Viral Traffic Techniques - Multiple streams of Traffic: PART III

You are free to publish this article online in your ezinewebsite, ebook, or other online publication. The fullresource box, including 'By line' must remain intact and bepublished with the article.If you publish this article, please contact me and let meknow where you are using it.Contact at: artpub@newbie-guides.com---**Article info**Word count: 1118Hard-wrapped at 65 characters---Viral Traffic Techniques - Multiple streams of Traffic: PART IIIViral traffic is the simplest way to get increased traffic flow to your site and your affiliate programs. Once you get it kick-started, the amount of traffic that viral marketing methodscan produce is quite staggering. Two of the more common (and more successful) methods are give-aways and affiliate programs.Give-aways are an incredibly effective way to drive traffic to your sites. The most common form of give-away are ebooks. Essentially what you do is create an ebook with links back to your site (or affiliate programs), and give it away to people.The goal is for them to in turn give it away to others and so on. I'm sure you can see that what we are talking about is the age old pyramid. Give it away to 3 who in turn give it to 3 who giveit to 3 more and suddenly you have a HUGE impact. Of course thereare pitfalls to any pyramid scheme - in this case, the main problem is making people give it away.There is no way to 'make' someone give your freebie away, however,you can do some things to make it more likely. The most importantthing to do is be sure that your give-aways are useful and have actual value. If you give away a product that is nothing more than a bunch of links to your affiliate programs, nobody else willgive it away - there is no value in it. However if you create a useful product that gives the reader some real benefit, they will be inclined to give it away themselves.There are two ways to ensure value and benefit in your give-aways.1) use real, useful content or a product that provides useful andunique value. 2) make it brandable - in essence, let people put their own information in the book/product when they continue to give it away. Many ebook compilers come with a little bit of software that lets users 'brand' the product with their own information. If you are thinking that this defeats the purpose of giving away products, it doesn't. It simply means that youmust be more subtle in your approach.For example, you make sure the splash page of your ebook/giveawayclearly identifies your homepage as the source of the book. Youcan make only 1/2 (or 3/4) of the links brandable within the book,include a footer on every page, an opt-in sign-up form on the 'last page' of the book for your email list etc. Above all, makeit valuable.If you still think it isn't possible, just take a look at what Jimmy D. Brown has done. He is widely known as one of the most successful money makers on the net. In a recent interview Jimmy, he revealed that he has NOT ADVERTISED ONCE in over 2 years. He gets all his traffic by giving away brandable ebooks.Affiliate programsAnother phenomenal method of generating viral traffic and sales is through affiliate programs. In this case, your own affiliate program for your own products. Again, quality and value are key.If you have a cruddy product with a 1% payout, nobody will be interested. Create a reasonable product that offers good value and reasonably unique content (information or service), and you will have a winner.Creating a product isn't all that hard. It does require a littlework of course, but creating a useful ebook, for example, is well within the grasp of most people. The key to making it work is to choose a topic that interests you, and about which you have some knowledge and experience. A little searching on the net, a couple of evenings typing and a 10-20 page ebook is very manageable. Keep in mind that length is not that important. Valuable content is. 100 pages of garbage is just that garbage.10 pages of useful, valuable content is golden.One of the extra benefits of having an affiliate program is thatyou gain access to all of your affiliates, and are then able to make additional offers to them, either to sell them products directly, or offer new affiliate opportunities as you create them.Clickbank offers a great system for managing any affiliate program that is based on a digitally delivered product or service(ebooks, auto-responders etc.) For a low fee of $49, they take care of EVERYTHING from credit card processing, to real-timetracking, to affiliate payouts. Clickbank also has a HUGE and active body of affiliates ready to take on your products. The only problem is that you don't have direct access to the contactinformation of these affiliates. However, it is quite possibleto get this information from them by simply making your 'join my affiliate program' web page behind an email collection form.What you do is make the potential affiliate request the affiliate sign-up page location from an autoresponder. This does two things, it filters out the people who simply want a discount offyour product, and gives you the contact information of the serious affiliates.Another rising star is payloadz. They are based on paypal, whichhas almost 20,000,000 active users. The great thing about payloadz is that they have the entire system secured against linktheft, a common problem with paypal links. Unlike many systems that claim to protect your links by encrypting the link (e.g. Linkcloaker),payloadz puts all the information into a database and creates acompletely new link that is 100% secure. I'm not knocking link cloakers, they are very valuable, and can save you thousands inlost commissions - they are simply not 100% foolproof (and most good ones like affiliate link cloakerwill admit that).The entire process of setting up a product for sale with payloadztakes about 3 minutes. Once this is done, you can use the linkanywhere. They also have a very robust affiliate program manager that lets you build your affiliate selling force quicklyand easily. Finally, because they are based on paypal, you benefit from a well known name, and a huge user base.Regardless of what kind of business you manage on the web, you should seriously consider developing viral traffic strategies aspart of your overall marketing strategy. Once they are in place,properly developed viral tools will continue to drive free traffic to your site for years. A little investment of your timein the beginning will result in great value in the long term.Recommended reading:Jimmy D. BrownHow to write an ebook in 7 daysBrandable ebook compilerHow to sell what you already know!---------------------------Eric Koshinsky: webmaster and guide at Newbie-guides.comWe aim to provide useful tips and guidance for those whoare new to personal online marketing. Learn more aboutprograms, techniques, and software that can help youreach your online marketing goals. Come on by and have a look.http://www.newbie-guides.com/?aaJoin our newsletter: news@newbie-guides.com