Building a bans site can be a fun yet highly addictive thing to do. As it is with most business people statistics can become addictive. Constantly locking in and checking how much you earned his exciting and thrilling yet can potentially be very depressing if you don't see any increase because of your artwork. Anyway I will continue in my free time to build banned sites as they have surely been my greatest money earner for all the different affiliate programs I've tried out. Google analytics is a free program and it is absolutely essential to anybody who is working with banned sites. The single and most important thing I check when I login to google analytics is the section on traffic sources. They shows you specifically where your traffic is coming from. Of course it varies for each site but generally one can spot where most of the traffic comes from. Looking at my statistics I see that I continually get a lot of traffic from stumble upon. I am not very enthusiastic however that I do get a lot of traffic from his website because as most people have pointed out traffic from stumble upon does not typically converts into sales. So sure it is a boost of confidence to see your graphical way up a truly I don't see huge difference in how much I have earned.
Of course the single most important source of traffic without a doubt is the Google organic search. If you have been living under a rock for the last five years I would understand if this is new to you but otherwise there is no excuse. Google has the world's most sophisticated and most popular search engine and that is a valuable tool beyond compare. Everything you do for Internet marketing these days is basically just for the sake of Google and its search engine. Sure there are other search engines out there such as MSN and Yahoo which are probably in the two in three places but they are far far behind Google in popularity. One wonders whether or not they will ever catch up.
Anyway moving on about traffic sources here are his some other valuable ones. Digg.com is always a solid source of traffic. It's fairly straightforward you submit a link to an article on your website and the people decide whether or not it is interesting as they vote on it. There are countless other Digg clone sites on the Internet but don't get too wrapped up in listing your website on all of these. Spend most of your time making sure that there are listings of all your popular articles on digg.
Another great way to get traffic if you are a fairly creative person is to use youtube. There are countless ways you can splice together a simple slide show with images and sound or you can even remakes somebody else's video. Simply do this and be sure to have your URL listed somewhere in the credits. For most of my videos I have the URL consistently viewable at the bottom of the video.
I could go on and on about more sources of traffic, but these ones are truly the most valuable.