Using Blogs and Forums for Free Traffic
For every subject that you can possibly imagine and probably a few that you would most likely never want to imagine, there are people gathered on the Internet on blog and forum sites who are discussing it… at great length.
You can bet that no matter what the topic of your website or what product or service that you are selling that somewhere (and probably a lot of somewheres) people are discussing it right now as we speak on blogs and forums on the Internet.
Whatever your product or service is, there is a specific group of people who are the most likely to buy it. These are the ones who are gathered on blogs and forums discussing a topic for which your product or service is an answer to their problem. I use the word “problem” rather loosely here. “Problem” covers anything that a person wants but doesn’t have… whether that thing is a new pair of jeans, a cure for cancer or anything in between. Problems are simply things that people want but don’t have…and your product is obviously one of those things…at least for some of them. Now, your mission is to find these people.
Go to your favorite search engine and in the search box type in your key words followed by the word: forums. Hit search. You will be amazed at the number of forums on which your potential customers are discussing the topic that you are most interested in and the one where your product can actually be of service.
Repeat the search using the word: blogs behind your key words. You will likely get just as many hits using that term.
Now out of these two searches that you have done, choose the top 4 or 5 sites of each search that come up in the results. Visit these sites and determine if they are in fact discussing the topic that your product relates to. Choose three or four of the most active forums or blogs. Active, meaning those who have had the most posts made to them in the last 24 hour period or who have the largest number of members listed. Join the sites.
Remember that posting to blogs and forums is a time consuming task. It is an important task and it is a task that will help to drive traffic to your website but, I assure you, it IS time consuming. For each and every blog and forum site that you join, you will need to post 3 to 5 times each week and each post will consist of at least 300 words, probably more.
This is important! Do NOT start out posting blatant advertisements for your product or for your website. Think of each blog and forum as a neighborhood that you have just moved into. The people on each site will most likely know one another well and you will be the new kid on the block, so act like it.
Posting advertisements for your product or for your website is just rude. They will likely be removed by the blog or forum administrator as will you be removed from the membership list. Advertisements are generally banned from all blog and forum sites.
What you can and should do is include your website address in your signature tag. That is not considered an advertisement. It is simply a part of your identity and is viewed as such by the administrators as well as the members of blogs and forums.
You are going to have to go slow here. Introduce yourself to the group. Take your time to get to know each of the members who are the most active and who exert the most influence within the group.
Remember that your posts need to be thoughtful, considerate and helpful to other members and must never EVER appear to be advertisements for your website or for your products. You can suggest your products as solutions for problems within your posts but they must not look like advertisements. They must appear to be of the friend-helping-a-friend variety.
You may be tempted to use articles that you have written as blog or forum posts and sort of get more bang for your buck so to speak…don’t. Articles and blog or forum posts are two different animals…and they are not interchangeable. The other reason for never using an article as a blog or forum posts is that search engine spiders may well identify one or the other as duplicate content. Duplicate content is NOT a good thing. Just don’t do it.
Never include links to your website within the body of your posts to blogs and forums. This can be construed as advertising and it can get you tossed out on your ear. You must be satisfied with the link to your website that will appear just below you name in your signature tag at the end of each post.
You can safely rely on the human trait of curiosity to insure that the members of the blogs and forums will click on the link to your website in your signature tag. Most people come with a healthy and built-in supply of curiosity. They will not be able to resist clicking on the link below you name at least once.
If they find something that will provide them with an answer to a problem while they are visiting your website out of curiosity, they will return time and again.
We haven’t discussed your website content and we don’t have time to now but let me tell you that content really is king when you are talking about website traffic. You must not use articles that you have submitted to article banks and you must not use your blog or forum posts as content for your website. Be sure, however, that your website is loaded with a lot of good and relevant content.
Posting to blogs and forums who’s topics relate to the topic of your website or to your product or service is an excellent way to create website traffic and do it for free.
Pj Germain
http://www.Affiliate-Success.Org
The Last Membership You’ll ever need!
Keyword Selection Necessities for Search Engine Optimization
Keyword selection is the most important piece of information to be successful online. To build a search engine friendly website, you have to have content. That content must be filled with words that would be used to identify your company and its products. Keywords are words that are often searched on the major search engines. Keywords are important because you want people to easily find your website when they are looking for the type of product you offer.
Finding the right keywords is the first step in the process of keyword selection. You have available a free tool on the internet called Overture for keyword selection. You can find the URL for Overture by accessing Google.
Overture will tell you how many times any given keyword was accessed during the prior one or two month period. It can give you a very good idea of what keywords or keyword phrases to optimize your site by using the free tool above.
It would be a good idea for you to choose some lesser-searched phrases for keywords. This should make it easier for your prospective customers to find you. The lesser searched keywords and phrases are not optimized as often as the most searched terms and will be much easier for your company to rank well for them.
Once you know what your main keywords are, you need to take one or two keywords and create a page of content based on these keywords. You do this by writing down information about your products. If you offer china dolls, and “china dolls” is one of the keyword phrases you have chosen, you should write a page on the quality of the dolls you use in your products. By using the term “china dolls” as often as possible, you will be able to show the search engines why you should be ranked for that term. Feel free to scatter your other main keywords throughout the content you write for your website. This can only help you obtain good rankings for those keywords. You must create a page of content for every one or two keywords for which you want to rank well.
Once you have content written for your keywords, it is very important to have a solid linking structure for the interior of your website. Search engines look at exterior and interior links to figure out what is important to your customers and help them find you. In English, this means that you will rank better by using the correct words inside the hyperlinks used on your website. These words are given extra weight by search engines by being used inside a link. You should include a link to another content page inside of every content page you write that points to a separate content or product page inside of your website.
The last and possibly the most important piece of your search engine optimization puzzle must be the exterior links pointing to your website. Major search engines, especially Google, put a very large focus on the words that are used to link to your website from other web pages. It is also important to obtain links from “authority” sites. A relevant site’s link is worth much more than a site that has nothing to do with what your company does. By following the simple steps above, you will be on your way to better search engine rankings for the most important keywords.
Bob Carper is a veteran consultant in information systems He holds a a MBA from Pitt. For additional information go to
http://www.secure-webconference.citymax.com. His blogsite is http://www.html-secrets.net/blog. You may also contact him at robertcarper06@comcast,net
Use the Power of Social Media Promotion to Supercharge your Traffic
We all know how important it is to have a content-rich website. Promoting these sites across the internet has in the past involved everything from search engine optimization to paid keyword referrals to link popularity campaigns. However, one of the most effective and relatively new methods to promote content-rich web sites these days, is through social media promotion.
What is “social media promotion” you ask? Simply, as defined by Wikipedia, social media:
“describes the online technologies and practices that people use to share opinions, insights, experiences, and perspectives with each other.”
Part of the Web 2.0 revolution; another catchphrase describing the new generation of web sites that have users that submit their own text, video and picture content; social media promotion can take many forms.
Usually, these technologies and practices take non-search engine forms and can involve such technologies as chat forums, message boards, blogs, podcasts, and wikis. Simply, social media can be considered ANYTHING that you can use to build a community to rally around. A well-run social media campaign can drive huge amounts of traffic to a website and can determine whether a new idea, website or startup ultimately takes off or not.
There are literally dozens of social media sites active across the internet today. Below are brief overviews of what I would consider the five most popular:
Digg (http://www.digg.com) the big boy of social media sites. Digg was formed initially with a tech focus and is still the end all for all tech or computer specific content items that you wish to pull across to the masses. Digg has however become so popular that its scope has now expanded to cover most any item of interest.
del.icio.us (http://del.icio.us/) a close second to Digg in the area of backlink generation. The primary purpose of del.icio.us is to store your bookmarks online; in that regard, it’s actually more community-focused then Digg. The ability to store your bookmarks online and add more from anyplace in the world, actually encourages cross-linking among site members who share similar interests. This in turn allows you to promote your own content to a shared community with similar interests, generating those much needed backlinks for site promotional purposes.
Technorati (http://www.technorati.com) the recognized authority on what is going in the world of weblogs. The main strength of Technocrati is the ability to keep tabs on your online visibility. The site allows you to keep tabs on who is linking to you, where you are being mentioned online, what kind of progress your site is making, and how your competitors are doing in comparison. The site can be indispensible if you routinely visit a lot of blogs and want to be updated on them when their content changes.
Wikipedia (http://www.wikipedia.org) online only since 2001, Wikipedia is now the world’s largest reference website on the planet. The content of Wikipedia is free and collaboratively written by people all around the world. This site is so popular that a search of most terms will display a Top 5 Wikipedia result in Google. It is worth noting that if your website is not already one of the strongest entries on the web, a listing on Wikipedia could actually “outrank” your own website. Therefore, make sure this result is actually truthful and complimentary, whenever possible.
Facebook (http://www.facebook.com) primarily driven by young adults, this social media site now numbers over nine million users and is still growing. Facebook helps you keep tabs on member profiles, at least those you can access. Recent changes to the site have made it very marketing friendly and a must-use if you have a college friendly product you wish to publicize. Members can purchase “facebook flyers,” which starting at $5, can be displayed 10,000 times a pop. Pricing increases based on frequency and number of days shown. Facebook groups are also very popular and very loyal, find something that connects with your group or the site and the results can be highly viral.
Getting your content noticed on these sites isn’t easy, but there are ways to prepare your content in such a way as to be considered “social media optimized.” This SMO approach is becoming a new concentration area for current SEO firms and can involve any of dozens of different approaches.
Here are five effective SMO rules that you can implement immediately when preparing your content for future social media campaigns:
1. Make your site linkable - also known as increasing your linkability, make it easy for outside parties and social media sites to link to your content. This can be done in a variety of ways, the easiest being to establish a blog on your site. If blogs aren’t your thing, maintaining free white papers, content-rich articles and resource pages that contain lots of useful links in one place, are great ways of increasing the linkable nature of your website.
2. Make bookmarking or social tagging easy - adding bookmarking buttons has been around for awhile. Go beyond this, though, by including a “delicious this” text link at the bottom of a post, and a Digg button near the top of the article. This format has been shown to be the most effective for generating votes for your content.
3. Start participating today - join the conversation on your site or in your site niche today. Start blogging on your own or make it a point to visit leading forums that target your audience and join the discussion . Answer some questions, provide some needed advice, and drop some “buzz” about your site at the same time; you won’t be sorry.
4. Reward helpful users - helpful or valuable users to your site that contribute noticeably to the site’s content and audience should be recognized and rewarded. This can take the form of a simple PM thank-you or a note on the forums themselves. The result of this is two-fold: you keep these valuable community members on your site, and you gain vocal champions of your site to outside members and sites they in turn visit.
5. Reward inbound site links - obviously the more inbound links your blog and site can generate, the better. This is still the singular method by which a site rises in the search rankings. Reward linking sites by providing them a permalink to use and listing them on your site in return. This simple act of acknowledgement provides the return gift of visibility and is never a bad thing.
The role of social media promotion to drive content is a continually expanding field. Even an examination of the main sites referenced above doesn’t begin to cover the viral social content impact of such popular social media mechanisms as YouTube videos or Flickr photo slides and galleries.
If planned and implemented correctly, social media promotion can be invaluable. The site visitor is in command, so why not start building a relationship with them, even if it’s on their terms?
Casey Markee is president of San Diego SEO firm Media Wyse. Casey has over 8 yrs. of experience within the online marketing arena and holds graduate degrees in Marketing & E-Commerce. Contact him today through http://www.MediaWyse.com with your SEO questions or assistance on your upcoming campaign.
How Can Offline Strategies Help Improve Your Online Sales?
By now you figured you have a decent site to promote your products online. You’re trying different traffic generation strategies on the Internet to get traffic to your site such as forum marketing, pay-per-click and others. From these traffic generation strategies, you feel that you can get sufficient traffic to your site.
However, why not get more traffic so you can increase the chances of making a sale and improve your website conversion rate?
These traffic generation strategies do not have that much to do with the Internet. These strategies are called offline strategies. Some of the offline strategies you can use are:
1. By Word Of Mouth
Go to your family members or friends who support you in this Internet marketing venture. Promote to them with what you feel can help them in their lives. For example, if you’re promoting a book on personal development, you can advise them on purchasing the book to help them in their problems, marriage etc.
To get them in touch with them, you can write a friendly email and provide them with the link to your site. Or you can talk about it with them and give the link to your site and ask them to check it out. There’s nothing more like moral support from your family and friends.
2. Business Networking
When you’re attending a seminar, do as much networking as possible. Equip yourself with name cards so that they can go to your site and let them see how far you have gone in Internet marketing. By mingling around with potential business associates, you can find ways in which you can promote your site by doing a joint venture with someone who you feel has the resources to give your site more exposure in the Internet world.
3. Submit Advertisements & Press Releases
You can write a press release to your local newspaper if you have a really great site to boast about and get people to know what you can offer to them. If your press release gets published, you’ve just earned a portion of a newspaper in which thousands of people will read your article, gain interest and head on down to your site.
You can also advertise your site by placing an advertisement in a newspaper or a business magazine. Make sure that the advertisement can greatly interest the reader and make them motivated to go to your site. What you can do is to ensure that your advertisement has a good sales copy and a specific time frame to tell your readers not to miss out in this time-limited opportunity.
These three simple offline strategies can greatly help your site in terms of traffic and sales. You do not have to look far in order for you to promote your site. Most Internet marketers underestimate the power of offline strategies, and I advise you not to be one of them.
Jo Han Mok is the author of the #1 international business bestseller, The E-Code. Unlock the code for unlimited online profits for yourself by visiting his website today at: http://www.SuperFastProfit.com
3 Steps to Internet Marketing Success
Regardless of what types of products or services you decide to offer in your business, there are certain things you should do to insure your internet marketing success.
Follow these tips, and you’ll make money much more quickly and build momentum in your internet marketing.
1. Get organized.
First, if you haven’t decided already what products or services you want to sell, you need to start here. Although it sounds obvious, many jump on the internet with the intent of starting a business and making money without a thought about how they plan to it.
That’s why it’s so easy for these new business owners to fall prey to all the hype that’s on the internet.
Decide what your interests are, and what you would enjoy doing. What do you like talking about? What would you do even if you knew you wouldn’t make any money doing it?
Once you’ve written down several ideas, then do your keyword research. Find out if there is a market for what you want to do. Is it competitive?
Although you will have to work harder to make your business a success, it’s worth it because you’ll be doing something you enjoy.
Remember, only about two percent of the market is internet marketing. Billions of dollars are made on all types of products and services. You have lots of choices. Choose something you will enjoy doing.
2. Write your marketing plan.
Every marketing plan should include whether or not you plan to build a list or a website. These two elements are crucial because it’s getting harder and harder to promote products without a website.
Building a list will help you cut your workload dramatically because you can build relationships with your list readers. You can send them other offers, as well as share valuable information.
If building a website isn’t something you want to hassle with, you can build a lead capture page and make a simple one page website. Then, drive traffic to this page.
Without a website, many article directories won’t allow you to submit articles that include affiliate links, even when those affiliate links are in the resource box of your article.
You should also include the different internet marketing techniques you plan to use.
This can include: search engine optimization, article writing, press releases, classifieds, joint ventures, or any other techniques.
If you are technically savvy, you can even include Web 2.0 techniques like making videos, or social bookmarking.
If you plan to use pay per click, include your a budget and know how much you can spend.
What techniques you choose to market your business will be determined by what type of business you choose, whether or not you plan to build a website, and what kind, and what techniques you want to use.
If you hate the thought of writing an article, no matter how effective, you won’t do it.
Starting off, you should only use one or two marketing techniques and build on your success. Test and track until you find a marketing formula that works for you.
3. Write your marketing materials.
If you are selling affiliate programs, often the work is done for you. You can create an autoresponder series from articles or email messages the site owner may offer. Check to see what materials the site owner offers. They may also offer you free ebooks you can give away, as well as articles. This will cut your work dramatically.
If the site owner offers email messages, rewrite these in your own words. Add messages to the series. If articles are available, then add these to your series too.
Set up your autoresponder and lead capture page, if you choose to use one. Then, write your marketing materials and start driving traffic to this page.
Commit to doing something every day. Test and track your efforts. Add new marketing techniques. Bad marketing is better than no marketing. Building a business is a waste of time of you don’t market.
Internet marketing success depends on how hard you’re willing to work to get your business out there. Organize your marketing, do it consistently, and you will see success.
Jinger Jarrett will show you how to get thousands of visitors to your site: http://www.killermarketingarsenal.com. Get free lead capture page software:
http://www.killermarketingarsenal.com/monthlyezine/. More ways to get free traffic:
http://www.squidoo.com/lensmasters/jingerjarrett
How To Get Thousands Of Visitors To Your New Blog In 10 Easy Steps
You have a new blog and you want it to be read by thousands of people. But how to get them to read your blog?
For start you must have some posts. Search engines and people must read something on your blog. So if you don’t have content add some before start promoting the blog.
Remember if the content is high quality people will talk about your blog to others. This brings your blog extra free traffic.
So start promoting the blog.
1. Let search engines know you exist. The idea is to get the search engines come and index your site.There is a free service that submits your blog in 20 search engines. All you have to do is to choose the desired search engines where you want the blog to appear, write the url and a valid email address. You may submit from Freewebsubmission.com.
2. Submit your blog to blog directories. Submitting to blog directories will help you increase the number of visitors, your page rank and your search engine position. Submit in as many blog directories as you can.Just search on any search engine for blog directory.
3. Submit your blog to general and niche directories. Submitting general and niche get a better search engine position and will increase the number of readers for your blog. For directory submission you can use a software tool that automates the process and save weeks of work. You can gat a free trial for the software from submiteaze.com/index.jsp?aff=137.
4. Submit you feeds to Rss directories. Submit your blog to all of the directories listed at rss-feeds-directory.com/blog_lists.html to get extra traffic.
5. Use social bookmarks. Adding social bookmark links to your blog makes it easy for your visitors to save and share your content. There is a free tool to make social bookmarks: toprankblog.com/tools/social-bookmarks.
6. Use Article Directories. Article directories can be a great resource for articles to post on your blog. Here are a few: ezinearticles.com, goarticles.com, knowledge-finder.com, informit.com/articles. 7. Start a press release campaign. When you have enough content on your blog you can start the press release campaign. You will find a lot of press release distributors just using a search engine.
8. Place the link and description of your blog in your signature. So that any posts to forums, outgoing emails, auto responder courses will promote your blog.
9. Locate blogs with a lot of traffic and place useful comments in their comment box. Be sure the blog and your comments are relevant to both your blog and theirs. Senseless posts won’t help you, they’ll hurt you.
10. Use ping services. Pinging will alert different search engines that your blog has updated. So the crawlers will come and index your new post. They crawl and index your site and your blog gets more visitors. The ping tool that I recommend is autopinger.com. Remember to make a blog post as often as possible. More than once a day is not really necessary.
Success.
Dan Ionescu is the webmaster of http://www.happyblogging.info the blog which teach you how to build a blog, promote it and make money with it and for http://www.giftideasblog.net the blog where you get the best gift ideas.
Advertising DOs and DON’Ts
From early on in my online career I realised that the fastest way to internet riches was to find a marketing concept that brought me profits and plough as much as I could into that resource, thus building my business and capital as I went.
For those just beginning in home business marketing it would be prudent to start off with a very small investment (I started with around $30) and try to build from there. It would like to report that I was very wise after the first investment but the truth is that the illusion of easily gotten riches lured me into a spree of buying virtually every item of software/marketing resource that I happened to feast my eyes upon.
Needless to say this is not the best way to go about building a successful online career but the experience and benefits I got from this initial burst of enthusiasm, in how not to go about targeted advertising, far outweighed the financial losses. I have spent money on most of what the web has to offer in terms of marketing and can now enlighten you on what to buy and what not to touch with a 12 ft barge pole.
FFAs or Free For All link pages were once a useful free resource and could have provided at least a few hits per day given the right ad. Today using the free version of these pages is all but useless and in my humble opinion a total waste of time. The vast majority of people submitting to these sites today are using automated submission software so human eyes WILL never see your ad and as far as I know Automatons (Robots to some people) DO NOT buy products;-)
Paid or free safelists from my experience are just not worth the effort involved. The very fact that everyone posting to a safelist is not interested in the subject matter but in selling their own products gives us some idea on the ineffectiveness of this method. Couple this with the time spent sorting through emails mostly for deletion you really could spend your time in more worthwhile marketing ventures.
Moving up the ladder of effectiveness we have banner advertising. From my experience the best banner I was able to design brought me in a maximum of 2.8% click through rate and from what I hear this is a GREAT %. Most banners will only pull a 1% CTR. If you can find a company selling banner advertising cheap enough to bring you into the profit zone then certainly give it a bash. Please remember though to track all your banner ads otherwise you will not know whether you are getting massive click throughs or none at all.
If you are going to post to classified sites then opt for the free version. There is some good classified submission software out there and may be worth the investment. Again ALWAYS TRACK YOUR ADS.
Renting an email list is a good option and can bring you many hits to your product or affiliate site. Make sure that the list is optin only, meaning the people have requested to see your ad. There are many good reputable companies out there and if you are willing to pay sometimes high fees to rent a list, this can be a profitable venture.
Search engine submission is definitely a worthwhile project and considering a good listing will bring you daily and continuing free traffic I suggest you spend a bit of time perfecting this method. I use Web Position Gold software to automate my submissions and prepare my pages for submission. This cuts down in hours of work and I would certainly recommend any budding business owners to get a copy.
I have also paid for a listing to Yahoo’s directory. At $299 per year this may sound very expensive to some but the traffic I have gotten from this listing paid for the submission within a short period of time.
Pay per click advertising is another good advertising resource to drive TARGETED traffic to your site. First figure out how much you can afford to pay per visitor to your site. For instance if you make a sale every 100 visitors and your product costs $20 then if you paid 20 cents per visitor you would break even. The reality is of course that you can get visitors for much less than 20 cents and I have many keyword phrases that will send visitors to my site for 1 cent each. If you can find a few good keyword phrases at a profitable price then you will do well. Two good PPCSEs to start with and that I use are Overture and Findwhat.
Ezine advertising is by far the best form of advertising and more importantly is reasonably priced. From my own experience a solo or top spot ad are the most effective and will return more visitors for the price. For a good list of ezines The Directory of Ezines.
A word of WARNING before closing this article: If you want to keep your business and your reputation intact then NEVER EVER use bulk email advertising. It just isn’t worth the risk. The hassle that you will get from sending out unsolicited email to 1000s of untargeted prospects will bring your business down in the long run. There are enough forms of advertising listed here to keep you going for a long time. Don’t waste your time on unproductive and senseless SPAMMING.
I wish you all the best in your efforts:-)
Mal Keenan is editor and publisher of Home Business Tips Newsletter and Forum:
http://www.home-business-tips-newsletter.com/forum
For An Online Home Business You Can REALLY Believe In Check Out:
http://www.malkeenan.com/pips.html
Traffic Generation - An Introduction
Traffic generation has become one of the single most important aspects of generating profit on the internet today. Without traffic, you cannot hope to make the money you are looking for. Without traffic, you will not sell anything and without traffic, no one will even know you, your business, or our website even exists. It is for this reason that you and any other internet marketer just starting out should know all about traffic generation, how it works, and what it can do for your business.
Traffic Generation Strategies
There are many different levels of strategies that webmasters and business owners can implement to generate the traffic they need. While there are many the following strategies are the most often used:
- Paying for Traffic. This method may provide traffic, but it will be empty, non-targeted, and cost you quite a bit of money.
- Link Exchanges. If done right this could be a great method of traffic generation. You want to focus on sites that are relevant to your own, not a competitor, and has a high page ranking. This is a free method of generating traffic.
- Articles. This is perhaps the most used and widely accepted form of traffic generation. Depending on how you want to go about it, this method is free to very low cost.
- Pay Per Click. Another widely used form of traffic generation. This method works well, if the right keywords or keyword phrases are used. Pay Per Click is not free, but the amount it will cost you depends on how much you bid on your keywords, you will pay each time someone clicks on your ad.
The most widely used method of traffic generation is the article strategy. This is cheap and sometimes free, depending on what route you take. If you are a writer yourself, it will cost you no money at all to write a compelling and informative article based around your chosen keywords. If you are not a writer or simply do not have the time, you can find great writers on freelance sites that are willing to write your articles for a great price.
Articles work great, only if they are well written, provide a solution, and are easy to read. The article must show knowledge, experience, and expertise in the topic and provide the reader with something new and informative. After you have a great article, you would then write a bio, also known as a resource box. This box should include your name, information about you or your business, and a link to your website. The resource box should contain information that shows why you are knowledgeable, experienced, and an expert in the area.
What then happens is that webmasters will use the article on their own websites (in some cases) and leave the resource box in tact, which means more link backs to your website and more traffic.
Again, traffic generation is the key to finding success and profit on the internet. Without traffic and visitors, you cannot hope to succeed in the very competitive world of online businesses. By using any of the above strategies and putting forth your best efforts, you will find traffic coming to your website in no time.
Sam Hodgeman is an Associate Editor at ratingshub.com, the Web’s ONLY place for ubiased reviews of Internet Marketing products: no Ads, no affiliate links EVER! Sign up today- read reviews, post reviews and rate other reviewers. Visit http://www.ratingshub.com and enter referral code ’samhebooks.’
Are You Starving Your Home Business Of Lifeblood?
If you’ve seen Kevin Costner’s film the “Field of Dreams” you will remember how he was inspired to build a baseball field with the words “If you build it, they will come”. He built the stadium, and with a little faith, streams of visitors were coming to see his dream.
Sorry to bring you back to the REAL world but this isn’t “Field of Dreams” and you aren’t Kevin Costner. If you want visitors to your dream website and you want some measure of success online, you need to take some important steps to do so.
Without a regular supply of leads to your business then you just aren’t going to make it in internet business, period.
How on earth could you? It would be like setting up an offline business and expecting it to succeed without anyone picking up the phone to call you or walking in through your companies’ front door.
Makes sense doesn’t it? Of course it does but the majority of prospects I deal with respond with shock horror when I tell them that now that they have set up their business websites they will have to buy leads or work hard to obtain them.
Leads are the lifeblood of your business and a highly targeted prospect can be worth $1000s, especially if you are involved in network marketing.
The way I see it, there are a few things you need to do to qualify leads and turn them into your customers or downline.
Firstly you need to obtain them, and as I can only share my own experiences, I will tell you what I do.
1) I buy leads - This is the simplest way to get leads and obviously will take the least amount of work to do this, because you are buying them from other sources and sending them to your business. These are usually raw leads, meaning they are people interested in starting an online business but not sure how to go about it nor with which company to proceed. It is up to you to convince them to use your product or service to do this.
2) I add them to my followup system - After buying leads you MUST add these prospects to some sort of followup system. This is basic stuff and if you don’t do it you won’t succeed.
There is absolutely no point in buying leads unless you followup with them. You COULD buy them and send them one email with a link to your business. A very small % will actually visit your site, what about the rest? Adding them to a followup system with at least twelve further messages will help turn your leads into HOT prospects. Some of my autoresponders have up to fifty message with articles, tips and recommendations.
3) I send targeted prospects to my business websites from the search engines - Many of my leads come from top rankings in the major search engines. A full e-book could be written on this alone but basically I set up a domain - obtained hosting - optimised my website with keywords related to my business - submitted my site to the major search engines - added quality home business related content and began a reciprocal linking campaign which boosts my sites web ranking more than anything else. The greatest thing about these leads is they are HIGHLY TARGETED and they are of course free.
Again I have set up a web form at my sites to encourage my search engine leads to add themselves to my followup system. I can then get to work on turning them into my customers and downline affiliates.
There are of course many other forms of sending customers to your website but the two above combined with an effective followup system can virtually put your business on autopilot and free up your time for other projects. They are also the most effective ways that I have found to reach a successful income.
Take the steps as outlined above and let me know how you get on.
Mal Keenan is editor and publisher of Home Business Tips Newsletter:
http://www.home-business-tips-newsletter.com/forum
For An Online Home Business You Can REALLY Believe In Check Out:
http://www.malkeenan.com/pips.html
Should You Tag and Ping?
You own a blog, and you want to make money from it. How do you do that? Well, to start with you need to get traffic to your blog. It doesn’t matter how brilliant the content of your blog is, if nobody ever sees it, then you’re never going to make any money from it.
So how do you go about getting more visitors to your site? Well, unless you’re willing to pay money for a Google Adwords campaign or something similar, then you need to make sure the major search engines like you. Or more to the point, convince the search engines that other websites like you! This is known as link popularity, and is often used by the search engines to determine whether or not to improve the ranking of a site in search results. The more links you have from other websites pointing to your website, the more “popular” your site is deemed to be, and the better its ranking.
Of course, like most strategies for improving traffic, linking has been abused and overdone in a big way with Internet marketers. They set up thousands of links from sites that had nothing to do with their own blog, and got rewarded for it. Now, however, search engines are mostly interested in relevant links. So if you have a blog about grooming dogs, and you have a link from a dog site, great. If the links is from a site about cheese, however, chances are it won’t help with your link popularity.
So the bottom line is that there’s no point joining any type of link farm, where you can buy or trade links with sites that have no relevancy to yours. You need to focus on obtaining links from complementary sites, which is best done by finding those sites online and writing to the site owner. Time consuming, but it pays off. Particularly if the site that links to you has a high page rank in Google.
If this all sounds like a lot of work - guess what, it is! That’s where the tag and ping technique comes into it. Basically, you list your blog on an authority site, and every time you update your blog, you let them know. The authority site needs can be either a social bookmarking site, like del.icio.us, or a blog directory, like Technorati. When you list your blog, you include a list of tags, or keywords, that your blog is about. So going back to the dog grooming example, you would use tags like “dog”, “dogs”, “dog grooming” and so on. That way, when people go to these authority sites and search for dog grooming, your site will be on the list.
The second part of the technique is to ping the sites you list your blog with. A ping is simply like giving the site a courtesy phone call to tell them your blog has a new post on it. It’s all done automatically, either by visiting the site and clicking on an update option for your blog, or you can set up a ping facility at a site like Pingomatic. Then all you need to do is refresh your ping request, and Pingomatic will automatically notify as many blog directories as you choose. This is a great way of letting lots of places at once know you’ve updated your blog.
It takes a few minutes to add your site to sites like del.icio.us, or to create a new job in Pingomatic. But the good thing is that once it’s done, it only takes a minute or two to update these authority sites, so that they can list your freshest content immediately.
To help you get started with tag and ping, I recommend that you check out an automated social bookmarking tool called the Auto Social Poster. This tool will allow you to automatically bookmark pages of your Wordpress blog and then tag and ping those pages. It does the tedious work so that you can focus on other aspects of your business.
Tag and ping is quite simple, so give it a try, and once you get the hang of it you’ll find it’s almost an automatic thing to tag and ping every time you post something new to your blog. Even better, you’ll start to see an improvement in your traffic and ranking.
Allen Jesson writes for several sites, http://www.internet-marketing-sense.com, http://www.online-sense.com and http://www.homebasednetmarketingbusiness.com.