Hi Neil ... I remember you saying that you get at least a million visitors a year to your
web site ... I wanted to ask you exactly how that happens and how other people can copy that
success. So what would be your first steps, what would you recommend?
Well it’s not any one thing, it’s obviously a combination of lots of different things that pull in
traffic. I don’t do much advertising myself so I couldn’t say one way or another whether that brings in
a lot of useful traffic.
The two main things I rely on are the associate program that I’ve had since about 1998. I’ve got about 4,000 affiliates now so they send me a lot of traffic. So starting an affiliate program actually
works very well.
And search engine strategies -- I get a lot of traffic from being listed in Yahoo and listed in
Google and they send me a lot of traffic so between the two of those and recurring traffic from when
I mention something in my newsletter I use a link to the Scam Free Zone even if it just redirects somewhere else, and links to customers when I email my customers I put links in there that go
through the Scam Free Zone.
So I would say those three main things: the associate program, search engine traffic, and
residual traffic from just emailing my lists.
Okay. It’s interesting you say you don’t actually do any advertising. When you were
starting out a few years ago did you do some advertising then?
No, I was just too tight to spend any money on advertising so I really didn’t, I just optimized a
few pages for the search engines and then it snowballed from there.
I didn’t do too much search engine optimization, I’m not completely skilled at that, I just
optimized a few pages and that brought in traffic and then gradually built on it by launching new
products which always generated more traffic because the affiliates would then put up more links
and things like that. It just snowballed really.
I do actually do a little bit of advertising though, I shouldn’t say I don’t do any because
someone will probably say "Hey, I know you advertise".
I have a sponsored listing on Yahoo, and that’s probably responsible for quite a bit of traffic but
I don’t actually track that, I couldn’t say how much I make from that whether it’s profitable or not
because they only send traffic to the root domain name, so I haven’t actually analyzed that traffic.
Could you explain what exactly is a sponsored ad in Yahoo and how do you use that?
Well first of all you have to be listed in Yahoo so you have to pay their listing fee just to get into
the directory.
That’s about $200, is that right?
