I had someone pm me about some advice and I ended up going on a bit of rant in their pm about filtering. I thought I'd share. Most of you don't know, but before I started into "mainstream" sites, I used to do adult(xxx) sites. The free ones to sell subscriptions to pay sites. We think about internet marketing, much different than people here. This is what I've picked up. I know there are people out there that only a few html pages on their website, and maybe a blog. Where as my adult sites would have 1000's of hand made seo ready html pages. What we were doing is building an empire in a domain. The whole point of the empire is to filter traffic. All we cared about as webmasters was getting traffic and filtering that traffic. We knew that overtime the SEs would catch our pages and send traffic to them as long as we did them right. I noticed people have landing/sales pages, and that's it. They write an article, it links to this page, and it sells to the person. The person clicks the affiliate link or leaves. End of story. I'm going to explain this in adult niches because they're easier to understand overall. If you write an article on teens and submit to an article directory. You can be pretty sure the people that click your link in the resource box are interested in teens. It's perfectly fine to have them landing on a sales page about teens. We called these FPAs (full page ads). The difference is that we didn't restrict people to the page. It wasn't a click the affiliate or hit the back button. If they weren't interested, we could persuade them to come into our empire. It could be as simple as a small link at the bottom that says "click here for my free teen articles" or "Check out my teen quiz" or whatever. The point is that if they're not interested in the first affiliate yourselling, might as well have them come into the empire and filter them. Let's say you did the click here for free teen articles. You're going to want to have articles on this new page. You're not going to actual have articles written out, but links to articles and maybe the first paragraph, so people can see. You will have ads on this related to the teen niche. The thing now is that each article will be a subniche of teen. You know the user is into teens, but teens is such a broad term. They could be into asian teens, redhead teens or even goth teens. So what happens is that you force the visitor to filter them self. If they click on the goth teens article, you can be sure they're into goth teens. And on that page you'd have goth affiliate ads. Basically, you're sending the surfer to exactly the affiliate they are interested in, instead of trying to push an affiliate on them. And the cool thing is that you can keep filtering after that. They get to the goth article, you can filter more. At the end of the article you could put links to a vampire teen link and a BDSM teen link and filter them even further. That is all we did. We had the original sell, than filter filter filter. Selling the whole time. Another cool thing is that there are a million ways of doing this. It really depends on how creative you are. The whole idea is to get the surfer to where they want to go. *Sorry for the adult niches, I just think people understand them better. It's little more difficult to get into niche talk with forex or bodybuilding because I'm not even sure people would even get or understand the subniches.
That's a great article and a great idea, Supper. The question is, how do I filter this traffic? I have an articles section for all niches except one, but people don't go there that often. Should I emphasize this link and then filter from there? Again, thank you for a great article and idea for action. nadavs
It depends. It's a process. While you filter, you do lose people, but people will follow the paths if you put them there. You don't have to do articles. You can actually make simple things to do this. Like yesterday I made a "poll" for my site. I put a link someone where on my site that will filter off traffic. It's not a real poll. It's really just html, but I make look like a poll. With the poll, I ask a question. Let's say it's bodybuilding. "What is your biggest challenge you face in bodybuilding?" Than you have options that are related to products that you can sell. - Building Muscle - Losing Fat - Planning A Diet ETC. When they select their option, it takes them to a results page. Basically I set it up so the option they select is always the number one option chosen. Basically show results than have a click here for more information, and bam they're off to the right affiliate. You wouldn't believe the stuff I've made to filter traffic. The transmission error one is hilarious. You make a page and you make it look like the first half of it loaded fine and you just add in, in big letters "TRANSMISSION ERROR" You can put some technical jargon in there too if you want. Below it, show a directory structure and make folders that say like "Members" or "Secret" or something like that. People will click on it, and they'll see all these different files or folders in there and basically each one is related to a specific affiliate and when they click it, you just send them right off. It is hilarious. You wouldn't believe where people will end up. If you layout the tracks, people will follow it. I recommend, hitting up your initial people coming in with a related ad. They either are interested or they're not. If they're interested they'll click, if not, you want them to come into your empire to filter them. You don't necessarily have to do articles with this. Anything works. You just put them in a position to choose.