We’ve seen that you can use Yahoo Answers in order to get some free traffic to your website. But some people wonder whether it is the right place for them to get traffic for THEIR site. Let’s take a look at what types of offers or products that you can successfully promote using them.

Affiliate/CPA offers.

This is the main thing that online marketers do to earn money: push some affiliate offers. You can get traffic to your offers by using Yahoo Answers, but you need to do it the right way. First, don’t post affiliate links on Yahoo Answers. Doing so will rapidly get you banned, as remember, it is not a place to advertise, but rather to share useful information. Therefore, you will need to build a landing page and get a domain name for your site. A $0.99 .info domain will do here.

Now, what kind of offers will do well here? While some people have had success with offers that require a credit card or a purchase, I have noticed that offers which simply require the person to sign up for a site or fill out information do better.

For example, if you are targeting the “make money online” niche, you have some options. You could build a simple, one or two page site that gives information on various paid survey opportunities and insert your affiliate links there. When you answer the question, provide some useful information about how online surveys work and how they can make some easy money and then send the reader to your site in order to compare various survey sites. You could also build a landing page for a free biz opp offer and send the reader there. You get $2 – $5 for every person that fills out the form.

There are other niches for you to explore as well. Many people ask questions about how much car insurance costs or how to get a student loan. There are plenty of pay per lead offers which are related to these niches. Just answer the askers question, and then tell them that “you found this site” which lets them compare car insurance quotes or get proposals for student loans, etc. Try out various types of offers and see what converts best.

No matter what you do, do not simply spam your website link all over the place. You should appear as a genuine participant in Yahoo Answers. Ask questions yourself. Answer some questions in other niches without linking to any website.

You could do this in about 1 or 2 hours each day. But if you want to save time, you can always hire a freelancer to answer the questions and participate for you. There are plenty of people who would be willing to do the work for you for a small amount, such as $0.25 per answer they post on the site.

As we all know, traffic is king in the internet marketing world. No traffic to your site equals no money for you, since there is no one visiting your site. There are various ways that you can use to get traffic to your website, but many webmasters are looking for free traffic. Is it even possible? Don’t you need to spend money in order to make money? Well, thanks to the power of the internet, it is possible to get free exposure for your site and thus draw visitors to it.

Yahoo Answers is a very good way to bring people to your website. For those of you who don’t know, Yahoo Answers is a place where people ask questions about various topics and others give them answers. The good thing about this platform is that you can insert a link to your site in your answer. Also, the site gets a lot of traffic from all around the world. What makes it a great marketing tool is that anyone can see the questions and answers, not only the person who asked the question.

But in order to stay out of trouble and get the maximum benefit from Yahoo Answers, you need to conduct your marketing activities properly. Remember, this is a place where users seek information. They don’t come to Yahoo Answers in order to be bombarded with commercial advertisements. After all, if someone wanted that, all they have to do is to open up their “Junk Mail” folder in their email account, there’s plenty of ads there all right.

When you answer a question, be sure to state some useful information and not just say “Here go to this website NOW!!! (your link)”. For example, if someone asks whether online surveys are legit or a scam you would say something like “While there are a few scam sites out there, most online survey sites are legit and pay you either in cash or by giving you stuff like gift card, I found a list of legit survey sites that are free to join here: (your link)”. It is better for you to build a landing page, rather than insert affiliate links. This will seem a lot less suspicious to Yahoo.

To stay below the radar, vary your answers, don’t simply copy and paste the same answer to everyone, even if the question is the same. Give answers in different topics as well, without inserting any links. Even if the site you are promoting is related to online surveys, for example, answer some questions about other things such as dogs or computers or whatever else you may know about as well. This will make it look like you are a legitimate contributor, rather than someone who is just answering questions related to their niche to get clicks to their own site. You should give more answers without your link than those with it.

The traffic that you will receive may start slowly, but if you keep at it you will soon get enough visitors to make some decent commissions or sales each month.

We all know that article marketing is an effective way to get traffic to your website. Whether it is a product that you own, or an affiliate offer that you are running, it is a very effective way of getting the visitors that you need. It also gives you the opportunity to get free traffic. Article marketing can bring you traffic in two ways, either by having readers who see your article click through to your site via your links, or by building backlinks that will help you rise in search engines for your desired keywords. While it is an effective marketing method, there are some things you need to keep under consideration to get the most out of it.

Many who are starting out in article marketing wonder just how long the articles have to be in order to be effective. The general rule is that an article of around 300 to 400 words in sufficient. You see, online readers typically have a short attention span. Any longer and they are likely to lose interest an feel bored. Unless your content has truly captivated them, they wouldn’t bother with reading a long wall of text. If you think that you have more to say than what would fit in a 400 word article, it would be better to split your ideas into two articles or so.

Remember, when you are doing article marketing, the goal is to get the reader to visit your website. Give them some basic information about the topic that your readers are interested in, but leave them wnting to know more about what you are talking about. If your article gives them all the details that they were looking for, readers will see no point in continuing on to your site.

If you want your articles to be useful in getting you backlinks in search engines, the content will have to be unique. Submitting articles to various respected article directories and websites is naturally a good thing to do, but the search engines are looking for content that is unique. Therefore, don’t simply submit the same article over and over. You can, instead, rewrite the article so that search engines will consider it to be unique.

There are a few tools and services available online which claim to be able to automatically take content and make it unique. If you use one of them, make sure that the articles come out as readable to a human being, rather than some gibberish which looks like it was written by someone who doesn’t even speak English. If readers can’t even understand what you are saying, they are quite unlikely to want to visit your website afterward and will simply go read something else. Therefore, it could be much better to rewrite the articles yourself or pay a freelancer a couple of dollars per article to do it for you. The results will usually be quite better.

While searching for ways to reduce the cost of your pay per click advertising, you may have come across the terms “advertising arbitrage.” There are quite a few products based on this concept, including one called “Get Google Ads Free!” which was quite popular about two years ago. Many other products tout that it is possible to get your pay per click ads for “free” by simply “inserting a few lines of code” in your page. But the question remains: is this really possible?

I will get right to the point with the answer: technically, yes. But these methods will not be suitable for most affiliate marketers or even those who have their own products to sell. Why? Aren’t the ads supposed to be free?

Well, they aren’t. You will still be required to pay for your traffic just like anyone else. The whole idea behind the “advertising arbitrage” concept is that you hope to make up the cost of your pay per click campaigns by selling ad space on your website. Claiming that your pay per click ads will be “free” in this case would be the equivalent of saying that you can get a free 8 bedroom house by renting out 7 of the rooms in order to cover your mortgage payment.

This will simply not work if you are actively selling something on your site, whether it’s a product of your own or affiliate offers that you are pushing. The first problem is that by selling ad space on your landing page you will be potentially leaking traffic away to your competition. Advertisers typically buy ad space only on relevant sites. So the only people interested in buying space on yours would usually be those in the same niche. Have you seen an ad banner for Pepsi on the Coca Cola website? What about an ad for Ford on the Honda site? I don’t think so.

To further add to the problem, it will be very hard to sell ad space on your site if it is a relatively new one with limited traffic. If your only source of traffic is pay per click ads, it will also be extremely difficult to sell enough ads to cover your costs.

Now, can this method of “traffic arbitrage” actually work for some people? Yes, it can, but only if the goal of your site is not primarily to sell something. Let’s say you own a discussion forum, a free image host or a free web hosting service. You could sell some ad space on your site (one of the main ways of getting revenue from these kinds of sites) and then buy pay per click traffic in the hopes of getting more members and thus drumming up more recurring visitors to your site. This is, to my knowledge, the only way to make traffic arbitrage work. The only true way to get free pay per click traffic is if you find a promotional offer or get a voucher for X amount of dollars of free ads somewhere.

When you are promoting an affiliate or CPA offer, you obviously need to advertise in order to get traffic to your site. After all, people will not magically type your affiliate link in their browser if they don’t know it exists. There are various ways to post ads online, let’s take a look at one of them:

Classified Ads Sites:

Some examples of these sites are Craigslist, Backpage, Gumtree and Kijiji. Of course there are many others but they all have one thing in common: the ability to place classified ads for free. Using these sites to get traffic to your CPA offers has brought great results to many people, but it needs to be done properly in order to be effective. Furthermore, you would need to check with your network manager to see if promoting a certain offer on a classifieds site is allowed. Some networks may ban this type of promotion altogether or restrict it only to certain offers.

There are also a few points to remember if you don’t want to get in trouble.

Don’t post ads that are misleading or deceptive. Some examples of this is posting business opportunity offers in the “Jobs” section and making it appear like you are offering an actual job, then requiring the applicant to fill out a lead form to prove that they are “qualified”, or requiring someone to sign up for a video conferencing trial for an “interview” that will never take place.

Due to complaints to merchants and in some cases investigations by the FTC, networks are cracking down on such “blackhat” advertising.

What you should rather do is post in the appropriate category and explain what the offer is about and what benefits it could bring to the customer. Since many affiliate sites are immediately flagged as “spam”, you will probably be better off getting your own domain name and landing page for your offer.

While this flagging of ads which are not spam and posted in the correct category could get annoying, remember that these sites are mainly there for local businesses to get clients and not to push affiliate offers. If there was no system in place to deal with overposting or postings in the wrong section, these places would soon be over run with hundreds of spam messages drowning out any legitimate content.

On certain offers, such as car loan or mortgage leads, another tactic that works would be having people contact you by email. You would then send them a reply with details of the offer and your affiliate link.

While posting is usually free, some sites allow your ad to be placed on top for a certain period of time or highlighted for a small fee. This will bring some additional attention to your ad and will ultimately result in more clicks for you.

In any case, remember that some networks may forbid advertising on these sites mainly due to past abuses. Therefore, be sure to get the OK from your affiliate manager before beginning.

We’ve all gotten the e-mails, and seen the ads for services that claim to boost your traffic in some significant way. Usually they offer a free boost in traffic just for signing up with them, and giving them some information about yourself, which will likely then be sold to other companies for marketing purposes. Most of the claims these traffic providers make are completely false. Let’s take a look at a few of the common claims they make and the truth about them.

“We’ll submit your site to 5 thousand search engines, you’ll get so much search traffic, it will blow your mind!”

Claims like this are rarely a direct lie, but they are misleading. Sure, they will submit your site to all of the search engines they promise to submit it to, but the actual impact on your traffic won’t be anywhere near as amazing as they claim. Most of your search traffic is going to come from Yahoo, Google, and Microsoft’s Bing. The thousands of other search engines might collectively generate 100 hits per month… if you’re lucky.

“We’ll get you to the top of Google”

Again, not a direct and total lie, but extremely misleading. Services making this promise will get you to the top of Google, but it won’t be for keywords that anyone is actually searching. If you have a site about cars, and you choose to use a service like this, chances are you’ll wind up being the first search result for “how to properly eat cheese while driving your car”. Sure, you’re the first result, but who is actually searching for that? No one, that’s who.

“100% Guaranteed”

If a service is offering to boost your traffic, and they try to make lofty promises and guarantees, you should just walk away. SEO and internet marketing are extremely complicated. No one can make a blanket guarantee that your traffic will be effected in a fixed way without looking at your site, and what’s going on in your niche.

The best way to get more traffic to your site is to take the time, and effort to optimize your site for search, and post relevant and interesting content to it. If you absolutely can’t resist using a traffic boosting service, be sure to do some research before picking a service. Avoid free services that make promises like the ones above, and if you’re going to use a paid service, look up some reviews before sinking any money into it.