Business Alone

If so, you need to do everything possible to increase the amount of traffic, the click-through response rate to your affiliate page links, and the relevance of your content to the product(s) you're promoting.

Typically, affiliates slap up a web page, add a few links, some cut-and-paste content, and forget about the site for a few weeks or months waiting for it to get spidered and included in the search engines.

There is a better way to accomplish affiliate sales. If you pay close attention to the details of your site, like you would if you were selling your own direct marketing product, your affiliate sales can soar.

Linking strategies for commercial web sites seem to be grabbing a lot of attention these days from marketing experts that claim in-bound links are critical to the search engine rankings.

There is a lot of on-going debate about just how important your links are to top rankings. I'm sure each of the top search engines has its own view of the subject. No doubt they give varying importance to this criterion.

Some claim also that the "page rank" (Google) or the importance of the site linking to your site also affects your search engine position.

But there are other reasons why you need links.

A joint venture is simply a partnership created to take advantage of non-competing products or services that are extended to the customers of the partner's business(es).

There are many different ways to set up a joint venture and a lot of variations to the theme, but this is basically how it is structured:

One business will make contact with a non-competing business owner to offer his services or products to the non-competing businesses customers and will offer that owner a portion of the profits of all sales (in return for the privilege of contacting his customer base).

I recently viewed a video clip produced by John Reese that showed his amazing VRE strategy that added over $500,000 to his business the first year it was implemented (beginning in February 2005.) You can view the video for yourself right here. (Excuse me if this link is no longer working - John has changed his business model several times in the past couple of years and the link may be down by now.)

John says he spent about 120 hours initially setting up this project which includes a network of small web sites that carry Google Adsense ads along with specifically targeted content related to high-paying keyword niches.

John is the same fellow that made some huge waves in the Internet marketing circles when he sold over $1 million of his Traffic Secrets course in a 24-hour period.

The premier search engine Google has come up with several programs that may be of interest to the solo small business owner. But there seems to be some matter of conflicting opinion about whether a web site owner should do anything to send his traffic away to someone else.

Here's the deal: Google allows web site owners to advertise products and services on their web site in exchange for a small referral fee each time a viewer clicks on one of the Google ads.

This is not an affiliate program since Google pays for each click rather than for a product that is actually purchased. In a sense, the web site owner is sharing in a PPC (pay per click) program. Google serves the ads and keeps track of the clicks. The web site owner puts Google's html code on his pages and provides relevant content for Google to match to its advertisers.

If, indeed, the Internet is a great information highway with traffic, data, digital goods and services, and communications whizzing back and forth at the speed of light, it would be worth the effort for every business owner to create as many links to that highway as possible.

Think of these links as little roads that feed a tiny portion of this traffic back and forth between your small business and the super highway.

Every business connects itself (or should) to the highway traffic. Some do a great job of it and others don't. Each owner determines for his business, both the number roads leading in and out and the ease with which those roads are found by passers-by that have an interest in this side trip.

Regardless of the size of your marketing budget, there are some business principles that should guide what you do, when you do it, and how you bring together the various elements of your business marketing.

The tendency for many new small businesses is simply to strike out and begin spreading the word about your product or service in a random hodge-podge manner, jumping from this to that depending upon where you think you'll get the most bang for your effort.

Your marketing "plan" has no real thinking behind it . . . you just figure the best you can do is to spread the word as quickly as you can to as many sources as you can and hope for the best.

Now that game plan certainly beats doing no marketing at all, but it lacks the leveraging power of a unified and comprehensive approach that ties all your different marketing efforts together and cements your brand in the minds of your customers.

Do you remember that line from radio and TV advertising of yesteryear?

You don't hear it so much anymore, but sponsors remain an important part of many companies today, both private for-profit and non-profit.

Have you ever stopped to think that your little solo business may have the opportunity to reach a lot of potential customers by becoming a sponsor?

Here's what I'm suggesting:

Every web site needs traffic. For most web sites, especially business sites, the more traffic you can get . . . the more sales you can make, all other things being equal.

One of the important characteristics of the most highly trafficked sites is that they have managed to build lots of inbound links. Not just "lots" as in dozens, but "lots" as in thousands.

Simply put, a link to your web site is a referral on a different site pointing to yours. A web site, other than yours, has "linked" to you by means of an active button, graphic, or text which anyone may click on to be immediately taken to your site.

Why would you want to have lots of "incoming" links?

I know there has been a lot written about Google's Page Rank "rating" system. Yet most folks I speak with don't really know what it is, how to increase the rank for your web site, and whether or not page rank (we'll call it "PR") really is that important to your web site and business or not.

The name "PageRank" is a trademark of Google, and the PR process has been patented by them. However, the patent is actually assigned to Stanford University and not to Google. Google has exclusive license rights on the patent from Stanford University.

The university received 1.8 million shares of Google in exchange for use of the patent; the shares were sold in 2005 for $336 million according to Wikipedia.

Here is Google's own explanation (or definition) of Page Rank: