Dot Com Note » web traffic

Ultimate Tips To Drive Traffic To Your Blog

Dotcom Note — Wed, 16 Jun 2010 17:36:38 +0000

A Blog is a stepping stone for many newbie internet marketers. It is easy to set up than a regular website. Blog platforms like Blogger and WordPress provide a mechanism for instant publication without spending a dime. Google’s Blogger platform goes even one step further by proving a monetization means through their AdSense platform. All you need spend is your time to write contents. All barriers to publishing your contents are gone. However, many people find their blogs sitting alone in the vastness of the Web. Nobody is coming to read what they have published in their blogs. The concerns about “how to drive traffic” ultimately lead to frustration and abandonment.

But before you give up your blogging and call it a day, you must understand that there are a few tips that you can easily implement to drive traffic to a blog. Try these tips for a month or so before you quit. I can assure you that you’ll get a few hundred visitors a day easily if you follow the tips outlined in this blog post.

I know you cannot afford a big budget like a corporate blogger. So, paid traffic through a pay-per-click campaign is ruled out. Also, banner advertisement in the top blogs related to your niche is out of reality because the top bloggers are demanding insane amount of money to display a tiny banner that may or may not get any real visitors. Why shouldn’t they? A lot of financially challenged people are paying them big bucks.

However, you don’t have to do so. I searched the blogospehere to find the best article on driving traffic to your blog for free. I was also looking for information that is easy to implement. Tips that does not require you to be a tech wizard. I’m happy to report that I have found such an article at performancing.com. Performancing.com provides effective tips and tricks to bloggers to succeed. If you’re not a subscriber of their RSS feed, I urge you do so immediately. With any further delay, I’m producing their excellent tips to drive traffic to your blog below.

Write content and publish consistently. It’s easy to come up with a plan, even create an editorial calendar. It’s much harder to actually stick to a consistent schedule. This is a common area of difficulty for bloggers, but important to master. Let’s just say that search engines and readers both love consistency of frequency. Unless you’re running a news site, you don’t necessarily have to publish tons of content daily.
Tweak your content to searches. You don’t want to cater entirely to site visitors’ searches, but do focus on search keywords that are relevant to your site’s niche. If visitors are reaching your site via a particular search but the “bounce” (leaving) rate is high, then they probably didn’t find the content they were seeking. Mine your site metrics for the most popular search terms for the recent past, then see if you can write content to match, while staying within your site’s niche.
Build up your posting frequency. Start small, build up your content as time, resources or budget permits. Additional content will bring additional readers, especially if you’re leveraging your social media channels.
Build your social networks. There are a variety of social networks, including social bookmarking sites (Stumbleupon, Delicious), social voting sites (Digg, Sphinn, Mixx, Reddit, Propeller), Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, other blogs, forums, media sharing sites (Flickr, YouTube, Scribd, Slideshare) and so on. Don’t forget to factor in the time it takes to build your social networks, so work at it daily if possible. Of course, having these networks is useless unless you leverage them to promote your content.
Promote content on at least two social media sites. There are a variety of ways to promote your content, including the social media sites mentioned above, as well as a variety of non-social profile pages that are free for use. These methods differ in the amount of Web traffic they each bring, though collectively they can make a tremendous difference to your site. You don’t have to use all of these methods, especially when you’re starting out. Bloggers differ on what they feel is most important, but if you have to pick just two to start with, a few of my blogging colleagues have variously suggested the following pairs as being “most” effective, in their experience:
- Stumbleupon and Digg.
- Stumbeupon and Twitter.
- Twitter and Facebook.
- Twitter and Digg.
Personally, I’d pick Twitter and Facebook, but it really depends on your content and your social networks. Promoting content successfully online really is about who you know and whether they’ll share your content. If you can get them to do it regularly, even better. Your Facebook Wall or a Fan Page serve as great reminders. Just don’t overdo it, and learn to balance promotion and social network building tasks when you’re not writing.
Deep link to your older content. For each new post that you write, you should try to link to at least two older posts in your own site’s archives. If your post is sufficiently long, you can link to more than two. Remember to link with appropriate keywords in the anchor text. The cynic might say that this is a cheap way to get more page views for your site, but linking to your own existing content from each new post serves multiple purposes
- Keep readers on your site. Yes, that gets you more page views, but is there really anything wrong with that if you’re giving readers what they want, possibly in your archives?
- Expose older content to readers who might have missed it.
- Build authority for your site for the keywords and variations used in link anchor text (more on this in a later post). From a search engine perspective, keep in mind that they all want relevant links to give to search users. If your site happens to have relevant links, why not emphasize that by deep linking? This potentially helps to reduce the waiting time it takes to rank in search engines.
- Throw a whammy at site scrapers who grab your content. They might steal your content but having a link to your own posts means you’ll at least know who did it and be able to take action, if desired.
Use target=”_blank” in your hyperlinks. If you don’t know what this means, don’t worry for now. If you do know, then use it for any links that go outside of your sites. This way, the main browser window/ tab stays on your site, hopefully keeping readers there longer and potentially building traffic.

Original article 7 Tips For Bootstrapping Your Traffic

Memorize these seven tips to drive traffic to your blog. Or better yet, create a mnemonic to remember the tips. If you’re busy to read the tips above, just remember the 7 points below:

Consistency
Search
Frequency
Social network
Promote
Deep Link
Use target attribute

Image credit: rich jorgemejia

How To Drive Traffic Using Social Bookmarketing

Dotcom Note — Tue, 01 Jun 2010 13:34:38 +0000

More and more internet marketers are using social bookmarking sites to drive traffic to their web sites. Of course some, mostly newbie, marketers are also spamming these book marking sites by submitting every blog post and article available in their web sites. That is a wrong approach to drive traffic using social bookmarking sites. Your goal in any social media marketing is to connect with your target audience. Your target audience has needs and you’re trying to full fill that need by sharing valuable information or data.

Before you start using social bookmarking sites to promote your web sites, you need to develop a plan and execute the plan using social media marketing best practices. While the best practices differ from site to site, there is a common thread in all these sites. Social media marketers have already figured out that common thread and they have already developed strategies to conquer social media markets.

You have to find a strategy and use it as a template in your social book-marketing campaign. Of course, you need to change it according to your web site’s content and your goal is to maximize your social media campaign efforts. I found an excellent blog post in MindSprout blog that gives you a set of suggestions that you can use as your blueprint for social media bookmarketing. I’m reproducing the five main points here with proper credit to the author.

1. Pick Your Poison

There are quite a few social bookmarking sites to choose from. Some of the more recognizable names include, Delicious, Stumble Upon, Clipmarks and Digg. Keep in mind that most social bookmarking users are typically loyal to one site, but that doesn’t mean that you need to be. Opening accounts on multiple sites will increase your audience reach and depth.

2. Sir Links-a-Lot

This may seem like a no brainer, but many people often overlook it – don’t forget to bookmark your own website. Creating social bookmarks help to generate backlinks for your site and everyone knows that the more backlinks you have, the higher your page will rank in search engine results. This is why it’s a good idea to establish accounts with several social bookmarking sites.

3. What to Share

With social bookmarking you can save just about anything that’s on the web. Create links to photos and video and, drumroll please, your website’s blog posts. Each time you upload a blog post you should make a new social bookmark link to it. Each day, social bookmarking sites receive millions of visits and spotlighting your blog posts is how you’ll bring them back to your website.

4. Keywords to Success

Marketing with social bookmarking uses a bit of search engine optimization (SEO) strategy. In other words, incorporate keywords into your social bookmarks that you’re building. When you save a blog post or video to a social bookmarking site, you’ll need to tag it with relevant keywords to help others find the bookmark. You’ll also to give your bookmarks come catchy titles that have few keywords added for good measure.

5. Badges! We Got Your Stinkin’ Badges!

After you’ve built your social bookmarking profile, added and tagged your links and inserted appropriate keywords, you’re ready to shamelessly promote the fruits of your labor. Create social bookmarking badges for the sites that you belong to and display them on your website and other social media profiles.

Click here for the original article.

Driving traffic using social bookmarketing is neither new nor hard. But unless you know how it can be done effectively, you will find it hard to get optimal results. Social bookmarking is also one of the quickest way to get you web page indexed and rank higher in search engines. It will increase your web site’s awareness. If you provide quality contents, you will find lots of return visitors and your web site traffic will increase due to your social bookmarketing efforts.

Traffic Voodoo Review – You Will Get Plenty Of Voodoo Traffic

Dotcom Note — Mon, 29 Mar 2010 19:24:09 +0000

Are you ready yet? Are you ready for voodoo traffic? What is voodoo traffic? You’ll learn it shortly. I keep getting lots of emails from Internet Marketers about this new program called traffic voodoo. It is like magic. You’ll magically get traffic. I could not resists and wanted to check it out.

I land on the site that has a video. Oh my God! video. Now let me tell you something. If you’re lazy and don’t want to read for 5 minutes but want to waste your time watching a 40 minutes videos that goes on and on, good luck with making money online.

The video starts with simple slides. The guy talks about his life experiences, as if I really care. If you’re buying a product based on the life experience of a person, again good luck making money from that product. Have you ever bought a TV based on the life experience of the engineer who developed it? Certainly not. So, I still wonder know why Internet Marketers tell their life stories.

I think I know why they use life stories. Long time ago, copywriters found that financially challenged people could be put in an emotional stance when you tell a story. When these financially challenged people completely lose their minds under the emotional stance, you will be able extract money from them selling anything you want.

Anyway, the guy tells you about his story of writing some checks to IRS (Internal Revenue Service) and such stuff. While driving back home, he realized he was not getting enough traffic to his side for selling his voodoo products. He spent close to $15,000, just like lots of people who would buy his products, to learn Internet Marketing.

Then he learned SEO (search engine optimization). Lo and behold. He earned several thousand dollars in one day.

Now he is generous enough to to teach you how to get traffic to your websites. Thousands and Thousands of people are paying him for his cutting edge traffic techniques. I wonder, what that cutting edge techniques could be. Must be some secret voodoo. You launch a site and start your voodoo rituals and traffic will start pouring in.

But this guy does not stop there. He wants to show you how much money he has made in 5 days, 2 days, 48 hours, etc. Again, if you’re buying this voodoo based on his earnings, good luck making money from voodoo traffic.

What is voodoo traffic? According to him, traffic is about

Power
Influence
Deal flow
Respect
Friendship
Becoming Authority

You will learn how to get traffic from

Search engines
YouTube
Facebook
Twitter
Blogs
Article Marketing
Pay Per Click (PPC)
Pay Per View (PPV/CPV)
Affiliates
Product Launches
Podcast and iTunes

There will be live webinars, private membership site, action plan check lists, written course materials, and much more. He has covered every thing you’ll find for free on the Web.

How much it will cost you? I don’t know. I will update it again when I get the price.

Multi Level Marketing Tips – Generate Free Google Traffic

Dotcom Note — Sun, 17 Jan 2010 18:25:00 +0000

One of the most successful multi level marketing tips is to generate free traffic from Google. If your goal is to send targeted traffic to your multi level marketing sites, then you’re in the right mind set. I like free traffic from Google and Google provides ample opportunity for that.

: Image by Scorpions and Centaurs via Flickr

You want qualified leads for your multi level marketing and advertising is costly. What you do? You use search engines to drive traffic to your sites. But you have to know how to do this and there are proven techniques that you can use right now.

1. Setting Long-term Goals. After finding a reputable company that will be in business for a long haul, you have to decide where you want to be in five years from now. Many MLM promoters pursue their friends and family and soon get disaponited when those folks don’t like the slamming and hammering sales techniques. It is also not very productive. Instead of pushing people to enroll in your program, you have to find ways for people to come to you.

2. Creating Your Own Brand. You need to establish trust by creating your own brand. If you quit because of rejections, you will not succeed. It takes time to build trust and don’t quit before you reach this point. Use social media like Facebook, Twitter, and blog to establish relationship with your online prospective customers.

3. Use a System. You have to be disciplined and create a process that you can follow day in and day out. Once you have a system in place, you will have the ability to determine who is on your list at a glance, be able to use a contact manager, and have the ability to maintain records. This will help you keep in touch with those who are on your list.

5. Don’t Fall for the Hype of Heavy Hitters or Guru’s Endorse. To succeed in multi level marketing, you need time to build a frontline with strong leaders. This leader will help you bring other leaders for their teams. It will not happen overnight. It requires hard work. If you see people promoting their products skipping this step, you should be very skeptical about their story.

Using the five point foundation discussed above, you have to embark on getting listed on the page one of Google search engine result for your multiple keywords. The “secret” to driving traffic from Google is Article marketing. It must be a part of your plan. You need to create contents to brand you and your company, it will provide you with name recognition that will result in repeat traffic. In addition, years from now those back links in articles will provide traffic to your site. This is an incredible network marketing advertising tool which many Internet marketers use but network marketers ignore.

What are the steps to start creating articles for back links and free traffic from Google?

1. Find people’s needs in your niche. What are people trying to find and problems they have. This is called market research. If you can find these needs by researching content sites like article directories such as ezinearticle.com, searching blogs related to network marketing, ebooks, mlm forums, etc. It really isn’t that difficult to find out.

2. After you find your niche, you have to do keyword research. This helps you uncover what people are searching in search engines. Focus on long tail keyword phrases that are 3 words or more. Don’t use broad phrases like website marketing, multi level marketing, networking marketing, etc. due to intense competition for those words. A long tail keyword like “free mlm resources” in all likelihood will get you better results than those highly competitive keywords.

3. Use a keyword tool to do your keyword research. One free keyword tool is Google’s AdWords Keyword Tool. It will also save you time in doing your keyword research.

4. Once you find a few dozen keywords, you have to find how many searches are done on those keywords. You also need to find how competitive those keywords are. Google AdWords Keyword Tool will help you determine search volume and a direct search using the keyword in quote will tell you the competition for that keyword in Google search index. Keywords that have high results like 40,000- 50,000 competing sites are not worth pursuing. Use keywords that produce 15,000 or under indexed pages.

5. Once you’ve collected the long tail keyword phrase by doing keyword research, use one keyword inside the title and also the first and last paragraph of one article. Don’t use all the keywords in one article. Write multiple articles to cover as many keywords as you have.

6. In the resource box of the article, include a link to your site. Use the same keyword as the anchor text for your link. Also use a call to action in your resource box. Don’t link to the Network companies splash page. Send traffic to your site.

7. Submit your article to article directories like GoArticles.com, Ezinearticles. com, ArticleBase.com. You can submit the same article to multiple article directories and use article distribution services. Once these popular article directories approve your articles and publish them, Google will index those pages. in a week do a Google search to check your search engine position for those keywords. where you landed. If you don’t like the search engine result position, go back and write more articles for a better page placement.

It really does not matter what type of multi level marketing business you’re pursuing, article marketing is a sure fire method to advertise your products and services.It provides you with free multi level marketing traffic over a long time period. If you have ignored this technique in the past, take action by writing articles that will payoff handsomely in the long run. This is the best multi level marketing tips to succeed in your multi level marketing home business.

Auto Surf Traffic Exchange – A Comprehensive Guide

Dotcom Note — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 15:22:06 +0000

An auto surf traffic exchange is a membership website where the members can promote their own web pages by earning or buying “credits”. Credits can be earned by viewing other members’ web pages – otherwise known as “surfing for credits”.

: Image by Burning Image via Flickr

To surf for credits all you need to do is to log in to the traffic exchange and hit the “Start Surfing” button. You will then be shown a member’s web page and a countdown timer. How long you will have to view the page varies from traffic exchange to traffic exchange and also depends on your membership status, but typically the timer takes 10 seconds to run down. When it hits zero you will have earned a credit and will be able to view a new web page. To do that you usually have to complete a simple “icon matching” task with a click of your mouse.

The more you surf, the more credits you will earn. And with some traffic exchanges you will also stand the chance of winning bonus credits and even cash prizes.

As your credits accumulate you can allocate them to your web pages, which will then be shown to other members of the traffic exchange.

Most traffic exchanges operate a “surf ratio” policy. This simply means that you need to surf more than one page in order to generate enough credit to have your page viewed in the system. Some traffic exchanges offer a 2:1 ratio, 3:1 or a 3:2 ratio, with a 1:1 ratio reserved for members who upgrade.

Another option for traffic exchange members is simply to buy credits. Traffic exchanges often hit you with “One Time Offers” where you can get a lot of credits at discounted rates if you buy straightaway.

As well as page viewing credits, traffic exchanges also offer “banner ad” and “text ad” impressions. Banners and text ads are shown above or below pages that you view when you surf for credits. You can get these impressions at a much cheaper rate than standard page-viewing credits. On the other hand, click-through rates are typically quite low.

Typically, a traffic exchange is free to join and has several “upgrade” options where you must pay a small monthly fee to secure the benefits.

So what are the benefits of upgrading?

It could be all or any of these benefits:

1. You get several hundred credits added to your account each month.

2. Your “surf ratio” improves.

3. The countdown time decreases.

4. You get new members randomly added to your “downline”.

5. You earn more in credits or commission whenever you recruit a new member for the traffic exchange.

Yes, traffic exchanges are also online affiliate businesses and when you join one you are allocated an affiliate number. If you check your member’s area you will see that there is a section devoted to promoting the traffic exchange. You can go there and get banners for your website or blog, and other promotional material such as email letters and so on.

Since you will be given free credits whenever you recruit someone to the traffic exchange, it makes sense to devote some space on your website or blog to promoting the traffic exchange.

You will also be encouraged to promote the traffic exchange on other traffic exchanges.

A lot of people join several traffic exchanges to gain extra exposure for their web pages, and also cross-promote their traffic exchanges in order to generate a lot of credits in the form of commission when people join traffic exchanges through their links.

When you use a traffic exchange to promote your website, here are a few common pitfalls that you will want to avoid:

1. Don’t promote pages that take a long time to download.

2. Don’t try to promote your main product with a long sales page. Keep your pages clean and simple with a basic message and either a sign up form for more info, or a “click here” button that will open up your main promotional page in a new browser window.

3. If you use a video promotion, don’t take more than ten seconds getting to your main message.

4. Make sure you do not run out of bandwidth – it is amazing how many times you see a “bandwidth limit expired” message instead of a member’s page when surfing traffic exchanges.

5. Do NOT promote XYZ traffic exchange on XYZ traffic exchange!! This sounds unbelievable, but a number of clueless people try to get traffic exchange members to join the traffic exchange that they are surfing on and are therefore already members of! Duh!

Traffic exchanges offer website owners a cheap and cheerful method of promoting their website pages and can be very effective if you know how to work them.

Maria Andros Social Media Traffic Blueprint Revealed

Dotcom Note — Mon, 03 Aug 2009 07:00:11 +0000

For close to $1000, the Social Media Guru Maria Andros will teach you how to make millions using Facebook, Twitter, and other social media sites. I bet Jack Dorsey, the creator of Twitter, did not dream that his service will open up untold riches for the hoipolloi. The program is Social Media Traffic Blueprint.

: Image via Wikipedia

And now Maria Andros has opened the door for everybody to untold riches using social media sites. She is going to tell her secrets to a chosen few who can afford close to $1000 to learn the mastery of social media sites for unimaginable profits. I can bet you that you can’t find the secrets she is going to reveal in hundreds of Twitter, Facebook and other social media related books at Amazon. I can’t.

I don’t know about her secrets. But some Guru says that his twitter followers jumped to more than 30 thousands after he implemented some of the techniques she suggested to him. So, I have to go by the Guru’s words.

According to the Guru, she has a blueprint. And he goes on explaining what a blueprint is in the email I received. That a blue print is a detailed plan. You don’t have to know anything. You just follow and magically every thing happens. Money flows from other people’s bank accounts to yours.

Wow, I did not really know how powerful the blueprint is. If I can get a blueprint for a house, I can just follow it and magically the house will be built. Wish I had known this before I purchased my house. Oh well, it is too late.

I headed over to Maria Andros social media traffic blueprint site. As expected, there was a video. I said to myself, “oh man, I have to watch this video now!” But I was lucky. The video is short and I can fast forward it. Good.

She is quick. Did not show me her fancy car or dream vacation. She started with the story of a guy who took a laep of faith and enrolled in her program by borrowing money from his credit card (the borrowing part I made it up). This guy did not have anything – no website, no product, and no list. I don’t know what kind of online business he was engaged in. I thought every internet marketer had at least one of the three.

The guy in the story joined the program hoping that some thing will magically happen to him. Lo and behold, within 30 days he made $75K in his business. Again, what was the business? Ok, may be he just made a “cute cat video” business to rake in the cash.

The four modules she is going to teach you are: 1. Youtube Channel and Branding, 2. Twitter Traffic, 3. Hypnotic Video Formulas, and 4. Competitive keyword Research and Analytics. Sorry, no Facebook. I was wrong. It is all videos.

Now you know Maria Andros Social Media Traffic Blueprint. Sign up with a leap of faith. You don’t need anything except close to $1,000. You will get it back as soon as you create your first “cute guinea pig video”.

How to Use News Popularity Sites to Drive Web Traffic To Your Site

Dotcom Note — Mon, 16 Mar 2009 23:42:48 +0000

Do you know some of the sources of huge traffic? Well, you can find them on social media news popularity sites like digg, reddit, mixx, etc. If your post hits the front page of one of these sites, you will get thousands of visitors, hundreds of back links, and repeat visitors to your blog. However, it is not easy to hit the front page of these sites. Every day, hundreds of people submit thousands of articles to these sites but none of them make it to the front page.

Most of the articles submitted to these sites are spam, of very low quality and self promoting marketing materials. The regular visitors of these sites demand good quality, informative, fact filled, and funny contents. Contents that attack a different angle to old materials may also do fairly well.

Photo Credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/eudaimos/2815941390/

By following the five steps described in this article, you will be able to reap the benefits of traffic and back links to your site without wasting time and efforts.

1. Know your audience. The first step to creating posts that get the attention of the visitors of these sites is to study the front page stories on these sites. Different sites cater to different tastes. Find out the type of contents that are popular in each site. For example, stories dealing with technology, liberal politics, and entertainment do well on digg.

If you are writing a story that does not quite match the popular topics of the site, you need to create an angle for satisfying the taste of the site’s audience. For example, conservative politics does not do well in digg but if you can talk about religion in politics in an entertaining way, it may get more votes than a serious post on why religion should be a part of politics.

2. Announce your presence. Sign up for a few sites and create your profile with authentic information about you. Include your blog links in your profile. Upload a picture so that everybody knows you are a real person, not an unknown spammer and scammer.

3. Drum up your post. Use some visual cues, like a digg button, on your high quality posts. This invitation helps your site visitors to submit your stories to the news popularity sites easily. Don’t use these buttons for every post. You don’t want every post submitted to these sites. If you submit every post, regular visitors of these news popularity sites will consider you as a spammer.

4. Create a friends network. Locate a dozen submitters, preferably bloggers in your niche, whose posts regularly appear on the front page. These submitters know what succeeds on the site and they spend lots of time finding stories that are likely to get votes. They also compete for stories to submit to these sites before anybody else.

Include these power submitters in your friend network and read stories submitted by these users. If you find a story interesting, positively vote on the story. Post comments on these stories.

Find out the sources of the stories of the power submitters. Subscribe to these sources using your RSS reader and set up Google alerts for news items related to the topics. If you find a story that matches the criteria, submit it before anybody else.

5. Share your stories. Once you have established yourself as a positive contributor to these sites, invite a few power submitters to read your high quality post and comments on it. Use twitter and instant messages for taking your networking efforts with the power submitters to the next level. Not all of your network friends in the news popularity site will respond positively. However, you will find a few who are willing to share their insights with you.

Announce your best posts to your twitter followers and inform about them to power submitters using instant messages. Don’t do it for every post. It will annoy the recipients and they will abandon your as fast as they can.

If some of your twitter followers are bloggers who are interested in your post, one of them may create a post spun off of your article and provide a link to your original story. If this happens within a few hours of you publishing your post, it will boost the quality of your story.

Getting your stories into the front pages of news popularity sites is hard work and time consuming. If you want to invest the time and efforts, the reward in terms of traffic and backlinks can be worth it.

Ask Yahooo! for How to Get Blog Traffic

Dotcom Note — Mon, 02 Mar 2009 03:09:19 +0000

Whether you have a blog or a web site, people will not pour into your site in droves just because you have built it. You need to work at attracting traffic to your site. Though the title is about how to get blog traffic, the techniques described here can be used for any web sites that have substantial amount of contents.

There are paid methods and free methods to get visitors to your blog. Unless you have an advertising budget at your disposal, you would have to rely on free methods. Free methods means getting organic traffic from the search engines or other sources. There are some well-known ways of doing so like article marketing and SEO. Besides those, here are two other ways of getting search engine traffic that are just as effective as the other more conventional ways.

Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/dmje/2438468928/

The first method is using Yahoo! Answers. Yahoo! Answers is a website for people to ask questions about anything and for other people to answer them. You must have at least two Yahoo! accounts to use this method (the more the better). The first step is to log into Yahoo! Answers using one of your Yahoo! accounts. Enter a keyword phrase related to your niche into Yahoo! Answers in the form of a question. For example if you are in the weight loss niche, one of your keyword phrases might be Lose Weight Naturally. So just type in How Can I Lose Weight Naturally? into Yahoo! Answers as a question.

Then exit from Yahoo! Answers and log in again but this time using your second Yahoo! account. Go back to the question you asked earlier and answer your own question. Of course, your answer should be informative and as accurate as possible. You can either get the answer from your own blog content or from another related website. If you take the answer from another website, be sure to re-word your answer so that you would not be plagiarizing. Along with your answer there will be a field called, Know your source? List it here: Now here is where you put in your blog URL.

Besides answering your own question, you could do a search within Yahoo! Answers for other similar questions asked by other people and submit your answer there also. What is happening is you are building quality backlinks to your blog with each answer you submit. It goes without saying that the more questions and answers you submit, the more backlinks you get to your blog. And everyone knows that backlinks push your blog ranking up the search engine.

In addition to getting visitors to your blog from search engines, you will also get visitors from those who read your answer on Yahoo! Answer.

The second method is by using forums. Find a forum related to the niche topic you are blogging about. Choose forums that allow you to put links into your signature file. Edit your signature file to include a catchy caption and your blog URL. When you visit the forum, search for threads that are relevant to your blog niche topic. As far as possible, visit threads with as few replies as possible. This is because people reading through the threads would normally not read more than the first page of replies. So if your reply is listed on the second or third page, the chances of people reading your reply is low.

Once you find such a thread, post your reply. Most forums have a check box to indicate you wish to show your signature file. Always make sure this check box is ticked. Another little twist to this method is to start your own thread in the forum. This way, everyone who visits your thread will see your post and signature file.

Using these little-known methods over time, you will start seeing more visitors to your blog from the search engines and from Yahoo! Answers and relevant forums.

How to Succeed in Driving Website Traffic Using Social Media Sites

Dotcom Note — Sun, 22 Feb 2009 17:59:10 +0000

Social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, MySpace etc. have become popular among the internet marketers. Most marketers hawk their websites, blog, affiliate links, list building URLs, etc. all day long to drive traffic to their web sites. Not only it is annoying to the network members, but also the effectiveness of such a strategy is yet to be proven.

However, you cannot ignore this emerging medium. You need to embrace it using a different mindset. If you follow the seven guidelines discussed below, you will be able to increase traffic to your site from these social media sites without exposing yourself as a self-centered marketer who will do anything to cash in on every opportunity.

Photo credit: http://flickr.com/photos/stevengroves/3100731854/

1. Create a profile page at each site and detail your interests, expertise, blogs, and websites in your profile. In Twitter, you are limited by text space and the number of URLs you can use in your bio. Facebook has more flexibility and you can pull your blog RSS into the Facebook notes.

Social network sites are pull medium where the old push marketing fails miserably. Your goal should be to pull people to your profile page by regularly posting valuable and interesting contents from other sites. You can post your blog article in Twitter occasionally but don’t submit every blog post your create.

2. The old school marketing relies on four Ps – price, product, placement, and promotion. The social media adds another dimension and one more P to the marketing philosophy and it is the participation.

You need to participate in the conversion and at the same time encourage others to participate. If you want to build a community that will trust you, you need to participate by providing expert opinions and valuable information. You need to help others when somebody has a question. Even if don’t know the answer, find it out by spending sometime on the Web.

You also need to draw others in the discussions by asking questions, giving controversial opinions, raising interesting issues that affect your niche. Passively posting your URL all over the place will not bring traffic to your site. Only concerted efforts to position yourself as a knowledgeable person in your niche will result in more visitors to your site.

3. To position yourself as an expert in your niche, you need to create contents that are fresh, interesting, and valuable to your readers. You also have to discover high quality contents in your niche for sharing with others. Subscribe to a few dozen blogs and scan them everyday for high quality contents so that you can share it with others in your network.

4. You cannot hide yourself in the social media world. If you are a fake, people will discover it fast and you will lose trust and traffic. So, be authentic, transparent and humble in all your conversations. If you make a mistake, admit it and move on.

5. To establish your credibility and expertise, you should read a wide variety of topics in your niche and explain them to others in the form of blog post, ebooks, white papers, etc. Give it all for free without any strings attached. Encourage others to distribute your materials.

If you are not sharing some valuable information, somebody else will share it. You cannot hide any information. It is better to be the first mover than wondering how did everybody find it out.

6. Be prepared to change your mind set. The old school mindset for driving traffic is posting you site links everywhere. The social media mind set is establishing yourself as an expert and sharing your knowledge. Once people know that you are a good resource for solutions to their problems, they will come to your site and you can monetize your site in different ways.

If you are wondering how you are going to make money if you give every thing for free than you need to understand this new medium before you jump into the bandwagon by posting your URLs every hour. Your goal is to drive traffic to your site. Your site may monetize using a variety of methods like, third party advertisement, selling tutorials, affiliate marketing, selling memberships, etc.

7. Social media is a marketing tool set that you leverage to drive traffic to your web site. For leveraging this new medium, you need to establish yourself as a good community member first. Don’t be farcical like Walmart who paid to Jim and Laura to blog around the country in Walmart parking lots capturing stories of Walmart employees and how they loved to work at Walmart.

You may enjoy a short-lived traffic boost to your site, but it will not last longer. When the truth is exposed, it will be a public relation nightmare for you or your brand. Build your brand by telling the truth. There is nothing wrong if you are sponsored by a corporation, just reveal the truth.

No More BlogRush for Traffic Exchange

Dotcom Note — Mon, 03 Nov 2008 00:17:21 +0000

BlogRush is dead. I had written about BlogRush traffic exchange math when it came out in Septemeber, 2007. My take on this pyramid style traffic exchange program was that the a few first movers and popular bloggers will mostly benefit from this scheme.

A lot of this type of traffic exchange programs popped up during the Porno Web days (1995-1998). Of course, those programs did not use widgets but the concept was the same.

Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/rwp-roger/2704952143/

Lots of big time online money making and marketing blogs opined how great the program was and consequently it spread like wild fire. I will not name any name but you can easily find out those blogs easily.

The reason of its demise, according to John Reese, the founder of BlogRuch is

BlogRush didn’t grow without its fair share of problems — from security issues to abusive users trying to ‘game’ the system to much lower click-rates than expected. We also had some problems with trying to fairly control the quality of the network, and in the process made many mistakes in deciding what blogs should stay or go. All of these issues, ultimately, limited the service’s full potential.

You can read Jeff Chandler’s take on the death of BlogRush at Performancing.com and what others are saying about their experience with BlogRush in the comment section.