Online Affiliate Marketing

The most important key to success in all online affiliate marketing consists of driving maximal website traffic at minimal cost. Historically, the vast majority of affiliate marketers have relied on one or more of the following three basic methods for achieving this end: 1) Email campaigns targeted to extensive lists of prospective customers; 2) driving targeted organic keyword traffic to one or more personal websites through search engines; and 3) driving targeted search engine traffic on a Pay Per Click (PPC) basis.

In addition to these well-known methods, there is now a revolutionary new fourth way of driving massive website traffic. Although it's not yet on the radar screen of most affiliate marketers, it clearly has the potential to overshadow all previous methods in its effectiveness. Interestingly, along with being potentially much more cost-effective, it can be utilized even without having a website.

This exciting and unique approach is so new that it does not even have a widely-accepted name at this point in time. Most commonly, however, it is referred to as "driving mass traffic." It basically entails driving traffic to specific affiliate offers through buying huge numbers of ad impressions on hundreds--or even thousands--of precisely targeted websites through one or more online ad networks. The potential number of impressions that can be served on these websites greatly exceeds what can be achieved through PPC--or through any other form of online advertising for that matter. As in using PPC, these ads must be carefully tested and tweaked in order to maximize return on investment.

The handful of online entrepreneurs who are pioneering this new marketing strategy are effectively building new bridges between many large online ad networks on the one hand and multiple affiliate and CPA networks on the other. Although these two large groups of online businesses are highly complementary, they have had minimal interaction in the past. By forging these relationships, therefore, these entrepreneurs are developing new avenues of highly lucrative e-commerce that, in the words of Rich Scheffren, can accurately be described as "a gold rush to end all gold rushes. . .something that would make what happened in California back in the 1800's look like a trickle."