Affiliate websites, like all sites, need to be promoted in order to be successful. After all, you can have the best site in the world but if no one sees it then you aren’t going to make any money from it. Using any or all of the 7 marketing methods listed below will help increase your Google PageRank, search engine rankings, and most importantly visits to your site.

1. Search Engine Submission

Once an important step in promoting your website, search engine submission has become a small part of promoting Affiliate Websites. Don’t bother paying a company to submit your website to 50,000 search engines. There really isn’t any value in it anymore. You may still want to submit your site to the big three (Google, Yahoo, MSN) but even this is starting to lose value. Of the seven promotion methods, this is by far the least important. Why has search engine submission lost its value? Because if you successfully follow the other techniques below then search engines will find your site from links on other sites.

2. Directory Submission

There are a lot of free and paid directories online and it is important to get your site listed on as many of them as possible, especially the ones with high PageRank. Directories offer one-way backlinks (more valuable than reciprocal links) and are widely used by surfers to find information and sites they are looking for. There are various companies and software programs developed to help you get your site on directories. An important factor to remember when submitting to directories is to include a lot of keywords in your site’s description area.

3. Pay Per Click (PPC) Advertising

Google AdWords or Yahoo Search Marketing are valuable tools to help get more visitors to your site. By paying to get your keywords to the front page of search results you are bound to increase your traffic. You will want to be careful with this form of advertising however because its costs can quickly get out of hand. You may only be paying $0.10 per click but if you get 1000 clicks in a day that is $100/day. It’s worth it if you end up making more that $100 each day from those clicks but you will want to keep close tabs on this.

4. Article Submission

Article submission has quickly become one of the most effective marketing strategies to come along in years. The process is fairly simple and allows for a great many backlinks to your site and helps you look like an expert in your field. For example, if your affiliate website is all about mountain bikes then write an article about ‘Great Places to Mountain Bike in Montana’.

Once you have written the article you can submit it to literally thousands of article websites on the Internet. The more websites that pick up your article, the better. The most important part of your article is the signature at the bottom. Make absolutely sure that you have a link to your affiliate website within your signature so that people can click it and visit your site. Article websites are quickly indexed by search engines resulting in a lot of links to your affiliate marketing website.

5. Forums

Similar to articles, forums give you the opportunity to inform people about your topic while at the same time having a link back to your site in your signature. Find forums that discuss relevant topics and answer peoples’ questions. This way you appear as an expert and people are more likely to visit your affiliate website. Like directory and article submission, forum posts help add one-way backlinks to your affiliate website which, in time, will increase your PageRank and search engine rankings.

6. Word of Mouth

Once you get people to your website, word of mouth is a visitor to your site telling someone else to visit your affiliate site. You can encourage people to do this by having a tell-a-friend box on your site. This way, the visitor can quickly put their friend’s email address into the box and then software on the website can send the friend an email. People are more likely to do this than open their email software and write an email to a friend about your site. Also, since you are writing the content of the email, you can ensure that it mentions important elements of your site and encourages people to visit.

7. Opt-in Newsletter

This is a terrific marketing technique to encourage people to keep coming back to your affiliate website and potentially making you money. Add a newsletter sign-up box on your site to get a mailing list of people that want more information from you. Once you have a list of people then start sending newsletters weekly or monthly (I wouldn’t send them daily as this may turn people off) that include some valuable information as well as links back to your site. If your site sells widgets, send a newsletter describing a new widget or telling them about a sale.

One very important note to make about sending newsletters is never send them to people that didn’t ask for it. Spamming people with your newsletter will quickly get you blacklisted and greatly hurt your business.

In Conclusion…

Site promotion is just as important, if not more important, than building a great site. There is no point having a great affiliate website if no one knows it is out there. You certainly won’t make any money from your affiliate site if you do not get people to come to it. Make sure you follow these 7 promotion techniques to increase site visitors and earnings.