In this final top mistakes on affiliate marketing let’s talk about…

POOR QUALITY TRAFFIC

Sometimes you may try a bit TOO hard to get traffic to your EMS blog/site. You might end up focusing too much on getting a large quantity of visitors, and the quality of the traffic might be too low or untargeted. While it’s great to have a large number of visitors to your site, it’s much more important to make sure the traffic is quality traffic. By quality traffic, I mean traffic that shares a few traits.

Traffic should be:

• Targeted to the EMS industry.
• More than curious, but directly interested in the topic.
• Willing to purchase something in the EMS niche.
• Able to purchase something in the EMS niche.

The traffic should be well-targeted to your EMS blog or site. You might be able to get a few thousand visitors from social bookmarking sites to your website about marine aquariums, but these visitors may be only vaguely interested. You might buy 10,000 random visitors to your marine aquarium site for $9 on eBay, but chances are most of those visitors will NOT be interested in aquarium fish!

But if you got that traffic from targeted keywords via PPC, or if you got the traffic from search engines or a banner ad on a related site, those visitors would almost certainly be interested in aquariums!

Targeted traffic can be elusive. Sometimes it’s pretty difficult to get targeted traffic to your site. If you’re in an extremely competitive EMS niche like NREMT or EMS gear and apparel , you migght find it harder to get a nice quantity of visitors.

Most of the time it’s just a matter of:

• Getting backlinks from quality, EMS RELATED sites.
• Writing articles on the paramedic or EMT topic.
• Submitting your site to EMS related directories.
• Buying links on related sites.
• Spending time working on SEO.
• Targeting long-tail keywords with little competition.
• Focusing more on quality than quantity.

Search engine traffic is some of the most targeted and high-quality traffic possible. You should aim for getting at least 50% of your traffic from search engines, if possible. Why is search engine traffic so targeted?

Well, because people who are searching for something are obviously interested in the topic. Let’s say you are at a social bookmarking site and you see an interesting article about a recent archaeological find. Out of curiosity, you click the link and read the story. It’s an interesting story, but only because it was a little strange and unusual. On this site, they are advertising a series of books and videos about ancient civilization. Would you buy? You might. But chances are you wouldn’t. That single interesting story probably would NOT be enough to get you to buy this product, unless you just happened to be interested in the topic already.

Now, let’s say you were extremely interested in ancient civilizations. You get on Google and you search for “ancient civilization” + “recent discoveries”. You find this interesting article, and you read it. Now you see the ad for the book and video series. Would you buy? If you didn’t already have it and you could afford it, there is a very good chance that you would, because you’re already highly interested in the subject!

This is the kind of traffic you need to get. You need to get traffic that is already interested in a topic. While getting some extra traffic is nice, you should try to focus more on TARGETED traffic.

As you may know, part of getting ranked high on Google or many other search engines depends on who links to you.

This short article will explain how to find out who is linking to your website, using simple search techniques. The basic way is to open up Google.com and type

link:yourdomain.com

This will show who links to your home page, including any of your internal pages. However, this isn’t always the best link search, since Google actually only will include websites that link to you if that site has a Google page Rank of 4 or above. Another way to look is to type

inurl:yourdomain.com

This should show a bit more accurate results. If you look at the results though, you will probably see a bunch of your web pages as the link results. To stop this from happening, you can type.

inurl:yourdomain.com -site:yourdomain.com

OR

link:yourdomain.com -site:yourdomain.com

This should exclude your website from being included in the results.

Also, you can try using “yourdomain” as a search item which will show sites linking to you as well, make sure you include the “”. In addition, play around with these search tools. Include the www in your search and try it without the www as well. These search tools also work great in other search engines. Like Yahoo, Altavista, Alltheweb and others. Keep in mind that each search engine has different particulars and some will give better or worse results.

You can also try to use this with domains that get top ranking for your search terms. If you do a link search on those sites, you can try and trade links or get a backlink from your competitors links. This will help you rank higher, since the links all wind up going to the same place. Remember, search engine ranking is an ongoing effort and once you can obtain good ranking, it will increase your visits, targeted sales and your sites exposure. All Free.

Here is one technique available to almost everyone, but exploited by a mere few. You may already know about putting links to your site or products on your Thank You pages and Confirmation pages. You may even put links to specific affiliate products on these pages.

But have you ever considered approaching OTHER sites and asking for a link on THEIR Confirmation and Thank You pages? You may be surprised at how many
web owners of specialized content sites would be delighted to offer you space on one of these pages – especially if you offer them an incentive, like a cash payment, a plug in your newsletter, a higher commission if it is a affiliate product you have, or a free sample of your EMS product or service.

A variation of this involves “404 Error” pages. These are pages that come up if a Internet user types in the wrong URL or tries to get to a URL that has expired or been removed. This is another type of backyard web property that many web owners and bloggers don’t mind displaying some extra links especially if there is something in it for them.

If you find a site that you feel could send you good, targeted traffic, ask if they’d like a sample of your product in return for letting you create a custom 404 error page for them. It can be a simple page with just a few links: one back to their home page, one to yours, and one to some kind of special discount offer or other incentive on your site.

If they are not comfortable offering a paid product, maybe they will agree to post a link to your free offer or trial period. This can give their visitor a valuable freebie and they look good doing it.

This technique works best with sites that are noncommercial in nature. So you may not much luck with EMS sites like JEMS or EMS1.com. However, there are thousands of sites, created and maintained by your fellow paramedics and EMT’s, that aren’t designed to make money. Many EMS blogs fit into this category. They may be about someones day to day life on the ambulance, educational tips, serious study information or maybe just a random collection of postings about being a paramedic. But if their owners have access to their server, and create their own pages, you may be able to “bribe” them into sending you targeted traffic by sharing a bit of unused web space with your links or offers.

I suggest when sending emails requesting this type of trade, you look at their site and find their actual email. Talk about their site and let them know you truly looked at it and that you know how much your link or offer will benefit their visitors. You may have to ask 10 or even 20 before you get one to say yes, but you might find that once one does agree and starts getting some income and/or positive feedback from their visitors, other bloggers in the EMS niche may change their mind.