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Posted on 25th February, 2012 | No Comment

Visitors to your site are critical – getting them there automatically is even better.  So here’s how…

But, first…

Keyword research is really the first step in getting traffic to your website. Why? Because you have to target these keywords if you are to have any hope of actually generating traffic for them. This means it’s critical to select your keywords properly.

Here are the important considerations for your research:

• Are the keywords you’re interested in attainable? Take a look at the “strength” of others websites (and how many) are already targeting these keywords.
• Are these “buying” keywords? Some keywords will bring lots of traffic, but none of them will buy. What you want is buyers!
• Another thing to think about is affiliates. If you want to build a huge business, you’re going to need affiliates to help you. This means that some of your traffic focus should be on getting affiliates to your site.

This is critical to your business, but it takes a lot of time and effort. Hiring someone else to do it costs a lot of money. The upside is that these two factors keep most everyone from even doing their keyword research. If you’re smart you will use website traffic software  to help you with this process. This way you get this critical step done fast and done well.

OK, now we can talk about traffic…

Once you’ve done your properly keyword research, you’re now ready to start targeting these keywords to draw in visitors.

Here’s a very interesting video that you should
watch if you are interested in getting free traffic
from Google:

The video explains some important basics about
getting traffic from Google and it comes with a
downloadable PDF guide (completely free) as well.

SECockpit video < click

I recommend you check this out, as the PDF
describes a method for optimizing your sites for
both the search engine bots AND your human visitos.
This can make a very big difference, especially
since Google is increasingly looking for “human
factors” when ranking websites (watch the video
and you’ll see what I mean):

SECockpit video

It’s not often that you’ll see this kind of
quality info shared, so take advantage of it while it lasts!

Powerful Traffic Tactics:

• Most people overlook the power of Surveys!
• “Help” Websites
• Video Sharing Sites

Surveys

People love filling in surveys. And if you make it interesting, other people will post your survey on their website. It’s a win-win. They get a great perk on their site and you get a link back to yours. This allows you to get free website traffic  from other people’s sites! This is a sneaky little idea that most people never even think of. Just make the question interesting enough that people will want to share it with their own visitors.

I like to use  Survey Monkey. I recommend it!

“Help” Websites

These sites, like answers.yahoo.com are filled with people asking and answering questions for each other. But, like the surveys, that’s not why you’re going to pay attention to these sites. You are going to generate traffic, leads and sales from them. Of course, the process of digging through these sites and pulling out the content info of leads for your business is very time consuming. But a much smarter method is to use  website traffic software  to do it for you. These tools put the whole thing on auto-pilot and just deliver the leads to you each day.

Video Websites

Video is huge and sites like YouTube and Vimeo are extremely popular. In fact, YouTube has over 2 billion videos watched per day! If you’re not taking advantage of this rich source of website traffic  then you are really missing out.

And don’t worry if you don’t have any idea of how to make a video. One super easy thing to do is take an article or website you’ve written. Then just do a screen capture of yourself going through it. And like anything else, there is software available that will turn articles into videos for you automatically. Or use Animoto. Very easy to use. 

An example from one of my other niches.

Create your own video slideshow at animoto.com.

Summary

Figuring out how to get some visitors to your site is not hard at all. It just takes a little time and some ingenuity. Plus, there’s lots of great software out there to help you.

So, start right now and:

• Keyword research first is key -  get Seocockpit

• Set up some viral surveys
• Survey Monkey
• Build your traffic traps
• Website Squeeze Pages
• And don’t forget about video 
• Animoto

Posted on 7th September, 2010 | No Comment

It’s undeniable – the one thing you need to succeed in your online business is traffic. And the best kind of traffic is free traffic. Where does free traffic come from? Google and other search engines.

How does free search engine traffic work?

This is something you’ve experienced first hand countless times. You visit your favorite search engine. Enter the words you’re interested in. And click one of the links that shows up. That website owner has just enjoyed the benefit of free traffic. What need to figure out is how to get you free traffic.

Most people only click results from the first couple pages. The truth is that this first page of results receives nearly all the clicks. What’s even more amazing is the the first 3 links get more than 70% of the free traffic.

So, obviously your site needs to be in the first page of results to get free traffic from Google. To do that, you need to be “ranked” in Google’s Top 10 results. Which leads to..

What is SEO?

Search Engine Optimization is a measure of how well Google and other search engines think your website matches the search terms people are typing into their search boxes. The intricate formula Google uses to figure this out is really only known by Google. However there are several things that we know for sure.

Getting indexed

Before you can get ranked, Google has to first know your site exists. This is called getting “indexed.” What this means is that Google’s spiders visit your site and records information about it in their database.

In order to get indexed, Google has to be able to find you. And the best way for Google to find you is to get inbound links from other sites. Since some of these sites will already be indexed, Google will follow the links on their pages and find you. Cool.

Use your Twitter and Facebook updates to get quick indexed links to your site. These sites are indexed multiple times every day. So your new link will get indexed very quickly.

Gaining ranking

Once you have been indexed, you will start working on increasing your ranking. Just getting indexed once does you almost no good, considering that Google has billions of pages in their database.

There are three components of gaining ranking: they are:

• Content
• Links
• Activity

Content strategies

This is the SEO work you do on your page. It means that the content on your page matches the keywords you’re targeting. Obviously, the article you’re reading now is about search engine optimization. One reason Google knows this is because the words search engine optimization appear inside it. And another way this is determined is by the other related phrases like traffic generation that are also in the article.

The title of the page, the domain name and other pages on your site are also important. Each of these plays a roles in Google determination about your site.

Your links

The next thing to consider is your links. This includes both the inbound and outbound links. With inbound links, you want to have more coming in than going out. So the number of inbound links is important.

One great way to get lots of inbound links is through web 2.0 sites. To accomplish this you start by writing an article that targets the keywords you’re after. Then you have to create multiple versions of this articles. Because you’re going to post a unique copy of it to lots of different websites. And quantity is the key here – so do lots and lots.

Increasing your activity

Finally, we know that Google gives you credit for the activity on your site. Static pages that just sit  there may rank at first, but will fall off over time. Google expects you to be updating your site regularly. One way to keep adding new content it through RSS feeds.

Another great way to keep your page content fresh is to enable comments on it and allow others to discuss your page topic. To get comments from others, you need to get others to visit your site. An easy way to do this is from forums.

Set up forum profiles with the ones related to your website. Visit often and make posts that are helpful. Always include a link back to your site. This generates even more links back to your site. And it gets people to visit the site you link to.

Conclusion

All of the above is important. However, writing a bunch of different articles on the same topic. Setting up tons of profiles on forums. And posting your articles and comments takes a lot of time. And you’re already too busy, so you mostly likely will never  get to doing any of it.

However, rank builder software exists. And it automates everything we’ve just talked about. So my best advice is to automate as much of this as you possibly can. And then you’ll besure to get it done. Not doing it means you will never get free traffic from Google.

Posted on 16th August, 2010 | No Comment

If you’ve got traffic coming to your site, you’re 99% there. The other 1% is what you do with that traffic, but if you have to traffic – you can figure out the rest. After getting the traffic you just need to convert it into subscribers and customers . . . but that’s the easy part. The most crucial aspect of this process is getting the visitors to your site.

Let’s talk about how to generate traffic…

Here are a few of the most popular way to get traffic to your site – for free:

• Web 2.0
• Articles Directories
• Video

OK, so how do they work?

Web 2.0

Web 2.0 simply means the new family of websites that have user-generated content. These are great sites to work with because they allow you to participate in this content creation. And because of the highly interactive and popular nature of these sites, Google and other search engines “index” their content regularly. And that’s important to you because it means that Google and the other search engines treat links from these sites as more meaningful than links from other sites. So, if you place links to your own site inside your content, you get a search engine ranking benefit from those links. That’s the real benefit of adding content to this sites – search engine ranking means ongoing free traffic. How to generate web 2.0 traffic is something we’ve only scratched the surface on. I don’t want to be exhaustive – I want to give you an overview of all the methods…

Article Websites

The next thing we want to talk about is article marketing. Article directories fall under the category of web 2.0 sites. Just like web 2.0 sites, article websites allow you to upload your own content – as articles. And just like other web 2.0 sites, you get all the SEO benefits from having your content on them. But you also get the extra benefit of other users taking your article and putting it on their site. And along with your article, they have to include your author information and a link back to you – so you get more free traffic and SEO benefits. If you want to generate traffic from articles follow these steps:

• Do your keyword research
• Write your article for the keywords you’ve chosen
• Hyperlink these keywords to your website – both in the content of the article and in your author’s info section.

Video Sites

The last of this group is video marketing. Just like article directories, video sharing sites also rely on user-generated content. And it carries all the same benefits of article marketing. The extra top secret benefit of video marketing is that it’s much easier to rank for competitive keywords than in any other medium.

Here’s how to get free traffic using video…

• Sign up for YouTube
• Turn off all the modules in your account profile
• Use the tags in your profile to enter the keywords you want to rank for
• Add a link to your website
• Upload at least 1 video
• In the title, the description and the tags for each video, include your main keywords

Putting it all together.

This is a great overview to get your started generating massive traffic to your site.