13 Related to internet marketing jeff johnson affiliate marketing super affiliate SEO search engine optimization affiliate internet affiliate marketing underground confessions internet…

Quality web traffic is the single most challenging aspect of online marketing but is the most important way to make sales. Sales lead to money flow and then to profit. Small business owners and entrepreneurs struggle with finding free traffic for their sites, but for big companies and marketers, its easier to simply buy traffic through Google Adwords.

Paid advertising online has a real benefit, in that it can be scaled! Traffic can be enhanced to boundless levels after you have found keywords that are connected with your business. Google Adwords bring almost immediate results, where search engine optimization takes much longer.

Buying traffic through Adwords (or other forms of paid advertising) is generally considered to be the most efficient method for acquiring targeted visitors. But there is a down side: if your website is not properly designed for making sales, you could lose a lot of money and you could lose it very fast.

An immediate surge of targeted traffic is the result of paid traffic, and with the appropriate keywords and marketing plan, can yield hundreds of thousands of visitors. As with a light switch, you can turn the traffic on and off.

Paying for traffic is very popular. When a marketer makes big claims of high monthly revenue, say in the hundreds of thousands each month, he or she is most likely paying for advertising.

Knowing how to take visitors to your site and turn them into customers is the most valuable aspect of your enterprise and should be firmly in place before marketing starts. Without effective sales copy on your website, you probably won’t see anyone becoming a customer, and your Adwords campaign (and especially our money) will have been a wasted effort.

The most significant step you can take in this process is to ensure that your website is converting traffic at maximum potential before buying traffic. If anything is out of order, including the look or the stated purpose, you could lose money.

After working over your website with a fine toothed comb, you are now set to begin utilizing Adwords. At what point do you know you are making a healthy profit?

If you spend $20 to make $24, is that a good return? Yes! That’s a good 20% return on investment!

Don’t be too quick to turn down what seems like a small profit.  Just think if you had paid $1,000 and returned $1,200 in revenue? With a higher investment, 20% begins to look even better.  If you spend $10,000 on advertising, your return would be $12,000. You can feel very pleased with even a 10% return on an Adwords campaign.

Some Adwords marketers spend more than $10,000 a day and return a very strong profit. Since most of these marketers are just pushing traffic, they direct-link to the product, and avoid dealing with customers and shipping products.

Research as much as you can about Adwords before you begin, either by talking with someone who has extensive experience or reading a few books. Most marketers start out with free traffic sources before switching to paid traffic. If you think you have what it takes, skip the free traffic step and move right into Adwords.

I’m serious when I tell you there are millions of dollars to be made in paid advertising. There is a lot of money to be made with Adwords. If they can do it, so can you and I!

Search Engine Optimization, or SEO as it is better known as, is one of the latest buzzwords doing the rounds of the Internet. Essentially search engine optimization means that website owners need to understand how a search engine finds results from the Internet, and what system do they use to determine the hierarchy in which these results are displayed. This fundamental knowledge can then be used by website owners to direct more traffic to their websites.

Before going into the intricacies of search engine optimization, understanding the link between it and affiliate marketing would be appropriate. Affiliate marketing is a source of income, and this doesn’t necessarily constrain itself to individuals, but also businesses. Businesses or groups of people can use affiliate marketing to pay the costs of maintaining a website. Although hosting websites on a server may be minimal, there are loads more expense heads, like writers and web designers, copyrights for content, logistical costs, etc. And apart from just paying off bills, affiliate marketing allows the website owners a tremendous flexibility when choosing the advertisements, so that they are in keeping with the content of the website.

Search engines use an algorithm to determine what the most relevant content on the have Internet. They crawl through websites, looking for occurrences of keywords. Websites usually have metadata tags describing the content of the website. However, due to misuse, the sole reliance on metadata has diminished considerably. A search engine will check the occurrences of the keywords within the body of the text, and also the time it was last updated. All these factors contribute to what is known as the website’s page rank, which in turn determines how high up the website goes in the results.

There are a few steps for search engine optimization for a website. These are not secrets by any means, but the key to success here is to consistently improve. This way there is no stagnation of any kind and the content remains fresh. The first step is to continuously update the content of the website, and include relevant keywords that occur often within that text in the metadata. The second step is to try and develop a back linking or ‘link love’ scenario, where other websites provide a link to this website. The search engine will also pick up on this, and it contributes to the overall page rank of a website.

Search engine optimization is also important for the individual affiliate marketer, especially if the affiliate has his own website.