As an affiliate, it's critical that you have a website. "Having" a website is not always the hardest part – the hardest part is that your website needs to get traffic! So, how do you get traffic?

There is absolutely no question that the best form of traffic is search engine traffic. Search engines can deliver highly targeted traffic that is absolutely free.

The catch?

Well, how do you get search engines to give you traffic in the first place? How do you convince a robotic spider that your website deserves their attention?

One word: Content

Search engines have one primary goal: To serve their visitors with quality content targeted to what their visitor is looking for. A search engine is going to do anything in their power to rank websites based on what think is relevant.

So, in the end, your real job is to find a way to convince the search engines that your website is better suited for a topic than another website – in other words – you need to better optimize your website for a given keyword that another website.

All in all this means that your website needs content. Day by day the “amount” of content your website needs is increasing. As more websites compete, the search engines are looking for more and more content on your website.

Search engines are giving more credibility, hence traffic, to larger websites with more updated content. They figure that if a website has lots of pages that are constantly updated, it is a more credible website. So, now how does the little guy, an affiliate, compete and keep their website on the top?

3 Sources of Fast and Credible Content

1. Article Directories

Many argue that article directories are bad places to get articles from because of the “duplicate content” penalty that search engines may throw at you. However, what they do not realize is that search engines penalize duplicated PAGES, not content – there is a difference.

This means that search engines are looking for duplicate HTML rather than duplicate articles. It is common sense that certain articles and press releases may be placed on multiple places on the internet – this has been happening since the beginning of the internet.

However, if HTML is duplicated, then the search engines know that someone is trying to trick them.

Feel free to grab articles from directories, just make sure that you are plugging these articles into your own unique HTML files – create your own custom templates.

2. Blogs

Blogs have become extremely powerful lately – search engines are devouring them. Why? Well blogs are short for “web log” – an internet based journal. Just the title automatically indicates that the blog will be consistently updated.

Blogs are also very clean and simple HTML with easy to follow navigation for search engines. If you have not yet, it is a wise decision to launch a blog on your own website.

3. Product Reviews/Information

Many affiliates who sell physical products or have websites that sell hundreds or thousands of websites argue that they cannot possibly write articles to promote all the products.

So, how do you have meaningful pages of “content” if you sell lots of products and writing articles is too difficult?

Write product reviews or copy/paste information on that product.

If you ever search for an electronic item in the search engines, you’ll find that the top ranking sites are not always articles but are typically just websites that sell that product. Some of them have “reviews” of the product and others just have copied and pasted information from the company.

So, a fast way to get content is to simply “borrow” technical specs and reviews on the product. But remember, put these into your own template (since it is repeated content).

There you have it – 3 sources for fast content to help you fill your website with many pages that search engines can index and then refer traffic to.

Copyright 2005 Kurma Group