Write articles. This is an often underutilized method of traffic generation, especially by internet marketing beginners, that does more than just bring traffic to your website. It positions you as an expert and builds trust in your prospects’ minds. The value of this is often underestimated. People have to trust you or value your opinion if they are going to order from you or join your “team.” People will pass you by if they don’t first feel comfortable with you and respect your opinions. Submitting articles is a great way to “break the ice”.
Here is what to do. Write a series of articles relating to your market niche. Distribute two articles per week to major ezines such as ezinearticles.com or goarticles.com. At the bottom of the article you are allowed to have a signature (or bio). You can include a small amount of information about your website and a link to your homepage. If people like the information you give them, they will click the link and visit your site. This is why it’s important to provide useful, high quality information. People will only want to visit your website if you give them something of value first.
Exchange links with popular sites. This method works on two levels. First of all, you will receive traffic through the your links posted on other sites. Also, as more and more websites link to yours, your search engine rankings naturally begin to rise. This can be a major source of traffic. Showing up on the first page of results in the major search engines can bring you tens of thousands of visitors per month.
Here is how to get links to your site. Find sites that are very similar in theme to your site. Make a call or send an e-mail to the site owner about the possibility of doing a link exchange. Send them a link to the page that you are displaying on your website that you have already put their link on. Now it is their turn. They will do one of two things, either accept your offer or not. If they refuse to add a link to your site on their website, simply remove their link from your site.
Use Pay Per Click advertising. Although Pay Per Click costs money, it can be a very good way to drive targeted traffic to your site. If you select your keywords with care and make proper bidding choices it can be a very cost effective and useful tool to add to your marketing plan. Google Adwords and Overture are the two top Pay Per Click companies. However, Yahoo and MSN offer pay per click advertising as well, often for less cost per click than the “big guys.” To get the most out of Pay Per Click advertising you need to be armed with at least a bit of knowledge on the subject. I suggest buying a book or ebook on the in’s and out’s of pay per click advertising before starting a campaign.
Submit videos to video sites. Making and posting Videos to Youtube of the best ways to get yourself “found” on the internet. Good quality videos can also be made with the most basic equipment. For instance, you can use a small digital camera that has a movie mode or an inexpensive webcam. You can also make videos from still pictures. So you actually can do videos without a movie camera at all! Processing your movie can be done using a free video editing program that is part of your Windows operating system.
Here is what to do. Make a video about your product or opportunity. Upload your video to Youtube and give it a catchy title and description based on it’s content. There are some things you can do with the title and description to make sure that it is seen by as many people as possible. For instance, make sure to do some keyword research and use those keywords or “tags” that laser target the audience that you want to reach. I could go on about that but that is a subject for another article. For now, learn from others that are already on Youtube. Take a look at the descriptions and tags on highly viewed videos and “learn” from them!
While any one of the traffic generating strategies mentioned above can make a difference in your marketing efforts, I suggest using all of them. Doing this will give you more traffic in the shortest timeframe. The more you put into the methods discussed in this article the better they will work.
Listening to some internet marketers lately, I get the impression that a lot of people are feeling discouraged over the results they are getting (or not getting) and wonder if they should give it all away.
Usually, the first thing new marketers come across when starting out, is all the hype about how much you can make online - IF - you buy this or that e-book or course. There are so many sales pages, email lists/newsletters and sales pitches coming in to our lives on a daily basis. It is a natural tendency to believe everyone else can do it, and do it well, but we struggle by comparison.
If you are feeling like this, I can empathize. I have felt that way lots of times. Then I realized what I was doing to myself. I was comparing myself to those marketers in the ‘Internet Marketing’ niche. It’s a huge niche, but it is also very competitive. They are the marketers that are hitting me everyday with this or that offer of the latest and greatest way to make money on-line.
The thing is, they are mostly selling me products FOR the IM niche and unless you are really into that niche yourself, they are not the products that relate to what you are doing.
They show you pictures of stats, transaction details and testimonials to try and convince you that they know what they are doing, and how you can do it too.
But, does what they are marketing help you right now with what YOU are doing?
Comparing ourselves to these marketers is counter productive to our motivation and mindset. We don’t need to do any comparisons, because they are not relevant.
2008 is the year of Web 2.0, selling REAL products to REAL customers. It isn’t going to be an instant million dollar business that we build. Just like in the off-line world, it takes time to build a following, trust and respect from prospective customers. We need to look at branding ourselves, becoming the person-to-go-to for the particular advice, information or product in OUR niche. Using all the Web 2.0 tools and applications to help us establish ourselves in the on-line market place.
It really upsets me when I hear the discouragement of others who are really working hard to make a go of it. The Internet is a worldwide marketplace. In other words, it’s unlimited. We have the tools and knowledge to make a very profitable business with our own niches. Stop looking at what the IM’ers are doing in their niche and concentrate on your own business.
Stick at it, add quality content - people WILL find you if you are honest, consistent and have a quality product. Don’t get discouraged just because you didn’t make your fortune this week. Your business and customer list will grow in time if you work at it.
Too many people give up and leave a potentially successful business in the sandbox. Stay focused on what you believe is a good niche, add to it, grow it, develop it over time. Above all, DON’T compare your efforts to those of the IM’ers who are hitting your inbox every day raving about their results.
We all need and want help and advice. We all need to learn. Things never stay the same on the internet and this year is a new learning curve for all of us.
There are plenty of FREE learning resources out there - and tools too. Spend an hour a day learning or using something new and see if you can apply it to your marketing efforts. Then spend another 2-3 hours developing your products. Stick at it and you will be successful.
I want to start sharing some information about using the great resources that are out there over the next few months, so stay tuned. There are some killer (free) tools right under our noses!
Til next time,
Stay Cool,
Sharon
In this world you only have two types of assets: Money and Time. The easiest way to drive traffic to your site is to buy it. But if you are an Internet marketing beginner you probably don’t have much money to invest in traffic building. In that case, you will need to invest your time.
The following traffic techniques are time consuming, but they are 100% free and will get you a fair amount of targeted traffic. If your site is properly optimized for monetization, you will soon be earning enough money to invest in buying traffic, and save your precious time to build new money making websites.
So here are 11 surefire free traffic techniques:
This tip is so obvious it will not even be counted, but it is often overlooked: submit your site to the major search engines (Google, Yahoo, MSN) and to as many other search engines as you can.
1. Use this proven Bum Marketing technique, write 5 to 10 articles and submit them to the free article directories. Of course you must include a link to your site in the article itself or in your bio box. The articles should be optimized for a keyword your site is targeting.
2. Find blogs related to your topic and leave useful comments with a backlink to your site. In the same way you could go to answers.yahoo.com, and answer questions related to your site’s topic. Off course put a link to your site in each of your answers. Another thing you should consider is joining the most popular forums that deal with your site’s topic and becoming an active poster. Include a link to your site in your signature.
3. This one can be very powerful. Write a press release about your site and submit it to press release sites such as prweb.com. If you are not familiar with press releases, take some time to do a little research: a press release is not written like an article.
4. If you are happy with a product or service you have used, write an unbiased testimonial and trade it for a backlink to your site.
5. Start a blog on blogger.com and a blog on wordpress.com, link them to your site and submit them to the hundreds of free blog directories. This will get you plenty of quality traffic as long as you keep your blogs updated.
6. Try posting ads with a link to your site on all the free classified ad sites you can find (such as craigslist.com). The best ones will allow you to post a live link. But don’t neglect the other ones. If your ad is well written, people will go out of their way and type your url in their browser. Off course you must post in the appropriate category.
7. An easy way to get extra free traffic is to add a link to your site in your email signature.
8. Start a page on myspace.com and on any other high page rank social bookmarking site you can find. In the same way, go to Squidoo.com, open a few accounts, create a few lenses and link them to your site.
9. Submit a viral video to youtube.com. You don’t really need any video producing know-how as a simple PowerPoint slideshow with some background music will do the job perfectly.
10. Search your main keywords on Google and see if you can exchange reciprocal links with related websites that come up in the top results.
11. You could write an ebook or a short report (say 10 to 20 pages), or find a product with giveaway rights that you can brand with a link to your site. Then submit it to all the free ebook directories you can find online.
This last tip is not free, but is worth the extra buck. Check out the misspellings or variations of your domain name, or those of your competitors. If you find a good available domain, grab it and redirect the traffic to your site.
Now all this looks like a full time job! These techniques work, but you don’t have to use them all at once. Just pick the one you feel the best with and act now. Invest 30 minutes to an hour daily in building your free traffic. Then step to your next favorite technique and within a few weeks you should be earning enough money to afford to buy traffic and concentrate your time and efforts on building your online business.
Our services at leader excel include any where from a personal website to an elite Premium business package website. Our premium package features include creating a personal header with your company’s logo that communicates your product and/or services.
Check out Leaders Excel Solutions at www.leadersexcelsolutions today for all of your website needs.
-
Subscribe to Feeds:
-
Feedburner
-
About Me
