1.       Many search engines and indices (plural for index) will allow you to submit your whole referral or affiliate link (though most wont.)   Most notably Google and MSN Live Search ( I knew someone that got his referral link for another site posted on the FIRST PAGE of Google and made a killing in referrals!)  One quick way to test a search provider if you have been promoting your referral links for some time would be to do a search for your username (usually present at the end of your referral link) and see what the results show.  Look for your own referral links listed in the search results.  If your referral link shows in its entirety then you know to add that search provider to your list for periodically submitting all of your raw referral or affiliate links directly.

2.       Buy or earn yourself a snappy new domain name and have it redirect (the whole domain) to your referral or affiliate link (you don’t even need hosting – just use domain forwarding.) Then promote your new domain to the search engines, indices, forums, and blogs. It helps not having the obvious referral link look.  Cheap domain names start at just $1.99 or can be FREE if you know where to look (below):

DomainLagoon |  HostingLagoon |  URLSavings |  AnotherFree |  URLFreedom

3.       Choose a referral banner that doesn’t give up the whole site URL (or edit/make your own.)  Many people will (for some reason) choose to type in the URL manually if they have the benefit of knowing it rather that clicking upon an obvious referral link.   Leave them guessing a bit (make it a bit of a mystery) as to what site the banner is speaking of.  When speaking of sites in text, refer to them in a way that doesn’t obviously or intuitively disclose the URL (for example, if I was writing about www.GreedyClicks.com, I would say “Greedy Clicks” rather than “GreedyClicks”, or “GreedyClicks.com”.

4.       Start blogging about your referral sites / links at Blogger.   Blogger is Google based and I’ve found is your best chance at a popular blog with a great Google rank.  I’ve noticed that Google regularly favors their own blogs based on their own blog site interface (and it doesn’t hurt to promote this blog to other search engines and indices as well.)  Blogger will also host your blog for free seamlessly on your own domain.  Another good blog site with max exposure is the eBay based blog.  Make an eBay blog and promote it as well.

5.       Regularly do a search, as if you knew nothing at all about the subject of the type sites you are promoting.   See what pops up.   Notice the first site on the list.   Notice what they are doing right? …and what you may be doing wrong? (meta tags, keywords, description, etc.)  Notice keywords, etc.    Improve the quality, quantity, and newness of your textual content regularly. Be honest and open, don’t resort to superlatives and hype wording like “Go to this site and make $500 in an hour” and “fire your boss” (a big turn off and one of the reasons why people may leave your site early.)  Morph your site into a closer rendition of the top site and re-submit (another step up the ladder?)  …just common sense.

6.       If you run your own referral sites…  do your homework on Search Engine Optimization (SEO) techniques (freely available all over the web.)  Learn about the proper use of META TAGS, robots.txt, and sitemap files.  If you are going to do it, do it right!  Oh, and don’t use “frames” when building your site (they are not search engine/index friendly – don’t shoot yourself in the foot.)

7.       Purchase professional web site promotional services and/or software that will automate your site submission efforts.  Don’t get fooled by software / services that say they will promote your site(s) to 30,000 search engines, etc.  Chances are 95% of those sites will be Free For All (FFA) sites which likely no human ever looks at (at one time FFA sites increased your “link popularity” – which mattered then – but all respectable search engines and indices have learned to ignore the FFA sites now – seeing their obvious abuse and non-consequence.)  Anyways, what’s the point?  Most FFA sites want you to manually confirm your entry nowadays (want 80 or 90 emails to respond to personally – go ahead and submit to useless FFA sites.)

8.       Be persistent, but DON’T SPAM the search engines/indices. A good interval for me (with good luck) has been to submit at least once a month (but NOT more.)  A lot of engines/indices will quickly add you to their trashcan if you bug them more (not a good place to be.)

9.       Join a link exchange network (thousands out there.) This may help significantly depending upon the quality (interest generated – staying power) of your own site (compared to others in the network.)

10.   Take over an already popular web site domain that has expired (get them cheap if you know where to look) and post your referral links / banners there.  Enjoy instant popularity with the twist of people not knowing what hit them once they’ve arrived.

11.   Think of a unique niche of people that might appreciate the product, service, or site you are promoting and post to forums covering that niche.  …for example, people with some sort of social anxiety (such as agoraphobia, etc.) or other homebound people might want to learn about online money making from home sites , etc.  Post to social forums covering that niche topic.

12.   Double or triple the impact of your message forum posts by promoting your posts to the search engines and indices as well…  Yes, after writing posts to a particular forum I always try to go back, gather the “permalink”s (or URLs) of the specific posts I wrote in notepad and spend a bit of time afterwards adding them to the search providers to crawl.

Below is a Partial List of Links to Popular Search Engine and Index URL Free Submission Pages

• Add your URL to Google

• Submit to Yahoo!

• Add your URL to Alexa Web Search

• MSN Live Search URL Submission

• Submit your Site to Jayde

• Free Multi-Add URL Online – ineedhits

© 2008 Wesley Bibro of FreeCashPro.com – All Rights Reserved – Republished Here With Expressed Permission

Before I go on…  If you have no idea what a browser cookie is I would suggest that you take a look at The Unofficial Cookie FAQ or browse on over to the Wikipedia article on the HTTP cookie.

Some people and anti-spyware software would have you believe that all browser cookies are bad (especially “tracking cookies”.)  When it comes to paid survey, incentive, GPT, and PTS sites (hereafter referred to as the “incentive site” for the sake of simplicity) cookies are your very best friend.

How do incentivized offers track?  Most use a combination of tracking cookies, the single pixel gif, a sub-id containing your site membership information, and your unique ip address.

1. When you click on an offer/survey the incentive site’s software will note your click.
2. You then will be sent to the offer’s url with a sub-id usually containing your incentive site user name appended to the end of the url.  Though is may seem instantaneous and direct on pretty much any connection other than dial-up, your browser is actually being sent on a wild goose chase of many different urls to get to your final destination (incentive sites use sponsor (or “CPA” / “affiliate”) networks as a source of their offers – those sponsor networks usually get their offers from other bigger sponsor networks.)  The only way to properly make sure that everyone the should be paid for your “lead” will be paid is to send you through a daisy-chain of successive URLs (each noting and crediting themselves your lead.)
3. Ok, you arrive at the survey/offer.  You fill out information, make a purchase, or perform whatever “action” is required to generate credit.  This is where the tracking cookie and single pixel gif come into play.  Once the action is performed then you are usually sent to a confirmation page that will place a cookie on your computer eventually reporting to the original incentive site that you have indeed completed the required action for credit.
4. Another reporting method is the mysterious single pixel gif.  This is a uniquely named image (picture) file that is so small (1 pixel by 1 pixel) that it is invisible to you that is placed on the confirmation page.  The gif is uniquely named so that it specifically and only refers to you specifically.  The offer’s web server knows that you have completed an action when a request is made to “show” that one pixel gif (known as the gif “firing” in the industry.)
5. If the offer site notices that you already have a cookie on your system from a previous session at that site (indicating that you are NOT a “unique lead”) then it may internally note this, allow you to continue, though ultimately report to the incentive site that you are not qualified for the incentive (ouch!)  The same goes for if you are recognized by your ip address or entered information such as your name, email address, etc.)  Your ip address also plays a part in identifying if your are within the required geographic location for that offer.
6. Once you are done viewing/completing the survey/offer, close browser window of leave the site, and end up back on the original incentive site then the tracking cookie reports that you have or have not qualified for your incentive.