Posts Tagged ‘traffic generation’

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 »

In this Facebook tutorial (which includes a video to help you), I want to share with you an aspect of fan pages that is often overlooked, but that can increase the exposure of your fan page if you do it correctly.

I’m talking about the facebook fan page url, also known as the facebook vanity url. This is the address of your fan page and the way in which people can find you on Facebook. Many people are unaware that you can optimise this in order to rank higher in the search engines using your page. Optimising the url also means that you can be found more easily and spread the word about your page more easily.

1. In order to set your fan page URL, you first need to log in to Facebook (like, duh?!)
2. Then, you need to type the following address into the the address bar of your browser: http://www.facebook.com/username. This will take you to the page that allows you to change your username on Facebook.
3. Once you’re there, select the page you want to change from the drop-down menu.
4. In the box on the right, type in the words that you want to appear after the facebook.com/ part of the address.
5. Once you’ve typed the words you want, click on ‘Check Availability’ and Facebook will see if that address is available. If it is, you can choose to permanently change the name of your page to your new URL.
6. Job done!

There are a few things to consider when it comes to changing the address of your fan page.

Here are some of the hints and tips 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.

*     *     *     *     *

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 »

As you’ll know if you follow my blog page on Facebook, I’ve grown that page to over 3100 mostly targeted fans in order to bring me some traffic each month. I’ve actually been working on Facebook for some time but only recently have I started to ramp up the way I use it to generate leads and income, largely inspired by people like Phil Henderson.

However, I’ve now started to branch out and grow several other pages in a number of different markets in order to expand the amount of income streams I have. Using methods I’ve learned both recently and over the time it took to grow this blog, I am growing the number of fans consistently and steadily. So, if you’re looking for how to get more fans on Facebook, then you’re in the right place.

Here I’m going to show you my top 7 ways to get more fans to your Facebook page, no matter what market or niche your page is in. I’ll break down each one so you can start applying them today.

One word of caution before we get started: Choose one or two of these methods and get good at them before you start on the others, otherwise you may find them overwhelming and hard to keep track of. If these methods are new to you, take your time to understand and apply them individually before combining those that work best for you.

So, with that said, on with the show!

Method One – Make Your Fan Page Title Irresistible… Then Optimise It

One of the first keys to getting lots of fans is to come up with a title that will excite people or that they will agree with without thinking about it. When it comes to marketing online, this means that you need to find a title that has the following attributes:

• It’s engaging and perhaps even a little outrageous or opinionated
• It’s keyword rich (meaning that it contains your main keywords for that niche)
• It’s specific to your market and the people you want to connect with
• It’s funny or at least amusing (humour gets ‘likes’ like you wouldn’t believe)

I’ve added the part about humour last because it’s not essential, but it does help add an extra element of attraction to your page as people enjoy humour and will like to share that humour with the other fans as well as their friends.

In order to find a page title that checks the first three features listed above, you need to do your research.

1. First of all, choose a market and then look within that market for a niche or even micro-niche. As an example, you could start with the lifestyle market, then look into relationships then drill down to the people looking to date a specific type of person (uniform dating, religious dating, sugar daddy dating, that kind of thing).
2. Research that niche using tools like the Google Keyword Tool or Market Samurai. You’re looking for ‘Exact Match’ keywords that get at least 500 searches per month on Google.
3. Choose a relatively ‘long-tail’ keyphrase (more than 4 words long) as there will be less competition for this when it comes to optimising your page (more on this later).
4. Look at other already successful pages that exist within your niche and see what their titles are. Don’t copy them word-for-word but see if you can use the basic idea and make it better, more engaging or funnier.
5. Take your chosen keyphrase and integrate it into your title, giving it an engaging twist. For example, if we continue with the dating example, the keyphrase might be ‘best place to find hot dates’ so the page could be called ‘Hotties of the World – The Best Place To Find Hot Dates On Facebook’ (you’ll be surprised what people will like).

Remember that there are currently over 500 million people on Facebook, so you’re bound to find something that appeals to a group of say, 25,000 (remember, this is a tiny fraction of the total people using the great book of Face).

The next step is to set up the page with your catchy title. If you’re still lost for a catchy title, check out the magazines or products that cater to your niche and use their catchy headlines or sub-headlines as the title for your page, ensuring that you integrate your keywords with them.

Now the goal is to get your page up to 25 fans as quickly as possible. Once you get to 25 fans, you can choose your own page address, meaning you can get facebook.com/YourKeyphrase. For example, I recently (3 days ago) set up a page for a new comedy show on the UK channel, Channel 4. My keyphrase was the show’s title and the name of the network so I got www.facebook.com/CampusChannel4.

To get your own Fan Page URL, log into Facebook then type Read the rest of this entry »