Archive for the ‘traffic generation’ Category

In a way, this post actually leads on from my post on How To Get Traffic To Your Blog, in which I showed 5 ways to promote a blog or blog post. Naturally you can use some of those methods to promote a website or offer, just as easily as you can to promote a blog.

However, this post is about a few more methods you can use to promote offers and make money from your site, whether they’re affiliate offers or your own product or service.

It also stems from a lesson I truly learned this past week. I say ‘truly’ because I think that unless you can and actually do apply what you’ve learned, then you’ve only half learned it.

I want to just cover this briefly before we get to the actual methods of how to promote a website.

The lesson seems simple enough: Go where the traffic is.

But most people with sites or blogs aren’t doing it and yet they’re still hoping to get loads of visitors, subscribers and sales.

You see, last week, I got to see behind the scenes of a large internet marketing outfit. I say large, it actually only consists of three guys, but they’re making hundred of thousands of dollars per month with what they do. This got me thinking…

If you think about it, there are certain hubs online where there’s already traffic in abundance. These include places like:

• Google
• YouTube (the second largest search engine in the world)
• Facebook
• Established mailing lists

What you need to do is to get in the way of that traffic to present your site and/or offer or service.

Now I know what you’re thinking…

‘Yes Matt, this is obvious. To get traffic you need to go where the traffic is.’

So why are most people (possibly you included) building sites and expecting the traffic to come to them?

Many people, when they start a site, fill it with great content, make it look great and then promote it via small streams of traffic that will never lead to bigger flows of visitors. Some of it comes down to a lack of willingness to spend some money, of which more later. And sure, it’s fine to promote your site to your friends and family, or to post updates on Twitter, but if you don’t already have a decent-sized following (of several thousand) on Twitter, the chances are that you won’t see lots of traffic.

This site gets around 2500 unique visitors per month at the moment and growing. Now that’s not massive, but it does lead to me building a subscriber list that grows daily and allows me to promote useful products to my readers.

I want you to bear in mind that to really get thousands of visitors, you need to Read the rest of this entry »

Social bookmarking is one of those buzz phrases you may have heard around the internet, but what is social bookmarking?

Put simply, social bookmarking is simply a more public version of the bookmarking you do on your own browser. When you want to remember a page or site on the internet, you usually go to the ‘Bookmarks’ menu in your browser and click ‘Bookmark this page’, right?

Well, with social bookmarking, you simply allow other people on social bookmarking sites like Delicious and Digg to see what you’ve bookmarked and visit that site themselves. Social bookmarking sites provide you with a platform on which you can keep track of your bookmarks while sharing them with other people.

The larger and more established social bookmarking sites are very well regarded by the search engines so when you bookmark something, that bookmark becomes like a vote for that site which Google and the other search engines see and consequently they will often rank sites higher that have lots of social bookmarks.

For a full list of the social bookmarking sites I use plus those that I recommend, check out my List of Social Bookmarking Sites post.

The benefits of bookmarking in this way are fairly obvious, but I’ll break down why I think they’re such a good part of online business and blogging. Read the rest of this entry »

For those of you looking for a list of social bookmarking sites, I’ve put together the following so you can see and use the full potential of social bookmarks.

The list isn’t an exhaustive list but it is split into the ones I use regularly and the others I know of as being reputable. There are 24 social bookmarking sites altogether in the list. I’ve seen other lists go into the hundreds but to be honest, if you get to the front page of even one of the sites below, you’ll see a rise in traffic. Also, many of those larger lists are outdated as many smaller services have closed down or been bought out.

Remember, there’s also social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter to consider too, which although not strictly social bookmarking sites, they can serve the same purpose and drive significant traffic to your sites via social interaction.

OK, here goes:

The Social Bookmarking Sites I Use

If you reach the front page on the following 6 sites (with the possible exception of TweetMeme) you’re likely to see a large spike in traffic to your site.

• Delicious – Probably the best known social bookmarking site on the internet.
• StumbleUpon – A site where you can stumble upon stories by clicking the stumble button which will bring up random sites within your area of interest. Fun and full of authority with the search engines. Also has its own link shortener which shortens links and shares them on SU at the same time giving you more leverage. The shortener is called SU.pr.
• Digg -  A massive authority when it comes to bookmarking.
• Reddit – A bookmarking site with the emphasis on news stories, this one is a monster. News before it happens.
• Diigo
• TweetMeme

I also used Read the rest of this entry »

In this guide on how to get traffic to your blog, I’m going to take you through a few traffic basics (including some important clarifications), followed by several methods that I’ve used to drive thousands of people to my sites over the years. If you’re at an intermediate or advanced level with you business, you may want to skip to the traffic strategies further down this page.

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When it comes to creating and building a business online, one factor dictates your success over all other factors…

Traffic.

Put simply, traffic is just another name for visitors to your website or blog. If you have traffic, you can start to convert some of those people into regular readers and then some of those regulars into customers.

Just before I show you how I get traffic to my blog and other sites, I want to clarify something very important when talking about traffic.

Getting lots of traffic is great, and if you were able to drive tens of thousands of visitors to your site each month, it would be hard to see how you couldn’t profit from those visitors. However, the key is to get targeted visitors.

What do I mean by ‘targeted’? Well, quite simply it means visitors who are already interested in your subject matter and who are likely to want to find out more about it. Ideally, they will be specifically interested in one particular area of your subject matter which your niche blog will inform them about.

The reason this targeting is so crucial is that they are far more likely to want to stay on your blog, become regular readers (subscribers) and sign up to find out more. They can even become customers, either of your products and offers or those you are an affiliate for.

On your travels around the internet you will see lots of services that offer to get your lots of traffic for relatively little money. The problem with them is that they are usually sending low quality (non-targeted) traffic which is largely worthless to you because they’re not qualified visitors i.e. they’ve shown no interest in your subject matter, they’ve just clicked because of some incentive or other.

So, in this guide, I’ll only be looking at how to get targeted visitors to your blog.

Before we start, I’m assuming you have Google Analytics set up on your site already. If you don’t, get it set up so you can effectively track where the traffic is coming from. Here’s where to start: Google Analytics

Part One: Targeted Content is King

You may have heard the now cliche phrase ‘Content is King’. I’ve added the word ‘targeted’ for the reasons stated above, but also because marketing that content is much easier if it’s specific in its nature.

As in my post on How To Get More Fans on Facebook, you may read what is essentially the advice ‘Write Good Content’ and wonder how effective that is. But think about this for a second. What is it about the blogs and sites you like reading that makes you want to read them and return to them in future? It isn’t the design or the photo of the blogger’s shiny head, is it?

Good content is what draws people back to the site again and again. It’s also what gets picked up by the search engines, to bring you more traffic (assuming it’s optimised correctly, of which more in a minute).

People like to share content via social media and this is another strong reason why creating and writing good content is so important.

But what do I actually mean by ‘good’ in this context?

Well, a more accurate description would be ‘content that helps, educates and/or entertains your reader’. A concept I learned from Yaro Starak about building blog content was the idea of ‘Pillar Content‘. This is simply the idea of creating strong (usually educational) articles that will become reference points for other people and will likely be shared by those people with others, who in turn will use it as reference and share it with their peer group and so on (a viral effect). If done properly, it will also be picked up by the search engines and become the reference for anyone searching for the terms you’re discussing.

There are several kinds of pillar content which include:

• ‘How To’ Articles – You take or find a concept that lots of people want or need to know and you show them how to do it. If you’re in any doubt as to the effectiveness of this idea, look at the title of the blog post you’re reading right now!
• Technical Blueprints – This is especially suited to the more technical blogs where you take people through the exact steps they need to follow to achieve something of a technical nature. It tends to be quite scientific.
• List Articles – You will have seen these all over the place, because this concept works well. For some reason we humans love a list. We like the order and simplicity it brings. Consequently, ‘The 10 Best Ways To ___________’ or ’7 Ways To ___________’ tend to be good ways to share information with your readers as it becomes easier to digest.

Personally, around 20% of my traffic to this site comes from ‘How To’ articles. The main reason is that I’ve researched the title and concept of my ‘how to’ beforehand.

Here’s how I do it: Read the rest of this entry »

If you’re in a hurry and just want to get on the list for Mark’s Ultimate Traffic Generation Summit, click here.

If you’ve been reading this blog for any time at all, you’ll probably have heard me mention the power of attending live events within the world of internet marketing, not just for the knowledge you can gain from the presentations, but also for the incredible networking opportunities it provides.

When I was getting started, one of my inspirations was Mark Anastasi (that’s him with me in the photo). He created an online business for himself after finding and following a mentor and now runs seminars showing others the way to do the same with all sorts of new media. Many of the seminars he runs combine the great stuff from conventional business and improves on it via the use of the internet. Just recently, I attended his excellent Facebook seminar and not only did I learn the skills to make Facebook a major traffic source for my business, but I also got to meet and hang out with some of the UK’s top marketers, some of whom have become friends that help me succeed.

Well, Mark is about to host a huge seminar in London that will show people who are serious about online business exactly how to drive loads of traffic to their websites.

The event is called The Ultimate Traffic Generation Summit and will be held at a hotel in central London.

Targeted traffic is one of those keys to online business. In fact, I’d even go so far as saying it’s the key to online business. Without traffic you don’t have the chance to make money.

What’s cool about the event that Mark is hosting is that they will be sharing both free and paid traffic strategies. I use both of these in my business so I’m really excited to learn how some of the speakers leveraged their money to get tons of targeted traffic.

I should mention that it won’t just be Mark sharing his tips and secrets either… Read the rest of this entry »

When you start doing video marketing, a lot of the emphasis tends to go towards making sure you have good content and that whatever screen capture software and microphone you use works for the job.

However, when it comes to actually uploading the video, you hit a slight stumbling block:

• Who’s going to view my video?
• How can I get more views on YouTube?

In many ways, this post is actually a follow-up to my 10 Top Tips For Effective Video Marketing which goes through some of the keys to making sure your video gets seen. One of the things I talk about there is keyword research, which is crucial to succeeding at pretty much anything online.

However, it’s also possible to get people to view your videos on YouTube via a few other, slightly more covert ways. You see, ordinarily you would do your research on a topic, create a compelling video and then hope that people find it. You could bookmark it and send it out on Facebook or to your list, but if you don’t have those or if you want more exposure, then check out the following (free) methods in this helpful video.

To get your free account on Twiends, simply click the following link:

http://www.adventuresininternetmarketing.net/twiends