Video Sharing
Video sharing has becomes a much formidable method of traffic generation
especially after the unbelievable popularity of YouTube. (http://www.youtube.com/).
Today, there are several other wannabes that are in the YouTube mould, but for a
marketer, video sharing has become synonymous with YouTube marketing.
The concept is simple again. You make an interesting video about some interesting
aspect about your product and then post it on YouTube. With its millions of viewers
per month, you can be sure that your video will be watched several times. If your
video is good, you can draw visitors from your video to your website directly.
YouTube is built for marketers. It has a unique feature in which you can insert a
website link into the video itself and make it clickable. Since the viewer doesn’t have
to undergo the hassle of seeing and typing the email address, you can be assured to
getting more visitors. Also, you can improve the prospects of your video through
content. YouTube allows meta tag descriptions, which means great SEO and also has
content such as headlines which again you can spruce up for SEO. You must also
note that YouTube is a Google subsidiary and hence it uses the amazing Google
search engine.
Another thing that you must note is that YouTube is also a social networking site.
You can make your account there and comment on videos and stuff. This means
people get to talking about your video and the product shown therein. This leads to
another awesome aspect of traffic generation, known as viral marketing.
Traffic Methods Part 10
Traffic Methods Part 9
Social Networking Sites
Social networking has become immensely popular in today’s times. Everyone from
freckle-faced teenagers to octogenarians is using these sites and, in fact, they are
spending a lot of time on them. As a marketer, you just cannot avoid the potential of
these websites in making your site highly-trafficked.
One reason why social networking works as a method of traffic generation is that you
can find people with various interests here, and most of them make their interests
known through their profiles. Many social networking websites are searchable
through meta tags, which are nothing but specialized keywords. Hence, if you have a
business of selling a gardening product, you could easily put ‘gardening’ in the search
bar of a social networking site and very soon a list of all the people who have listed
gardening as a hobby in their public profiles will show up. Then you can send a bulk
email to all these people speaking about your product and can even give them your
business link to visit.
Do you realize what is happening here? You are marketing directly to people who are
interested in gardening, which increases your traffic conversion rate manifold.
The best thing about social networking is that you don’t have to go anywhere to build
your list. You have it right there on the site. However, this also brings in competition.
But, if your product does spell good quality and people are impressed by the content
you provide them, you will stand out eventually.
Social marketing is a fast – almost instantaneous – method of getting traffic. People
usually constantly monitor their social networking profiles. As soon as they get the
email verification from you, they will want to visit the site and check out. This is your
‘make or break’ moment. You have to make sure your emails are right.
The following are three of the most popular social networking sites that Internet
marketers use. Do you have profiles on them already?
Facebook (http://www.facebook.com/)
MySpace (http://www.myspace.com/)
Twitter (http://www.twitter.com/)
This is not the end. There are various niches here such as video sharing sites, photo
sharing sites and several others like that which belong to a special niche of services.
We will speak about them later in this eBook.
Traffic Methods Part 8
Email Marketing
Email marketing is based on lead generation. Leads are people who have done some
activity on your website or on an affiliate website – such as downloading an eBook or
adding themselves to an opt-in list or subscribing to a newsletter, etc. – and have
given their email id in the process. The email id is called as the lead. The collection of
all these people is known as the list.
The actual process of email marketing involves sending informative content through
email to these people on your list. The emails have to be content-rich, providing them
something of value and very subtly nudging them to perform some further action,
such as visit your website for an offer or a free gift. Though the eventual intention is
selling the product, it is not done blatantly in email marketing.
Email marketing brings in a lesser flow of traffic than other methods generate.
Despite that, marketers use this method prominently. The main reason for that lies
in the fact that the low traffic brought by this method is all targeted traffic. The
people who have opted in to become part of your list are people who are interested in
your list. It is very easy to get them to convert. This is the method they refer to when
they say – “Get the customers to come to you; don’t go to them yourself.”
But, the success of this method lies in your email. You have to take care that you
provide something of immense value that these people can use. These can be:-
→ Some latest news about the industry
→ An easier way to do ordinary things related to the niche
→ A set of tips, pointers or guidelines
→ A short but effective how-to guide
→ Directions for getting freebies and discounted offers within the niche
→ Success stories of other people
→ Motivational material
… and so on.
People are looking for such information on the Internet anyway. When
you send this directly to them in their inbox, your credibility increases. Not only do
you get traffic, but you also get repeated traffic and conversions.
Traffic Methods Part 7
Link Exchange Programs
Link exchange programs are just what their names indicate. Website owners promote
each other’s links on their sites. These are similar to traffic exchange programs in
that many people come together to promote each other’s businesses. But the
difference lies in the way this promotion is done. In traffic exchange programs, the
link promotion is done on a separate website directory. However, in link exchange
programs, the promotion is done on the websites of the participants themselves.
Link exchange is done through text as well as banners. The people who want to
promote their sites make their links available in the form of HTML codes or banners.
These are then picked up by other webmasters and promoted on their own sites.
The main intention is, of course, to get as much visibility as possible. When more
people begin clicking on the ads, the SEO of the link automatically increases and still
more people come in. Like many other SEO methods, implementing a suitable link
exchange program helps you to get more eyeballs on your website.
But there is a distaff side of link exchange that you have to think of. You need to
promote your website link only on websites that are equal to or greater in popularity
than yours. Submitting to a low ranking website will do nothing to your PageRank.
Similarly, you should not accept sites that are very low in status than yours. This will
adversely affect your own PageRank.
You can get free websites for link submission as well. For this you will need to contact
the website owner directly. Use a service such as WhoIS to know who the owner of a
particular website is and their email contact so that you can communicate with them
directly. You can find details about any webmaster of any website using WhoIS which
you can obtain from http://ping.eu.
Link exchange is a very good method of bringing in traffic to your website; however,
if you are looking for targeted traffic – i.e. traffic that will be really interested in
buying your products – you will need to look harder and use some other methods in
conjunction with this.
Traffic Methods Part 6
Directory Submission
Directory submission is another SEO method that holds a promise of good traffic. It
is very similar to the previously mentioned traffic exchange programs and in fact
most marketers consider them to be exactly the same. But there are differences here
in which marketers can submit their websites. The website links are not randomly
accepted by the directories, but they have to fulfill certain qualifications, which might
be following a particular niche. The websites are ranked by the directory on the basis
of the value that they can provide to a potential visitor.
The rest of the concept is the same. As more and more people visit these links, the
website begins ranking better. We say that the website gets better search engine
optimized. Hence, this is a method that you should not avoid for generating traffic.
The task that takes the highest amount of time here is the submission itself. Though
there are automatic submission services available, most marketers still use the
manual submission route because that spells quality. Freelancers are employed most
times for getting these submissions done so that the marketers can focus on their
other more important tasks.
There are two main types of directory submission services provided. One of these is
specific to the kinds of keywords that are used. Keyword optimization becomes
important so that the website link gets accepted by the directory. The other method is
a normal directory submission. Here back links are provided so that the websites can
be visited. Both kinds of directories are very popular with Internet marketers.
The following are some directory submission services that you can use:-
Best Web Directories (http://www.best-web-directories.com/)
AboutUs.org (http://www.aboutus.org/)
Yahoo! Directory (http://dir.yahoo.com/)
The following are some special niche directories:-
For the business niche – Business.com (http://www.business.com/)
For the biography niche – Biographicon (http://www.biographicon.com/)
Traffic Methods Part 5
Traffic Exchange Programs
Traffic exchange programs are places where you can submit your website link. This is
a membership place. All members will submit their own links. The idea is to get
together and promote each other’s links as though this is a giant affiliate program,
where every website owner is an affiliate of the other.
The direct benefit is that there is a whole army of people promoting your website and
not just you, which means that you get some stupendous publicity. Your website link
jumps up several notches on the search engine ranking and the Alexa rankings
because of the great publicity that this generates. In other words, you get a
breathtaking amount of traffic.
There are free traffic exchange programs where you can submit the link of your
website for free, only in exchange for promoting other website links. However, there
is another mode at work here too. You can click on the links of other websites,
becoming traffic for them, which gives you points. When you get a particular number
of points, you can submit your website link too.
You might ask how this is beneficial to the website submitters since you have clicked
on the links without any intention of buying anything. Actually, it still works, because
you are trafficking the site. This makes the search engine think that the website is
popular and it gives the website a better rank. Your clicks have propelled the website
to a higher position on the search engine results.
The following are some popular traffic exchange sites:-
Traffic G (http://www.trafficg.com/)
Web Traffic Genie (http://www.webtrafficgenie.com/)
Easy Hits 4 U (http://www.easyhits4u.com/)
Click Thru (http://www.clickthru.com/)
Traffic Swarm (http://www.trafficswarm.com/)
Link Referral (http://www.linkreferral.com/)
Traffic Methods Part 4
Article Submissions
Submitting articles for traffic generation is a method that has been around since the
beginning of the concept of Internet marketing and it is still going great guns. The
fact that websites like Google rank content-rich websites better is what consolidates
its position. Article submission is definitely one of the best methods of SEO available
in today’s times.
The concept is simple – you write a keyword rich article and then you submit it on
various article directories. You are given a bio box at the bottom of the article where
you can put in your and your business’ name, with the link of the website that you
want to promote. You can also put in a brief description about yourself in this box.
When a person stumbles upon on your website – the chances of which are high
because you will be keyword optimizing your article – there is a likelihood that they
will like your article and will then click on the link to get more information. This is
how you get your traffic through article marketing.
Marketers use various article directories, most of which are free. The following is a
list of some very good article marketing directories:-
Ezine Articles (http://www.ezinearticles.com/)
iSnare (http://www.isnare.com/)
Go Articles (http://www.goarticles.com/)
Articles Base (http://www.articlesbase.com/)
Article City (http://www.articlecity.com/)
Article Alley (http://www.articlealley.com/)
Buzzle (http://www.buzzle.com/)
By saying good we mean article directories that are ranked well by the search
engines. You can even submit the same article on several of these directories, which
is what many marketers do. However, you must make sure that you keep the same
author name, or it could count as plagiarism. The best way, of course, is to make a
little variation in the articles when submitting to each directory so that it looks
different. You could even do that with software known as content spinning software.
This software can produce variations of an article so that they are not rapped on the
knuckles by search engines for duplication. However, since the quality of spun
articles is not good, you will need to do some manual editing once they are spun.
The following are two popular content spinning software applications that some top
Internet marketers use:-
Content Spinner (http://www.contentspinner.com/)
Content Spooler (http://www.contentspooler.com/)
Traffic Methods Part 3
Blogging and Forum Posting
You surely know what blogs and forums are. Though blogs and forums are different
from each other, there’s one thing that’s common between them. Both of them allow
visitors to post comments on them. That is the reason why they become interactive
tools for the marketers of today.
Many marketers are known to start blogs of their own and make a post about their
industry or even about their own product. They then put the link of their business
website in the post or below it (below is considered more dignified). Visitors read the
post and may probably visit the link mentioned. Thus, blogging is a good method of
traffic generation.
Now, it is not necessary for you to have your own blog to market through them.
(Incidentally if you want to make your own blog, software such as Blogger, available
at http://www.blogger.com/, and Wordpress, available at
http://www.wordpress.com/ can help you.) You could even visit blogs and forums of
other people that are active on the Internet and make your comment on them. Even
these have the same result; you get people coming in through the promoted link.
Forums follow a similar principle, but here you have to follow threads. Check out
Digital Point Forums (http://forums.digitalpoint.com/) to see how the system works.
Here you can initiate a thread. Forums have a better approach than blogs because
here you will find only people who are very serious in the industry. Thus, both blogs
and forums can improve the amount of traffic that your website is getting if you do
them correctly.
Traffic Methods Part 2
SEO
Search engine optimization, abbreviated as SEO, has been a buzzword in the Internet
marketing world for several years now. Basically it means making a website better
searchable by the search engines. Marketers who are looking at optimizing their
websites work with regards to one of three major search engines – Google, Yahoo! Or
MSN – because all these three have different parameters for organizing their links.
Out of this Google is the most popular and most marketers wish that their rank –
called as PageRank in Google parlance – improves. Since Google is a context based
search engine (which means it ranks content-rich websites higher than others),
marketers use the following methods for improving their PageRank on Google:-
→ They research on keywords and use them in their content. Google ranks
websites based on the number of currently popular keywords that it contains.
→ Apart from keyword optimization, the overall content matters too. There must
at least a 250 word content on a webpage for it to be considered by Google.
→ The content needs to be regularly updated too. Google is looking for content
that provides value to the reader. Content that keeps changing is looked upon
as dynamic content that the visitor would like.
Speaking in a broader sense, all methods of traffic generation are SEO methods.
There’s a reason behind this. Search engines like Google keep a watch on the
popularity of websites. According to them, if a website is visited more, it contains
good value. Hence, websites that generate traffic automatically end up with better
stakes on the search engines.
Traffic Methods Part 1
Pay Per Click Services
Pay per click or PPC is a model in which you pay advertisers according to the number
of clicks they can generate for your website. The concept is very simple. You use
Google AdWords (http://adwords.google.com/) or another PPC software and
become a member. Then you submit your URL to them which you want to promote.
The PPC service will then find other website owners on the Internet that are
interested in promoting your website URL. These are your affiliates. They will place
your URL on their sites in the form of an advertisement and whenever any person
clicks on them, you pay them.
There are other methods to pay out; PPC is not the only one. Many services also
provide a Pay Per Sale model (PPS) where you pay out only when a sale has been
done. There is also a Pay Per Lead model (PPL) where you pay out when the visitor
takes some particular action such as providing their email id, which becomes a lead.
If you haven’t tried out PPC yet, you are surely missing the number 1 traffic
generation method which every Internet marketer worth their salt is using. It isn’t
quite difficult to get into this medium of promotion – you must start researching on
it pronto.
The following is a list of some other PPC software applications that you can use
instead of Google AdWords.
Yahoo! Campaign Optimization (http://searchmarketing.yahoo.com/)
MSN AdCenter (http://adcenter.microsoft.com/)
Omniture (http://www.omniture.com/)
Apex Reach (http://www.apexreach.com/)
Atlas Search (http://www.atlassolutions.com/services_search.aspx/)
KeywordMax (http://www.keywordmax.com/)
SearchRev (http://www.searchrev.com/)
SearchFeed (http://www.searchfeed.com/)
SearchIgnite (http://about.searchignite.com/)
Montly PLR's
Why Monthly Public Label Right (PLR)?
Most of the time, people are afraid of monthly commitments, that is why they are afraid to join monthly PLR sites.
That is NOT the right way to think!
The advantages of joining a monthly PLR membership site are as follows:
-It can be a lot cheaper compared to buying from other sources because monthly subscriptions are usually a lot cheaper than one time purchases.
-You get consistent content every month!
-You get to monetize the LATEST, hottest, new niches! With new monthly content, you can be sure you will not be using OLD, outdated content.
-You get to create multiple streams of incomes when you really push yourselves to work hard every month.
-Explode Your Monthly Income Through Monthly PLR Sites!
-You get the privileges of exclusivity. Because monthly content are not easily available to the public, you do not compete with tons of other Internet marketers (or niche marketers) that are recycling the SAME, overused content over and over again! The only people you are ‘competing’ against are the people who has membership access and there is usually a membership cap to a PLR membership site.
-You also get to enjoy first mover’s advantage! You will know exactly when the content will be released and you can start loading up the content on your sites as quickly as possible. After all, the early bird get’s the word, right?
Now that we are very clear why PLR memberships are one of the best investments one can make, we will have to choose the right membership site!
