Last post I talked about Article Marketing as a cost free way to get more traffic and there is one other method I use for getting traffic for free and that is using Web 2.0 sites like Squidoo and Hubpages.

Having these sites pointing to your squeeze pages gets your more traffic. I don’t get as much traffic from Squidoo & Hubpages as I do from article marketing, but every little bit helps right?

If you haven’t already started creating lenses (squidoo) and hubs (hubpages) be warned that they are rather fun and before you know it you might get addicated and find yourself up at midnight trying to get to 50 lenses so you can become a giant squid (or is that just me?).

While I like making squidoo lenses I don’t make much money from them directly (yes I know you can add affiliate links in them but I rarely get clicks or make money from my lens and hubs, and I also know many people who do make good money from squidoo and hubs but I don’t.). So I use them for traffic to my squeeze pages and that DOES work for me.

So how does this work?

You can either take one of your articles that you have already written or create a new one. Break it up into three parts and make a text module for each part. Add a relevant Youtube video (there are modules that you can add that do this) and remember to add links back to your squeeze page.

If you are already making lenses and hubs this should only take you around ½ hour or so. If you are new to it, then give yourself a bit of extra time to get used to using the format.

I won’t go into a big ‘how to use Squidoo’ here because it’s actually quite intuitive and if you get stuck there are HUNDREDS of different pages online that teach you to use it.

After your pages are done then to keep them working for you and ranked high just make a small change about once a week to keep things fresh. Just adding a new tag is enough and will only take you a few minutes.

So that’s it. That’s really all I do to drive traffic to my squeeze pages. Some of my affiliate sites are getting hundreds of visitors a day using these simple methods.

It doesn’t have to be complicated – you just need to take action.

I hope you enjoyed my mini series in making money from affiliate marketing.

Now .. what will I write about next … hmmm

Now that you have your affiliate page set up, it’s time to get some traffic to it so you can capture those email addresses and start collecting some money.

There are many ways to get traffic and all of them will cost you something, whether you pay for it with dollars (PPC) or with time (article marketing, etc). So don’t ever believe it when someone claims to get free traffic, it ALWAYS costs you something (time or money).

That being said, I do prefer to get my traffic without paying a cent if at all possible. So let’s start with my favorite way to get traffic:

Article Writing

Believe it or not everyone is capable of writing an article. With research and actually writing, it shouldn’t take longer than about an hour per article. The more you write however the easier and quicker it becomes. Plus you only need to write around 300-500 words for most article directories.

How many articles should you write?

While that depends on each niche and the quality of the articles as a good guide I’d aim for at least 20 articles per affiliate landing page. If you find its converting well and you are making a lot of sales you could write more if you like.

To get really good traffic try to write at least 2 articles per week. Over time this really adds up and within 6 months you’ll have around 50 articles out there all sending you traffic to your squeeze page (and making you lots of lovely sales).

Your article headlines should be short and catchy and also contain your main keyword. Good headlines are those that compel the reader to want to read more. I’ve found titles that contain “How To”, “Top 5” and “10 Ways” do very well.

Here’s some examples of a good headline:

“5 Killer Tips to Get Traffic to Your Squeeze Page” or “Want More Website Traffic? Secret Article Writing Tips”

Now for the body of the article. What I usually do is write an introduction which tells the reader what they are going to find out by reading this article. I also like to include a benefit they’ll get by reading it such as “after reading this article you’ll know how to increase your website traffic almost overnight …”. Remember to include your main keyword phrase once in the introduction and again somewhere in the body of the article.

After you have finished your article it’s time to write a resource box where you get to promote your squeeze page. Don’t just write something like, “sign up for my newsletter at yourwebsite.com” as you’ll get a crap click through rate. You need to really entice your reader to click through and take action so try and tell them what’s in it for them by visiting your website. I like to mention the free report they can get so something like “Want to really explode your website traffic? Download my FREE report (normally valued at $17) at mywebsite.com and start seeing a really difference in traffic and sales”. That should increase your click through rate.

Now it’s finished where do you submit it to?

I usually only submit to ezinearticles.com. I’ve tried submitting to lots of directories and even once used a submission service that spun different variations of your article to different directories but to be honest I didn’t see that much difference in traffic from just submitting it to ezinearticles so now just submit it there and nowhere else. (don’t get their premium service – the free one is just the same you just have to wait a few days longer).

You’ll find that many people go to ezinearticles to get content for their own websites so don’t be surprised if you see it at other places as well (that’s a good thing – as long as they keep the resource box intact!).

How much traffic do you get from articles?

How long is a piece of string? Seriously though I’ve had some articles that have got less than 20 views and some that have over 10,000 views. You just never know which ones are going to rank well in the search engines and get the traffic sometimes. That’s why I recommend you write at least 20 articles per squeeze page – some of them will do well and some of them won’t so you need at least that many to get good traffic.

Ok, so next post I’ll continue on with more ideas for getting traffic so stay tuned to getting traffic from Web 2.0 sites.

It’s now time to upload all of our work to our website. You should now have your index page ready to go with your opt-in form on it. A free report that you can give away, and the download page for it, and your autoresponder set up to build your list.

To upload your webpage’s you need a FTP program. You probably already have one on your computer somewhere. The most common programs are FileZilla, CuteFTP & WiseFTP just to name a few. If you use Firefox as your browser there is even an extension called FireFTP which you can use with the browser to upload your web pages.

Most of them work the same way, you need to know your username and password for your hosting account and the web address of where you are going to put your files. All of the FTP programs come with great help pages if you get stuck using them.

Ok, now you should have your website set up, let’s go over what you’ve learnt:

Step 1. Find a product to promote
Step 2. Choosing your product
Step 3a. Set up Hosting & Domain Name
Step 3b. Creating Your Index Page & Free Report
Step 3c. Setting Up Your Download Page
Step 4. Your Autoresponder
Step 5. Uploading it all using FTP (this post).

So what’s next?

Now you need to get people to your website. You need TRAFFIC! So next post I’ll start teaching you how to get traffic to your website.

You’ve probably heard this a thousand times, but making money online is sooo much easier when you have an autoresponder doing all the work for you.

The two biggest autoresponders that most people choose between is Get Response or Aweber. I’m not going to get into an argument which is the best one because they are both pretty good.

I personally prefer and use Aweber because I find it easier to get a campaign and email set up which I am sure you already know because if you are on any of my lists that is who the email gets sent by.

The reason why I think Autoresponders are so important is that you can have as many lists as you like for as many different products as you like and you can set up a series of emails so they get email #1 when they sign up, email #2 a few days later, email #3 later again and so on.

I’ve known people that have nearly a year’s worth of emails set up in their autoresponder so whenever anyone new joins their list they can market to them for years or more.

Another reason I recommend that you fork out the costs for an Autoresponder is because of email deliverability. Many ‘free’ autoresponder accounts are not worth even trying because many of the emails don’t even get to where they are going because of spam blockers and the like.

Besides you usually only have to make one sale from any one of your lists per month to cover the costs.

Ok, now that I’ve convinced you to get an autoresponder account, let’s continue setting up our index page.

Firstly you’ll need to set up a new mailing list for your affiliate product that you are going to promote. Call it anything you like, but I like to name it something similar to the domain name so people recognize it easily.

SHH SECRET STRATEGY – Now before you get the html code for the opt in form, you’ll see that you can put a location into your Thank You page. This is the page that people see when they confirm their subscription. If you leave it blank they’ll get sent to the default Aweber ‘thank you for joining’ page.

Don’t let them see this, it’s a wasted opportunity. Instead put your affiliate link / CPA offer into the thank you page field in your autoresponder sign up form! Then when your customer confirms their subscription they’ll get taken directly to the affiliate offer. This WILL earn you money.

After you have finished setting up your autoresponder list grab the html code and place it onto your index.html page. Let your customers know that as well as the free report they’ll also get weekly tips and secrets about the niche that you’ve chosen.

Cool .. we are nearly there. Now you will need to upload everything to your website so you can start sending visitors there .. I’ll talking about uploading and FTP’ing next post ..

Well we are still on the topic of setting up your website. So let’s keep going to see how far we get today ..

Ok, when we left off last time, I was talking about setting up your opt-in page, or squeeze page. That page will be the first page that people see when they come to your website so you need to call it index.html.

I had also just shown you how to convert your new report into a PDF file. I’ll quickly talk about how you can upload it to your website soon so that people can download it, but first you need a download page to put it on.

So let’s create that page that you can put your report on so that your customers can download your free report.

Download Page

This is the second page of your affiliate website and on it you will have the link to your free report as well as a link to the affiliate offer that you are promoting.

It’s always a good idea to name this page with some numbers or extra letters so it’s hard to guess. I usually add numbers to the end of my pages, so something like download328.html.

Set your download page up something like this:

“Here is the link for your free report >> DOWNLOAD LINK HERE <<”

And right underneath it is where you will put your affiliate offer. Something like “This product is also really great for people trying to lose weight – it has helped thousands just like you to drop pounds fast and easy >> Your Affiliate Link <<”

Obviously tailor to offer to the product you are promoting, but never just have your free report download and nothing else because you’ll be missing out on opportunities – always add a relevant offer – it won’t cost you anything and you’ll be surprised how many people click on it and even buy the product.

Some people also like to put adsense ads on their download page but I have never made much money from this so I’d rather just have an affiliate link instead.

Next we’ll go back to our opt-in (squeeze) page and finish setting that up. To do that you need an autoresponder account.

5. Autoresponder account

Since we will be using our index page to collect our customer’s details you’ll need to use an autoresponder account to collect their details and schedule your emails to them.

I’ll talk about setting up your autoresponder account next post ..