Get Traffic To Your Website

In the older days people used to use flashy banners and buttons that would distract people from the actual content on the site. Some people still use these outdated methods that would harm their sites, more than bring actual traffic to it.

So here are some methods you can use to generate some traffic to your site.

• Optimize each page on your website with the right keywords, titles and meta tags. This will go a long way to getting the search engines to rank your site and this will bring in natural traffic.
• Having one contest a month or so will be a sure winner. People love contests and by having contests you are actually asking people to participate in your site and content.
• Try podcasting. By providing a regular podcast weekly, you are sure to attract the people to your site that will want to hear what you have to say.
• Create your own forum. Now this I won’t always recommend since getting people to your forum is time consuming, but if your website is really taking off and you have a lot of people that like to chat with you or about your service/product, then set up a forum.
• Use article marketing to promote your site. Go to ezinearticles.com and submit one unique article per day and you will get constant traffic to your site.
• Submit your website to website directories. Try to find targeted directories that will give you better exposure.
• Same with websites…find other websites in a niche related to your own and ask if you can exchange links.
• When posting on forums, use your signature file. Here you can have an image or link to your own site. Try not to let it look spammy or bad in general. Choose good keywords here.
• Another way to bring in traffic is through newsgroups. You can visit Google Groups to see what people are talking about. Do not advertise your services. Rather be helpful.

There you have it! Some great ideas to bring There you have it! Some great ideas to bring traffic to your site.

Viral Marketing 101 – Not Using It Could Kill Your Business!

Creativity.

This is one virtue a site must possess to lead the race in the ruthless competition in the Internet based business. With so many competition and rivalry going on, every method of marketing must be employed and utilized.

It doesn’t matter if you have a killer product or a fantastically designed website, if people don’t know that you exist, it doesn’t matter, and you are not going to make it big. Worse of all, you business could just get killed.

While there are so many methods and schemes used by so many e-commerce sites today, there are still some of those that can help you with an extra boost in the popularity ratings. One of these is the so called Viral Marketing.

While the term Viral easily depicts a virus, a word very much dreaded by all computer owners, it is not what it seems. You do not actually use a computer virus to spread your business; on the contrary it just might kill you. Everyone has had enough of all those pop up ads and spywares.

Viral Marketing Overview

Viral Marketing also known otherwise as Viral Advertising is a marketing technique used to build the public awareness of one’s product or company. They use many forms of media to reach out to the public without actually promoting the product by riding on in other forms of addictive means that could get a person hooked and be obliged or amused to actually pass it on, with the product or company advertisement along with it.

In a nutshell, companies ride on the idea that if people like the content of a media they will pass it on to their friends and family. They sponsor the certain media, such as a cool flash game, funny video, amusing story and such, which one may pass on to another with the company brand or logo or the products description or any other content to help promote the company or its product.

Viral marketing has become a popular means of advertising and marketing because they are relatively low cost. To avoid being tagged as spam mail, viral marketing counts on the eagerness of one person to pas on the product. If a person sees the name of the person they know as the sender, they won’t block it and open it as well.

Many companies offer incentives such as discounts and rebates when they help in spreading their viral marketing. They rely on the number of recipients a viral marketing gets from one person in determining the amount or number of incentive they can be attributed with.

Using Viral Marketing to your advantage

The main and foremost advantage of viral marketing is that you get a lot of publicity and public awareness about your site and your company. You get to generate a flow of traffic that are potential customers. With a little ingenuity and imagination, plus some incentives or prizes, you can reach out to a great number of people and announce your existence.

Most every site and companies are catching on to the effectivity of Viral Marketing and Advertising. Not using it could kill your business. Along with other schemes and methods in promoting your site, like Search Engine Optimization and such, viral marketing could easily push you ahead in the rating games.

Viral Marketing could be a sneaky way to get people to know about you and your company. You get them to pass your advertisement along. They are also very low cost that not investing in it could be downright a business suicide. All it takes is a great idea, a good addicting game, a funny story many ideas are still out there. Create a gossip or a buzz, many movies are promoted by using scandals and gossips to make them moiré popular. Remember the movie “The Blair Witch Project”?

Many big companies have tried viral marketing and have had many success stories with it. A classic example is Microsoft’s Hotmail. They were the first known big company to utilize the scheme and it has worked wonders for them.

Now it’s your turn to use viral marketing to work wonders for you. Act now and reap the benefits Viral Marketing will provide for you and your sales figures.

List Building Part 3

A few methods for generating a list will be looked at here again. We have discussed other list building methods in previous posts. So what else can you do to build a list?

Make sure you have a website, because one way to build your list is to use a squeeze page.

Now you may be wondering what a squeeze page is. In short it is a one page, attractively designed webform with your autoresponder collecting the information for your email list. A squeeze page will advertise something that the subscriber wants, like an ebook or a report. It’s almost like a prelude to your main website, like an advertisement of some sorts. Some people use squeeze pages before they launch the main site to generate traffic and buzz as well.

Here the visitor will be presented with a few bulleted headlines that will tell them what incentive there is for signing up to this list. This in turn will make them quickly decide if they want to sign up or not. The main advantage here is that if the visitor doesn’t purchase on the firt time, you can always follow up at a later date to see if they will be interested in your products and services.

Another list building method is using free reports. Similar like free ebooks. Your free reports will be much easier to create than an ebook. It should have only a few pages, sometimes one or two pages is enough.

In essence the report should contain links to your blog, Lenses, hubpages, website and optin form etc. It should contain generalized information that links to your products or services and can even contain information on any surveys you may have done etc.

Some other list building techniques are using classified websites to generate interest. Also coupons, trade and exchange ads can help you as well. There are many methods…it’s a matter of trying it and see which ones work for you.

Leave a comment if you found an amazing list building tip that we didn’t share.

List Building Part 2

Well we covered auto responders and ebooks in the previous list building post.

Next we will see what other methods we can use to create lists with.

A proven, low-cost method is articles and article submission. You need to be dedicated for this though as you will need to write 3-6 articles a week and submit it to article directories. The most popular article directory is EzineArticles.com

By including your opt-in url in your Author’s Resource Box, you will ensure that if people liked your article, they will sign up to your email list.

Another great method is blogging. A blog can be written in an informal manner and by consistently blogging about specific issues, you will get targeted traffic to your site and if you lead them to your opt-in page, then you will start to create a mailing list. Just make sure to ping your blog so you can get the search engines indexing your pages quicker.

Have you ever heard of an E-Course? Well essentially it is like an ebook, except it will keep your subscribers anticipating the next part. An e-course can be, “How to Train Your Puppy” and each email that goes out will give them that added extra information. You can even interact with your subscribers by asking them to submit ideas, content and feedback in your ecourse. Just remember to set up another email address to receive all the replies.

You basically organize a week’s worth of content and make use of your autoresponder to send one piece of information out every day or every other day. At the end you can ask them to recommend you to others.

You can also make money by offering a special service or product they can purchase from you. By writing a proper recommendation and not trying to sell will appear better in the long run.

Well That is all there is for now. Leave some comments if you found this useful.

List Building Tips

Well first you get different types of lists. One of those are opt-in lists. An opt-in list means that people have subscribed to your ezine, ecourse or newsletter and have to opt-in by providing their email address, name etc. This subscriber becomes a part of your email list.

If you came across a double opt-in list, all it means is that after the person initially signs up to your email list, they need to go to their email inbox and click the link that was provided to them in the email from your site. By doing this they basically confirm they want to receive email from you and therefore it is more legit.

If a subscriber is unhappy with your service, they will without doubt remove themselves from your list. They do this by clicking on the ‘Unsubscribe’ link in your email. This is also called an opt-out list.

So let’s start with the first way to get a list. You get a list by using an autoresponder. Now if you have never heard of it before, you will know in the near future what you missed out on.

Not only does an autoresponder make it easy for you to manage your list, but it can set specific times when it should send your email to your subscriber list. It saves a tremendous amount of time by automating the whole process for you.

An autoresponder can be programmed with the specifics and then once or twice a week your email will go out to your list which will keep your message in their minds.

Another way to generate a list is by creating free ebooks and handing them out to people. Send it off to free ebook directories and contact everyone you know to give the ebook away to their friends, lists and family. With the right information and links back to your sign-up page, you can easily generate a list.

Well that is all for now. Have fun!

Make Money From A Niche Part 2

(In the Previous part we looked at choosing your niche, keywords and analyzing your competition)

Go back to Google or Yahoo and do your research. Find lessons that will teach you how to draw Naruto, as an example in my case etc.

You will need the following:

One unique article of up to 600 words long. Usually 500 words is the normal length. After that you need 3 shorter articles at 300 words in length each. They must be unique as well. By unique I mean they should not copy what anyone has said. Then you take the above 4 articles and do one rewrite of each article. Yes, I know it is a lot to do in the beginning but it will pay off in the end.

So now you have all your articles and want to know the next step?

Well you go to the following sites and set up an account with each of them:

1. www.blogger.com

2. www.hubpages.com

3. www.wordpress.com

4. www.squidoo.com

I would start with squidoo if I were you. Squidoo ranks really well in the search engines so start with that one and then move onto the other sites. With Squidoo you may want to read up on how to create a good squidoo lens. Just remember that your squidoo lens title should reflect your main keywords in some way. So now you take the first longer unique article and place it in one of your first text module. In the second text module you either want to review similar products or simple use a feature and benefit module. You need to make sure there are several links in your squidoo page that will lead a visitor to purchase from you. After you finished it, head on over to www.pingomatic.com and ping your lens.

But so far you have generated zero traffic. So here you need to head on over to Yahoo Answers, sign up and start answering people’s questions in topics related to your niche. In the ‘Resource’ box you can mention two links. So one should be your Squidoo Lens and the other can be any of your other sites. You may want to vary them for best exposure. Another way to obtain traffic is to use www.ezinearticles.com You will need to write unique articles for submission here and in theAuthor’s Box you can include links to your site or Squidoo page. Here you can use some of the articles that have been done previously, or you can simply use those articles for your other free sites like Blogger or WordPress.

You can also take advantage of social sites to bring in more traffic. You can visit sites like Facebook, Digg, StumbleUpon etc. All these sites you set up a profile and let it lead to your main site.

Once you have your content, you may want to start on your ebook or report that will teach people what they want to know. So in this case, I would make a small 10 page report on how to draw Naruto and then make sure I have set up a payment system through Paypal or any other company that will accept payments online and then ensure that the link to purchase this report is in all the sites, especially the Squidoo Lens and in the main site.

Beyond that just make sure you add some fresh content one to two times a day. Even if it is a 100 words, always make sure you ping it at pingomatic when you are finished and you will by now have made your first few dollars if you were persistent and kept at it.

Good luck!

Make Money From A Niche Part 1

Start with the basics first.

Visit Clickbank and look at some of the products on there. When you see a good sales letter, it will naturally jump out at you. They will make promises that will deliver you the earth, moon and sun and almost most people will be tempted to take out their wallet and purchase the product. Stop! All I want you to do is look at these sales letters. The ones that are good, grab them and save them to a special folder on your desktop for later. These will be excellent reference material when you get to the sales letter part.

Decide on your niche.

For some people this is easy and some people this is hard. I would suggest that you find a niche that you are comfortable with and know something about. Of course if you don’t have many interests, then your best bet is to take a topic you think you would like to write on and go do the necessary research to obtain all the information you need.

In this instance, I will focus on a very narrow topic close to my heart: Learn How To Draw Naruto.

Now it is just an example to quickly explain what I would do. First I pick a niche that is popular, but can be narrowed down and after research, I know it will be profitable. Just the term ‘Naruto’ is too broad and therefore focusing on how to draw Naruto, you are targeting a fan audience that love to draw the character from the anime series.

You will need to do the proper keyword research and for that I suggest you visit Adwords Keyword Tool. Here you enter the search term ‘How to draw Naruto’ and see what results it will give you. You will find results like:

1.How to draw Naruto characters

2.How to draw Naruto Style

3.How to draw Naruto step by step

These will give you some ideas on what you can add as keywords to your sales letter later on, and also for your general research this is very helpful. You can see how many people search for specific topics. Anything over 100,000 and it is too broad. If it is beneath 50,000 searches in a month then you have a winner.

Next you need to analyze your competition.

All you do here is visit Google and use your niche topic to find other similar sites. See what they offer on their pages, and what they sell if they sell anything at all etc. Are they ranking high these sites and are they considered authority sites? All these things you need to go look into.

Now comes the interesting part where you gather all the information together for your content.

End of Part 1. Go to Part 2.

Blog For Fun And Profit

You have read about it on the internet and seen that people everywhere are happily creating their own blogs. But you have never done it. Can you do it?

Of course you can!

Blogging in a way is very personal and talks to your readers in a conversational tone. The overall style is informal and you get to have feedback off strangers on topics close to your heart.

Essentially that is what it means…you become a voice and let people know about anything and everything. As time carried on, people started realizing that with having lots of subscribers and tons of visitors, they could monetize their blog.

First the most used blog platforms are WordPress and Blogger. Next you will do all the normal steps where you choose your name for the blog, see what market you will target. It is very important to narrow your focus than being too broad with too many subjects. Once you have your blog set up you need to get some traffic to it. A tool I use is called Blog Linker. Go visit the site here and see how it can provide traffic to your site.Blog Linker is a free tool that will manage your traffic by using auto reciprocal linking. Once you are registered, a special code is supplied to you to add it to your blog. Well that sorts the traffic for you. Next you want to sign up with Google Adsense. Now this will only work if your blog is hosted on your own domain and hosting account. I don’t think Adsense allows people to use their services on free blogs anymore.

Read all the rules associated with Adsense and you will be well on your way to making money. Another way to monetize your blog is to sign up for sites like Pay Per Post and Sponsored Reviews. I will tell you up front that if your blog is brand new then they won’t accept it. So make sure to blog for at least several months before joining up with these companies. At least 50% of your writing should be unique on the blog. If you have met their requirements and at least attained a few subscribers and a good page rank, then you can start making money by reviewing people’s services and websites on your blog. You will get paid to do that and some people make up to $600.00 or more per month doing that.

In the end it is all about fun. Do not stress too much about what the people want to hear, but try to be original and just write what comes to mind. If you are writing for a specific target market, then make your blog interesting and fun by using pictures and photos where you can.

Well that is all for now. Enjoy your day!

Select A Profitable Niche

So you have decided to start a blog. You want it to be unique but not sure what to write about. Some of you already know what you want to write about, but for the rest of us that are capable of writing on several topics, it becomes much harder. So what to do in this instance?

Well you can make money by selecting a profitable niche.

First thing to understand is that a niche is a small portion within a huge market. If you target ‘Puppies’ then it is a big market. But if you targeted ‘white terrier puppies’ then you are targeting a niche. The more specific the better the niche is.

The only problem some people face like myself is that I get easily distracted by other things. If I had to write about white terrier puppies, then that is what I should write about and not start writing about other breeds or benefits of training your puppy etc. As a sub-category on your blog you can go into training your white terrier puppy but if you focus too much on training then you might as well have started a blog on training your puppy instead. So stick to the subject and do not get distracted.

Here is a short checklist you can use when selecting your profitable niche:

• What demand is there for this niche?
• What type of people will be reading the blog?
• How will the blog look? Will it fit in with the niche that is chosen?
• How much are people willing to spend in this niche?
• How many hits does the niche get in Google per month? Find statistics through the Google Adwords Keyword Tool
• Are there people already selling these products in your niche?

These are just some things you need to look at before choosing a profitable niche.

So if you have some time then get researching and start your blog today with the intent to make money.

10 Mistakes In Blogging

There are usually some mistakes I see that most bloggers make and it surprises me that they do not take the time to see if people actually like it. There is also a reason why the most successful blogs follow a specific format.

So here are 10 mistakes bloggers make when it comes to their blog:

• Avoid dark backgrounds. This is something I see often. You search for your chosen topic and found a site or someone asks you to have a look at their blog and it has a black or dark blue background with white text on it or even worse, yellow or some other color text that just doesn’t fit. Some people associate a dark background with a gaming site or a hacker’s site and thus illegal. Some others prefer not to read white on dark background because it hurts their eyes. I am one of those people that agree with the latter. Pure black bacground with white text is too harsh on the eyes.  Stick to light background colors or simple white. It’s the same when you look at a book… do you ever read books with a dark background? You don’t!
• Make sure to evenly space your blog posts with paragraphs.
• Sign up to some affiliate programs and get them on your blog. If you want to make money this is the way to go. Some people are trying real hard to make money but they aren’t promoting anything.
• Try and use a .com to represent your blog and .co.uk is also acceptable if you are situated in the UK.
• By blogging often you are more likely to be picked up by google. People that do not blog regularly will find their PR drop and it won’t get picked up as often by Google.
• Install tracking software like Google Analytics on your blog to see what people are up. Most people never don’t and so lose on the fact that they do not know what people like the most on their blog.
• Try to interact with your readers. A lot of people just write articles. They don’t try to speak to you as a person and personally that isn’t what a blog is all about. The more personal you can be the more someone can relate to you as the person voicing their thoughts.
• A lot of people forget to allow search engines to index their blog and on the admin side there is a function you can change for that. So make sure you allow search engines onto your blog.
• Lastly, most people do not drive traffic to their blog. This is very important as without traffic all your hard work will go unnoticed. Writing alone won’t bring you traffic, so spend some time and get traffic to your site.

So see what mistakes you have made and change them today!

Next Page »