by Editor | Affiliate Marketing, Content Marketing |
Traffic is what all Internet Marketers are after. Though to be more precise, we are after targeted traffic, not just any old traffic. Targeted traffic means they are interested in what we have to offer and are therefore more likely to buy, signup or otherwise participate in our website.
Many marketers spend thousands of dollars and hundreds of hours building traffic to their websites. In some cases, the cost of traffic generation far exceeds the meager income made from the site itself.
Aside from the usual traffic generation methods, there are other Web 2.0 techniques you can use to increase your traffic.
One site, in particular, stands out with its ability to generate vast amounts of traffic very quickly.
This site is Stumbleupon.com. It is a site that has a great following and offers something for people who are bored at work or at home. The basic premise is that you find a site you think is interesting (you Stumbled Upon it) and submit it to Stumbleupon.
Visitors to Stumbleupon can look through the sites other people have found. They can vote to say they like a site, which gets it more views or says they don’t like it, which gets them fewer views.
In many ways, Stumbleupon appeals to that voyeuristic, reality TV mindset. People can see what other people are doing and vote – something which is becoming ingrained into our culture.
In order for your site to do well on Stumbleupon, it must be the kind of site that people will want to pass on and recommend. Sales letters don’t tend to do very well, but controversial or contrarian articles do. Anything that is cute, funny or entertaining will do well.
This can be an article, a video, or anything of a similar ilk. It must be something that has social appeal to your niche. You may have to think about how you can spin your content in order to give it wide-ranging appeal. It can be done though and will get you traffic.
You can Stumbleupon your site yourself, but it is better to get someone else to do the original Stumbleupon for you. This could be a friend, family or an outsourcer. They will need a set of space-separated tags plus a description and to know which category you want it placed in.
Once it has been Stumbleuponed, you need to get other people to say they like it through the Stumbleupon website. This will help to kickstart the viral effect. If you can, put a link to Stumbleupon on your website to make it easy for your visitors to say they like it.
A well-written article with wide social appeal can get thousands of visitors in a single day from Stumbleupon. It is a very powerful site that you, as a marketer, must be using. With the traffic potential from this site, you are missing out on valuable backlinks and massive amounts of traffic if you are not using it.
by Editor | Content Marketing, Affiliate Marketing |
As marketers, we are told that we should be article marketing. It is how you make money as an affiliate, it is how you promote your websites and it is how you add content to your virtual real estate empire.
Many people find article writing difficult to do because they are not used to writing. If you have the money, it can be outsourced. However, for many people starting out online, money is tight and so they can’t afford an outsourcer.
You can get articles written for a couple of dollars, but they are likely to be very poor quality. For a decent 400 to the 500-words article, you are looking to pay around ten dollars, possibly more depending on the niche and the author.
You can write the articles yourself, and it’s not that difficult to do if you follow a system. Many people suffer from writer’s block or are just not used to writing an article. It can be very daunting to sit down and write if it is something you are not used to.
Below is a system that works very well, it is one I use myself and you can be writing high-quality articles surprisingly quickly with this technique. It really isn’t that hard and it enables even the most novice of writers to create decent articles rapidly.
Step 1: Decide upon the niche you are writing in.
Step 2: Determine which keyword(s) you are targeting in your article.
Step 3: Determine the subject your article will be about.
Step 4: Type into Google some of your keywords and see what problems and issues people are facing in that niche. What do they want to know? What is their pain? What solutions are they looking for?
Step 5: Write a powerful, interest building title with your keyword at the start, if possible.
Step 6: Write out four or five short sentences about the problem (don’t give away too much … you want your reader to buy).
Step 7: Turn each sentence into more descriptive paragraphs, remembering not to give away too much information.
Step 8: Write a paragraph introducing the article at the top.
Step 9: Write a paragraph summarizing what was in the article at the bottom.
And there you have a good quality, unique article that you could spin or just submit to an article directory or use on your website. Content is king on the Internet, and unique content provides you with an edge over the competition.
This method will help you to quickly write articles, and it won’t be long before you can write a high-quality article in under ten minutes. With practice, you will be able to do them in five to seven minutes easily!
And remember the more articles you have out there, the more you can potentially earn!
by Editor | SEO, Affiliate Marketing, Content Marketing |
In today’s net-savvy world it has become common for any business to have a website which they use mostly for advertising their products and services. With the advent of search engines, it has become even easier for the customers to search for the stuff online. For a website to be successful its link should land in the first three pages which the search engine brings and the rank of the page should be high which means many visitors come to the site. This can be achieved by applying search engine optimization or popularly known as SEO. This is a marketing strategy that increases the quality and quantity of traffic flow to a particular website via search engines.
SEO not only affects the search engine results, but also image search, video search, and industry-specific vertical search engines. It determines how a search algorithm functions and searches what is popular with people. When a website link is submitted to a search engine, a spider crawls through a page to gather links that lead to other pages and stores those pages on the server of the search engine. The information collected from these pages is sent to the indexer, whose job is to extract information from those pages such as the keywords and their weights, the location of the page and other links that are stored for the spider to crawl in the future.
In the beginning, the search engine optimizer algorithms were dependant on the keywords, Meta tags, and index files provided by the Webmaster. Meta tags provided information about a particular page, but using them for indexing the pages didn’t prove to be successful as some Webmasters added irrelevant Meta tags to increase the number of hits and earn huge ad revenue. They even changed the HTML of the web pages to achieve a good rank for the page. But this was a case of abuse as it fetched irrelevant pages.
Search engines then began utilizing complex ranking algorithms, which was difficult for webmasters to manipulate so as to provide web surfers with genuine results. The rank of the web page was calculated mathematically by functions using the strength and quantity of the inbound links. The higher the rank of the page the more chances it had to be viewed by a person. Later algorithms were developed which considered various other on-page factors such as rank and off-page factors such as hyperlink. Since the webmasters couldn’t manipulate the page rank, they began exchanging, selling and buying links, which lead to link spamming and even creation of numerous sites dedicated to this purpose.
Algorithms became more complex by every passing day and top search engines kept their algorithms a secret. As the cost of SEO increased, advertisers were roped in to pay for it, which finally resulted in high-quality web pages. Although investing in SEO is very fruitful, but at the same time is risky because without any prior notice the algorithms being used are bound to change and the search engine will stop directing visitors to the page. Many consultants are available in the market that provides SEO services. They manipulate the HTML source code of the web site like menus, shopping carts and sometimes even the content of the website to draw more traffic. Search engines like Yahoo have algorithms that extract pages not according to the page rank but according to the cost per click or set fee, that is if an advertiser desires that the page containing his ad be displayed, he is expected to pay money for it. This is a point of controversy, as only the big businesses will be able to increase the number of hits of their page but not the small business who might be having a better quality page.
Google Ad Words explores ads that have words typed in the search box by the surfer. The Million Dollar Homepage started the concept of Pixel advertising, which is a graphical kind of advertising. Depending on the pixels, space is sold to the advertiser. Keyword advertising involves advertisers who buy URLs of a site and place their ads at that location. Thus SEO is a market on its own which is yielding great results for businesses on the Internet.
by Editor | Affiliate Marketing, Content Marketing, Leads Generation |
Web technologies are taking the Internet by storm. They have captured the hearts and minds not only of Internet Marketers but of their target markets too.
More and more people are using Web sites to either connect to their friends and family or to create their own hobby or fan sites.
These technologies can be extremely important in your traffic generation strategies because it allows you a method of direct contact with your target market. Done well, web technologies can provide you with thousands of visitors plus a valuable boost in the search engine rankings.
There are hundreds of Web 5.0 sites, with more cropping up every day in more focused niches. These are the sites that are of particular interest to the Internet Marketer as you have a tightly focused niche of people who would be interested in your product or services.
Of course, you can’t just walk into a Web 5.0 site and start promoting your product. Doing this will get yourself shot down in metaphorical flames. Marketers who do this quickly find themselves hounded out of the market.
When you use a web 5.0 site you have to use it like you would a list. You have to establish yourself in the niche as an expert, someone to listen to and who knows what they are talking about. Sometimes this means being yourself, other times you may have a pseudonym.
Whatever the case, you need to spend some time understanding the group and the market so that you can appeal to them in the best way. Be helpful, provide valuable information and you will soon be viewed as an expert.
Once you have established yourself as an authority figure you can easily promote your products and services as people will link your expertise with them. It allows you not only to promote your products but to promote products as an affiliate.
One word of caution is to not spread yourself too thin. Working on a social networking site to establish yourself as an authority can take a lot of your time and if you try to work on too many, you find yourself unable to do enough on any of the sites. Pick just a couple to focus your attention on, one niche site and one general site.
Another web 5.0 sites allow you to create your own websites. Some of these frown on overt commercialism, whereas others are pretty much a free for all.
This type of site is best used to push your product or information site up the search engine rankings.
You create sites on web 5.0 properties using unique content based around your keywords. You then create active links through to your own website. You do some simple promotion of these properties (pinging, social bookmarking etc) to give them some link juice, and then they will work to boost your website in the search engine rankings.
Whilst this doesn’t give you direct traffic, it will give you a leg up the organic search engine rankings. This will help to further increase your traffic. Plus, the additional benefit is each of these Web 5.0 properties will rank in their own right and get traffic, some of which will be passed on to your main site.
Web 5.0 sites are an incredible method of getting traffic. If you use them properly and spend the time on them, they can help you get thousands of additional visitors for free!
by Editor | Content Marketing, Affiliate Marketing |
Content marketing can go by a lot of different names such as private media, branded content, customer media and so on, but they are all essentially content marketing. This is probably one of the best ways to make sure your marketing is being truly effective.
One definition of content marketing is a technique of making and distributing valuable and relevant content to bring in a much-defined target audience with the overall objective being the creation of sales. Basically this is a way to reaching out to your customers and potential customers in a way specifically designed to attract them to you and keep them coming back.
Content marketing is all done without overtly trying to sell a product; it is intended to educate and inform the customers. With typical marketing, the goal is to make a sale and the product or service is the main point of the approach. Content marketing is very different from this approach and has proven to be very effective.
The idea of content marketing is to deliver consistent and useful information to the customer. In return, they will reward the company with their business and, over time, their loyalty to the brand. This form of marketing creates a bond between the customer and the company. This bond is a very hard one to break and results in ongoing business over time and a loyal customer.
Traditional marketing is becoming less and less useful as customers are able to skip commercials or change the channel on the TV. Ads in papers and billboards are not interactive and provide no real help to the customer. Pop-ups on the Internet are another way advertisers try to market their products but this can be ineffective as more and more people use their pop-up blocking tools on their browsers to avoid these invasive marketing tactics.
Content marketing breaks the mold completely and as odd as it may seem, the customer is the one who searches out the information they need. Not only do they remember where they found what they needed, they remember who provided useful information as well -and this is where the marketing comes in.
Potential customers will buy from a company they trust and feel has the same interests as they do. This is why providing helpful advice and information is so very important to this marketing strategy. Most of the time, the people reading information on a web page don’t realize they are being marketed to as they read the content.
Recent studies have shown 70-80% of people who were surveyed, felt more comfortable buying something from a company they trust. Content marketing builds trust because the customer begins to look forward to your next content installment and may make decisions based on the information given.
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