Blogging can be a fantastic way to get more traffic charging full speed to your website.

The good news is that setting up a Blog for your website is surprisingly easy but there are a few caveats and things you need to change to ensure your blog is setup correctly to get maximum exposure in the search engines.

Before we start discussing what you should and shouldn’t do with Blogs, let’s take a step back and define what a Blog actually is.

A Blog can be thought of as a simple, public online diary where you can write entries (posts) into the diary.

Being public, the posts can be viewed by anyone who happens to surf by your site, and hopefully you have lots and lots of people reading every post you make, and contributing to your Blog in the form of adding comments, looking at relevant links you add to your blog, watching audio and video, and hopefully linking to your blog from their website, if they happen to have one.

What is particularly attractive about Blogs, is that the entire process of Blogging is very simple to do, mainly due to the great quality of Blog software available that you can install on your website.

Decent Blogging software provides all the functionality you need, the management of posts by yourself (and others), the categorization of posts (something that is essential) and even the process of telling other blogging websites every time you make a new post automatically.

Automatically telling other sites about your posts is a huge plus since it’s getting known on the Internet, without the need for you to be having to manually “submit” your blog in order for people to find out about it.

Now in my opinion, one of the most important things to ensure is that you don’t just use the Blog as a sales page (I recommend you leave the selling of your products and services to your actual sales page on your website).

Obviously you will want to talk about your products and services, and the benefits visitors will get in using them, but I believe it’s important not to have an all out sales pitch, as that will tend to turn off visitors who may be seeing your message for the first time. I also recommend you talk about non-business stuff, information about you, the person, some of your interests, things you have found of interest on the Internet, etc.

When people read these personal posts, they get to know the real you, and form a relationship with a “real person” and not a nameless website, and this can only assist you in future sales with these people.

A Blog also allows (and in fact encourages) participation by visitors, who can post responses to your entries, and this is often a great way to stimulate interesting conversations. Good Blogging software will allow you to remove spam responses (where visitors or programs “write” messages directing people to their site) as well as to moderate conversations that are in appropriate or off-topic.One of the best reasons to use Blogs is to help you rank highly in the search engines. The search engines love Blogs, provided they are providing relevant and quality content.

To give you an idea of how important search engines see Blogs, Google bought one of the largest Blogging sites out there (blogger.com). Having a focused relevant site with interesting and useful content can only help you in your journey to find true search engine love.

If you have read any of the other articles on this website, you’ve probably gathered that I preach relevant useful content. Blogs are no different than other web traffic techniques, you need to ensure it’s relevant, and ensure your separate your posts into logical categories.

For example if you have a website about software development, you may make posts discussing programming generally, other posts about training for software developers, and more posts about a specific computer language like Java.

It’s vitally important that you don’t just lump all posts together for a number of reasons. Firstly, people coming to your Blog may have a specific interest in some of your posts (training for example) and may find it hard and frustrating to easily find all posts you have written on training if you have not clearly defined categories (and allowed posts to be searched/sorted by these categories).

Likewise the search engines may view your Blog as less relevant if you lump all your posts together than another Blog elsewhere that has posts clearly defined in categories. Search engines very much prefer categorization of information and reward websites that categorise correctly with high search engine rankings.

The most popular open source blogging package is wordpress. Check that out online.

Wordpress is a free blogging package (yes nothing to pay!), and is extremely flexible and easy to use without sacrificing anything in power and flexibility. I use this package and recommend you do as well.

Because of its popularity many Web host’s have it available for installation on their websites for you with “one-click” installs.

So what should you write about in your Blog? Good question, here are a few ideas: -

1. Your products (duh, obvious one here). Don’t do the hard sell here, remember here you are trying to generate a bit of interest about the product, perhaps from visitors to your Blog who know nothing about your products, think of it more as a pre-sale to entice them to click on the link when the sales page hopefully weaves it’s magic.

2. Free valuable content – Found a decent product from a competitors website?, Found a free tool that made life easier for you, etc? Write a review and link to your competitors website. Focus on making your Blog interesting to read and of value to the reader. If you can think what the Blog looks like from the visitors perspective you are halfway there to making it work well.

3. Personal posts – Not related at all to your products, may be related to your life, on holidays somewhere? Cute little “human interest” stories. I’m talking about the type of stuff that visitors can relate to, and can bring out the real you. An example on my Blog is my discussions about diet and exercise. This has nothing at all to do with my products but I am sure a lot of visitors will be able to relate to my battle to beat the bulge. Normally this “intermixing” of content would be a definite “no-no” because it would have the effect of diluting the importance of your website, but this isn’t your main website, and it’s not on your sales pages, it’s on your Blog. I got lots of emails from other blogs from visitors where they took the time to write me about some of these personal stories and many ended up buying products from me at a later date.
4. What about Video and Audio? Absolutely! Again check out my Blog and you will see to the left of the page I have a series of links to audio and video I have produced. Although it’s a growing area, the vast majority of Blogs out there don’t use audio and video and in my opinion it’s a mistake because they are missing out on a lot of traffic!

I hope you have now realized the power of using and maintaining a Blog, it can be the ultimate web site promotion with the result being increased web site traffic.

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 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.

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.

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.

One of the most valuable things you can do is to have an affiliate program for your website (this is assuming you actually have a product you have created, and are selling). If you don’t have a product, put some serious thought into developing one. I can’t begin to describe how great a feeling it is when people are buying a product you have created yourself, simply put it’s fantastic!

Now Affiliate programs can massive increase the numbers of visitors to your website, with no upfront advertising costs!

Here is how the process works…

Let’s say you have a product you have created and are selling on your website for $97 (In this example the product will be an e-Book).

Each person who arrives at your website pays $97, and gets the e-book, and you keep the full $97 (less any expenses incurred i.e. credit card processing fees/ paypal fees, etc).

Simple so far, and this in itself is obviously a viable business model and literally tens of thousands of e-Books are sold each and every day using this very method.

Now what about offering a third party, the opportunity of selling your product to their customers. Just think about it for a minute, there are going to be millions of people who, no matter how perfect your web traffic techniques are, how high your search engine rankings are, will never find out about you, and even know that you have a product for sale.

Wouldn’t it be great if you could get other people to market your website to their customers free of charge? (with you only having to pay them a commission if and only if their customer actually purchases your product).

Think of all the extra sales you would make (remember these sales are likely to be purchased by people who may never have found your website, so they are actually bonus customers, and any purchases they make are extra bonus sales you were not likely to have made).

This is the power of affiliate programs and affiliate marketing in general. This is why my website has had an affiliate program in place since the day it opened.

Not having an affiliate program is an area where lots of marketers fall down in my opinion, but I’ve also seem websites with reseller programs failing due to the percentage of commission they offer the affiliate for each sale made by the affiliates customers. In my opinion the absolute minimum you should pay is 50% but it can and should often be higher (which we will discuss later in the chapter).

Now I know what your probably thinking. Using our example the $97 profit has suddenly dropped to $48.50 (with other expenses not yet taken out of this amount) but let’s look at this in detail.

As I’ve mentioned above, these are bonus sales that it’s likely you would not have made. Secondly if you have done things right, you have setup a mailing list for the customer to join, right? Or better still have a complete membership website that your customers can login into after they purchase the e-Book.

Affiliate prorams can be a fantastic way to leverage the power of other marketers by getting them to sell your product with no upfront cost and to introduce your products to new and exciting markets.

A great way to get yet more traffic to your website is by using Article Directories. The method is really quite simple, you submit an article to a website, and at the bottom of the page you list your contact details including a link back to your website.

People visiting the Article Directory website article read your article and if you’ve done your job well will click through to your website to get more information. The end result? More Web Site Traffic For You!

Now it gets better, of course as you can imagine with a wealth of information on the website, Article Directories are soon favorites with the search engines who visit them frequently and index their content, meaning people who don’t even frequent the Article Directory website in question will find your article in the search engines.

Add to this the fact that your article is in the search engines propels you website further up in search engine rankings.

But there’s still more! Article Directories are often frequented by webmasters looking for content for their website. The directories allow them to copy this information onto their websites, so long as it’s kept in it’s original format, and you guess it, this includes your details and link to your website.

So now, not only do visitors to the Article Directories have access to the article you wrote, but the search engines do as well, and so do all the customers of the Webmaster who just placed your article on his web page.

So you get it three ways! How cool is that (well technically it may end up four ways when the search engines index the webmasters website, but then we start having issues with duplicate content which we explore below).

What is particularly good with these principles, is you get cheap web site traffic, and lot’s of it!

Hopefully you are starting to get an idea of the power of article directories, not only do you get traffic from the article directory site itself, but it’s likely your website will be elevated higher up in the search engines, because more people are linking to you!

The article really doesn’t need to be that long either, probably 350-400 words is long enough. Make sure you use your keyword phrases in the articles and pay particular attention to your link text and mix this up so it’s not the same.

e.g. <a href=”http://overwhelmingtraffic.com”>web traffic tips</a>
<a href=”http://overwhelmingtraffic.com”>more website visitors</a>

Get the idea? You don’t need a different phrase for each and every link but do take the time to mix them up so you are not just using the same anchor text for all article, it’s important so that the search engines don’t think you are trying to manipulate the search engine rankings (which they are more likely to think if you are using the exact same anchor text in all of your links).

Now one thing you don’t want to do is upload the exact same content to all article directories, because this creates duplicate content which is a real no-no and has the effect of reducing the importance of your website in the search engines eyes.

The flow on effect of this is that you site will be listed further down in the search engine results (higher is good, lower is bad) and it will be harder for people to find you website using your keywords in the search engines.

Search engines these days crave unique relevant content and you will be “marked down” in importance if you just upload the same article unchanged to all the article directories.

With that said, you probably don’t want to completely re-write a new article from scratch each time you upload either, right?

Is there a way we can get around this? Well many experts discuss the differences in an articles contents and the general consensus is that if you change 30% of an article, it will no longer be considered duplicate content.

In other words if you can change 30% of an article it will be considered a new article by the search engines, and not a duplicate of an existing one you have submitted elsewhere.

The aim of this product is to allow you to easily create new versions of articles from existing ones. Now don’t think that it will write the articles for you, after all if you have ever seen some of the content produced by some of these automated article generators you will know what I mean when I say they are pretty bad!

Writing articles is something you really need to do yourself (or outsource) as opposed to trying to get a computer to write text for you. However using a product like Content Composer will take a lot of the fiddly work out of changing content for submission to multiple Article directory sites.

Content Composer actually allows you to have multiple parts of an article and it will then join random parts of the article together leaving you with a unique article. The more unique parts of the article you re-write the more unique articles you can get.

For example you could re-write (say) 3 different beginnings of an article, and 3 different endings, and leave the body the same. You could then get Content Composer to create a unique article and it would randomly grab one of the beginnings, the body, and a random ending.

The above is a very simplistic overview of what it does, I suggest you head over to the website and watch some of the videos, it really is a great product.

Also check out one of his related products (Article Announcer) which is fully compatible with Content Composer. This product will actually upload your Content Composer articles to the article directories!

I used this very product when I uploaded my articles to the Article directory. I particularly liked the fact that in Article Announcer I could open up a saved Content Composer article and then submit it easily. Magic stuff!

Posting on forums, if used properly, can be an excellent way to get your name “out there”, and ultimately to build up a heap of traffic to your website.Note the emphasis on the words “if used properly”.

Good, relevant and useful content is the key here.

Let’s cut to the chase, if you expect to join a forum and to post a huge advertisement, and then sit back and wait for the massive amount of web traffic to hit your web site, then your probably going to be disappointed (not to mention waiting for a long time for it to happen).

You don’t spam people with email (hopefully!) and spamming a forum is just as bad (effectively posting a huge advertisement is spam) and will more often than not get you banned from the forum, and your post will get deleted, not to mention you will quickly get a reputation as a forum spammer.

Even though the Internet is a huge place, you might be surprised on just how fast word can get around for things like this. Don’t risk it.

Not spamming is even more important if your trying to become an expert in your niche area, because chances are the forum you just got banned from was a major one for your niche market if you had done your research properly.

So what is the best way to use a forum to get value out of it?

Firstly, find relevant forums for your niche market, and take the time to read the rules generally of the forum, and specifically the rules as they relate to forums posts.

To find forums use the search engine and look for forums and your keyword phrases.

e.g. Forums for car wholesalers, do a search for forum car wholesalers.

Some forums will not allow you to post any form of blatant advertisement, others may allow a signature block at the end of the post that can point to a website, with maybe a brief description of your site, others may not even allow that. Take the time to read up on just what is and isn’t allowed for each forum you sign up with.

Once you’ve done that, actually consider if you’re going to be able to add value to the forum by posting.

Do you have knowledge that can be used to help out other posters? Can you actually add decent content, that is not just along the lines of “Sounds like you need my affiliate-o-matic program, grab it from my website”.

Recognize that you should be able to reply to posts without doing selling of any kind (although hopefully you selected a forum that allowed a signature block in your posts, so that at the bottom of each of your fabulous relevant, and expert, rich in wisdom posts, there is also a link for people to reach you).

This signature should NOT be the focus of the post though; the focus of your posts is to actually help people by solving the particular problem or issue listed in the forum post.

You will be amazed how quickly you can build up yourself as an expert in the forum, which adds immense believability and credibility to you on the forum, meaning people will start coming to you for help!

The other huge bonus is that forum posts usually get picked up by the search engines so that over time your answers will get into the search engine results, and low and behold there is a link to your website in them!

Make sure your posts are in a forum that is relevant to your niche market. For example if you have answered questions in a gardening forum, and your signature at the bottom of each of your posts leads people to a sports site, you may be disappointed with the results.

In this case, assuming your web site was sports related, you would have been far better off posting in a sports forum, but hopefully a sporting forum that is specific to the exact sports your website focuses on.

The search engines love relevancy, and you will find you will often actually lose points, and valuable rankings if you are just concentrating on getting large numbers of links, and not paying attention to using relevant forums to your niche market.

Remember the golden rule about one way links, a relevant one way link to your website from another site (including forums) is far, far more valuable if both sites have related content.

Make sure you look into posting of forums to get a boost in visitors to your site. This is a very easy way to get free traffic on your web site.

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.

I’m now going to talk about a technique that may send your auto responder into Melt Down due to the number of people subscribing to it!

This is paid advertising, or payment for a list of subscribers, and possibly could have been included in the paid traffic chapter. However I felt the subject was important enough to warrant it’s own chapter. Some people may not want to buy web site traffic, but provided you look at the costs carefully it can be very effective.

The technique is not generally known by many Internet markers (or used by that many), and traditionally has been used by large companies only.

There are websites on the Internet that have pre-qualified lists of people waiting to join your list! You hook up with these websites and then all subscribers within your niche market are instantly sent to your auto-responder to sign-up. How cool is that? This is literally a way to add hundreds or thousands of subscribers to your list automatically!

Remember these are people who have specifically indicated an interest in your niche market so you have qualified people ready to buy your products (with that said, some of the less reputable Co-Registration sites may send you any people from their lists, whether they have indicated an interest in your particular niche or not, so it will pay you to stay with the reputable Co-Registration providers).

Of course you still have to actually be able to sell them your product, and sell them on yourself and your website.

You really want to have a decent auto-responder campaign up to give yourself every chance to make a customer from your signups (no surprises there).

The Co-Registration lists can be huge; it’s possible to get 100,000 or more people to sign up on your list. Can you imagine that! But the big lists also cost lots of money, and like any expense you really need to have a budget and know what your conversion rate is in advance before deciding on spending money on these services.

As I have mentioned elsewhere in another article on this website, it’s really important that you track your referrals, especially in the case of paid traffic, so I would suggest that you use link tracking software and/or have a completely new set of auto-responders just for the referrals from the Co-Registration websites so you can actually measure your results.

I have details of link tracking software in the Tools of the Trade resource on this website, I suggest you use Pro Track Manager (a Mike Filsaime product). This is actually a re-branded version of AdTrackz,which I happen to believe is the best Ad Tracking software currently on the Internet (in my opinion).

According to some of the gurus who use Co-Registration sites they profess that you can double your money in seven days. In other words you will get back twice what you invested in purchasing the referrals within seven days.

The other thing you really need to be careful about is ensuring that your auto-responder provider will support co-registration.

AWeber does not support co-registration, and I’ve heard stories of accounts getting deleted if they are found to be using Co-Registration services.

The probable reason for this is that having a large number of people getting “subscribed” to your list in one hit would place a huge load on their servers.

If your looking to use Co-Registration, I suggest you look at both GetResponse (Auto Responders) and GetSubscriber (for Co-Registration services).

These websites actively support each other so you can be sure there are no issues using them both together.

Co-Registration could just be the jump-start your website needs, so I suggest you check out these websites and read up on Co-Registration services. This could be a fantastic way to generate web site traffic.