How to Maximize Your Online Referral / Affiliate Link Marketing Efforts

Coming from an information technology / web site development background and having discovered the wealth that can be earned several years ago from marketing incentive / reward / get paid to (GPT) sites I have discovered several simple and little-known strategies, tips, and tricks for maximizing online marketing efforts

1. Step 1

   1. Many search engines and indices (plural for index) will allow you to submit your whole referral or affiliate link (though most wont.) Most notably Google and MSN Live Search ( I knew someone that got his referral link for another site posted on the FIRST PAGE of Google and made a killing in referrals!) One quick way to test a search provider if you have been promoting your referral links for some time would be to do a search for your username (usually present at the end of your referral link) and see what the results show. Look for your own referral links listed in the search results. If your referral link shows in its entirety then you know to add that search provider to your list for periodically submitting all of your raw referral or affiliate links directly.

2. Step 2

   2. Buy yourself a snappy new domain name and have it redirect (the whole domain) to your referral or affiliate link (you don't even need hosting – just use domain forwarding.) Then promote your new domain to the search engines, indices, forums, and blogs. It helps not having the obvious referral link look. Cheap domain names start at just $1.99 if you know where to look.

3. Step 3

   3. Choose a referral banner that doesn't give up the whole site URL (or edit/make your own.) Many people will (for some reason) choose to type in the URL manually if they have the benefit of knowing it rather that clicking upon an obvious referral link. Leave them guessing a bit (make it a bit of a mystery) as to what site the banner is speaking of. When speaking of sites in text, refer to them in a way that doesn't obviously or intuitively disclose the URL (for example, if I was writing about www.GreedyClicks.com, I would say "Greedy Clicks" rather than "GreedyClicks", or "GreedyClicks.com".

4. Step 4

   4. Start blogging about your referral sites / links at Blogger (www.Blogger.com) Blogger is Google based and I’ve found is your best chance at a popular blog with a great Google rank. I’ve noticed that Google regularly favors their own blogs based on their own blog site interface (and it doesn't hurt to promote this blog to other search engines and indices as well.) Blogger will also host your blog for free seamlessly on your own domain. Another good blog site with max exposure is the eBay based blog (blogs.ebay.com). Make an eBay blog and promote it as well.

5. Step 5

   5. Regularly do a search, as if you knew nothing at all about the subject of the type sites you are promoting. See what pops up. Notice the first site on the list. Notice what they are doing right? ...and what you may be doing wrong? (meta tags, keywords, description, etc.) Notice keywords, etc. Improve the quality, quantity, and newness of your textual content regularly. Be honest and open, don't resort to superlatives and hype wording like "Go to this site and make $500 in an hour" and "fire your boss" (a big turn off and one of the reasons why people may leave your site early.) Morph your site into a closer rendition of the top site and re-submit (another step up the ladder?) ...just common sense.

6. Step 6

   6. If you run your own referral sites... do your homework on Search Engine Optimization (SEO) techniques (freely available all over the web.) Learn about the proper use of META TAGS, robots.txt, and sitemap files. If you are going to do it, do it right! Oh, and don't use "frames" when building your site (they are not search engine/index friendly - don't shoot yourself in the foot.)

7. Step 7

   7. Purchase professional web site promotional services and/or software that will automate your site submission efforts. Don't get fooled by software / services that say they will promote your site(s) to 30,000 search engines, etc. Chances are 95% of those sites will be Free For All (FFA) sites which likely no human ever looks at (at one time FFA sites increased your "link popularity" - which mattered then - but all respectable search engines and indices have learned to ignore the FFA sites now - seeing their obvious abuse and non-consequence.) Anyways, what's the point? Most FFA sites want you to manually confirm your entry nowadays (want 80 or 90 emails to respond to personally - go ahead and submit to useless FFA sites.)

8. Step 8

   8. Be persistent, but DON'T SPAM the search engines/indices. A good interval for me (with good luck) has been to submit at least once a month (but NOT more.) A lot of engines/indices will quickly add you to their trashcan if you bug them more (not a good place to be.)

9. Step 9

   9. Join a link exchange network (thousands out there.) This may help significantly depending upon the quality (interest generated - staying power) of your own site (compared to others in the network.)

10. Step 10

    10. Take over an already popular web site domain that has expired (get them cheap if you know where to look) and post your referral links / banners there. Enjoy instant popularity with the twist of people not knowing what hit them once they've arrived.

11. Step 11

    11. Think of a unique niche of people that might appreciate the product, service, or site you are promoting and post to forums covering that niche. ...for example, people with some sort of social anxiety (such as agoraphobia, etc.) or other homebound people might want to learn about online money making from home sites , etc.

12. Step 12

    12. Double or triple the impact of your message forum posts by promoting your posts to the search engines and indices as well... Yes, after writing posts to a particular forum I always try to go back, gather the "permalink"s (or URLs) of the specific posts I wrote in notepad and spend a bit of time afterwards adding them to the search providers to crawl.