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creatingonlinecom · Guest

http://www.deluxe-planet.net There is a thread under this category asking what our affiliate sales are currently. I started to post this there, but then decided to start a new thread, because my post was starting to head in the direction of offering tips for improving sales. So here it is. Feel free to add your own tips and ideas that have worked well for you here, even if just one tip. This is going to be rather long, so grab a cup of coffee and settle in for some "light reading". I earn about $35 profit per day (on template sales, that is) and have never spent a penny on advertising or site promotion. It's nothing I can retire on *grin*, but it's growing every day, and a little extra money each month sure comes in handy. My primary draw is the fact that I offer free online web design, photo editing, and site promotion tools and have done so for years, and I have a top 10 ranking for these tools at Google (do a search for "free online photo editor" at Google. *wink*) so I'm receiving targeted traffic, that is, webmasters wanting to edit and improve their website in some way, shape, or form. Offering website templates was just a natural option for me, and I have my website templates promoted all over the pages of my free online tools. I also am a photographer and offer free stock photos at my site, which is my second largest traffic draw. These visitors are usually webmasters looking for images to use to make their web design a little nicer. I'm advertising my templates there, as well. So, in essence, I'm getting highly targeted traffic into my site (webmasters) and taking every opportunity to promote the website templates on my most popular pages. In my site promotion tips section of my site, I indicate that it's always a wise idea to "give something away" to get visitors in the door, at which time you can then promote income-producing products to them, as well. So what can you use if you don't have free online tools or photos to give away? Use your imagination. Over the years, I've tried different things. One site promotion tip I offer at my site is to give away free "linkable graphics." This can be an award or a member seal of some type. At one point, I was giving an award for web design. I have long since discontinued it, because it became too time consuming reviewing all of the sites, but it's still out there and going strong. I created a cool graphic that award winners could place on their site, which graphic linked back to my site *wink*. This worked well in two ways: I was receiving alot of traffic from webmasters, especially NEW webmasters who were pretty proud of their website design and wanted to accumulate and display web design awards, and also the graphic was linking back to my site, so I greatly increased the number of backlinks to my site. I didn't give the award to just anyone, however. The site did have to reflect a certain level of quality design and content to receive it. I then listed my award with the biggest award sites, and the traffic just started flowing in! Here are links to 2 of the biggest award sites, if you'd like to try this: http://www.website-awards.net/index.htm and http://www.uwsag.com/ I mentioned "membership seals". I've never done this, but it's very easy to do and works the same way as the awards. Create a unique linkable graphic and decide what type of group you'd like your seal to represent. "Family Safe Sites" is an example of a membership seal. Or it could be something like "Pop-Up Free Sites", so anyone who has a website completely free of pop-up ads would probably be very interested in displaying your membership seal. You get the idea. Regardless of the type of award or membership seal you decide to give away, the goals you'll accomplish here are getting webmasters coming through your website and increasing the number of backlinks to your site. One thing that anyone can offer free from their website is INFORMATION. So write some articles and offer free tips in your area of expertise. The Googlebots will eat them up. *grin* They love pages full of lots of valuable textual content. I do also put out a newsletter and have written a few articles that are available at my site. But probably the most important thing to do is to optimize your website for the search engines. I've focused on Google, because, well that's obvious. I keep track of changes in Google algorithms by occasionally browsing through some SEO forums (such as http://www.seochat.com) and Google's own webmaster tips pages: http://www.google.com/intl/en/webmasters/ I frequently update my site, especially all of my template pages. (I'm actually in the process of a redoing all of the pages at my site with a new design right now.) Stagnant pages will slowly, but surely drop down down down in ranking. Google wants "fresh, updated content", so I regularly add information and change things around, especially on my template pages. I keep track of the changes in my ranking for various keywords and phrases by using this very cool free online tool: http://www.digitalpoint.com/tools/keywords/?action=create I am tracking my ranking, for instance, for "website templates", "free website templates", and then particular types of website templates, such as "wedding website templates" (for which phrase I'm currently ranked #4 at Google - cool, huh? *grin*) with this tool. I seem to be doing better personally by targeting specific template categories. There's so much competition out there for the generic terms "website templates" and "free website templates", that I've decided to focus on specific types of templates. So I occasionally check my ranking with the above mentioned tool and can see if I have advanced or dropped my ranking for specific terms and track the changes. This lets me know which pages I need to go in and edit a bit to "freshen up" and maybe do some additional optimizing (play around with the meta tags, add more keywords in the text on the page, that sort of thing). I also heavily rely on my site stats to see where my traffic is coming from. I want to see people doing searches for specific types of website templates and arriving at my site. I've used this free site stat tool ( http://extremetracking.com) for years, and I love it, even better than all the detailed site stats that come free with my hosting package. By clicking the "Referrer Tracking 1" link, I can view the actual pages at Google that led my visitors to me (by clicking on the individual referrer links), can see which keywords they used, my position for those keywords, etc. I have a whole slew of additional tips, but I'm not sure if I'm boring you to death, so I'll stop for now. If interested in more, let me know, and I'll be happy to post them!