This post is going to contain the simple, yet effective techniques I have learned during my time online to generate targeted traffic and generate sales. These are strategies I’m using for my own online business and have found to be working well and improving over time.

If you’ve been following along with us, my last post was about a struggling internet marketer who is reaching out in a desperate attempt to generate sales with his affiliate marketing website.

One of the questions asked was, “How do I drive traffic to my site that can generate sales?”

This is going to be the topic of this post, and I’ll be going very in-depth, starting with the basics and moving towards the more advanced strategies.

I apologize in advance if this turns into a very lengthy post, but please bare with me as it will be well worth your time to read through everything.

So let’s begin, shall we?

The very first thing you must understand is that everything revolves around keywords. Keywords are the life-blood of websites and how they become seen by internet users using search engines.

SEO (search engine optimization) is the foundation of using keywords effectively, and this is how you’re going to target specific internet users to generate sales online.

Rather than going in-depth on the subject of SEO on this post, I have a few previous posts that should cover this subject thoroughly enough for you to understand. Please check them out, and if you have questions use the comment section:

• Web Page Optimization
• Easy Free Keyword Research
• Discover Commercial Intention of Keyword Phrases

Optimizing your web page for specific keywords is critical and is the foundation for which you’ll build the rest of your marketing efforts upon. Seriously, nothing else matters until you’ve done this. Don’t ignore it!

One thing I’ve learned is that backlinks are KING. Okay, so content is still KING, but backlinks are a very close second, and here’s why. Backlinks to your website or web pages are what helps to drive your site or pages higher in search engine results pages when someone searches for a specific keyword phrase. See how this is coming together?

Without building backlinks to your site, you won’t generate enough traffic to your site to generate sales. Now I know what you’re thinking here. There are other ways to generate traffic without building backlinks, and that’s true. However, the best traffic is free search engine traffic, and the only way to get it is to rank on the first page in Google, or Yahoo and Bing. I’d focus on Google as it produces over 70% of search traffic across the entire web.

Now that you understand the importance of building backlinks and getting your site or web pages to the top of search engines, you now need to start the backlink building process. There are numerous ways to go about this, and luckily for you, I’ve written many posts on the subject. Here they are:

• Improve Search Engine Rankings the Easy Way
• Get 80 High PR One Way Backlinks Each Month
• Build Long-Term Traffic to Your Work From Home Site with Article Marketing
• Build Your Online Business with Article Marketing
• Forum Signatures
• Free Traffic System

Remember when building backlinks that you want to use your keywords for the web page you’re linking to. This is the only way that your backlinks are going to be effective in boosting your search engine rankings.

Okay, so you now have  a great start in getting backlinks; however, I’m not done just yet.

Well… sorta. I have a post planned that will discuss another very effect backlink building strategy and will be posted soon, so stay tuned for that.

Hopefully right now you have a solid understanding of doing keyword research and web page optimization, and how it all ties in to building backlinks. This is all part of building targeted website traffic that will result in sales.

As always, if you have any questions about anything discussed here, leave a comment below.

My next post will discuss the second question asked by a struggling internet marketer, but in the meantime, start applying the tips I mentioned today to your website, and you’ll soon see an increase in traffic and internet income.

One of my readers prompted me to write about the use of forums in marketing your work from home web site or products/services that you offer. Believe it or not, forums can provide terrific targeted traffic as well as long-term natural search engine traffic.

I’ve always been a fan of forums. They provide an enormous wealth of information that is completely free. You can get any question answered by those more experienced. These two benefits alone are well worth the time of getting involved in forums.

An even bigger benefit that some overlook is the marketing aspect that forum participation can bring. The marketing doesn’t come from your posts, but instead from your forum signature. This aspect, that is built into most if not all forums, is not used to its full potential.

Forum signatures should be designed to grab the attention of other forum members who read your posts. This can be tricky as you usually have limited space to create a signature, but it can be done.

A forum signature usually consists of your favorite links to websites that you want to share with others. These can also be your own websites, and that’s what this post is going to focus on.

Here’s an example of one of my signatures… http://www.warriorforum.com/members/alan-mater.html. Click on the About Me tab and scroll down till you see the Signature section.

Notice how every website or web page contains a phrase that is hyperlinked to go to the corresponding URL. For instance, I have Professional Proofreading Services linked to go to http://www.replaceyoursalary.com/proofreading.html.

The mistake I see many make is that they ignore the keyword aspect of forum signatures and just enter the URL for their website, and sometimes they don’t even have it hyperlinked! That’s fine if you’re focusing on direct traffic from the forum, but you’re missing out on the larger aspect of natural search engine traffic.

Note: Most forums have different signature rules and require specific code in order to create hyperlinked text. Be sure you know what is required when setting up your signature, otherwise it won’t turn out right.

You see, using keywords in your signature links will create backlinks to the web pages those links link to for your given keyword phrase and also boost those pages rankings in the search engines. This will create long-term search traffic, which should be your ultimate goal.

Forum participation is a great way to get your name and business or work from home web site noticed by others. But, you want to get noticed by the right kind of people. What I mean is that you want to pick forums that are related to what your business or web site offers. You want your direct traffic to be as targeted as possible.

The last MUST is providing value when posting in forums. This will ensure you get noticed and bring more clickthroughs of your signature links. Below I’ll provide a list of forums I actively post in that are related to the Internet Marketing and Work From Home niche and get a great deal of traffic from…

Warrior Forum

Conquer Your Niche

Entrepreneur Forums

Work At Home Forum

Alright, now get to work and start getting involved in forums!