Routine Order

I am kind of toying with the idea of driving visitors to Clickbank using affiliate links. Fear not, it is not on this website, but on another one. Clickbank is probably the largest internet retailer of digital products - mostly ebooks, guides, scripts, tools and even some merchandise. The most difficult part of becoming a clickbank affiliate is finding the right products that talk to your visitors and setting up the links to those product pages. In clickbank terminology, these links are called “hoplinks”. That’s what put me off so far - the process of creating those links on your website and updating them periodically is tenuous, but even that is nothing compared to the process of finding new products on clickbank that are worth promoting.

So why am I thinking of doing this now? What has changed, you might ask? Well, I just found the killer tool to make life easier for me as a clickbank affiliate - hoprss. HopRSS provides an easy to use Clickbank RSS Feed that allows you to display the latest and greatest products on Clickbank forever - with just the initial setup.

What’s great about hoprss is that it does not rely on javascript. So the RSS feed gives you a list of products related to specified keywords or niches and once you set it up, the HTML source of your website that displays the item links is updated automatically. What this means is that in addition to being a valuable monetization tool, hoprss also adds new, relevant content to your website regularly. This can only be good for your website as seen by search engines. Try the Clickbank affiliate feed for your site, if it is oriented towards some commercial niche. And no, the links in this post are not affiliate links, I gain no kickbacks from these links whatsoever. The service is 100% free too - the author of the script probably hopes to earn enough from the ads on the hoprss homepage.

You can buy targeted traffic, and I am not talking about google’s product here. Quality Traffic Supply promises to deliver targeted traffic to a website that is contextually driven. I wonder how their business model works - seeing as how google pretty much dominates the show with regard to contextual advertising. The benefit, as far as I can see, is that Quality Traffic Supply drives traffic from contextually related sites in “over 250 categories”. So unlike google’s product which mostly directs visitors your way based on the search terms, this service is search term independent in that the traffic will come from like-minded sites.

I was just casually looking into ways of getting more traffic to this blog - I have been blogging for about 6 months now, and the number of visitors I get is growing slowly. Writing here would be a lot more fun with more readers and comments. However, I can’t spend hundreds on adsense/adwords, and I would like to get visitors who are interested in arcane technology, popular science — the kind of stuff I write here. That’s what led me to the targeted traffic firms other than google. But the question now is, how do I define myself as a target? I don’t really sell anything, or write about one specific field. Oh well, perhaps I should just stop checking my stats every day, stop navel-gazing and write whatever I like, regardless of whether there is an audience. The idea of spending money to get visitors might be overkill for me at this point.