The Visitors You Never Knew You Had

When monitoring your traffic, especially if you have a large site, you will of course look mainly at the traffic received related to the keywords you have targeted. But is every visitor likely to be there for the same reason? If you take a moment to analyze your traffic statistics, you will be surprised at how many visitors you get from odd places and strange search terms.

If you are working actively with targeting specific keywords within your niche, you are no doubt getting your fair share of traffic from the search engines. But, on top of those visitors, you will get search engine traffic from phrases and words you are not actively targeting. Many of these visitors are most likely derived from searches related to your niche. More often than not however, a web page will have many specific phrases, certain to attract the occasional visitor from Google.

If your site is large enough, or if you are running multiple sites, you are probably getting quite a few visitors like this every day. The problem with this kind of traffic is the lack of information about the visitors. You haven’t actively tried to attract these people, yet they arrive. But, in order to take advantage of this traffic, you need to figure out from where they are coming, and most importantly, what page(s) they are landing on.

The easiest way is to look at your website’s statistics, most information will be found there. First off, look at the search terms that have resulted in visitors. Try to find phrases or words NOT specific for your niche, but instead of a more general nature. Or better yet; A phrase that, taken out of it’s context, will be related to something completely different. If you can find enough, similar or related, search terms, odds are you can use these to improve your revenue with the use of an affiliate program.

When you have figured out what search terms generate the most traffic, it’s time to see where they are landing. Do a few searches on these queries – on ALL major search engines – to see the most likely entry pages for each particular query. If you can find one or a few pages often occurring on various queries, you have an excellent opportunity to figure out what these visitors are looking for. If you can, it’s almost too easy to present them with banners from well chosen affiliate programs. This way, some of the people will click your ads rather than the back button, thus making you some money.

Sometimes the terms giving you the extra visitors will be easy to translate, hence making it clear what the visitors are really looking for. In these cases, all you need to do is sign up for an affiliate program offering products of interest. In other cases, the terms are of a very general nature, making it less obvious what they are looking for. It is, however, possible to experiment with a few text ads, analyzing what ads attract the most clicks. Most free website statistics software don’t enable you to track visitor-behaviour, but if you sign up for Google statistics you’ll be able to see how many times each link is clicked, making it easy to find an affiliate program matching the visitors you never knew you had.

If you have numerous pages attracting odd visitors, you can easily repeat the above for each page getting enough search engine traffic to make it worth your while.

Poker affiliate programs – Look beyond the obvious

If you have a site about poker, casinos or gambling in general, you stand a good chance of making a nice profit by using various affiliate programs. But, choosing a program solely on its pay per sale percentage won’t necessarily maximize your revenue. Looking at your visitors – and what they are looking for – will make it easier to choose a new poker affiliate program.

The online gambling industry is one of the most profitable niches for an affiliate marketer. But, due to its potential revenue, the competition is very hard, and you really need to make the most of every single visitor you get.

The more information you can gather about your visitors, the easier it gets to choose the right affiliate program suiting their needs. Much information can be accessed from your website statistics – or from the account statistics if you are buying traffic with contextual ads. What search terms attract the most traffic? Do you know exactly why they are arriving and where? If the most common search term is very general in its nature, it can be hard to know exactly what the visitors are looking for, but if you are getting visitors from more specific search terms, you should have a pretty good idea as to what your visitors are interested in.

Once you have evaluated your visitors’ needs, it’s time to figure out how to meet them. If you are getting search engine traffic for any term related to poker bonuses, odds are many of your visitors are looking for just that. No matter how good the affiliate program’s percentage, if they do not offer a bonus high enough – or no bonus at all -, most of your visitors won’t sign up, hence not making you a commission. Instead, this would give you an excellent opportunity to find as many poker rooms possible with high sign up bonuses, and hopefully many of your visitors will come back to find a new poker room with a good bonus once they are done with their first choice.

In the same manner you can find affiliate programs matching most keywords, if you have visitors you KNOW are looking for one particular thing – no matter if it’s poker bonuses, Omaha tables or stud – you should try to present them with products and services matching their needs on an as detailed level as possible.

Assuming you have a somewhat good knowledge in the niche you are working within, finding this kind of information can be done rapidly, but the more effort you put into finding the correct casino- or poker affiliate program, the better your traffic will convert. Most often the poker rooms offer trial accounts, making it free and easy to check out both the software, type of games and whether or not it’s a busy poker room or not. All this information is highly important for knowing IF you should use the affiliate program in question, as well as for the marketer choosing what commission plan to use.

The more information you can get hold of – both about your visitors and about the affiliate programs – the better. You should always evaluate the programs joined, to ensure they are converting as expected.