This tip is goes really well with a tip I got from Jimmy D. Brown, which is to focus more of your affiliate  marketing efforts on membership sites that pay you a commission every  month.

If I was starting over with an online business, I would have built my  empire every differently, in anticipation of the days when I would be  unable to work.

First, I would have built  a better membership than the one I  have now, more like the one I used to have.

(Which is why I’m  completely revamping my membership site.)

Second, I would have joined  and found the most valuable memberships and shared them with my  audience.

If you really want to go into detail about this, you  should join Jimmy’s blog.

For now, all I’ll say is this. If you sell 200  memberships to a site that pays you a profit of even $10 a month, if  you’re like most people, you can quit your day job. If you do that in a  month, then do it again the next month, you’re not starting over, you’re  doubling your income.

But let’s get to the part about the traffic tip. What’s the perfect traffic tip to complement the membership site model?

Membership sites are a different animal to promote.  You can’t leverage the content to promote the site because the content  is what makes the site worth paying for access, and most of the great  social media and search methods for promotion are based on content. So  you can either pay for content, or do this.

As an affiliate,  you’ll want to use the micro-tip.

Build content around the topics of the  membership sites you want to promote. Find the gap between the  knowledge the membership is offering and the knowledge of the newbie,  and give pieces of that content away for free as bait to get them to  join your content stream.

Then leverage that content stream -  free membership site, daily tweets, newsletter, whatever – to introduce  them to different membership sites in that area, until they say yes to  one or more of them.

This doesn’t always mean a whole article,  or even a whole paragraph. Sometimes, a sentence is enough. If I was  selling a site with monthly personal development tips, I could pick an  expert for that month and quote them.

Mike Dooley says, Thoughts Become Things. I could pop the video about that into my blog with a link leading to his site. (If he had a membership site.)

It can be that simple.

Find a topic, find membership sites in that topic, find micro-tips to lead prospects to sign up to hear from you, then given them micro-tips matched to various membership sites until they join.

An affiliate marketer, is, of course, a person who makes the majority of their income marketing other people’s products.

As someone who sells my own products, I give affiliates incentives to sell my products by calculating how much I would spend to get a new lead to buy a given product, and passing that income on to my affiliates.

Sometimes that’s up to 50%, so on a $100, an affiliate would incur none of the cost of creating the product, paying for professional graphics, sales copy, hosting, etc.

If you’re an affiliate, you do, however, have to figure out how to get people to buy a product with the cost of doing so as close to zero as possible, to maximize the money you put in your pocket, and reduce the amount of up-front money you spend on expenses.

Confused about how this is possible? You’re not alone.

Because if you simply dump as much money as you can into advertising, you’re not always certain of the return. You might turn to free traffic methods, but you can only be sure that your time investment will be profitable IF you’re able to predict a steady conversion rate of immediate visitors to sales.

Then there’s the fact that you’d constantly be starting over again. Once the customer decides to buy or not buy, or the hype for the product dies down, you’ll have to start your search for the perfect customer all over again.

Unless you apply the super affiliate traffic secret.

The secret is right before your eyes. In internet marketing circles, who always seems to make the most money from a big launch, you know, besides the product owner.

Yes, the JV partners. And who makes the best kinds of partners?

People with their own audiences.

People with lists they can mail out to whenever the next new thing comes out.

Now, I’m not trying to tell you that you need to go out and get a list of 100,000 people before you can be a super affiliate. You could start out well enough with a list of 1000. But you’ve got to start out with some kind of list, at some time.

Start a site of your own to capture people who are all interested in the area you most often market in. It could be as simple as a one page site with a video, a short summary of your newsletter and a sign-up block. Or it could be a blog that you maintain daily, maybe a forum.

The point is, start a central location, a base of operations where you start your own community of like-minded individuals. Then you’ll be making suggestions to the same group of people each month.

There’s another big secret super affiliates have, but that’s technically another tip.

The next one, in fact.

366 Ways to Get Web Visitors –

I have decided to release a list of 366 Traffic Methods all at once. So now, you can’t ask me how to get traffic for a WHOLE YEAR.

Go away!

Okay, I’m just kidding.

Really.

The great thing about this guide is that it’s rebrandable.

You can just put your own link on the front page, or you can do that AND join the free affiliate program and load affiliate links in it with the rebranding kit, a zip file you can find right here or on the last page of the guide. I have committed Mac treason and created a program that only runs on Windows, (XP or Vista). Please refrain from flogging me. I will do my best to help if you have a Mac that doesn’t run Windows, just reply below.

(And… btw… HOW DO YOU LIVE? I was without Windows on my MacBook Pro for two weeks and almost drown in my own tears. Anyway.)

(You can get your 366 Traffic Methods here if you are reading this via feed and can’t see the embed above. That’s a PDF link so don’t hurt yourself!)

If you own The Evergreen Traffic System or Traffic Reality and are signed up at my site, there’s an affiliate link in your member area that will give you an extra 10% bonus, so please use that one instead of signing up twice.

Oh, and of course I forgot to mention in the guide that the cookie the affiliate code drops is good for a Year.

That’s right, even if it takes a year for someone who signs up to our newsletter at the site to buy, or even if they don’t sign up but you were the first person to tell them, it will be a year before anyone else gets to make a sale through them.

So. Uh. You might want to grab the rebrand kit and get your copy out there before everyone else.

And if you need hints as to how you can do that?

It’s a guide to generating web traffic! So you can use the traffic generating guide to generate traffic to the traffic generating guide. Lots of the methods are free, too. (See what I did there?)

This time, no catches – download an excerpt from Simple Social Media Strategies right now by right-clicking and saving to your computer. This is a PDF file, so you’ll need Adobe Acrobat Reader to open it (which is free and can be used on any computer).

It’s an excerpt of the first 14 pages of 50+, an update I did to a version I wrote last year. If you’re interested in a 50% commission on affiliate sales of the $47/$77 SSMS packages with video, please reply below. I’ll do JVs too for people with lists over 1000.

photo credit: laurenatclemson

Here’s a short story for those of you who are procrastinating on putting together some kind of free teaser content to get someone to subscribe to your site.

Me, just now?

I subscribed to a good-looking but outdated site about free traffic, just to get possibly the world’s stupidest and most out-dated traffic tip, bar none that I’ve seen in the last 4 years. The site it came from actually has the occasional really good tip, so I’m not going to out them.

At least not here.

But the moral of the story?

Is the curiosity factor. I know just about everything there is to know about generating traffic.

I got that way by researching even the remotest possibility of someone having a website promotion strategy that I didn’t know about. 99% of the time I’m told about the dumbest possible trick that won’t work for 100s of reasons.

You know how I decide whether or not to sign up though? It’s not the tip – how do I know what that is until I subscribe and get the freebie?

It’s the site’s other content. Even if I get a hint that the freebie might be useless, I’m not actually signing up FOR the freebie. I’m signing up to be reminded periodically that the site exists and may help me.

POSSIBLY getting a good tip in the process is gravy.

The point is: a LOT of people think the same way I do. Most people who are any type of online-savvy are already hip to the “free gift with sign-up” tactic. It’s something those of us who are on the fence use to talk ourselves into giving that site our time of day.

Bottom line?

Do it. Find a freebie, and dangle the “ooo shiny” to get me to sign up.

But.

Find a GREAT freebie. In fact, find a COLLECTION of great freebies related to your topic and dangle THAT, not some useless drivel that insults my intelligence. Even the most web-shy newbie appreciates being treated like they have half a brain.

And if this site had presented me with something that actually lived up to the hype? I was a sale waiting to happen. I’m sitting here with my fiance’s credit card spending up all his money, $97 more wouldn’t have hurt either of us.

So, go do it. NOW before you forget. It can be 1- 5 pages long – who has time for a 100 page ebook anymore anyway – unless they paid for it?

It can be a video, an audio, a transcript of an older teleseminar product you’ve decommissioned.

Because?

If your site is halfway decent and your prospect is interested anyway, a good freebie upon sign-up can get them down off the fence, and turn them into a subscriber, then a sale.

Extra piece for affiliates: Are you marketing your own squeeze page, or turning over that traffic directly to another site. There’s no surer way to make sure your affiliate link is the one that’s clicked than to send them there from your OWN site, where you give away your OWN freebie, to sign up to, yes, your OWN newsletter, so you can help business people find different ways to meet their needs.

Oh, and on the what’s happening next front, I’m going to reveal the new tip-a-day newsletter sometime this week, the new membership sometime in the next 14 days and some articles on How to Create Unstoppable Traffic, as well as another free guide.