The quality of your website backlinks is one of the most important factors to ranking in search engines. Search engines look at links as endorsements. If one website links to you, that’s essentially a “vote” for your website.

If you get a “vote” from a high quality website such as Amazon.com or Apple.com, that’s counted as much more important than getting a link from just any website on the internet.

Without good backlinks, your chances of getting ranked for even semi-competitive keywords are almost zero. With great backlinks and great content, your chances of ranking for competitive keywords are much, much higher. Let’s take a look at the two most important factors to determining a link’s strength: relevance and authority.

Relevance

Getting a link from a website that is related to yours is counted much more highly than a link from a website that is not related to yours because search engines know that is how links are naturally supposed to work. Related businesses refer one another. People make recommendations to people with similar interests. If you suddenly get a bunch of unrelated links, search engines start to get suspicious. In other words, if you run a cooking website, it’s much better to get 50 links from other cooking websites than 200 links from clothing and violin websites.

Authoritative

In addition to relevance, Google also looks at the authority of a website when determining its link power. After all, if link count was all that mattered, anyone could just start 200 new websites and link them all to one site to get them ranked. That’s not how it works. Those websites need to have already built up credibility in Google’s eyes in order for the links to really count.

One way Google measures a site’s authority is through PageRank (PR). PR is a simple way of ranking how many websites have linked to that site. In turn, high PR sites can then link to another site and give them more of a boost than a low PR site.

PR isn’t all that matters, however. The website’s age, the amount of content, the time users stay on the site and how often they come back all come into play. In fact, over the last couple years, Google has significantly downplayed the role of PageRank in their algorithm because so many marketers have started trying to use PR to game the system.

Backlinks: The Bottom Line

The bottom line is this: try to get as many links as you can, from the best sites in your industry. You might not be able to start with the biggest sites, but start with websites that you admire and respect and work your way up to larger sites from there.

Co-registration leads are leads generated from people signing up for email lists and clicking an “I’d also like to learn about …” box. Co-registration leads are an often underutilized, yet highly profitable source of traffic. They often get a bad rap from people who don’t understand the business, but that can work to your advantage.

Here are the benefits of using co-registration leads:

They are Inexpensive

You can buy a lead for 20 cents to 40 cents on the low end or about 80 cents on the high end. Contrast this with AdWords traffic. Say you are paying 25 cents a click and you have a 10 percent opt-in rate. That’s $2.50 per email. It’s true that the quality of co-registration leads is lower than people who opt in specifically to your list. Even so, you can very often get high quality co-registration leads at a fraction of what it will cost from other advertising sources.

Few People Understand Co-Registration

A lot of people think co-registration is spam. Others think they never convert. In fact, a lot of people have tried co-registration and lost money. The reality is that they don’t understand how co-registration works. They don’t understand the difference between positive opt-in and negative opt-in (when they check the box to get on your list versus uncheck it), or how crucial the mailing system is to maintaining a relationship with the lead.

When done properly, co-registration can be incredibly lucrative. When done incorrectly, co-registration is often a money losing proposition. The downside to this is that you will have to spend some time learning the ins and outs before beginning. The upside is that there is far less competition on co-registration than other advertising sources.

They Are Scalable

A lot of high-converting, low-competition advertising sources just don’t scale. For example, MySpace ads might have less competition than Facebook’s, but you just can’t get much traffic with MySpace. Co-registration on the other hand is nearly infinitely scalable. If you find a profitable broad market, you can literally buy hundreds of thousands of leads per month. Getting the first $1,000 with co-registration is often harder than going from $1,000 to $10,000.

They Convert

Finally and most importantly, co-registration leads convert. It doesn’t work quite the way most people think, though. Co-registration leads will generally covert after a few well-written emails; not necessarily right away. The people who try co-registration and can’t get it to work usually aren’t approaching it correctly. They are trying to recoup their money too quickly, aren’t mailing new leads quickly enough, or just have bad copy.

The bottom line is that co-registration leads convert, they are scalable, they are inexpensive, and not a lot of people understand them. There’s a lot of room for mistakes, but there’s also a lot of room for profit. If you take the time to understand how co-registration works, you can make a small fortune from it.

Knowing exactly who is visiting your website can give you a lot of insight into the best ways to communicate with them. It can tell you which pages on your site people like and don’t like, it can tell you what kind of audience you are attracting, and it can even tell you about what they are thinking when they land on your site.

Here’s how to find out more about who is visiting your website.

Bounce Rates, Return Rates and Length of Stay

These statistics will tell you a lot about what people are thinking about your content. If a lot of people land on your pages and leave right away, then you are probably not catching their attention. If a lot of people land on certain pages and stay for a long period of time, then that probably means that your visitors like your content and are staying to take it all in. If most of your visitors just visit once and never return, then that probably means your content isn’t really appealing to your customers. If they return often, then that means they like your content and want to come back for more.

Keywords

What keywords are people entering to get to your website? If you run a finance website, but find that most of your visitors are landing on your website through keywords related to refinancing credit cards, then you might want to do a special article series about credit card refinancing. The keywords people land on your site with can tell you a lot about what kind of information people are looking for when they come to your site.

Most Popular Pages and Posts

Which pages on your site get the most traffic? Again, this will show you what kind of information people are most interested in. If a page is often referred to or revisited, that probably means it is the kind of content that your users want to see more of.

Traffic Sources

Finally, look over your traffic sources regularly. If other websites are sending you traffic regularly, see if you can get in contact with those sites. If smaller search engines are sending you traffic, see if you can optimize for those search engines. If a lot of people are coming from direct type-in traffic, that probably means your offline marketing or branding efforts are working. Find out what is working, and then put more time and energy into making it work even better.

These are just a few ways to use your analytics and data to figure out who is coming to your website and what they want from your site. Review this data regularly as it can change quite a bit in just a short period of time.

StumbleUpon is capable of sending thousands of people to your website in just days, even if you have no track record. Doing so requires understanding the StumbleUpon system a bit, as getting traffic there is different than anywhere else on the Internet. Here is how StumbleUpon works and how you can use it to drive traffic:

The “Power Stumbler” Structure

The most important thing to marketing success in StumbleUpon is contacts with “Power Stumblers.” Power Stumblers are people who can send over 1,000 stumblers to your page just by posting your website URL. In other words, they are people who already have an audience and have spent a lot of time on the website. They exist in every industry and they are often specialized, meaning that one Power Stumbler might post exclusively about business and have business-oriented followers, while another posts primarily funny videos.

Contacting Power Stumblers

Start out by making a list of ten power stumblers with whom you would like to make contact. These should be stumblers who are influential and are in some way related to your business.

Follow their stumbles. Post reviews on their stumbles. Reviews are written by the first few stumblers and are crucial to a stumble’s success, because future stumblers will look at the review to decide if they are interested in visiting a stumble. You can really help someone out by writing a great review.

Send them a personal message about one of their stumbles. Tell them you up-voted it or reviewed it. Ask them if they need any help with anything else. In other words, build a relationship and start doing favors. That way, when you need a favor in return (i.e., to have your post stumbled), they are likely to agree.

Random StumbleUpon Tips

In general, Sunday evening is the best time to post your stumble, as people tend to be browsing and meandering online at that time. It’s a lot easier to get a couple of thousand people to a few pages than 10,000 people to one page. In other words, don’t try and get one page to explode in traffic, but try to get several pages to a good traffic flow.

For some reason, blogs tend to do better on StumbleUpon than other types of web pages. If it doesn’t make a difference to your website, then try and host your content on a blog rather than a static web page.

StumbleUpon marketing is different than other types of marketing in that it tends to be quite relationship-based. Start building your favor bank by getting in contact with influential people in your space and helping them by reviewing and up-voting. Then and only then should you ask them for a favor to promote your website when the time is appropriate.

Generally, anyone making more than $10,000 per month through affiliate marketing can be considered a “super affiliate.” Here are a few tips on how you can go from beginner or intermediate to making five figures a month:

Attend Affiliate Conventions

ADTECH, Affiliate Summit West, Affiliate Summit East and many smaller conventions should be treated as mandatory events. Although you won’t necessarily learn much from the speakers, the main benefit of going to affiliate conferences is to meet other affiliates and super affiliates. Build relationships and ask questions, which might include:

* “What are your traffic sources?”
* “What kinds of offers have worked for you?”
* “What networks do you work with? How’s the service? Do they scrape (under-report leads)?”

Don’t expect affiliates to share their secrets with you until you have a good enough relationship with them. Until you are their friend, they won’t freely share their offers, traffic sources and tactics.

Experiment with Multiple Traffic Sources

Every affiliate has to go through a phase where they do some very heavy experimentation. Some affiliates find that the meticulous honing of AdWords CPCs, keywords, ad copy and landing pages to be their perfect match.

Others prefer the long-term brand building of search engine optimization (SEO). Others still prefer designing banner ads and creating graphical creatives, making money through the content network or through large media buys.

The sources of traffic are endless. In general, each affiliate will experiment with a variety of traffic sources and then land on one that really works for them. There’s no way to know which method will work for you without experimenting with a wide range of traffic sources.

Testing, Tracking and Scaling

No matter what kind of traffic source you end up using, you will still need to learn the skills of testing, tracking and scaling. Testing involves trying different versions of your headlines, websites, ad copy and offers. Even the same offer from different affiliate networks can test differently. That is why even if you are using a relatively static technique such a SEO, you still need to test offers, revenue sources and such.

Scaling is a whole other matter. Once you find something that works, how can you make the most of it? How do you turn one working campaign on AdWords into a working campaign on Yahoo, MSN, PPV, Facebook, SEO, banner ads and more?

These are three skills that every super affiliate has to master in order to succeed. In fact, many super affiliates succeed precisely because they are so meticulous about testing and scaling.

These three tips–to meet other successful affiliates, to test and find your ideal traffic source and to split test and scale meticulously–will take you very far if you follow them consistently.