10 Remarkably Effective Traffic Building Techniques (Part 2 of 3)

Posted by Daniel on September 15, 2007 under Advertising, Ebook Business, Viral Marketing, Web Traffic | Be the First to Comment

by Daniel Moro
(continued from the previous page…)

4. Free Ebooks

Ebooks are books that are made available in an electronic format. The beauty of ebooks is they cost virtually nothing to produce and distribute. Ebooks initially became popular as the perfect format for information products being sold and delivered online, but they have now been recognized as a very effective resource for building traffic.

After you have written an ebook you can give it away to visitors as a reward for subscribing to your mailing list or newsletter. Your ebook for traffic building does not need to be the same number of pages as a full-length book. Many ebooks being used as free incentives are in the range of 12 to 25 pages.

You can even recruit related businesses and web sites to give away your ebook to their customers. The other site benefits because their visitors get something for free. And you benefit because you reach new readers with your information including a link to your web site.

Many ebook authors include a few advertising and affiliate links towards the end of their ebooks which can lead to additional revenue, especially if their free ebooks are heavily distributed.

Read more on Ebooks…

5. Viral Marketing

Viral marketing is any advertising method that propagates itself. It is built on the concept of a message spreading by ‘word of mouth’. Two examples of viral marketing online are “Tell a Friend” forms, and Viral Ebooks.

The idea with viral marketing is to induce visitors or readers to pass along your marketing message to other sites or people, creating a potentially exponential growth in the message’s visibility and response.

A “Tell a Friend” form is designed to get one person that you have already reached to recommend your site or service to a number of their friends. You can offer an incentive for them to make the recommendation, for example giving them a free report or ebook in return for recommending you to five friends.

To make a viral ebook, you use special tools to make your ebook rebrandable. In a rebrandable ebook, certain parts of your ebook are set up for customization. By doing this you enable your partners to insert their own business name, web site links, or even their own affiliate ID into your ebook. This gives them an additional incentive to pass on copies of it, ultimately helping you to promote your business and grow your traffic.

Read more on Viral Marketing…

6. Classified Advertising

Classified advertising is a form of advertising which is particularly common in newspapers and magazines. Many online ezines and email newsletters offer classified advertising spots and advertising in these can be one of the best sources of targeted traffic.

The best traffic growth comes from carefully targeting your potential visitors and with classified advertising you have the ability to select newsletters and with an audience that closely resembles your own target audience.

With online classified advertising it is especially important to consider the position of the advertisement you are purchasing. An ad spot at the very top of an email newsletter will receive considerably more clicks than an ad spot further down the message.

And while we are on the subject of classified advertising, don’t dismiss offline classified advertising as irrelevant. It is possible to run a classified advertisement in an offline publication such as newspaper or carefully targeted magazine and get an excellent response of readers checking out your web site.

Read more on Advertising…

7. Advertising Swaps

Once you have a mailing list of your own with several thousand subscribers consider setting up ‘ad swaps’ with other newsletters. Make a list of possible newsletters that would make good swapping targets. This list might include newsletters on the very same topic as yours, but it could also include publications on closely related topics.

A newsletter on copywriting, for example, might do an ad swap with another copywriting newsletter. Or they might swap with newsletters on related topics such as advertising, editing, and freelance writing.

Swapping ads one of the most effective low cost techniques for building traffic. There is only the opportunity cost of not having paid advertising in those spots of your newsletter. I can assure you that the traffic growth will be worth more in the long term than a one-off advertising payment from someone for a classified ad.

Read more on Advertising…

(Part 3 of this article continues on the next page…)

10 Remarkably Effective Traffic Building Techniques (Part 1 of 3)

Posted by Daniel on September 1, 2007 under Article Marketing, Pay-Per-Click, SEO, Web Traffic | Be the First to Comment

by Daniel Moro

In the world of online business, traffic is like gold. It is something you work hard for, and once you have it, you can turn it into cash, or even barter and trade with it. Above all you must remember how valuable it really is, and invest wisely with it, or your online business will fail.

If you want to grow your online customer base then you must build a good stream of incoming traffic to your web site. Traffic leads to revenue. Depending upon your online business model it probably does that in one of two ways.

For many online businesses, building traffic leads to growth in an opt-in mailing list which leads to establishing relationship or rapport. This in turn leads to strong prospects and an increase in sales volume.

For online businesses consisting of web sites without their own products and services, building a good stream of incoming traffic leads to increased visitor numbers which leads to higher quantities of clicks on affiliate links or advertisements such as AdSense. This in turn leads to an increase in the site revenue.

Let’s look at ten traffic building techniques that have proven to be remarkably effective for growing an online business.

1. Search Engine Optimization

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the process of designing and fine-tuning a web page and the links to that web page to improve the web page’s relevance and ranking in the organic, crawler-based listings of a search engine, for particular keyword phrase searches.

Search engine optimization does require some study of the techniques involved. That can be time consuming and the results might take weeks or even months to see but, in the long term, investing your efforts in obtaining natural – also known as organic – high-ranking placement in the top search engines will pay huge dividends.
While it is possible to optimize pages for many search engines, most webmasters working on SEO concentrate on Google, MSN and Yahoo.

Read more on Search Engine Optimization…

2. Pay Per Click Advertising

In addition to their organic search results the major search engines publish additional sponsored listings on a pay-per-click basis. Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising is one of the quickest ways to drive traffic to a web site. This is certainly not the cheapest traffic building technique, but it is probably the most effective technique to guarantee a large quantity of traffic, fast.

The web sites shown in sponsored listings are usually determined through a bidding system. You bid the maximum price that you are willing to pay for each visitor that clicks on your listing and comes through to your site. The more you bid, the more likely your listing will show.

How much you need to bid to get traffic really depends upon the niche in which your web site operates. Although you could easily pay anywhere from $0.01 to $1.00 for each visitor that clicks through your listing, many webmasters obtain traffic for $0.05 to $0.15 per click.

Read more on Pay Per Click Advertising…

3. Article Marketing

Article marketing involves writing articles and making them available for webmasters and editors to publish. The greatest exposure usually comes from listing the articles at article directories such as EzineArticles and IdeaMarketers. This allows anyone to publish the article without any fee to you, the author, provided they include your ‘Author Resource Box’ at the end of the article. Your author’s resource box should be a small paragraph or two about you including a direct link to your web site.

Article marketing is a great traffic building technique for several reasons.

First, there is an increase in name exposure and brand awareness as people read your articles all over the Internet. They will begin to recognize you as an expert in your topic.
Second, there is direct traffic to your web site from readers clicking through the link in your author’s resource box.

Third, there is the indirect benefit of backlinks increasing your search engine ranking. Backlinks are links on other web sites that point to your web page. Backlinks are important for search engine optimization because some search engines, especially Google, give more credit to web sites that have a good number of quality backlinks.

Read more on Article Marketing…

(Part 2 of this article continues here…)