Hi,

I am new to the world of affiliate marketing and have been given the job of promoting this site DownloadsPlaza.com

It seems to me that the majority of download sites rely only on organic search results and direct links. However I am required to increase traffic and revenue for this site.

The first thing I intend to do is add Adsense to the site and and start a campaign to add more links in through link exchange etc.

I would be interested in anyones ideas on alternative methods of generating traffic and increasing the revenue of this site. I am open to all constructive criticism and to any ideas or cross promotional partnerships with other websites.

Thanks

Here's a couple of suggestions:

1) I download software and then I see a submit box that says "notify me when an update to this program is released." Then when a new version of the software comes out, you guys send me an email. Insert links for related software in that email as well.

2) Organic results are going to be a big converter for you, and unfortunately it takes time. I recommend giving each dowload it's own keyword-rich page to better enable possibilities for SERPs (search engine results pages) incoming links.

Bend,

How will Adsense ads help build traffic? Or did you mean Adwords (where you pay for people to click on ads that take them to your site)?

I use Adwords, Yahoo Search Marketing, and Msn Adcenter to draw traffic to my software download site. They all do the trick, but I prefer Adwords since it's all realtime... you make a change to your ads and it immediately accepts the changes without editorial review that's required by Yahoo and Msn.

This kind of advertising is the fastest thing you can do to generate traffic, but it costs money.

Then again, creating organic links takes time... which is money too. If I had to pay myself $50 an hour to blog and post in forums to build organic links, I'd be completely broke and in debt.

Yes, organic traffic from the search engines will be a good way to receive a large majority if your traffic. But even this traffic doesn't just come to your site overnight. You have to work on it, to get it.

This can be done by doing link exchanges, adding your website to web directories, writing articles, including your sites link in your email and forum sigs, knocking out a press release, etc...