Traffic Generation Tips
November 22, 2010 by Dustman
Filed under Internet Marketing
Everyone knows the number one thing you need to be successful online is traffic to your website. Obviously, this assumes you actually have a reason for wanting this traffic. After getting the traffic you just need to convert it into subscribers and customers . . . but that’s the easy part. The important thing is getting the traffic and sustaining it.
How, then do you get traffic to your site?
Here’s a short list of great, free traffic generating methods:
- Web 2.0
- Article Websites
- Video
Let’s talk about each of these.
Web 2.0
A Web 2.0 site gives its users the ability to interact with each other and create the site’s content together. The exciting thing about Web 2.0 sites is that you get to add your own content and it becomes part of these sites. And because of the highly interactive and popular nature of these sites, Google and other search engines “index” their content regularly. Which means the content on them gets “indexed” faster and with more weight. And any links in your content that point to your own sites count as a strong “vote” in favor of your sites – lending you credibility in the search engines. This is the hidden benefit of using Web 2.0 sites. There are many more web 2.0 traffic tactics we don’t have time to get into here, but this will get you started.
Articles Sites
The natural next topic is article marketing. Article directories fall under the category of web 2.0 sites. Article directories are sites where users (including you) can upload articles they have written. And just like other web 2.0 sites, you get all the SEO benefits from having your content on them. And in addition to this, other users can take your article and place it on their own website. And in return for getting to use your content, these other users include links back to your website that gives you further search engine ranking and more free traffic. If you want to generate traffic from articles follow these steps:
- First, spend the time to determine your keywords
- Tailor the content of your article for the keywords
- Be sure to link to your site on the keywords you’ve chosen. Do this inside the article itself and in your author’s bio.
Video
And finally, we need to talk about getting traffic from videos. Here to we’re really looking at a web 2.0 sub-category. And just as article directories give you great SEO benefits and allow others to redistribute your content on their sites. video sharing sites give you all these same benefits. And if all that wasn’t enough, you also stand a much stronger chance of getting a high search engine ranking for the keywords you want with video than you do with text-based content.
OK, so how do you do effective video marketing?
- Sign up for YouTube
- Turn off all the modules in your account profile
- Add tags to your profile
- Make sure to include in your profile a link to your site
- Add at least one video to your profile
- In the title, the description and the tags for each video, include your main keywords
In closing…
If you want to get traffic to your site, then follow the advice in this article.
Membership Niche Selection Tips
November 15, 2010 by Dustman
Filed under Internet Marketing
Let’s talk about niche selection. This is very important to ensuring the profitability of your membership website.
Step 1 – Find a Fanatical Market
If you want your membership business to be profitable, you have to find a marketing with fanatics in it. Simply put, a fanatic is someone who’s willing to spend time and more importantly money on a topic they are interested in. OK, so we know what a fanatic is, but how do we find them?
- One simple idea that’s easily forgotten is to scan the magazine racks when you’re out and about. It’s becoming increasingly difficult to run a print magazine. So if you see one on the shelves you know they are making money, which means that there are enough people interested in what they’re saying to make it profitable. That doesn’t mean definitely that it will make a good membership business, but it’s a good starting point.
- You’ve got lots of opportunities every day to see what people are interested in. Just pay attention to what people talk about on the radio, at social gatherings, at the store or restaurants and anywhere in public. People generally talk about things they are interested in. And this means there may be a market for information about it.
- Don’t forget about clubs and organizations. If there are enough people to to build a club, there are certainly enough people to start a membership site on the same topic. By the same token, if enough people are interested to hold a convention on a certain topic, you can definitely find enough people to build a membership business around that same topic.
- Think about the things that you are interested in. Chances are that if you like a certain topic or hobby, other people do, too. And, as an added bonus, it’s much more fun to build a business around things you’re interested in.
- Another fantastic way to discover what people are interest in is Google Trends. Google Trends tells you the most popular current search terms. These are the things people are actively searching for in Google. They’re searching because they want information. Building a membership business around things people are actively searching for is a great way to ensure your success.
Step 2 – Determine the financial feasibility
Once you found a potential niche or topic to center your membership site around, you need to figure out if you can actually make any money in it. One way to figure this out is to see if other are making money in it.
Here’s a punch list for figuring out if anyone’s making money in your niche:
- Are there blogs or forums in this niche? Take the name of your niche and search for “niche name blog” & “niche name forum” in Google to see if there is an active group of people talking about and interested in the niche. This means there is a large group of people already assembled for you to market to.
- Search Amazon, Google shopping and eBay to see if people are creating and selling products in the niche. If other people are creating and selling products in this niche, it means there is money to be made.
- Look at Google Adwords for the same ads are running over time. If people are running the same ad over time it means they are making money in the niche. They would not continue to spend money on the ads if there were not making a return from them.
Last, but not least… How hard will it be to break into this niche?
OK, so you found a hot topic and you know other people are making money on it. Will you be able to get involved and do the same? Here’s how to make this determination:
- Figure out what kinds of products people are interested in. If it’s mostly physical products, coaching and live seminars, then it will be harder to break into this niche. That’s because it’s much easier to build a membership business around information vs. any other kind of product.
- The next thing to look at is the competition. You don’t want to try to break into a saturated marketing, so figure out how many people are already selling in this niche.
- Compare the size of the market versus the number of competitors. Some competition is a good sign – just make sure the market is big enough for you to join in.
- Market readiness. Are people ready to buy? Are the receptive to marketing messages? Some niches are made up of people who require lots information and have a very long lead time, and some markets are filled with people who will spend lots of money right now.
Putting it all together
At this point you’ve figured out what niche you’re going into. You found your fanatics, you know they spend money and you’re confident there’s room in the market for you. Now that you’ve prepared properly, you’re success is 99% guaranteed. How to actually run your membership website is the only thing left to talk about…
Traffic is King, but this comes FIRST
November 13, 2010 by Dustman
Filed under Internet Marketing
The best way to ensure your success is to build automated traffic sources to send you visitors day and night.
Before we begin
Keyword research is really the first step in getting traffic to your website. The reason this is so important is that you are going to be building content and traffic sources for specific keywords. This means it’s critical to select your keywords properly.
Here are the important considerations for your research:
- Are the keywords you’re interested in attainable? You’ll have to analyze the competition and see what’s out there for this.
- What kinds of visitors do these keywords bring? If you don’t do your research you’ll end up with a lot of traffic that doesn’t buy from you. You want to generate visitors ready to buy.
- Will these keywords bring affiliates? If you want to build a huge business, you’re going to need affiliates to help you. This means that some of your traffic focus should be on getting affiliates to your site.
Of course, this all takes time if you plan to do it yourself. Experts are expensive and don’t guarantee results. The upside is that these two factors keep most everyone from even doing their keyword research. If you’re smart you will use website traffic software to help you with this process. This way you get this critical step done fast and done well.
OK, now we can talk about traffic…
Now that you’ve completed your keyword research, you can begin using these keywords to get traffic to your website.
Here are a couple of clever ways to do this…
- Surveys
- “Answer” Sites
- Video Websites
Surveys
People love filling in surveys. And smart website owners know this, so they will include your survey on their site if you make a good one. It’s a win-win. They get a great perk on their site and you get a link back to yours. The beauty of this is that it generates website visitors for you with no work on your part. Most people think surveys are just for collecting data, but in this case you don’t even care about the answers. So, get creative and make up a survey that’s wacky to get other people interested in putting it on their sites.
“Answer” Sites
These sites, like answers.yahoo.com are filled with people asking and answering questions for each other. However, you’re interest in these sites is not to ask and answer questions. What you want to do is use these sites to generate traffic and leads for your business. One thing you can do is to visit sites like Craigslist and Yahoo! Answers and manually extract contact info to contact other users. So, if you’re smart, you’ll use website traffic software to do it all for you. These tools put the whole thing on auto-pilot and just deliver the leads to you each day.
Video Sharing Sites
Another great resource is video sharing sites like YouTube. YouTube is one of the most highly traffic and search websites on the entire internet! If you’re not taking advantage of this rich source of website traffic, then you are really missing out.
And don’t worry if you don’t have any idea of how to make a video. It’s really easy to just start with an article or something you’ve already written. Then just do a screen capture of yourself going through it. You can even get software that will automatically do this for you.
Summary
Figuring out how to get some visitors to your site is not hard at all. It just takes a little time and some ingenuity. And today there are tons of options for software tools that can help with every part of this process.
Get started right away:
- Keyword research first is key
- Next, set up a survey or two with viral appeal
- Make sure to use the “answer” sites
- Capitalize on video!
Affiliate Marketing Secrets
November 11, 2010 by Dustman
Filed under Internet Marketing
The Need to Know Affiliate Marketing Secrets
If you want to get started quickly and easily in internet marketing, then affiliate marketing Secrets is for you. What “affiliate marketing” means is that you just send traffic to someone else’s website, they handle the sales, support and billing, and you get a percentage of the sale price as your commission (usually 50% or more for digital products).
The benefits of this are
- You can start instantly with no up-front costs and no need to create a product, craft a sales letter, develop the website, create marketing materials, or set up the ordering, billing & delivery system.
- It runs on auto-pilotfor you because the product owner does all the hard work of support, maintenance and billing.
- There’s no risk for you, because the product owner has already done all the research , development and testing. So you already know that the visitors you send will result in commissions for you.
Obviously affiliate marketing secrets makes sense – these benefits make it a clear winner!
OK, but it’s not all rosy…
You work hard to send the traffic to the product owner’s website, but once you do that you will never see those visitors again. Most of them will not buy on their first visit, which means you’re losing over 90% of the traffic right off the top. The 10% or less that make a purchase now belong to the product owner. She can sell them additional products, but you can never sell to them again.
Affiliate Marketing Secrets way around this?
Simply put, you need to capture the name and email of your visitors *before* sending them to the product sales page. By getting their contact info, you can follow up increase your odds of making the sale by sending them back to the product owner’s website multiple times. And if you’re a super star affiliate, you’ll provide high-quality content before sending them to the product website.
Here’s what these affiliate marketing strategies will do for you:
- Owning a list of potential buyers gives you the ability to market additional products at the push of a button.
- You’ll be warming them up by providing valuable information and then casually linking to the product sales page in the context of this information.
In order to set a system like this up, you will need the following affiliate marketing tools:
- A lead capture page, preferably with video
- One or more content-rich “warm up” pages
- An email series with at least 5 high-quality content emails
The video squeeze page is where you’ll direct your traffic instead of directly to the product sales page. Your squeeze page adds your visitors to you autoresponder. This is how you start building your list, and at the same time begin sending them useful information. After subscribing them to your email list, it redirects them to your content mini-site.
You content mini-site builds the good will, so that when you send them to the product sales page, they are in a buying mood. And at the same time, the email series begins following up with them to get them back to the sales page, in case they don’t buy on the first visit.
Putting all of these Affiliate Marketing Secrets together will increase your sales by 500% or more, so it’s obviously worth the time and energy to do it. And once it’s set up, it runs automatically – you just send visitors to the squeeze page, instead of the product website.
One option, if you’re not up to the challenge of setting this all up yourself, is to let someone like Affiliate Silver Bullet do it for you. With a service like that, you don’t have to do anything. They make the video, build the squeeze page, write the email series, develop the content mini-site, etc. And then just give you a finished package. The benefit is that it’s much less expensive then you could do it yourself, and it’s instantly set up. One negative is that there will be other people using this same affiliate marketing system. However, the odds of you and them both finding the same visitor are so small, that it doesn’t really matter.
Alternatively, you can use a service like Elance to “outsource” each of these compnents. Whichever way you decided to go, it’s critical to get an affiliate marketing system like this in place,
