Unless your pockets are incredibly deep, broadbrush or 'mall' approach won't work for your small business. The cost to advertise to people across a large number of interest categories is prohibitive; and untargetted, unfocused visitors don't buy products.

To attract focused, interested visitors, you yourself must become focused and interested in your subject matter.

First you pick a topic, and then refine it. And then you refine it some more. And some more.

Let's say that you're a sports enthusiast.

You know that millions of people are also interested in sports, and you'd be willing to bet that 'sports' would be a lucrative niche and search term to advertise, right? Well, you're right on first count, but you'd lose money on second.

Let's check out demand using Overture's search term suggestion tool:

==> http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/

Although Overture reported over 800,000 searches for term 'sports' in April 2003, and you can have top listing for term for a 'mere' 21 cents, how many sales might you expect to generate with that popular term?

Not many!

Even if only one percent of that 800,000 searchers visited your site, and you had top listing at twenty-one cents, my guess is that you just wasted $1,680.00. The term 'sports' is just too unspecific.

If while doing keyword research using search term suggestion tool at Overture, you looked one line below 'sports', you'd see that second entry is 'sports car' with more almost 200 hundred thousand searches, or one quarter of all searches that included term 'sports'.

(c) 2003 Pencil Dude

Often difference between affiliates who drive traffic and sales to their affiliate programs' sites depends on little things that they do month after month. I know this is case for me. Here's what we do.

1. You Have To Do Something - Anything.

I was on phone with an affiliate manager for one of large Internet Marketing courses and during that conversation he told me an interesting thing or two. He told me that they get a lot of e-mails and phone calls from affiliates wondering why they haven't made any money from their program.

Every single person that has asked that question all had same problem. They hadn't bothered to do anything at all. These people hadn't even bothered to put up a banner that was readily available on their websites, let alone do any of better ways of promoting a program.

You have to do something. Start with easy stuff. If your affiliate program gives you banners or text ads to put on your site, use them. Put them up immediately. There - you've just taken your first positive action towards making some money from your affiliate program.

2. Keep In Contact With Your Affiliate Manager:

Hopefully your affiliate program keeps you up to date by way of a regular newsletter or some sort of affiliate update. However, regardless of whether they do or not it's important to keep in contact with your affiliate manager yourself.

Send them an e-mail and introduce yourself, tell them what you are doing in way of promotion for their program. If they sell more than one product or service, find out what product is doing really well currently. Ask them what types of creative are working best for that product. Is it a particular classified ad, HTML e-mail ad, banner, pop-up?

There are numerous instances where this really worked well for me. Let me share one with you.