Is there a way I can use Web phenomena such as MySpace and YouTube to get more clicks on my affiliate site?
Yes.
Ah, that’s probably too short an answer, so let’s expand upon the idea here, because it’s a very important one: if you can find a venue online where you can gain some traffic or visibility, even if most of it’s within that venue exclusively, why wouldn’t you want to have a presence? I have a MySpace profile, for example (Dave’s MySpace Profile) and while I certainly don’t consider myself a particularly passionate MySpace user, it’s definitely the case that some of my customers, my readers, are quite involved and they like being able to connect with me on their virtual turf.
Same with YouTube and its sister, Google Video: If you have some video content of interest that you can upload, something that perhaps promotes your site, product or service in a witty or amusing way, I strongly counsel you to do so, and then link to it from your blog, your Web site, and even email your favorite dozen customers to let them know about it!
As you cast a wider net, however, some of the sites that are popular might not prove to be good venues for your promotional efforts, just by the nature of their existing communities. For example, most affiliate marketing folk aren’t going to find customers through the college-focused Facebook social networking site. If you’re selling next-morning hangover cures, however, maybe it would be worth exploring that possibility.
Bookmarking and “resource identification sites” like Del.icio.us, Digg and Reddit are worth leveraging as you can, but it’s difficult to gain any traction unless you have a veritable army of customers who can “vote” your information to the top of the pile on those sites, and generally that kind of fraud can be easily detected and blocked anyway, so it probably isn’t a good idea. In fact, forget I said that at all!
Instead, spend some time thinking about and then adding valuable, helfpul, and informative comments on popular blog sites that demonstrate your expertise in your market segment. Don’t have explicit links in the ‘body’ of your comment, but do point to your site in the URL field that’s an optional value to specify when commenting. You won’t get a 100% click-thru rate, but even if it’s 5% that’s still 5% more than you’d have without that contributing to the discussion.
Hope that helps you identify fruitful avenues for further research as you try to generate more customers (not traffic! customers!) to your site.
Great post Dave. I have read you before. I was looking for “driving traffic from youtube” or some such topic and there you were near the top of the search results. What’s an easy and free video editor for osX 10.4 I can use to add my url to the end of my .3gp vlogs before uploading them to youtube or blip.tv?
Russ, I’m not sure, but I am guessing that most of your inbound links are on linkfarms or other spammy sites that don’t rank or have any real value in Google??
Hi Dave, I’ve just finished reading “Growing your business with Google” and I’m gearing up to redo my entire tattooing website to make it more search engine friendly. One thing is still confusing me. I know that inbound links are a great way to raise my PageRank but when I tried the google search for link:www.russabbott.com It only gave me one result. I know for a fact that there are countless more links coming to my site than the one that was displayed in the search results. Is there something about this link that makes it different or somehow superior to all of the others? Why doesn’t Google disply all of the other links to my site?
Thanks,
Russ Abbott
http://www.russabbott.com
Dave,
I don’t have any of the accouts you talk about here, but I think you are missing the point with “voting” for your story, web site, etc. People digg, etc. for many different reasons, as many as there are social circles. You either like the story, the author, the company… you get the idea. Many people voting for your artical says your artical is important for some reason. Just like buying a newspaper, you might not like every story, but you still would tell your new neighbor which paper was the better buy. And you are correct, sites such as digg take much more than number of diggs to decide which stories are on the front page.
Looks like I will be asking Santa for a video camera this Christmas. The thought of making fun videos and posting them is intriguing, but to think of it as a way to drive traffic to my websites is great.
Maybe there is a way to incorporate a url into the video. Wouldn’t want to make it too obvious of an advertisement, but certainly worth considering. This can prove to be a lot of fun.