Archive for October, 2008

One of the most powerful ways that you can drive targeted and free traffic to your web site or blog is via Articles Marketing! This is one method that I love best because it is totally free, effective and it builds credibility for you online! In terms of ROI for the time you spent on driving traffic, Articles Marketing is the best among all popular traffic generation strategies.

To put articles marketing in simple terms: this means that you write an article about a topic, submit the article to articles directories, then allows other web sites or individuals to use your article for their own use but with your author’s credits and copyrights intact so that you are still the legal owner of the article or contents that you have created.

Anyone can become an author and writer online if you want. And these are the steps that you can take to start your article marketing:

1.    Write an article on a topic that you are interested about.
2.    Find a popular article directory to submit your article to. One very popular article directory is ezinearticles.com or goarticles.com.
3.    Taking ezinearticles.com as an example, you can go to ezinearticles.com and sign up for a free account to start submitting your articles. Most article directories allow you to set up an online account for free.
4.    Upon successfully signing up for ezinearticles.com (or any article directories that you have chosen), submit your article to ezinearticles.com and wait for the editors at ezinearticles.com to approve your article.
5.    When your articles have been approved by ezinearticles.com, your article will appear on ezinearticles.com and you can reach out to potentially tens of thousands of traffic when you are being featured on ezinearticles.com.
6.    When your article appear on ezinearticles.com, many web sites or individuals/businesses will “pull” your article from ezinearticles.com and publish them on their web sites if they like what you write or if they think what you have written is relevant to what they are doing. What this means is that once you submitted your approved article to ezinearticles.com, you may potentially see many web sites all over the Internet featuring the article that you have written! What do you think this can do for you?

Articles marketing can help you to improve your visibility online and increases the likelihood of people finding you on the Internet.

Additional tips for you when you write your articles:
a)    Remember to include a link back to your web site in your resource/credit box so that you can direct traffic back to your web to collect opt-in, or to read your salesletter, or to buy something from you etc.
b)    Each article directory has their own rules and regulations for submission of articles, so ensure that you comply to all of them. Failure to do so means that your article will be rejected and you will need to re-edit the article and submit it again to ensure your compliance with their articles writing guidelines before your article will be approved.
c)    There are article submission services that can help you submit your articles to many articles directories. You can search for it online if you want to outsource this part.
d)    If you hate to write, you can also outsource your writing to some ghostwriters for a fee.

In summary, article marketing is a free, long-term strategy to generate web site traffic. To me, this is one of the best ways available to anyone because if you can do it right, you can do it only once, and get paid many times over and over again!

Another free and relatively way to generate free traffic to your web site will be the use of forums.

As you already know, a forum is an online place where you can meet like-minded individuals with interest on the same topics. Traffic to a popular forum can be a lot and this is where you can leverage onto a forum’s popularity and tap into some of those free traffic to your own site.

There are a few ways that you can ’steal’ some traffic from a forum legally.

1.    One way is to start up your own forum if you know how to.
Yes, start up a forum for yourself and attract traffic to your site. Usually, forums are targeted at certain topics and everyone in a particular forum is usually interested in the same topic. Plus the fact that traffic are usually repeated traffic, which means that a forum user will return to the same forum over and over again in order to participate in the forum discussions.

2.    Another way is to find forums that are relevant to what you are doing for your site and be a forum member there.
Signing up for a forum is usually free, so join the forum community that you are interested in and be part of the forum. Join in the discussions whenever you can and do provide useful and valuable information or advice to the forum community there. If you can build up credibility and a solid reputation for yourself in the forum, then at will even be better.

If  you are asking “Yes, I understand you, but how do I get traffic to my site from the forum?” Here are the answers (I will list down 2 common ways you can steal traffic from the forum that you are in) :

a)    Below each of your forum posting, you can include a forum signature below your post. A forum signature can often be a hyperlink to your web site or just a statement that you want to put across to your readers. Whenever someone sees it, there is a likelihood that someone may find it interesting and click on your forum signature. Most forums should allow a forum signature as many forums software allow a forum signature to be set, unless the forum owners or administrators disable this function. A popular forum discussion/thread can have many new and repeated views by forum visitors and you are exposing your forum signature to them. This increases your visibility online and increases the chance of someone clicking on it and going to your web site.

b)    The other way is to write or indicate your web site link in your forum postings. You may be asking someone to review your web site or give you some comments on your web site. Or maybe you have provided some useful information on your forum post and you can re-direct them to another web site whereby they can find more information on what you have posted. For example, the visitors may get a free report on another web site when they follow your link.

Take note that when you are doing this, be careful of what you are doing because if you are doing advertising blatantly without providing any real value to the forum community, you may be banned by some forum administrators because they will think that you are spamming their forums.

This is another free, time-tested and popular way of driving free traffic to your blog or web site.

Today, I will talk about generating traffic via blogs. Besides than posting on your own blogs to create a following of readership for your own blogs, you can actually leverage on other blogs, especially popular ones, to increase traffic to your web site.

How do I find blogs to post? Read on to find out:

There are plenty of ways to do this. I will list a few of them below (note that they are not exhaustive):

1. Go to www.technorati.com and find blogs to post based on the topic that you are in. Use keywords to search for relevant blogs that you wish to locate and post.

2. Go to blogsearch.google.com. As usual, enter keywords to search for relevant blogs that you wish to post to.
3. To find more blog directories to locate more blogs, go to google.com and enter “blog search” as your keywords and you will be presented with a listing of blog directories. You can then use this to find the relevant blogs that you are looking for!

You may be asking “What do you do at other people’s blogs?”. These are some of the things you can do when you find other blogs relevant to what you are doing:

1. You can learn to appreciate what other bloggers are writing or doing, and give your comments on their blogs to show your appreciation or feedback. Most of the time,  you will be asked to enter your name, email address and web site address. Assuming that your comments are not moderated by the blog owners, your approved comments will appear on their blogs and this gives your web site some online exposure. Imagine your comments are appearing on a very popular blog, how do you think you will benefit from their traffic?

2. If you like something that you saw on a blog, you may post some good resources in return to share with the blog owners and their community, or even your own contents that you have produced if you sincerely and honestly believe that it will be of benefit to other people as well. In my own experience, I posted a special e-report online to share with many blog owners and it was downloaded by many people online.

3. You can ask for a link exchange. If you find a similar blog to what you are doing, you can politely ask for a link to your web site. You can reciprocate by putting a link back to their blog. Doing this will be beneficial to both of you as this provides exposure of each other’s blog to the other party’s community.

Apply the above steps consistently. I am sure you will get more traffic to your web site.

Great post! That is why I love Firefox so much! It is so easily expandable!

Check out:

http://mashable.com/2007/06/19/social-networking-firefox

I will cover social networking and bookmarking sites in details later in my traffic generation series on my blog. Do bookmark my site!

Having a web site itself is not enough if no one is going to visit it. Hence, being able to generate traffic to one’s web site becomes important. There are many ways to generate traffic to a web site but the key thing to note is that you only want to generate targeted traffic. The reason is simple: Untargeted traffic is useless!

There are countless ways to get traffic to your web site. Some ways are time-tested and proven to work. Some are newer ways that sprung up along the way as the Internet evolves. With all the talks about Web 2.0, new ways of generating traffic are popping up every single day as new ideas online became popular.

What most people are interested to know about are free ways to generate traffic to their web sites. While there are paid and effective ways to get traffic to a web site, not every individual or business has the marketing budget to spend on doing paid online advertising such as Pay-Per-Click advertising etc.

The focus of this series of Traffic Generation articles will be mainly on using free methods to generate free and targeted traffic. I am writing this series of articles based on my first-hand experience of using these free methods to generate few hundreds opt-ins to my newsletters, several hundred dollars of online profits to one of my web site projects within 2 months of using them. These methods really work but the key is for you to consistently apply them and do it on a continuous basis.

If you are not willing to spend money on getting traffic, then spending your time is the next best thing to do. Nothing spectacular ever drop from the sky for any one, most of the time. If you disagree, I welcome you to prove to me otherwise, on a perpetual basis, that everything drops from the sky for you every single time.

Here are the various free traffic generation methods that I adopt. They are not exhaustive of what one can do because there are really many other ways of getting traffic:

1. Find and do postings on relevant forums (make use of your signature to do the marketing, or write it in your forum posting. However, do not do blatant advertising. This will not get you anything except bans from forum moderators.)

2. Find and do postings on relevant blogs

3. Put comments on YouTube videos. If you are more IT-savvy, create your own videos and upload them onto youtube.com. You can try Google Video as well. Remember to link back to your own site.

4. Create a MySpace.com profile and use it to gain online exposure. Post your comments on myspace videos, blogs, friends’ profiles etc. Add friends to your MySpace.com profile.

5. Find free classified ads and do your free ads posting.

6. Sign up for social bookmarking sites such as http://www.del.icio.us, http://www.simpy.com, http://www.diigo.com etc and put your bookmarks online to share with everyone.

7. Sign up for free memberships at Web 2.0 web sites such as www.stumbleupon.com, www.squidoo.com, www.thisnext.com and exploit the power of word-of-mouth and social networking/collaboration sites to drive traffic.

8. Sign up at articles directories as a writer/author, write your articles, then submit your articles to them. Get ready for your articles to be plastered all over the Internet to drive traffic to your web site.

I welcome you to apply those traffic strategies above because they work well.