Paid Search, Email Marketing and Affiliate Marketing Tips

Monte: Right, right. Okay, let’s roll on to number 2.

Jay: The second tip is purchasing paid search placements. These are now the little ads on the right-hand side of Google, and MSN, and AOL, and Yahoo; and these links at the top of the site on the right-hand side of the site, it often says “Sponsored link” there. You can buy these ads on a per click basis. So you only pay when a customer sees your ad and clicks on the ad; and you get highly ranked by bidding on Google and Overture for position. So, in some cases, for example Monte, for us, in the domain business, it’s quite expensive. It costs $4 or $5 per click for some of the top terms; but in a lot of industries, it only costs $.10 or $.20 to get a click to get someone to your web site on the keywords that they’re searching for. I’ll also post the links to Google and Overture where you can sign up and try out these ad word campaigns; and as you mentioned earlier, Google sponsored us for this event, and they’re giving away $100 coupons. So, we’ll give away 20 of those coupons. If you haven’t ever tried a Google ad word campaign, it’s a great way to give it a try with $100 of free clicks.

Monte: Right. And that’s what the ad word giveaway is for; so you can give this a try. You want to make sure that you put caps and limits on that so you don’t burn through something that you didn’t want to spend in terms of a budget.

Jay: Exactly.

Monte: And I’m just reading a couple of the posts on the chat. The reason why, one of the posts was, why is this relevant to domains and are we going to be talking about other things that are valuing domains, pricing, and trending? We are throughout the show and through the shows to come. We feel this is really important; because, when somebody buys and registers a domain name, one of the things they want to do is drive traffic to that domain name. If it’s going to become a live business, and identity, something you’re going to operate a business on on the web, you want to make sure it’s positioned right to draw traffic and revenue to that site. So, we felt that these top 10 tips are something that is of value to domainers and to web masters alike. Move on to number 3, then.

Jay: Number 3 is a real simple tip, and that’s to add a signature to all of your email. And what you can do is ask all of your employees to add a signature which you can set up in most of the different email programs, and include your web site address or URL on that signature. Virtually overnight you can have hundreds or thousands of live links to your site; because if you send an email and people forward that email, and people forward that email to other people, your link to your web site and maybe even a reason to visit your site can be spread all around the internet. So a simple tip, by adding a signature to your email, can get a lot of traffic to your site.

Monte: Great. Great. Number 4.

Jay: Number 4 we call sign up a virtual sales force. And this is all around using affiliate marketing to get traffic to your web site. Affiliate marketing is basically like a virtual sales force, because affiliates are paid a finder’s fee for every customer they send to web sites. One of the best at this is Amazon. They have over a million affiliates who are paid that finder’s fee every time they send someone to Amazon and that person purchases a book or another product over there. There’s a couple companies that do this, Commission Junction and LinkShare; and they have a network of affiliates, you can sign up with Commission Junction and LinkShare and they will get out and contact the affiliates who will sign up for your program and drive traffic to your site. And Commission Junction and LinkShare and the other people who manage affiliate programs will manage that program for you and they will send the checks to those affiliates on your behalf, and you only have to send one check to them each month.