Now that our first WordPress affiliate store is built – it’s time to promote it! We have some great products, some original content, we’re indexed – and now we have to bring some people to it. What I mean is, we need to build some links and traffic, because the best store in the world is worthless without visitors.

This post is part of the “How to Build a WordPress Affiliate Store Series“.

For those of you that may not have read the rest of this series – I’m going to recap for you…

So like I said, now that we have a store up and running – we need to promote it and bring traffic to it. There are many ways to do this – and I’ve written about most of them already, but some of you are new to my blog and may not have read some of the golden nuggets I have buried away in the last year of archived posts. Rather than re-write what I’ve already written – I’ll give you a list of things to do to promote your new datafeedR affiliate store in WordPress. Granted – these techniques can be used to promote virtually any affiliate, niche store, blog, or web site you have. The next time you’re surfing the web wasting time and watching YouTube videos of talking dogs or barking cats – spend that time actually building up your network of links to get better pagerank and rankings for your new WordPress affiliate store! That or monetize your youtube videos and use them to drive traffic to your site/sites.

Register with Search Engines

I shouldn’t have to mention this – but I will…be sure to register your site with MSN, Yahoo!, AND google so spiders for all the major search engines are visiting you regularly.

Perform Basic Keyword Research

If you’re going to be building backlinks and pagerank for your blog, then you need to know what keywords you are going to key in on and use when posting in forums and commenting on blogs. Use my Keyword Research Cheat Sheet to get started. Also be sure to read How to perform Keyword Research Day #1, and How to perform Keyword Research Day #2. It also wouldn’t hurt you to read How to Rank Well for Specific Keywords.

Submit 3 Quality Articles

Once your store is up and running one of the first things I would do is to write and submit 3 quality 1,000+ word articles to article directories. Read my Guide to Article Directory Promotion. Also read Article Marketing with AffShpere. You’ll want to submit at least a few articles to the directories each month for best results, but good article submissions will get you quick backlinks – a great jumpstart!

Leave Blog Comments

Leaving blog comments is not only a great way to build links, but you can get a great deal of traffic from it too. I make a point to post on both dofollow blogs (for links), as well as nofollow (high traffic) blogs for traffic. For best results, read BANS: Success Building Backlinks Part 1. At the time I wrote it for my Build a Niche Store series, but the techniques can be applied to any blog or affiliate store as well.

Create Targeted Pages on Free Sites

This is a topic that could go on about for days on end. There are dozens (probably hundreds) of sites that you can use to creat targeted pages to build traffic, authority, and links for your site. When I wrote the post BANS: Building Targeted Links and Authority it was about using both Squidoo and HubPages to leverage your site for better search rankings. Both are great, but there are bunches of other ways as well. One is using wiki’s to build links. I wrote about that in Working the Wikis for Backlinks.

Create links in documents and upload them to free publishing services like Scribd.

Create free web sites or blogs using free services like Newsvine, Blogger, WordPress.com, Google Pages, MSN Spaces (now Windows Live Spaces), Yahoo 360, and on and on and on…

Use Social Media

Get social traffic with social bookmarking or ranking sites like del.icio.us, digg.com, StumbleUpon, etc. Sign up for entreCard to find and network with other blogs in your niche. If you get friends in the social media world, you can exchange links, stumbles, diggs, etc. Google it – there are many forums for this sort of thing!! Especially on BlogCatalog and MyBlogLog.

Use Profile Pages

Profile pages can be used to build links easily and quickly. Once you create an account, fill out your profile completely including links to your web sites. This is something you can do with a YouTube account, Technorati, LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, BlogCatalog, Bumpzee, MyBlogLog, MySpace, BlogFlux, Mashable, digitalpoint, and many more!!

Post in Forums

Posting in forums is a great way to get backlinks and traffic as well. Well-used forums are indexed almost daily (hourly even), and there are many ways to do this. If you post a lot in the same forum setup your signature links to point to your sites. Be sure to follow the rules of that forum for how many and what type of links you can use. Read my post How to Build Better Backlinks in Forums to get an idea of the best way to do this.

Also, I’ve found a way to find nearly any forum postings for any niche quickly and easily. You probably don’t know that there are search engines out there that only index forums. If you search them for keywords in your niche, you can start creating backlinks directly related to your niche or affiliate store blogs!! Check out Boardtracker, BoardReader, Twing.com, and Omgili.com and you’ll find more forums to post in for backlinks then you ever thought possible!

And where did I find those 4 resources for searching forums?? In my free subscription to Webmaster magazine! It came in my weekly email from Webmaster Magazine about better SEO techniques. If you aren’t subscribed, get signed up now, it costs nothing and you get no spam.

Wrapping it Up

I just gave you about 100 ways to promote your new datafeedR WordPress affiliate store. These resources and techniques can be used to promote any blog, web site, niche store, etc. But if you’ve been following the How to Build an Affiliate Store in WordPress series – these techniques are extremely valuable to you because better SERP rankings equals more money, and more traffic equals more money! You need to do something off this list each week at least (and in some cases every day).

Do you have a promotional technique not listed here?? Comment now!