Generating Traffic Course: Day 2
Thursday, June 12, 2008
Day 2: Article Marketing and Forum Marketing
You’ve probably heard about Article Marketing and Forum Marketing. In fact, you may even be sick of hearing about it. But are you doing it? The reason that you hear so much about these two marketing techniques is that they work!
Yes, article marketing and forum marketing builds traffic slowly. There are faster ways to get traffic. But, when you build traffic using these methods as well, you are also building your credibility. You are drawing responsive people to your site, and if your site is doing its job as well, and you get those people on your list, you can draw them back time and time again.
Note: If you are not collecting email addresses at your website, the traffic that you bring there is essentially wasted. By building an opt-in list, you can bring traffic back to your site over and over again, and this is essential to online businesses. Email addresses and first names should be collected with an opt-in page, or with subscribe boxes located on every single page of your website!
Now, let’s start generating some traffic with articles. The concept is that you write an article, which should be anywhere from 350 to 750 words in length. You include an author’s resource box at the bottom of your article, and your website link is included in that resource box. You submit the article to article directories and ezine publishers.
If you can’t write, you can get article written for less than $10 each by a ghostwriter. If you don’t have the time it takes to submit articles, you can hire a service to do that for you as well. It is essential that you do article marketing, because it is viral. Your articles will be used on other people’s websites, blogs, and in their ezines – spreading the word about your site.
Forum marketing is also important. To do forum marketing, you find good, well populated forums that relate to your niche. You simply participate in those forums, and include a signature file at the bottom of all of your posts, that lead people to your website. Forum marketing does not take much time at all, once you’ve found the forums that you want to participate in.
Again, these are slow, but effective (and free) ways to generate traffic. But no matter how slow they are, they are essential to your overall online business because of the virility of these techniques, and the credibility that it gives you.
Homework Assignment: Write and submit one article, each week. Participate in your niche forums on a daily basis, posting one message in each forum per day, using a signature file that brings people to your website.
Generating Traffic Course: Day 3
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Labels: Net Marketing
Generating Traffic Course: Day 3
Wednesday, June 11, 2008
Day 3: Joint Venture Giveaways
In this, day three of the five part traffic generation course, we are going to discuss how joint venture giveaways will help you generate traffic to your site. In fact, they do more than generate traffic. Joint venture giveaways will also help you build a large opt-in list, in a very short period of time, and you can bring those visitors back to your site time and time again.
Joining a joint venture giveaway is easy and free. You just need to find a giveaway, and these can be found through joint venture related forums, or through the search engines. Once you’ve found a giveaway, you need a free gift to give away.
This can be something that you create yourself, or have created for you, such as a free report, an audio, a video, or an ebook – or even a piece of software. It can also be a Private Label Rights product that you have. The important thing is that your gift has value to the people that will be downloading it.
You need an autoresponder and a website. Set up an opt-in page, which is often called a squeeze page or a capture page, on your site. Connect it to your autoresponder, and in your autoresponder, set up a list for the giveaway. Create your confirmation email and download for the gift email in your autoresponder.
Determine where the visitor will go, once they hit the submit button on your opt-in page. They can go to the first page of your site. They could be sent to a sales page for an affiliate product that you sell. You could set up a One Time Offer, or OTO, where they have one chance to purchase a product from you, at a special price.
Finally, when you are all set up on your end; submit your information to the host of the joint venture giveaway event. They will typically want the name of your gift, the URL of your opt-in page, a description of that gift, and the link to the graphic that represents your gift, such as a graphical ebook cover or CD cover.
While you will build a nice big list with the joint venture giveaway, remember that your purpose is to generate traffic as well. You don’t want people showing up, getting their gift, and leaving – never to be seen or heard from again. Your list resolves a lot of this, because you can use it to bring them back.
But at the same time, when your visitor is redirected after submitting the form, try to have them redirected to a page on your site that will immediately capture their attention, and keep them there for a while, even after they have been given their free gift.
Homework Assignment: Visit some joint venture related forums, and find at least one joint venture giveaway to participate in. Create your gift, create your opt-in page, and any other pages that you need for the giveaway, and watch the traffic roll in!
Generating Traffic Course: Day 4
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Labels: Net Marketing
Generating Traffic Course: Day 4
Tuesday, June 10, 2008
Day 4: Social Bookmarking
Today, we are going to look at something that is still relatively new in the Internet Marketing arena: Social Bookmarking. Social Bookmarking is essentially using a social bookmarking service to bookmark your webpages or blog posts, so that other users of the bookmarking site can visit. When you bookmark a site, you tag it with keywords, and people can search for the keywords that reflect their interests at the social bookmarking site.
Does it work? Absolutely! In fact, this is a very fast way to generate really good traffic to your site – for free. Again, you will want to try to get them on your opt-in list, once they arrive at your site, so that you can bring them back again and again. Notice that I said ‘really good traffic.’ This is good traffic because the visitor finds your site by searching for the keywords that you’ve used when you bookmarked it. They are essentially looking for you. For this reason, it is important to use keyword tags, for each page, that are absolutely relevant to the content on that page. Don’t try to use unrelated keywords, this tactic simply won’t work.
There are numerous social bookmarking sites out there, and hitting them all, to bookmark each page of your website, could literally take days, if not weeks. Fortunately, there are social bookmarking services that will send your bookmarks and tags to numerous social bookmarking sites in one fell swoop.
You want a service that targets the best social bookmarking sites, and that service is Only Wire, at http://www.onlywire.com. Only Wire is free to use (another bonus). Getting set up with Only Wire takes a couple of hours, because you will need to go to each of the social bookmarking sites that it lists, register, and then put your username and password for each site into the list at Only Wire.
Once that is done, you will add the Only Wire icon to your browser toolbar (very easy to do – you just click, hold the mouse button down, and drag and drop it up there). Now, you are all set up. When you are ready to bookmark your pages, first go to the Only Wire site and login. Leave that window open. Open another window (tabbed browsers work great for this), go to your site, go to a page that you want to bookmark, and hit the icon.
You will be taken to the Only Wire add a bookmark page. Here, everything is filled in, except your keyword tags. List the keywords that are associated with the page you are bookmarking, and hit submit. You’re done with that page – move on to the next one. Nothing could be easier, and again, it is very effective.
Homework Assignment: Join Only Wire at http://www.onlywire.com . Register for each site on the list, and get Only Wire all set up. Add the bookmark icon to your browser toolbar, and go to each page of your website, click the icon, and add it to the social bookmarks and tag each page with keywords.
Generating Traffic Course: Day 5
Posted byEssex14 at 1:46 AM 0 comments Links to this post
Labels: Net Marketing
3 Reasons Why Google Adsense is Great for Content Sites
Monday, June 9, 2008
3 Reasons Why Adsense Is Essential For Content Sites
To learn why Adsense is essential for your content sites is to know first how this works.
The concept is really simple, if you think about it. The publisher or the webmaster inserts a java script into a certain website. Each time the page is accessed, the java script will pull advertisements from the Adsense program. The ads that are targeted should therefore be related to the content that is contained on the web page serving the ad. If a visitor clicks on an advertisement, the webmaster serving the ad earns a portion of the money that the advertiser is paying the search engine for the click.
The search engine is the one handling all the tracking and payments, providing an easy way for webmasters to display content-sensitive and targeted ads without having the hassle to solicit advertisers, collect funds, monitor the clicks and statistics which could be a time-consuming task in itself. It seems that there is never a shortage of advertisers in the program from which the search engine pulls the Adsense ads. Also webmasters are less concerned by the lack of information search engines are providing and are more focused in making cash from these search engines.
The first reason why Adsense is essential for content sites is because it already has come a long way in understanding the needs of publishers and webmasters. Together with its continuous progression is the appearance of more advanced system that allows full ad customization. Webmasters are given the chance to choose from many different types of text ad formats to better complement their website and fit their webpage layout.
The different formatting enables the site owners the possibility of more click through from visitors who may or may not be aware of what they are clicking on. It can also appeal to the people visiting thus make them take that next step of looking up what it is all about. This way the people behind the Adsense will get their content read and making profit in the process.
The second reason is the ability of the Adsense publishers to track not only how their sites are progressing but also the earnings based on the webmaster-defined channels. The recent improvements in the search engines gives webmasters the capability to monitor how their ads are performing using customizable reports that has the capacity to detail page impressions, clicks and click-through rates. Webmasters and publishers can now track specific ad formats, colors and pages within a website. Trends are also easily spotted.
With the real-time reporting at hand, the effectiveness of the changes made will be assessed quickly. There would be time to sort out the contents that people are making the most clicks on. The ever-changing demands would be met while generating cash for the webmasters and publishers. The more flexible tools are also allowing webmasters to group web pages by URL, domain, ad type or category, which will provide them some accurate insight on which pages, ads and domains are performing best.
The last and final reason is that the advertisers have realized the benefits associated having their ads served on targeted websites. Thus increasing the possibility that a prospective web surfer will have an interest in their product and services. All because of the content and its constant maintenance. As opposed to those who are no using Adsense in their sites, they are given the option of having other people do their content for them, giving them the benefit of having successful and money-generating web sites.
Adsense is all about targeted content, the more targeted your content is, the more target the search engines’ ads will be. There are some web masters and publishers who are focused more on their site contents and how best to maintain them rather than the cash that the ads will generate for them. This is the part where the effectiveness is working its best.
There was a time when people were not yet aware of the money to be achieved from advertisements. The cash generated only came into existence when the webmasters and publishers realized how they can make Adsense be that generator. In those days, the content were the most important factors that is taken quite seriously. It still is. With the allure of money, of course.
Posted byEssex14 at 8:48 PM 0 comments Links to this post
Labels: Make Money Online
Generating Traffic Course: Day 5
Day 5: Purchasing Traffic
There is a right way, and a wrong way to purchase traffic. You can use a service that guarantees you traffic (wrong way) or you can use a pay-per-click service (right way). Whatever you do, don’t fall for those websites that promise to deliver you thousands of hits in a twenty four hour period.
Let’s take a look at those services. First, you don’t know where or how they are generating the traffic. In most cases, the traffic is not targeted, meaning that it is possible that not a single one of those thousands of visitors has any interest in the topic of your niche. Finally, you can’t really be sure that the traffic is ‘real.’
But, there is a way to purchase real, targeted traffic. You can use Pay-Per-Click advertising, through a service such as Google AdWords. When you purchase traffic using this method, the traffic is targeted – and real. You don’t pay for a certain number of traffic, you pay for each click, as the name, pay-per-click, indicates.
Now, if you don’t know what you are doing, Pay-Per-Click can be expensive, and ineffective. It is important that you make sure that you write a targeted ad, first and foremost. It is also essential that you select the right keywords, and that you bid the right amount on those keywords.
Google AdWords really makes this very easy. You can type in your main keyword, and they will give you a list of other related keywords that apply as well. Next, when you set the amount you are willing to pay, per click, for each keyword, you can use the traffic analysis tools in Google AdWords to see where your ad will be listed, based on what you are paying per click, and how much traffic you can expect from it.
Raise your bid price until you see that you will be listed where you want to be (preferably the first page of search results). Again, PPC can be very expensive. Make sure that you know how much you can afford to spend on these ads each week, divide it by seven, and set a daily budget up in your AdWords account. Also specify how you want those funds spread out through the day.
There are entire courses written on the topic of Google AdWords. I advise that you take one, because there are a lot of elements and tricks that need to be learned to make AdWords work out well for you.
Again, don’t waste your traffic! Make sure that you are capturing first names and email addresses from the people that arrive at your website through PPC advertising!
Homework Assignment: Determine whether or not you want to purchase traffic or not, and if you do, find a good pay-per-click service, such as Google AdWords, and get set up.
Posted byEssex14 at 10:08 AM 0 comments Links to this post
Labels: Net Marketing
Article Marketing In Simple Video
This just a short video giving some simple info to better your understanding for what exactly article marketing is and how you can benefit from it.
Posted byEssex14 at 1:24 AM 1 comments Links to this post
Labels: Net Marketing, Videos
