Proven Niche Website Building Tips to Generate Traffic, Sharing, and Affiliate Revenue

Website building

 

So you want to launch a new website and generate affiliate commissions, but are unsure about your strategy. Well, building websites or blogs about certain topics, subjects, or “niches’ is a great way to proceed for a number of reasons. People love websites that focus on a certain subject they are interested in, so make sure to build your niche website or blog with laser-focus and with a purpose to ensure you will get traffic, repeat visitors, and build a following over time. As you build out your site, your traffic and following will increase, therefore you can generate revenue with your site by doing things like: advertising affiliate banners, adding Google Adsense, building an email list, gaining Twitter followers, and adding Facebook fans/likes. All of this can be accomplished with very little cost. Niche website/blog building is an integral part of publishing content on the web, generating traffic, and therefore producing affiliate sales. Content is king and the more content you are able to allow the search engines to “spider”, catalog, and then rank, the more possible traffic you can generate to your sites. Here are some niche website, SEO, Social Networking, and linking concepts to get you moving in the right direction:

 

Site Building Tools – I highly recommend WordPress to build sites with (my company’s free site builder with free hosting uses WordPress). There are many sites builders you can use to get a presence up on the web. Make sure to set it up properly with good titles and categories. If using WordPress, utilize tagging as well which multiplies the actually amount of spiderable pages on your site. Blogger.com is also a good free platform to use to create a site, add affiliate banners, and start posting fresh content.

 

Site Organizational Strategy – When you go to launch niche sites, to promote affiliate merchants, make sure to stay organized in a spreadsheet with info like: Merchant promoted, platform used to build it, login info (passwords), and posting frequency, i.e. (Date.com, WordPress, Evan@exper.com (jimihen5478321), twice daily). This will help you stay organized and will allow you follow a pre-established plan of action. Strategize on posting frequency to maximize your efforts.

 

Daily content posting – Posting content daily (i.e. articles, bog posts, essays, merchant reviews, product reviews) is a great way to ensure that the search engines will be coming back to your site frequently to check for new content to catalog. Over time, the more frequently you post, the more pages you will have in the search engine’s repository or cache. The more pages you have in the cache, the more possible times your site’s pages can come up in the search results for various search terms, i.e. “Purchase flowers in Las Vegas”. Daily content posting is the best way to increase the number of pages on your site and therefore increase the amount of possible traffic you can generate with that particular site. Post original content is always the best couse of action because the search engines love original content. Try to stay timely with your posts by setting up Google Alerts on your core keyword phrase so you are notified as soon as something new about that subject happens, then you can go make a post on your site about it which can increase your chances to get traffic to that page.

 

Use the Best Plug-ins to Enhance Your SEO – One of the advantages to using WordPress to build your sites is all the amazing plug-ins you can add to your site to increase functionality and “stickiness”. Here are some links to the top plug-ins available:

http://yoast.com/top-wordpress-plugins/

http://wphacks.com/wordpress-plugins/

http://mashable.com/2009/03/20/wordpress-seo-plugins/

 

Social Bookmark Your Articles – Social bookmarking is a great way to generate traffic, inbound links, and better rankings for your site’s content. You have to join the sites first and create a profile. This will allow you to bookmark,or submit, any articles you wish. You can submit your own articles to these sites and other people may bookmark them if they find them interesting which helps their exposure. You should bookmark or Digg other peoples content and articles too, it just may encourage them to do your too. Top Social Bookmarking Sites: http://www.ebizmba.com/articles/social-bookmarking-websites. I recommend the Addthis.com Google Chome extension to allow you to submit your new pages and posts easier to the top social bookmarking sites.

 

Social Networking – Create a Twitter account and Facebook Fan Page for each site you wish to build up. Example, you are running a site advertising flower affiliate merchants, so you would create an identity “FlowerGuru” for instance on Twitter and a FlowerGuru Fan Page on FB. This will allow you to advertise these groups on your sites and generate followers and fans. Then, these followers and friends can be messaged and communicated with to generate traffic back to your sites. Social networking is very powerful and shouldn’t be used obnoxiously. Always remain professional and post content you think your followers and fans would benefit from, i.e. helpful tips, informative articles from trusted sources, interactive polls, and affiliate promotions. Try to avoid being annoying because or you will lose followers. You should also have a main personal identity that you can maintain in order to network professionally on Facebook and LinkedIn.

 

Coupon Promoting – Coupon sites are all the rage because people are increasingly looking for coupons to save money with online merchants. Many affiliate merchants provide coupon codes to affiliate to help them promote. Some merchants provide coupon feeds that you can grab and publish on your site on a page or per merchant. You need some skills or tools to accomplish this. Posting unique merchant descriptions and merchant reviews will allow your site to rank well because it has unique content and isn’t just posting coupon codes. Unique content is absolutely essentially to good rankings, especially for a coupon site when there is so much competition.

 

Communities and Forums – Launching your own social community is great way to build something real and substantial that will grow over time. Social communities are great for repeat traffic and building a large member base. Like sites, the larger it builds the more traffic it can generate. Ning.com is a tremendous tool for niche community building, but has a small monthly fee. Vbulletin is great for online forums. Forums and social networks are just more ways to create ad space and get traffic. The nice thing is they are built up content-wise by the users, which can add a significant amount of content depending on how active your community is.

 

Link Building Strategies – Acquiring inbound inks to your sites is essential to building better search engine rankings over time. There are many different ways you can get links to your site, such as:
– Blog Roll Links – When a fellow blogger links to your blog sitewide, you can reciprocate with a link. Goes on every page so it can be powerful.
– Blog Commenting – Posting comments on blogs related to yours (Google Blog Search can be used to find related blogs to comment on). Make good comments or they won’t be approved.
– Forum Posting with Signature Link – Join multiple forums, set-up signature links, start posting good comments and interacting.
– Online Press Releases – great for building links from quality news sites. I recommend eReleases.com for maximum distribution and effectiveness.

 

Site Stickiness – Site stickiness is a tremendous concept to grasp and implement. Making your site more sticky will allow you to capture more from your site’s traffic. Some essential sticky features are: newsletter signup, bookmark this site, social network sharing buttons like follow on Twitter and FaceBook Fanpage, and RSS Feed. Basically anything that will help you capture more of your visitors information. Another great way to engage visitors is to run sweepstakes or contests through tools like WildFireApp and Woobox. This is a very effective way of engaging your visitors and capturing them into your web so you can remarket to them later on.

 

RSS Feed Submissions – Every blog has by nature RSS feeds included. RSS feeds allow you to syndicate your content all over the web and into people’s feed readers. Your RSS feeds need to be manually submitted to get the best effect. Definitely check out Robin Good’s site for more excellent info on RSS and the top 200 RSS directories to submit to: www.masternewmedia.org. Once you have submitted your RSS feed once to each RSS directory you are done.

 

Article Ideas – Coming up with article and blog post ideas can be challenging at times. Look at other related sites and see what they are posting in their blogs and article sections. Here are some examples of article titles:
– “Top 10 ways to Find a Date Online”
– “Best Ways to Lose Weight in the New Year”
– “What are the Top Phone Service Providers for Home Phone Service”
–  “How to start a garden in your backyard”

Also how to’s, breaking news, and new product launches are good topics to write about.

 

Brand Your Affiliate Sites – Creating a brand with your affiliate site or blog is a good idea because people will remember your site and revisit them frequently. Give people a reason to bookmark your site or join your newsletter. Treat them well and grow them huge over time! Personal branding is all the rage, so make sure to create your memorable brand and then represent it to the fullest online. Anything can work with the right amount of push and effort behind it.

I hope you enjoyed some of my niche website building tips. These tips can be used by anyone looking to generate traffic and affiliate commissions. Let me know if you have any questions at all! Thanks!

CEO and Founder

Evan is the CEO and Founder of Experience Advertising. He has more than 20 years experience and background with ecommerce website marketing. His skill sets include: search engine marketing, social media marketing, affiliate marketing, conversion rate optimization, and other traffic driving and community building strategies.