What is the point of this post you might ask?

The power of video. It really makes a statement doesn't it.

I'll be back soon with some great information on video's and other exciting web 2.0 techniques that are generating serious traffic.

Stay tuned!

I haven't actually signed up for it myself, but by all accounts it is completely free, so thought it may be of value to you to check it out.

I suggest you watch the video below then surf over to the website for more information.   I would be very interested in hearing back from you as to how you found the program.

While you on on the website, you may want to checkout some of the other articles on the website.

Disclaimer:  I am not associated with that website in any way and the link below is NOT an affiliate link (at least not from my link).

This is just a post to help out a fellow Internet Marketer (no more, no less).

The website mentioned in the blog is cash101.blogspot.com

Until next time….

Cheers

Tim

Another way to gets lots of traffic to your websites is via teleconferences. Teleconferencing is where you can have visitors call in and as group listen to your message, interviews, etc via a normal phone line.

Additionally there are also special virtual rooms on the Internet where you can invite people and the conversation occurs over the Internet rather than on the phone). I collectively refer to both these types as teleconferences for simplicity however you will note they are often referred to as Webinars (Web Seminars).

Now the thing to think about is what the teleconference will be all about, obviously it has to be of relevance to your listeners otherwise they won’t bother attending at all, so ensure your subject is one that is relevant to them and that they would have an interest in.

Perhaps an obvious thing, but you would be surprised at the number of people would assume people in a completely different market would have an interest in their particular subject (whilst it is possible that a percentage of people here will have an interest, you probably far better off targeting people with a specific interest in your market/products first).

I would recommend you not treat a teleconference as a full on selling opportunity where you spend all your time promoting your product(s) and service(s) as this will most likely turn people off. If your like me full on sales are a big turn off, and I am very unlikely to buy a product from a company doing this, particularly if this is my first introduction to their products and services.

Remember the golden rule is to ensure you have something of use for the teleconference attendee, something of value to give to them. You need to give them a reason to attend your teleconference, so ensure that you attack it from this angle.

A good example of a teleconference would be an introduction to a particular product you are using, and the problems that are solved by using the product.

In this example you would probably make the actual problem the focus of the teleconference, and talk about other possible solutions including your product.

Pick a real problem that it’s likely will be faced by lots of people with an interest in your niche market. For example in web traffic, a good teleconference could have simple premise. “Real and Practical ways to gain traffic to your Website in hours, not weeks!”.

Hmmm I must remember to use that one down the track!

Make the discussion very informative, very interesting, and actually make sure you can solve the problems you are discussing! Of course there is no reason why you can not follow up with a URL and promote your website, if your truly going to be able to solve a particular problem it can slot into the presentation quite well.

There are different options available to you in teleconferences, for example you can decide whether to have listener participation or not, whether you should charge for the teleconference, and whether you should record the teleconference and make it available to those people who missed the event.

Thinking laterally, there is no reason why you can not just record the teleconference and then sell it as a product on your website afterwards, it’s certainly been done before! Alternatively you could use the recording as a free bonus for purchases of your products, etc.

Good online conference software will actually allow you do the following: -

1. Have a password, so that only people you have invited can attend (or it could be only those that have paid for the conference, etc).
2. A mute button so that you can silence all other listeners. This is useful when you are talking to avoid other people talking over you, etc.
3. Video capability – So you can display a video, webcam image, etc.
4. Internet Browser capability – This is very useful where you can at your computer enter a URL and all the other conference attendees see that URL on their screen – This is great for presentations i.e. Powerpoint, etc where you can bring up information and show this whilst talking at the same time. This is also very useful for software demonstrations, etc.
5. Private and Public message – Private messages to a selected person, or a public message that all participants can see.

My web host, the guys from Kiosk have a product called hot conference. This product has all the above capabilities and a lot more. You can use this product for your online conferences. Setup is very easy as well.

Not only can you use it for your own online conferences, but they also have an affiliate program for it, where you can sell the “conference” solution to other people. Better yet it’s a 9-tier affiliate program. What I found particularly cool is that they do their affiliate training for hot conference (the name of their conferencing tool) using.. Yes you guessed it hot conference itself. In fact I was not even aware of this package when I first signed up with the web host.

Another good thing to note is that you get a three person conference room (maximum of three people connected at once) for free when you sign up for their web host, so this could be a good solution for you if you don’t need the ability for a large number of people to be connected at any one time.

Of course there is a multitude of options with online conferencing, another popular choice is GotoMeeting. This is more expensive than Hot Conference but is a very well known and popular option. Some of the big Internet Marketers use it.My advice to you would be to start off with the online conference tools, and try that out before deciding which way to go in the long term. It’s very important to fully test any solution you decide to proceed with before committing to it.

So what is Viral Marketing? It’s really just a method to get your message out to as many people as possible by word of mouth. In other words the idea is to spread your message much like a computer virus would spread.

“Infection” in this case though is a good thing; in this context it’s people becoming aware of you and your website.

Now the actual message can be in many formats, from an email, a video, an audio file, and more. The idea is to get people who already have your message to spread it to people they know, multiplying your message spreading exponentially.

First, let me make it very clear that I am not talking about sending Spam out to millions of people. Apart from the legalities of doing this, sending spam is just dumb, because it’s not wanted, and is certainly not going to spread is it, after all if it makes it past the spam folders and actually makes it into someones Inbox, it’s just going to get deleted when it is read isn’t it (that’s if it even gets read).

Here we go with what seems the topical phrase of all my articles, “Relevant Great Content”. Yes nothing has changed, you need to give value to people who have received your message so that a) they may want to take action with it, and b) forward it on to other people.

So how do we get people to do this? How do we get people to actually pass on your message to someone else?

First things first, it has to be something relevant and useful. In other words it has to have value (real or perceived). The person who has received your message has to believe it will give value to someone else (and/or them!) before they will pass it on.

One thing I have found in this industry is the power of partnerships; it’s a lot easier to get you message out there if you have friends in the industry with large mailing lists of their own.

Let’s say you have released a new e-Book. You currently have a mailing list of 1000 people who have expressed an interest or actually purchased something from you in the past.

Your e-Book is, of course in a related niche so you feel sure you can generate some interest in your mailing list so that is the first place to attack.

Now you do have an affiliate program in place don’t you? Read up on the details of why you need an affiliate program in the affiliate article, as this is a vital step because decent affiliates will market your product to their mailing lists and contacts, and this is the power of viral marketing!

Let’s say you have 100 affiliates and each has 1000 customers in their mailing lists. Suddenly you have leveraged on your affiliate and your message is broadcast to 100,000 people in addition to your 1000 people in your mailing list.

Taking it to the next level imagine if your affiliates have affiliates of there own, see how the numbers can grow exponentially?

Now this example is about affiliates, but there is also no reason with the right message that you can’t get your customers doing the work of the affiliates by forwarding your message on to their friends.

In these cases the primary motive is not making money, but it may be because they think your product is great and a friend would benefit from it, or they just think it’s cool and want to tell the world.

Ahhh the power of word of mouth advertising, I tell you there is no more powerful force in advertising then getting your customers telling their friends how cool, hip and fantastic you and your products are (I’m sure you’ve told all your friends about me, haven’t you?).

If you can get customers telling your friends about your product and then once they sign up they tell their friends well you can see that it will take no time at all to have a huge response to your message!

You’ll be needing to buy new servers for your website because the old one has melted with the overwhelming traffic you have received (did you like how I got a reference to my website in between the valuable content?).

Ok Tim, I hear you saying I get the message that this Viral stuff may be handy, but how can I actually use this stuff on my site.

Well firstly, a great technique I used is included in with the master Mike Filsaimes Butterfly Marketing product this has Viral Software included for people who can easily pass on information about your site to other people. They actually automatically get a box to enter friends email addresses, etc.

Pretty well no other method will get you more traffic than Viral traffic because let’s face it, Viral traffic is effectively word of mouth advertising (assuming you have set it up properly). Some of the coolest sites on the Internet exist and grow in member sizes every day due to these techniques.

The human mind thinks in pictures, so a good video will “stick in the mind” of people generally, particularly if it a little “out there” and different to some of the boring video “sales pitches” that are easy to find online.

Of course the Video should offer relevant and useful content to the viewer as well, so make sure that it is interesting and fun to watch as well as being relevant.

Having relevant, great quality, and useful content is vital to your online success.

If your website is all about dog training, and the video you produce is about computers, well your probably not going to get a great response are you? Unless you happen to be selling a method to train dogs to use computers, in which case that would be a great idea! Showing a dog “typing” on a computer!It’s vital that you provide relevant, and useful content and give the viewer a reason to take action (hopefully visiting your site).

Once they get to your website (assuming the video is posted on YouTube or another video content sites) then your other marketing methods kick into gear. Obviously you can also place Video on your website in which case it’s more of an “added-value” to keep the visitor on your website. That said more and more Internet Marketers are “getting” Video.

The use of Video includes things like uploading content to youtube.com (you have heard of them, right? Google paid $1.3Billion dollars to purchase the company!). Every man (and his dog) is uploading video content to YouTube, so why not you?

Now if you not as good looking as me, don’t worry you can still make a successful video. You see the video doesn’t necessarily need to show you in the picture, it could be a PowerPoint presentation, a web page presentation, or demonstration of some software.

What you are trying to do with Video is capture the interest of the viewer. You need to make a connection with him/her so that they are hopefully interested enough to visit your website in the future, or stay at your website to find out more information.

Now I know my good looks and pleasing personality and lovely Australian accent make me an enticing easy sell to viewers, but if your not fortunate enough to possess all these traits don’t despair!!

All jokes about my “good looks” aside take a look at some videos (do a search on google for 50 million hits, and see if you can find me on page 1!)

If someone like me can produce something like that, then surely you can. Maybe you actually found my website from a video. If so, how’s that? Proof that video works that’s what!

And if not, remember this. Youtube alone has tens of thousands of videos played EVERY day, think about the number of people who are visiting that website, that’s a lot of people, and because people can search by category they can find your video.

Don’t ignore a potential goldmine here! Part of being success as a marketer on the internet means you need to ensure your grabbing as big a share of traffic as you can. It doesn’t make any sense to ignore this market does it? In fact it doesn’t make sense to ignore any traffic strategies (within reason) does it?

Camtasia is the product that I use for all my video presentations, and it is so simple to use and easy to setup, you just can’t go wrong. About the only thing I can complain about is that there is not a mac version.

If your interested in Video on your website but the price of Camtasia is a little too much for you, consider Easy Web Video (the name of the product).

It's a simple way to get Video on your website in next to no time!I also have a real video recorder that I use from time to time, it just takes a little investment of time to find out about the technology (how to convert file formats, etc) but once you have that information, your good to go.

Camtasia has the ability to link into a webcam, which really makes it a neat solution. In fact that is how I did the Video on the front page.

Now the next problem you may face is uploading videos to the various video services. Like search engines they are many video websites, and it can take some time to individually upload videos to each site, ensure they are working, etc.

I found, in my online travels a very useful video service. This one is not a website, but an actual software product. Unfortunately the package is not free, but the good thing about it is that it will allow you to upload your videos to multiple sites quickly and easily and automatically by using the software on your desktop.

Check out Video Upload Pro.

Of course, you don’t need to use automated software; you can still do it yourself, but keep them in mind if you find that you are wasting lots of time doing manually what could be done automatically.Hopefully I have convinced you that you need to be using video content on your website. It's a fantastic web site traffic promotion.

One of the things I see lots of Internet Marketers doing is putting their full focus on Google and their search engine rankings, to the exclusion of all other search engines.

At first glance this makes sense because Google do have by far the largest market share i.e. more people use Google for finding what they want on the Internet than any other search engine.

However because more people use it, more advertisers are drawn to it and advertise with Google, so this often brings more competition, and more cost to advertise.

Have you ever considered focusing on some of the less prominent search engine? Or at least putting some focus on them?

Yahoo and MSN are two examples of search engines that still get a considerable number of people using them (obviously not to the level Google does) however, it some cases I have researched there is little and if your really lucky no competition for paid advertising with these search engines in particular niches.

That’s right, it is possible to be the only paid advertiser for a given niche. Of course this can change at any time, and people will get savvier about this as the word gets around.

Imagine if you can get your website listed prominently in these search engines result pages, but also advertising your website using their paid advertising!

Now you will obviously want to ensure you’re also using Google, and focusing on getting good rankings in their search engines results, but don’t ignore these other search engines.

One thing I tell people is to try and bring in as much traffic as you can from as many sources as possible.

I mean would you be happy with 1000 visitors to a day when it quite possibly to increase this by 100% or more by using some of the other traffic sources outlined on this website?

You want as many visitors as possible, don’t you. Sure you want them to be targeted and qualified visitors, and not just random people surfing by (unless you have a fantastic product that everyone in the world would want). If you have such a product let me know, I’d probably want to invest in your company!.

It just takes a little vision to expand your horizons. I tell people to spend some time looking at the larger picture and working out where you want your website to be. Always focus on what your site is or looks like from a visitor’s perspective. Great content that is relevant to the visitor will ramp up your sales in no time flat!

Make sure you look into other search engines, there could be a gold nugget just waiting for you to come along and mine!

There are websites that provide questions and answers for a huge variety of subjects. This is a goldmine of information just waiting to be used.

A user on one of these Question and Answer web sites can submit a “question” on a particular subject and other users of the Question and Answer web site can provide answers to it and the answers can be voted on (and then sorted by) relevance (more votes meaning more relevance). All the responses can be viewed online.

These Question and Answer web sites can generate you great amounts of traffic if you can answer questions in your area of expertise (it goes without saying that you need to ensure that your answering Questions that are related to your particular niche on the Internet).

Yahoo have a Question and Answer website that offers a complete question and answer service and it’s very useful to use to get your name out there and known to people.

You do certainly need to be careful about what you post. Don’t expect to be able to just post a URL and get masses of traffic, you will find your “answer” voted down or even removed if you do this.

As I have mentioned numerous times, providing great quality and relevant content will be far more valuable. Actually helping people out (by answering their question) will show you to be an “expert” in your market in no time flat.

The rules generally specify no “soliciting”, so answer the question and help someone out, with a detailed answer and then add a reference to your website for people to follow up for more information.

The other great reason to use Question and Answer sites (particularly Yahoo given that Google is not accepting new questions and answers) is that lots of websites syndicate the questions and answers for content on their website.

As I mentioned above, Questions and Answers can also appear in search engine results. Of course the other benefit is that users of the question and answer sites themselves will get to your website from reading your responses.

Personally in my experience I treat the answering of questions as building up a presence on the Internet rather than a source of huge traffic to my websites, however it is certainly something that should not be ignored.

With that said, I believe it can be a great “return on investment” where for a relatively small amount of time invested (to answer questions) you can get a steady trickle of web traffic.

One of the most untapped areas in web traffic is the use of online press releases.

A press release in this context is effectively a short attention-grabbing article you write and submit to popular press release web sites. These websites then syndicate your content to many other sites and other news feeds, spreading the message dramatically and in many cases generating huge traffic for your website.

For a discussion on offline press releases please read the offline advertising article, which goes into significant detail about all things you can do offline to increase your overall web presence.

The cool thing about press releases is that they also get picked up by the search engines, and can bring you traffic time and time again in the future.

Why is this important I hear you asking? Generally the search engines rate the major press release websites highly and index their contents (and thus your press articles) very often, often numerous times in a day! This gives you a one-way link from a quality site (read up on one-way links in another article on this Website.

In the case of new websites, issuing a press release is in my opinion essential because it will get your website indexed by the search engines very quickly.

More to the point, a press release you have submitted to the various press release websites may well rank higher in the search engines that your actual website itself, while you are building up your rankings for your website so it’s a great way to gain exposure quickly and efficiently (people can visit your website from the link in the press release).

One of the most popular press release websites is P.R. WEB so I would recommend you start with this site.

Now be prepared to pay in some cases, because not all press release websites are created equal. Whilst it is possible to find free press release sites, chances are that you are not going to get anywhere near as much traffic from these sites as you would from the major ones, so I would suggest you focus on these first and then move on to the other sites once you have done that.

Remember Search Engines love great content, and search engines love press releases. Believe me when I say press release sites are spidered (indexed) very frequently by the search engines.

So you have decided that you want to use a press release for your website. What should you actually write about in the press release?

Another interesting question. Thanks for asking. The contents of the press release depends on what you are trying to achieve. No surprises there, right?

Firstly it has to be attention grabbing, as does any article to grab the attention of the reader, and the actual content, should be relatively short sweet and to the point, with a call to action. That is, to give the reader the urge to actually click your link in the press release to visit your website.

You don’t want to be wallowing in self-promotion and telling everyone how good you are (they will find this out soon enough when they visit your website). Rather, you want to convince them that they should be visiting your website, and that there is a benefit to them (the reader) of doing so, and that they should do so right now!

You should write your ad for the “press” because the “press” will be the people who will initially read your release and determine the relevance of it, and how hard they “push it”.

If they see a benefit to a reader in the article it makes sense for them to promote it because more people will be interested in the press release and their website also benefits as a result (from visitors reading your press release because the press release is actually stored on the press release website).

For example, if your releasing a new eBook on Web Traffic, then perhaps a heading like the following

How To Grab A Massive Surge in Visitors To Your Web-Site Today

And then in the sub-heading and body of the text you would outline what you are specifically offering (but at a high level, because they will get all the specific information they need when they visit the page, won’t they?). Remember this is effectively a “pre-sell”. All we are trying to do with a press release is to get your name or product or service “out-there” and to get people to actually click through to visit your site, where hopefully you have done a superb job of convincing them that you are the site they have been waiting to visit for their entire life (that, or at least to have them think you are worth their time in “poking around” your site for a look-see).

In my opinion you should never delete your press release because leaving it online means it will always be a source of traffic for you, and perhaps more importantly if someone stumbles upon your press release in the future and it is outdated, it can actually work in your favour and give you credibility because it shows your website has been online for some time.

Some ideas for a press release include: -

1. Launch of a new site
2. Launch of a new product
3. A new addition to the site, for example you may be extending your site to including coaching to your customers.
4. A major new event in your life – e.g. forming an association with a key industry figure, a new seminar, etc

The list is endless. Remember that your press release needs to be relevant to the reader and not just a hard sell if you truly want to maximise the traffic to your website.

Give the reader a reason (and a darn good one) to visit your website, make them compelled to get to your website.

What about if you think you will have difficulties writing a press release?

Well firstly you shouldn’t think like that because writing about yourself should not be that hard, should it? Let’s face it, if you write a press release and it does not work as well as you expected, just write another one! You will get better at doing it the more you practice.

If you really don’t want to do it, or are looking for ways to outsource this type of stuff (and outsourcing is a great leverage tool) freeing you up to do other things, then some of the press release sites do offer the ability to write a press release for you.

Obviously this would be at an extra cost but you just give them the basic information, pictures, etc and they will put a press release together for you. Prweb offers this as an option for an additional $100 (when I last checked their website) and that’s not bad value. As part of the process they will call you to discuss exactly what you are after.

In summary, don’t ignore press releases they can provide great levels of traffic as soon as the press release is released and then in the future via the search engines.

Here is another fantastic way to get your name “out-there” and get people visiting your website.

PodCasting!

Podcasting is Audio (and/or Video) that you create on your computer (or via other means, and then load into your computer) that you then share and allow other people to listen and/or view.

There are large numbers of Podcasting sites that allow you to upload your audio or video presentation, and then attach a description and information about the presentation. Once this is done, people who visit these podcast sites can “find” your podcast and hopefully if it is interesting enough to them, they will subscribe to your “feed” (similar to a mailing list, but for audio/video) and then be automatically notified whenever you release a new audio or video.

Now generally the “feed” is not controlled by you (unlike a regular mailing list) but rather is controlled by the podcast directory and a podcast “reader” which is software (often free) that you can use to automatically check whether new content is available for your selected “feeds” and to then get downloaded automatically.

You can then watch or listen to the downloaded presentation at your leisure, copy to your iPod, etc. It’s really pretty cool.

One of the biggest names in PodCasting is iTunes. You’ve probably heard of iTunes and wondered what it is. iTunes is software that is supplied by Apple (the Mac people) that you can download for free and it will manage all your podcast “feeds” as well as your music and video collection on your computer, and even allow you to buy music (and podcasts) via it’s iTunes store.

Apple have versions of iTunes for both Windows and Mac and it is completely free to download.

Now iTunes is big business, ten of thousands of people download stuff from it every day, so this is probably the first site you want to try and get your podcast listed on.

But I’m getting ahead of myself, first things first, lets discuss what you could be putting into the audio / video.

If your like me, and have a great face for radio, don’t despair. You don’t necessarily need to produce video content, audio is perfectly acceptable for many subscribers, as it’s something you can do (listen to) anywhere (although with video iPods available these days this is also true for Video).

First and foremost you presentation should be adding value to your listeners/viewers. A hard sell sales presentation won’t be worth much to listeners/viewers (at least probably not to those who’s first experience of you is via the audio/video), rather it should be quality relevant content that will appeal to listeners with an interest in your niche market.

Bear in mind that it’s highly likely that when you upload a presentation for inclusion in iTunes, it will be reviewed manually by a human, and if it’s just a hyped up call to action to buy something chances are they may not approve it for inclusion. And even if they did approve it, listeners are going to be turned off when they hear it especially if you have not previously built up a relationship with them.

I suggest an interview is a great idea for a podcast. Put together a set of questions and answers to common problems that you “solve” on your website, and have some one interview you. Save the audio and upload to iTunes!

Another idea (once you get a few podcasts completed) is an overview of your product or services, but again not a hard sell, but a detailed list of what you can do or case studies on how you have helped other customers previously.

Just remember it needs to be interesting to listen to, so make sure you target it to your customers needs and to be solving problems that your potential customers may be facing.

You may find iTunes will want a series of podcasts before adding you to their directory, so it would be wise to do 2-3 podcasts if possible and then submit them for inclusion as a group.

If you plan to host your podcasts yourself, be very careful and consider if you have another bandwidth to do so, particularly if your feeds get picked up by lots of people.

Because of the nature of podcasts (audio or video) the files can end up being huge, so It’s very important that you plan this out in advance as you may find once you get successful and have a reasonable number of people listening to your podcasts, that you will be putting your server in meltdown and be running out of quota. This could mean your ISP shuts down your website!

Don’t be victim to this, plan for growth on day 1, and assume you are going to be successful and put the right steps in place so you have sufficient bandwidth when things take off.

Either put all your efforts into getting listed in iTunes or other large Podcast sites, or if your going to do it yourself, invest in a reasonable PodCast hosting company who specializes in Podcasts.

A decent alternative to iTunes for hosting your iTunes (especially if your have trouble getting iTunes to actually accept your podcasts is a company called Liberated Syndication. I suggest you check out their website, they are one of the best out there, and give outstanding value for money and in some cases it’s free.

Remember all podcasters had to start somewhere, and some of the bigger ones actually have paid advertising now (where sponsors pay the podcaster for an advertisement to be placed in the podcast). This could end up to be a really nice little money earner for you as well as provide great value for your listeners.

If you have a particular interesting in making search engine company investors extremely happy by paying endless amounts of money to the search engines companies, then Pay Per Click (PPC) can be a great way to go.

Just joking guys, PPC is one of the staples in relation to web traffic on the Internet and is a very quick and easy way to get visitors to your site (though you do need to take care that you watch the amount you spend, and set daily limits, etc).

For those readers who are not familiar with PPC, essentially it’s the process whereby the search engines will present your short ad to people using the search engine (on the results page when the results of the users search are displayed).

Usually the ads are shown to the right hand side of the page, but in any event they are usually shown separate from the “normal” search engine results.

You pay for each click a user makes on your ad (no clicks means you have nothing to pay). Usually your ad when clicked would navigate to your website, but sometimes it may be to an affiliates website if you are selling other peoples products.

So in one sense, only paying per click is a good thing, because in theory people clicking your ad have some interest in your product or service, so they come to your website more qualified that a person who may just have happened to surf by.

You really need to spend time thinking about what phrases people would use to get to your website.

You don’t want to be taking chances with this. You don’t want to assume you know which keyword phrases are used by people wanting your websites (or more correctly, the keyword phrases people are using to find solutions to the particular problem they are trying to solve). We really want to know for sure that the keyword phrases we use are correct for your particular market.

In fact I am constantly surprised by some of the phrases people use when searching. Spelling mistakes are common, abbreviations are often used, punctuation can be used inappropriately, etc. The good news is that there are a number of things you can do here.

Firstly you could do some experimentation with the search engines yourself and use all the keyword phrases you think should be used to find products in your niche. Just go to the search engine and type them in and take a look at the results. Are the sites that are returned relevant to your niche?

In other words if you positioned yourself in that area would people searching in those categories find your websites content relevant (it goes without saying that you have great content, right?).

If the answer is yes and you think you would find it relevant, jot down the keyword phrase.

Also take a note of the number of sponsored links (advertisers) usually listed on the right or top of the search engine results (usually it explicitly mentions they are sponsored links). The actual number is important because too few could mean that perhaps the keyword phrase is not commonly used (but it could also mean you have found a golden nugget, that is a particular keyword phrase that is being used but not being actively targeted by Advertisers).

Too many sponsored results may mean the keyword phrase is heavily used and it may be expensive to get your sponsored links working (but again this could be a golden opportunity for you).

In general the search engines put the sponsored link that has bid the most money at the top of the list, so a quick way to ensure your up front is to pay the most (and bid more than your opposition).

However bear in mind as well, that the search engines also sort-sponsored links by the click through rate (CTR), in other words the number of times a sponsored link is clicked versus the number of times it is shown on screen in search engine results.

A sponsored link with a higher CTR indicates that more people are clicking that link, and you will find a sponsored link with a high CTR will rank higher in many cases that other sponsored links even if they have bid less money. So it is possible to have your cake and eat it to (or in this case to bid a smaller amount and have you sponsored link appear higher than your competitors who are paying more for their ad’s than you are!).

Of course to do this (get a higher CTR than other sponsored links) you need to draw attention to your ad, so your content (ad) must be more compelling than your competitors. Given the lack of space in these ads you need to be really creative to get your link clicked on more often than your competitors (even if your happy paying more than your competitors per click).

The number one sponsored link is not always going to be clicked more often than other ads, especially if it does not give the person moere of a reason to want to click it, than the ads near it.

Whatever you do, don’t just set-up a PPC campaign and leave it unchecked. Even if your having some success, make sure you go into the campaign details by logging into the search engine website for PPC marketers, and then check out the stats regularly to see how you are going because things can change very quickly as new competitors come into the marketplace.

You need to be continually checking your keywords, CTR’s of your ads, and fine tuning and tweaking to run things optimally. I am not suggesting this needs to be on a daily basis, but it just depends on your particular campaign and your market.

This is probably a good place to discuss link tracking on your website.

You can purchase software that gets installed onto your website that makes it really quite easy to see the traffic coming to your website and where it originates. It’s a good idea to do this to work out how much traffic your getting from your various sources (PPC, free Google search, press releases, etc).

The other reason why you want to be checking your ads frequently is that over time you will certainly find some ads performing better than others. You can see at a glance the CTR of your various ads, but also with link tracking it’s possible to work out the ads that are actually making you money (people are actually buying off the ad in higher proportions to other ads).

PPC is a fantastic way to get instant traffic to your website, just make sure you are doing your sums and keeping track of your expenditure and of course checking your ads regularly as well as what your competitors are doing and offering.

This article discusses paying other websites for the privilege of sending people to your website.

Note that Pay Per Click (PPC) the process of paying the search engines to list a sponsored link to your website in search engine results is such a large topic that it has it’s own article on this Website.

Now you may feel some reluctance to pay for advertising, and like any expense you should ensure it’s relevant and worthwhile to what you are trying to achieve.

It’s also critical that when paying for web traffic that you ensure you know your statistics.

You need to know the number of click through's you are getting for a particular ad in order to gauge its effectiveness.

If your not actually tracking these statistics in some meaningful way they you have no way to determine if the paid traffic is providing a return on your investment. In other words you need to know exactly how many people are visiting your site by clicking the link on the site you paid advertising on.

This is one of the areas where I see a lot of people fall down, they make the decision to buy some advertising space from another website (or mailing list) and then do not track the effectiveness of it. How can you measure the effectiveness of an ad if you are not keeping statistics? (hint… You can’t!).

This is where decent ad tracking software comes into play, what you can do is set-up a new tracking link for each and every paid ad you set-up, so that you can know with certainty the amount of traffic you are receiving for it. Because each paid ad has a separate tracking link you know with certainly how many clicks you are getting on the link, and this gives you much more power as you have some real statistics you can use to gauge the effectiveness of each ad you pay for.

Now before we go into more detail, lets discuss the type of traffic you can buy, and discuss the pros and cons of each type of paid traffic method.

Banner Ad’s on Competitors Websites

This can be a great way to leverage visitors from another sites traffic. Usually you pay a fixed fee per month for the banner ad and it’s displayed for a full month on the website.

Depending on the amount of money you pay, it may be a fixed ad, or may be mixed in with a number of other ads and displayed on a rotational basis (e.g. visitor 1 is shown ad 1, visitor 2 is shown ad 2, etc).

Other options may include paying for a fixed number of impressions. E.g. 10,000 impressions would in theory mean that your ad would be displayed for 10,000 visitors to the website.

It’s very important that you choose your websites to buy ad space on very carefully. Obviously you want to ensure the website has products or services related to your particular niche, and that the website does have good number of visitors.

Usually when you approach the website the webmaster can give you some statistics on how many visitors they get per day on average, etc. If they can’t provide you some real life statistics I would suggest you pass on using that website.

Using various tools it is a relatively simple matter to determine how relevant the website is in the search engines.

Traffic web sites.

Another method of paying for web traffic is traffic websites. These are websites that you pay some form of membership fee to, and they then guarantee to send you a number of visitors. Sounds good in theory, and there are many good sites out there.

Remember that in general you don’t want just any type of traffic, rather, you want qualified targeted traffic.Which would you prefer 1,000,000 people arriving at your website with absolutely no interest in your product? Or 100 people who have an interest in the exact products you are selling?

I’m sure you will agree targeted traffic wins out over sheer volume any old day. You need to ensure the traffic website you sign up with does allow targeted traffic.

Also be wary of some of the less reputable sites that guarantee traffic to your website, as sometimes they achieve this by using automated computer software. It may appear that you have received the traffic (and your web logs may confirm it) however it is all traffic generated by a computer, meaning a human has not visited your site. Result? No sales, and a waste of money.

Use reputable companies to ensure you don’t get burnt. If you see a super duper offer offering a million visitors for $1 it’s probably too good to be true!

General tips

Some general tips for any type of paid advertising.

1. Ensure your ad is of interest to and relevant to the visitors/readers.

There is no point advertising on a website or paying for an ad in a mailing list where visitors/readers have no interest in your website, most of the time you will be wasting your time as well as the visitors/readers. You will also be wasting any money you have paid for the advertising.

2. Do your sums to determine what you are trying to achieve – Weigh up the cost of the advertising, vs expected click throughs and profit. What is your break-ever point, how many sales do you need to make to break-even.

3. Use decent tracking software for every ad so you have the information at
your fingertips on how many people have connected, etc.

Check out Pro Track Manager, it is a fantastic product that I use myself and recommend.

You will be absolutely blown away by the features of this package and exactly what it can track. It can even track where people are leaving your website from, easily highlighting web pages you may need to work on some more.

Yes Online Classified Advertisements can be an effective method to generate real and substantial traffic to your website!

You may have read that online classified ads were dead or just a place where spammers live, but I am here to tell you they are alive and kicking. You just need to use the right classified websites (no surprises there).

Still don’t believe me? Well what if I told you that eBay, the premier and largest auction site in the world has launched Classified Ads as part of their service? Getting interested yet?

They offer full multimedia options (video and audio) as well as regular text/html and are happy for you to link out to your website and show an email address (all of this stuff is not available with regular eBay auctions, well at least not if you want to avoid potentially getting your auctions closed down).

I’m sure you will agree that eBay would not launch a new service unless they felt they could make money out of it (and lots of money!).

And heres the kicker, search engines absolutely love eBay and you can be confident that your link will be found by the search engines very, very quickly (and you site indexed/re-indexed in next to no time).

Thinking laterally you could use this to launch a website and get your website indexed in a day or so by the search engines. Contrast that with how long indexing can take with using other methods (weeks and months in some cases).

Now because it’s relatively new, only certain categories with eBay currently allow Classified Ad’s but you can be sure this will grow over time.

The great thing about them is that you pay a fixed price for the classified ad to have it listed for around a month (or you can define a shorter period). Potential customers fill out a form on your classified ad page and the details are forwarded to you.

Alternatively you can have a link to your sales page and the customer can navigate directly there.

Of course eBay is not the only classified Ads site, pretty well the biggest site for classified Ad’s is craigslist.org (incidentally eBay owns a 25% stake in this company).

Craig Newmark (the owner) started the site in San Francisco (indeed when you surf over to craigslist.org you start off in this area).

However it has grown to include all states in America, as well as many countries including Australia, Canada, Mexico, Sweden, the UK and many more.

Once you hit the website you can easily select the area you want to focus on.

Millions of people use craigslist.org EVERY day so this is a huge opportunity for you, and the really cool thing is many posts are free! There is a charge for job postings in some areas, but a lot of the site is free.

Again thinking laterally if you find out a classified ad in a particular location is not free on Craigslist, then try another location, you should eventually find a free one.

Now don’t think you are going to be able to do one classified ad on Craigslist and post it in every location or serve it up for everyone to see, it doesn’t work like that. And if you start posting the same thing over and over to multiple areas of Craigslist the ad will get pulled.

So you need to be smart about this. Remember I have harped on and on about relevant great content?

No differences to be found here, make sure your post is giving useful content and relevant information, and that it’s posted in the correct location/section of craigslist.org.

If you’re selling computer equipment don’t post it in Beauty Services (even if you think your computer is a beauty like mine is).

Now duplicate content is frowned upon and will likely get your Ad’s deleted, but that’s not to say you can only post once.

Post to multiple areas by all means, but mix your content up and make it different. Although you can probably get away with just changing the subject and reposting, it’s far better to actually change the main text as well, so that if a potential customer reads both your classified ads they wont see them as the same classified ad and report you (in which case both classified ads will likely be deleted).

Most of Craiglist classified ads stay online and available for up to 45 days, so you get great value in leaving them up. And just like eBay, the search engines love Craigslist as well, and you will find your website is indexed VERY QUICKLY after you post.

Craigslist has some important posting rules you need to be aware of, so be sure to read the help section so you know exactly what the rules are.

Make sure the link you are displaying actually works, if your showing an email address, make sure it’s live, and that you are checking it regularly.

The good thing about Craigslist is that unlike most other classified Ad websites, they place NO LIMIT on the space you can use for your ad, so get creative, get your text rich and compelling and get people pumped up to click your link and find out more about you.

Now we have discussed eBay Ads and Craiglist, as to me they are two most important places you want to be listed, but there are literally thousands of other classified ad websites you should consider.

There is even software out there that you can buy that will automatically post your ad to hundreds of classified ads (although I personally don’t use software like this).

If you have any experience in a particular product please drop me a line, and I’ll incorporate your findings in a future version of this e-Book to benefit all readers.

Don’t ignore classified ads, they can dramatically increase web site traffic.

The search engines look very favorably on websites that have an incoming link from a prominent website, where that website does not link back to the other site (This is not surprisingly called a one way link). It's also known more commonly as a backlink.
The search engines as a rule give less importance to a website involved in two way linking (where both websites link to each other) since this has been abused so much in the past by webmasters seeking to achieve high search engine rankings.

There is still a benefit with two way links especially if you are linking to a prominent site so if your only choice to link to a prominent website is by linking back to them from your website, by all means do it. Just remember if you can get them to link back to you only (one way link) it will be more beneficial to your search engine rankings.

Remember that the website you are linking to (or getting one way links from) should have content related to the content on your website.

One way links are far and away the best way to boost your rankings in the search engines, ultimately bringing you more traffic as more people find your website in the search engine results.

The more “important” (from the point of view of the search engines) the site that is linking to you is, the better, and this is what separates the men from the boys in relation to search engine rankings.

One good way to get the ball rolling is to submit articles to article directories (see the Articles Directory article for specific information). The key here is to make sure the article directory you are submitting has itself got a good page ranking with Google.

It’s very important to ensure that your one-way links have related content to your site. Even if it’s coming from a high ranking page, if your incoming link is from a website selling cars, and your selling flowers on your website, it’s unlikely to help you much. If however your site was all about car tyres then the link would be far more likely to provide a benefit to you in search engine rankings.

The more one-way links you can get from relevant, trusted (in the eyes of the search engines) and quality content sites the better. Remember that a single quality one way link will probably provide more of a benefit to your website than be 20-30 low quality links (un-trusted, sub-quality, not entirely relevant content to your website, or combinations of these problems).

The other thing you will definitely want to do is to mix-up your anchor text from these one-way links (Anchor text is the text shown on screen for a link to your website).

Wherever possible you will want to try and control what is in the anchor text on these sites (obviously this will not be possible some times because it’s not your website, however I’ve found many web masters are happy to help).

You definitely don’t want to have the same anchor text for many incoming links from many websites as this can set a red flag to the search engines, who may well rate your website less importance because they believe you may be manipulating the results (I’m not saying that the anchor text for every one way link needs to be unique, just that you should ensure you have a number of combinations of them in use).

You want to have your best keyword phrases in use with your incoming links, but use a lot of variation and even just some regular links (just your domain name in the anchor text) will help keeping things natural.

The other thing you want to do is be sure to not always link to your root directory of your website, but rather directly to articles, etc. This allows your incoming link to be targeted for a particular page.

For example with overwhelmingtraffic.com I have submitted articles to various article directories that are a subset of a more comprehensive article. In this case I’ve chosen to link from the article directory article direct to the more compressive article on my website. I’ve also ensured that the article is not just a duplicate, since search engines dislike duplicate content and will mark down your websites importance if duplicate content is found.

Of course one way links to your website will not only boost your website’s search engine rankings, but it will also bring traffic to your site.

Start slowly and build up the links over time, you will find your likely to get far better results doing it this way, and that it’s also more likely that your great search engine rankings are likely to “stick” in the future.

An area you may not have considered being a source of decent traffic is offline advertising.

By offline I am talking about newspapers, business cards, trade journal magazines, etc.

This can be an excellent niche for your website if used properly, although you need to ensure you do your sums with this method quite carefully because the costs can be quite high, and it is easy to lose a lot of money if your not careful.

What you want to do is have a think about where your customer base hangs out when they are not online, what they read, etc.

It can be incredibly beneficial advertising your products offline, because most of your online competition is probably not doing it. To me this is just screaming “untapped market” !

To start the process, research popular trade magazines, periodicals, newspapers (specifically if there is a regular “section” for your niche market in a particular newspaper, etc).

For example, if your product is computer related, many newspapers have a computer “section”.

If you take the time to do this, you will find a number of areas where potential customers can be found.

Now, of course the process is a lot more complicated for offline ads since there is no simple method of clicking a link to get to your website.

Rather, they have to read your ad, find your link, remember it and/or write it down, and then get to the computer and find the piece of paper and/or remember your link and type it in. In today’s fast paced world with most people having a million and one things on their minds it’s not an easy ask, so you need to make it as easy as possible for your potential customer.

Firstly your URL needs to be as small as possible, to reduce the chance of a typo, but also to make it stand out.

Which one of these links stands out for you?

http://joebloggs.com/affiliates/make-me-mega-bucks/overwhelmingtraffic

Versus: -

http://dollarsonline.com/special

I am sure you will agree the 2nd URL would look a lot better for the potential customer. You may ask why not just make the URL getmore.com instead of the special? The reason for that is tracking.

Because of the investment required, you need to make sure when investing offline, that you carefully track the number of visitors arriving on your website. Probably the best way of doing this is to have a unique URL that you only use in a particular type of offline ad, and that is not linked from your normal website. E.g. Other parts of your website should not link to this URL (although it would obviously be ok for this URL to link to other parts of your Website).

By adding a subdirectory to the URL, it can give you an easy way to track the response for a particular ad or type of promotion. e.g. the /special in the above example.

lternatively you could have used a subdomain as follows: -

http://special.dollarsonline.com

Tracking where your customers arrive from is always important (we discuss this in future chapters in more detail) but in this case it’s imperative for you to know where they came from so you can make decisions in the future about where to best spend your offline advertising budget i.e. which offline ads are generating the best response.

I recommend the following with each campaign

1. Have a unique URL for each campaign or type of offline ad
2. Have a special offer to the potential customer that is only available if they go to that exact URL.
3. To ensure that the URL you specify is not linked to from other pages on your website (and thus not indexed by the search engines) so you can make a special offer if required to those people (and only those people) who visit that URL. Remember that getting people to visit that URL helps you in tracking the overall success of your campaign.
4. Offer a special incentive (discount, coupon, free report, etc) to all visitors.

How about sponsorship? This is where you get behind a local club or organization and in return you get the ability to place an advertisement in their newsletter, or a sign in the clubrooms, etc. Club members tend to get behind their sponsors so if your product is of interest to people it could be an easy sell.

Something I have done in the past is to have a URL on my car and an attention-grabbing headline. Yes I have made sales from this, obviously not hundreds of visitors a day, but for a once off cost it can really pay off, stickers for cars are usually pretty inexpensive.

Visit local council and see if you can pay for an advertisement in their newsletters, or what about schools? Plenty of scope here so long as your product and/or information is relevant!

Give offline marketing a try; remember most of your competitors probably aren’t doing it, so it could be a goldmine for you. Increased web site traffic is but one of the benefits of using this approach.

A mailing list in full use with decent auto-responders is a joy to see and literally poetry in motion. If your not sure what an auto-responder is, be sure to check out the link at the bottom of this article.

How would you like to sell a product to a customer and then market more of your products to that same customer in the future automatically without having to do anything (apart from setting up a process one time only?

Interested? Mailing lists are big business, and lots of businesses fail to see just how important capturing a customers email address can be.

Even if you do not have your own product i.e. if you are an affiliate marketer for other peoples products I am going to try to convince you of the importance of a mailing list you can use to market over and over to customers.

Logically, it makes sense to sell to existing customers doesn’t it? You have bought this existing customer to your website in the past and hopefully because you gave outstanding service and the product they purchased exceeded their expectations, they will be much more receptive to you for any new products you offer in the future.

Having the customer (or even potential customers) on a mailing list makes sense doesn’t it? It’s a great way to keep in touch and to keep your name in their Inbox (hopefully for good reasons!) and is a great way to convert potential buyers into customers and existing customers in repeat-business customers.

It all starts with the mailing list. It’s very important to capture the visitors name and email address when they get to your website, so that you have an opportunity to build a relationship with them in the future.

So how do you go about that? After all many people are reluctant to give out an email address to just anyone, because we all dislike spam, and you have to have built up a level of rapport before people are comfortable giving you their email address. It’s really a catch-22 isn’t it?

Well two things will help here, firstly the quality of the information on your website will be a real plus. Relevant quality content will show the visitor that this is not a dodgy website, but rather a real website run by a real person.

Having a privacy policy and real contact information including phone numbers is also very important and helps in showing your customer that you are a real living person.

With all that said, many potential customers would still be reluctant to give you their email address, so you have to give out an incentive, a reason for them to give you their email address.

This is where a useful report, a useful e-Book, or other information can come in handy. Tell the visitor if they sign up to your mailing list, they get access to the report, or whatever it is that you are offering free of charge. If you haven’t got anything else to give away, think laterally.

What about offering a coupon to be used to claim a discount when ordering, or some other benefit.

People get the opportunity to find out more about you and your products and services with auto-responders. Often it may take five or more pieces of “content” before someone feels comfortable enough to purchase something from you.

I have purchased a lot (and when I say a lot the emphasis is on the words a lot) of e-Books in my time, and the quality of a fair portion of them was sub-average at best.

In many cases I would not have purchased the e-Book if I had read some of it first, but on the other hand there are some purchases I have not made because I wasn’t sure what to expect quality wise, and being able to read a few chapters might just have swayed me to purchase the book).

The thing to remember with free giveaways is to make sure it’s a quality product and relevant to your site. If your freebie turns out to be useless to your subscriber and not of value, they are going to unsubscribe faster than you can say “oops I blew it”.

Speaking of un-subscribing, it’s also very important for the visitor to know they can un-subscribe anytime without penalty, so make sure you make this clear on the sign up/opt-in page, and then ensure you actually do unsubscribe them if you receive a request to do so.

Auto-responders really are the bee’s knee’s (Aussie slang for perfect).

Automating things is one of the first steps to achieving truly great things, and an auto-responder is a great thing to use to automate your customer or potential customer follow-up.

Read my auto-responder Article for specific techniques on how to follow up customers and some of the rules of the game.

Lots of companies providing mailing list and auto-responder automation. If you do any research you will find that AWeber is generally acknowledged to be one of the best, and I use them exclusively.

If your in the market for this type of automation, I suggest you check them out.

One of the great things they do is offer a full 30 day no-risk and even a free trial. Mailing lists can be one of the most ways to ramp up traffic to your webite by getting prospects or customers coming back time and again.

Mailing Lists Are Something you should look into in your quest for more web site traffic.