If you are looking for a sure-fire way to get yourself referrals after you have signed up to get a free laptop, you’ll want to find some ways to promote your referral link. In a previous post, I wrote about advanced strategies that you can use to get yourself more promotion and more referrals – getting you oh so close to that new laptop.
You can’t do any of the stuff I outline in this article until you create your account so you better go do that before you proceed here.
I touched on the topic of building a web site in my advanced strategies post, and I will say it as plainly and clearly as I know how: Building a web site is the most effective way to getting referrals. Lots of them.
With a web site, you have the ability to reach many many people from different regions. You can talk about what you are trying to do to get a free laptop and give others your link. Here are some tips to building the best site and how to take your competition so far out of the running that you never know they exist.
1. Content is king. Build a web site with high quality, coherent content and people will actually read it. If you can write in a convincing tone you will most likely be able to get people to take action on your offers. Search engines also love original, quality, unique, natural content that was written by a human for the first time. Search engines know what crappy content is when they find it, and they can tell if you are using copied content as well. Using original content will ensure that your website will stay indexed in search engines so you can be found. Google and other search engines are trying to give their users good results and putting duplicate content in their index is a waste of their time and resources when it already exists in their system for their users to find. Bottom line: high quality, original content rocks!
2. Promote your site. Try to promote your site to send people to it. Consider using PPC, or pay-per-click advertising. You can bid on keywords (like free laptop) and pay only when users click your ads around the internet. The goal is that they click on your ad, come to your site, give you a referral. Then they also get to work on their own campaign as well and start working towards their own gift too. It’s a win-win situation.You can also promote your site by using other websites, such as article directories. Websites like ezinearticles.com, goarticles.com, hubpages, squidoo, etc all allow you to write articles and put a link back to your website. You can get more people to come to your site this way too. Do not spam. Your accounts will most likely be disabled and your articles will be removed if you post horrible content that does not aid any internet user whatsoever.Promotion can also be done using social media like Twitter, Facebook, even email signatures. Put a link to your website where you have your sales page. This is more effective than just spamming your referral link around.
3. Make your site look good. Believe it or not, search engines can tell what a “nice looking site” is. They reward sites that are organized, fast, and clean. If a search engine is trying to crawl a website and can’t figure out what it’s about or anything about the page layout/structure, you may not do well in the search engines. This is called on-page SEO.Design is also key because it makes you look authentic. However, don’t believe that design is everything; it’s not. Web usability studies have shown that content quality is more important to web users than web site design. However, good (or bad) design does make a first impression.
4. Try not to go for a free blog or free website. Most of the time these places have rules where you cannot advertise (including a referral or affiliate link), and you won’t have much control over things, like design. Getting a “regular” paid website set up can cost some money, especially with hosting and domain fees, but if you put time into design and content quality you will be rewarded. Search around online for the best ways to get a website launched, and perhaps consider buying a few books on building websites. I would personally suggest reading blogs and articles on the basics – and then when you figure out which direction you want to go, buy a book on that subject.
5. Do SEO. SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, enables your website to be found, liked, and ranked by search engines. Getting found using a search tool can help visitors reach your website. Here is a great tip for doing SEO: Use the google adwords keyword tool and put in keywords that you would like to try to rank for. The tool will give you an idea of how many people search for each keyword. The more people search for a keyword, the more competition there will be for it. Keep this in mind. Put up pages of content on your website that is optimized for those keywords and you will stand a good chance of getting found by people searching for them. If you are serious about SEO, buy a book or do research online doing off-site SEO for your web site. By following through with SEO you stand a great chance of being found by visitors using search engines.Do not take part in any black-hat or grey-hat SEO practices. This will get your site deindexed or banned from search engines and will be a complete waste of your time. Search engines can tell when people use spammy and shady tactics to attempt SEO.
6. Final tip, and the biggest key to making a successful website: Build high quality content, and lots of it. Promote your site using honest, legitimate strategies and tactics like white-hat SEO and advertising. Put care into your site and you will be rewarded by search engines and your visitors.
Why a build web site anyway? Let’s do some math. Let’s say a website takes you 10 hours to fully build and launch. The initial costs are around $75, and afterwords you spend about 2 hours a week to promote and maintain. You succeed in getting 1,000 unique visitors to your website each month, either as a result of advertising/marketing, or SEO.
If just 1% of your visitors go on to complete your offers, you will get 10 referrals per month. We will assume it will take you 5 months to reach your threshold and be eligible to receive your free laptop or other gift.
For 5 months of time, you would have spent $75 and 50 hours of your time working on your site; working on getting referrals. If your gift is worth $1500, that means that you would have earned $28.50 per hour spent working on your website. What’s more is that after you earn your gift, your website keeps chugging along. If you make it right, your website will keep earning referrals and keep getting visitors. If your website was to continue on a perpetual course taking in the same numbers of traffic and producing the same results, your referrals will pile up every 5 months.
If that sounds like a reasonable deal to you — do yourself a favor and sign up for an account now.
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