If you want to make more affiliate sales, you have to ratchet up your traffic-generation efforts. There are a number of ways in which you can do that. You can send out solo mailing ads, you can use pay per click advertising, you create banner ads, you can post on forums — et cetera.

Of all these avenues for traffic generation, search engine optimization may be one of the cheapest in terms of the amount of time and money it will take per visitor generated. One of the biggest bonuses to SEO-generated traffic is that it continues to flow in without any additional work and money.

With that said, you are probably familiar with the many routine ways of generating traffic. You know about using tags, using keyword optimization, submitting articles to directories, getting back links, etc. This is nothing novel. You’ve tried these techniques and you’ve either gotten results or not).

At this point, what you’ll want to do is find a couple of feathers to put in your cap – a few truly novel SEO techniques that you can use to boost your results. With affiliate marketing, you have a number of interesting options. I will discuss some of them in the remainder of this section.

Let’s start with “Niche Marketing on Crack”: www.nichemarketingoncrack.com/. Sound interesting? This is a new method from Internet marketer “Andrew Hansen”; and it offers a far more realistic, far more credible explanation of how you can generate traffic as an affiliate product marketer.

Now, unlike most big launch products you’ve probably seen, it doesn’t offer a plan for making a million dollars. And this is perhaps one of its best features. Rather than giving you the “big plan,” it tells you how to make small sites in a short period of time that will make you a small amount of money each year. One of the strangest things about this product is that the claims are unsettlingly reasonable.

Additionally, it teaches readers how to become successful and replicate that success dozens of times over through a fool-proof system.

Rather than giving readers an opaque set of directions or a laundry list of Internet marketing banalities, it gives readers a clear, step-by-step set of directions that walk you through the entire process. Andrew claims that his girlfriend and her mother were able to replicate his success—were able to make sales consistently with these sites—with no prior knowledge of Internet marketing.

But that’s not all. In addition to using Andrew’s strategy, there are a number of other methods you can use to generate traffic for little or no cost through search engine optimization. For instance, you create a forum on your site; and encourage people to post. Not only would this help to encourage repeat traffic, but this would allow your visitors to generate content for you, which search engines would rank and attribute to your site.

You could also use scripts to collect data and arrange it in certain ways on your site. For instance, Mr. Rat’s Amazon product feed (which you can find here www.mrrat.com/scripts.html) collects information from Amazon and then displays it on your site according to your own specifications.

You could purchase or create scripts similar to this that automatically collect product information and display it in a unique way. Google will take not of this next time they rank your site; and you are likely to see an improvement in your search engine ranking positions as a result.

When it comes down to it, you have many options for improving your search engine ranking positions; and doing so can often be much cheaper than using pay per click sources of traffic. So integrate some of the aforementioned tips into your arsenal and put them to use generating traffic.

Gunnar Berglund is a veteran Internet marketer since 2000.
He is the owner of www.emarketingprofit.com
and www.houseofseo.com a search engine optimization and
search engine marketing company.