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Traffic is the lifeblood of any website. No visitors, means no customers, no business. A lot of people talk about free traffic but there actually is no such thing as free traffic, as there is likely some sort of opportunity cost involved like paying someone to do your traffic generating tasks, and if you do it yourself your time is certainly worth something. You would be surprised how many people still believe that they can sit back and relax and wait for traffic to hit their websites after they are built. Does not happen that way. You would need to promote your website, just like you would promote a business.

There are many ways to get more visitors to your website but here is a list of the fastest and easiest ways and a brief description of each.

1. Email Signatures

If you have a business website, you should at least have an email signature that has a link to your website AND your unique selling proposition or any value statement that catches attention and prompts a reader to click the link to your website.

2. Social Networking and Social Media Accounts

If you have Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Youtube then you have the opportunity to tell people on your network about your website, product or services. However there is the right way and a wrong way to do that, and from what I have seen, a lot of people do it the wrong way.

Do not spam nor annoy people with messages that they are not interested in. The key to getting people to your website through social properties is to catch their attention by posting your own or sharing other people’s content such notes, articles, links, and videos that are of interest to people on your network. The key there is to first get their attention, then sustain their interest with whatever piece of content they are viewing,  the longer they consume that content a desire in them brews, then make them take action by giving them an irresistible offer or incentive.

I always underscore the three key elements to a successful social marketing campaign:

• continuously grow your network
• keep posting content that people on your network will enjoy or find useful
• interact with people in your network in order to establish a rapport and build trust

You can send traffic to your website from social sites through the links that you include with the content that you publish.

3. Craigslist and Classified Ads Websites

If you are selling products or services and you cater to a local audience, Craigslist  is a great way to be able to put those products and services in front of customers who are already looking for what you have to offer. In fact, Craigslist is a great way to quickly dispose of products or inventory that you do not want cluttering your shelves, because you want to make room for new stuff.

Craigslist allows you to post classified ads that contain links in the listing, links that readers click and are sent to wherever those links point.

4. Press Release Submission

If you own a business, you probably have sent out Press Releases to media outfits requesting that they get published or the story carried. You would probably see a lot of these on newspapers. The same thing works online, you submit a newsworthy story to Press Release websites that will publish and distribute your story to media outfits. There are free sites and paid sites that you can submit to and of course the paid sites offer some form of added value.

The traffic from Press Releases will come in three ways:

• people reading the Press Release on the PR sites where it is published click a link in that takes them to your website
• people subscribed via RSS feeds to these PR sites will receive notices of your new PR via email
• people reading news websites who carried your PR story click the link that takes them to your website

5. Email Marketing

If you are an existing business and have customers, leverage on existing customers by getting them on your mailing list. Satisfied customers often make repeat buys from a seller that has earned their trust.  Again, there is a right way and a wrong way to do it. The wrong way would be to, not be in touch with your customer then suddenly send them a message that you have a sale. You would need to be in touch with your customer through email, immediately after they make a purchase and find out if they are satisfied with the transaction; keep in touch with them by providing them with useful information that would make them make the most out of the product they had purchased; then offer them special deals on related products. It is also important that you get their permission for you to send them email messages, and this is easily accomplished with many email marketing services such as Aweber, which I use and have used for several years now.

6. Article Marketing

This is one of the most effective means of getting traffic today. Simply put, it is the process of writing articles that are relevant to your prospective customers, articles they would find helpful or useful and would contain a call to action for them to click a link that is part of that article. You would need to submit that to article directories such as ezinearticles.com or goarticles.com.

The traffic you will receive come in the form of visitors reading that article published on those article directories and the traffic from websites that republish that article on their websites. Article directories allow other websites to republish articles as long as the links remain intact.

You can also publish these articles on high traffic social sites; blog sites like Wordpress.com and Blogger.com; content sites like Hugpages.com and Squidoo.com. These sites have a huge number of pages and communities tagged or categorize according to topic or subject matter. Publish content on these sites and tag them with relevant keywords; words or phrases that best describe your content, the same words and phrase that people on these sites use on the website’s internal search engine in order to find your content.

7. Forum Posting

Forums or online bulletin boards are online communities where you can find people of similar interests. You would need to join forums where your target customers are found and contribute in threads or discussions, providing useful content that will help resolve any of their issues or problems. Make sure to include a link on your website on your forum signature, with your unique selling proposition or a value statement.

8. Yahoo and Help Sites Posting

A few years ago, a friend of mine laughed at the idea of going to Yahoo Answers and answering questions, she found it silly. Well, the fact of the matter is, Yahoo answers has proven to be a good source of traffic. All you have to do is find answers that you can provide good answers to, and if you can use your website as a reference to those answers or an added resource you can post that link in your answer.

9. Blog Commenting

Blog commenting today is often referred to as blog spam, since a lot of people simply leave brief non helpful comments at the end of blog posts, just so they can get a link from that blog post. The right way to do it, is contribute to the discussion, add something helpful or useful to the blog post so that the owner will allow your comment to remain and you keep that link.

Traffic from blog comment links will come in the form of readers who found your comments useful.

10. Integration Marketing

Integration marketing is a term I heard being used by Kim Roach, but this is nothing new. A lot of companies have partnerships and co branding activities. This method of increasing traffic is simply the act of finding related businesses that you can partner with, and put your product in their sales process.

In business partnerships, you can for instance be a contract plumber who gets business from an architect, who hires you to take care of plumbing for a house the architect is building. In the virtual world, you can be an elearning software vendor who ties up with a human resource and training consultant who sells training DVDs online, and when DVD buyers check out, the buyer is given a one time offer where they can try your elearning system for free and a link where they can claim that offer. Another example that has more of a direct impact on sales rather than traffic is, you can be a seller of cellular phone skins and accessories who ties up with a cell phone retailer, and in the check out process when a customer buys a phone from that retailer, the customer will be shown your skins and cell phone accessories at discounted prices.

All the strategies above are FREE methods, but again.. they are not exactly free because your time has a price to it, right? I believe time is precious and certainly not free. If you don’t do it yourself, you can hire someone to do all that for you.

Here are some guidelines below… but a disclaimer, these are my own, and might not work for you..

1. Check Pictures

If a person sending you a friend request does not have his or her own face on it, or might have other people’s pictures like an actress/actor, a dog… think twice before immediately accepting the request, and do a little investigating.

There are some Facebook accounts however, who have a complete set of photos of the same person but are still bogus.. photos are typically ripped from an unsuspecting user of another network like Friendster or Multiply and used on the fake account.

2. Check the friend request sender’s account profile for comments of other people on their pictures, and see if it appears like these comments are genuine interactions between people who actually know each other, that means that person actually exists.

3. Check the person’s wall and see if anyone has tagged them in pictures, notes or status messages .. if that person is tagged on photos of other people that is a good sign that the person is real and that Facebook account is legit. Look for posts on the wall that reveal a person’s personality, likes and dislikes, hobbies and interests. These are easily spotted in the form of photos and videos of that person, notes, and believable status updates.

4. Check the friend request sender’s wall for posted messages from other people and actual interactions.. if all you see are ..”added…”, “liked”, or “is now friends with”.. it is very likely this account is just being used to build up a network of people in order to market something to and is not owned by an actual person

5. Finally, do a search on Google for the person’s name. If they indeed exist there is a chance that their name is mentioned on some web page somewhere that has been indexed on Google.

Again, I believe it is important to check the add requests you get, because you could be allowing access to private information such as an email address, phone numbers and other personal information that might be taken advantage of by shady individuals.  You could also be setting yourself up to get annoying advertising messages. Or worse, your identity get’s stolen and your pictures get used to create a fake personality/account on Facebook or another social networking site.

Here’s one more thing to think about. If you need visitors to send to an offer or to a website… or if you have a business that needs customers.. and you have 10 FB accounts each with 1000 people, you have a total network of 10,000 people. If you post a status message with a link to a website you want to promote, even if 10% of people click the link, that there is instantly 1000 visitors. Imagine if you post at least 5 status messages a day with a link. If your click through rate (CTR) is consistently 10%, then you are able to drive 5000 people everyday to any site of your choosing.

We know Facebook is profitable, and that is due to the website’s high traffic and usage by its members. But you probably would have never guessed it was profitable for some in this manner… people and companies whose business is creating and developing social networking accounts, who get paid to build it from the ground up, and even auction accounts with thousands of friends for thousands of dollars.

I recorded a screen capture video during the evaluation of the website and in the video I talked about…

• another keyword research tool I use aside from the Google Keyword Tool
• ways how to increase traffic and increase the number of external links to a website

I suggest you choose FULL screen mode by clicking the screen icon on the lower right portion of the video box.

• check on the number of pages indexed on Google
• check on how many external links are pointing to the main page and to all pages on the website
• check Alexa traffic ranking
• check source code to see what keywords the main page contains to give me an idea what keywords they want that page to rank for
• verify identified keywords and check for monthly search volumes, did competitive research and took a look at the sites on the top 10 for those keywords and getting a profile of them, how authoritative they are and establishing how easy or difficult it would be to rank for those keywords

Important points on the video I made are:

• I recommended a few simple traffic generation, link building strategies to increase traffic to the website
• I revealed a practical approach to SEO… going for top rankings for multiple non competitive keywords that keep you afloat and fund long term SEO goals for competitive keywords

The thing about doing these videos live and unscripted is, there are some points that I miss or things that I would have normally done but forget to, here they are.

Important points and tasks I DID NOT discuss or DID NOT do.

1. Check Source Code for Google Analytics

You should always have Google Analytics installed. You just must. If you can, also register your website on Google Webmaster Tools, and even more information and statistics about your website will be available to you, especially when you want to really optimize performance.

2. Market Research

You might have heard me talk about keyword research and competitive research in the past, but there is one thing that I have not mentioned… market research. With keyword research and competitive research you are identifying keywords that your potential audience is using to find the information or content you have as well as evaluating if you can rank for those keywords within a reasonable time period.

But if you are selling something (product/service), you also need to be sure if a keyword is indeed going to be profitable… by profitable I mean, are people using this keyword the type who would buy something or are they simply researchers looking for information. If your conversion goals are sales, then you have to also make sure you do not spend all that time, money and effort to get a number 1 ranking for a keyword that simply brings in researchers or freebie seekers and not hot buyers.

There are simple ways to do that; you can check for PPC ads for that keyword on Google, the more ads the better, more ads appearing on Google for that keyword on a regular basis means money is spent by people using this keyword. You can also simply do a PPC test on Google to verify which keywords convert and which don’t, before you pursue the SEO route and rank for those keywords. There is also a tool that helps identify commercial intent on MSN AdLabs (MSN’s PPC platform) and you can find it here, http://adlab.msn.com/Online-Commercial-Intention/Default.aspx.

3. Link Examination of Competing Websites for Target Keywords

I did not take a look at each and every one of the websites listed on the top 10 for each of the keywords of interest, and taken a look at their authority, establishing how huge the website is and how many links point to the ranking page and to all pages on the website.

Finally I wish to stress that the evaluation you have seen pretty much covers aspects that I can access or uncover. A key part of SEO is engagement and visitor experience which we can only get a picture of, if first of all the website is tracking statistics through Google Analytics or any other system that provides comprehensive tracking, and if we had access to that data to take a look at metrics and KPIs (key performance indicators).

So here are those videos broken into three parts. To get a clearer bigger picture, click the FULL SCREEN button.

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

In the videos you will learn:
- how to check how many other websites are linking to your website or web page
- about a free SEO tool to use in checking websites
- about the Alexa ranking
- how to find the right keywords to get your website or web pages ranked for on search engines
- how to verify if your web pages are properly optimized, and will rank for the right keywords
- how to increase your website traffic
- more…

Free Website Traffic and SEO Analysis Part 1

Free Website Traffic and SEO Analysis Part 2

Free Website Traffic and SEO Analysis Part 3

Free Website Traffic and SEO Analysis Part 4

I thought I’d write this post, and say SEO is actually Feng Shui for websites… a fitting and timely post for the Chinese New Year.

A lot of people believe SEO to be mysterious and difficult. I disagree.

First, what likely makes it mysterious is the fact that the rules to ranking well through SEO are not known, since these rules change often. Google itself may not even know with certainty how it ranks a website since the algorithm is composed of so many rules, and likely different teams working on each.

Second… SEO being difficult. It has actually become even easier, so easy that anyone can do it and what has made it easy is that there are so many social sites and user generated sites out there that are high authority high traffic websites that can be leveraged to achieve SEO goals.

But what is SEO?

To simplify, SEO is a traffic generating strategy that involves improving both website content (design, layout, structure, etc) and website visibility / accessibility on other sites (through links) that result in better visibility on search engines for keyword searches made by your desired visitors or target audience.

What is Feng Shui?

While there are several mysterious sounding esoteric definitions of Feng Shui, I subscribe to the idea that it is the practical placement and arrangement of items, ideas, designs or things that create the least resistance to movement or use and thus enhance efficiency or productivity.

In Relation to Your Website Attributes

Each and every item on your website and each of the pages have a purpose and that is to lead a visitor to perform a specific conversion goal.

At the page level, each and every page has to have the right layout, design, use the right images and the right text in order to make the visitor’s experience on that page fluid and with least resistance. They are guided smoothly to what you eventually want them to do.

At the website level, all pages and their content are connected together through a well thought out structure of links, making visitor navigability and ease of going from one page to the next, the top priority.

In Relation to Your Website Visibility / Accessibility

Now that you have optimized your website you would need to invite people to see it. Much like a well appointed home which you have spent a lot of time decorating, making sure to arrange everything in a manner that feels comfortable and stress free… you would then invite people to your home.

To get people to visit your home on the web, you would need to create action on other websites where people you would want visiting your home are found. What I mean by creating action is to initiate contact or activity such as being proactive on social media and social networking sites, interacting with other people and making sure that there is a link within those interactions so that people you interact with as well as people following the discussion can visit your website through those links.

You would need to also choose the right places/website, use the right words to get attention, and use the right offer or incentives that would make people want to visit your website.

Simplified.. that is how SEO actually works… ensuring your website is ready to welcome visitors from all the links you have been able to create on the web, that in turn yields more visitors that find you through rankings on search engines for keywords relevant to content on each of the pages of your website.

You must design a marketing program that offers a series of action steps to the prospective customer. The sooner you do this, the faster your Internet investment will pay off.

Direct markets use an acronym to remind them of what every marketing campaign needs: AIDA. This stands for attention, interest, desire, and action.

Attention is step one. If the visitor has arrived at your Web site, it had better grab his attention. I hope your site does this rapidly. Visitors get bored, fast.

I suggest that you make a promise or offer, stated early, and clearly visible on your site within a few seconds. I also suggest that you minimize graphics. Graphics reduce download time.

Let’s say that you have his attention. You must now interest him. You must find a way to present information to him that will keep him from clicking to another site.

Maybe you remind him of a problem he now faces or will soon face (fear). Maybe you present an opportunity that he has not thought of (greed). Fear and greed are the buyers’ great motivators in business-related sales.

You have his interest. You must now produce desire. The question is: Desire to do what? You are leading him to take action.

The action you should motivate him to take is to identify himself, so that you can contact him again by automated e-mail. You must persuade him to request something: a free report, a short course, a list of specifications – something. Whatever it is, by requesting it, he sends you his e-mail address.

This is the key to profitability. Your Web site should have several useful functions: to gain the visitor’s attention, to create interest, to create desire, and to generate an action step. Very few Web site designers have self-consciously applied AIDA. They are technicians and artists, not marketers. Not that many marketers understand AIDA.

His action steps should not cost him any money. You want his e-mail address. Offer him something of immediate value to get that e-mail address. Offer him several things, if you can.

Think carefully about what you would want from your site if you were a first-time visitor to your site. Empathize.

What do you want him to do after he reads a special report? What is the next action step you want him to take? Design everything in your free reports to generate one final action step per report. I suggest that you get him to subscribe to a newsletter. Then you can contact him regularly.

Another possibility: get him to sign up for a free e- mail course. For this, you should probably use a sequential or follow-up autoresponder. You can offer a course using only free one-shot autoresponders, but you must rely on the reader to click a click-and-send link to receive each subsequent lesson. He may forget. It’s usually better to have an automated system mail them at regular intervals. Your goal in sending a course is simple: you gain additional contacts with him. He requests these contacts.

Assume in everything you do on your retail sales site that your number-one assignment is to get his e-mail address. If he leaves your site without having identified himself, your site has failed to achieve its most important goal.

It’s nice to make a sale on your site from a first- time visitor. It’s also incredibly rare. Don’t try. Get him to order a free report.

For more tips go to www.WebMediaExpert.com
“Powerful Internet Marketing Solutions for your business!”

Newsletters are indeed a very effective means of promoting a product or service. It is non obtrusive nor intrusive, and is a great way to establish and sustain a rapport with the recipients of your newsletter.

There are however some key points to remember when running a newsletter especially if these are circulated online through email.

1. Always Only Send Out Relevant Content

Your newsletter should be relevant to the audience you serve. You should provide useful, helpful information that is of interest to your readers. Do not simply send out news about offers and advertising but send them stories that catch their attention, sustain their interest and then create the desire for what you have to offer. The highest conversions are a result of the right offer tied in to the right story.

2. Make Sure You Have Permission

A lot of times companies make the mistake of sending out advertising messages to a bunch of email addresses without even knowing how these email addresses were sourced, without knowing if these were business contacts, personal contacts, leads, or past customers.

Email Spam is a big issue today, and sending out information or advertising that is unrequested for is spam. Before adding people to your mailing list, you should have their permission.

Bestselling author and entrepreneur Seth Godin is recognized as lead advocate and even father of what he coined “Permission Marketing”. It is used more commonly in the online marketing space and its undesirable opposite is interruption marketing. The concept of is simple, marketers obtain permission before advancing to the next step in the purchasing process.

In the case of a newsletter, you would need to get permission to send the newsletter to a recipient. This is common among online marketers, especially email marketers and search marketers.

When a person voluntarily signs up to receive your newsletter through a sign up form on a website and provides you with their name and email address in the process, they are signifying their intent to receive messages from you. As an anti-spam measure, some marketers even send out a confirmation email with a link in it that needs to be clicked to ensure that the requester voluntarily grants permission and explicitly expresses his desire to receive information via email.

“This form of marketing requires that the prospective customer has either obtained explicit permission to send their promotional message (e.g. an email or catalog request) or implicit permission (e.g. querying a search engine). This can be either via an online email opt-in form or by using search engines, which implies a request for information which can include that of a commercial nature.” - Wikipedia

If you have their permission, that means they are interested in what you have to send or offer them regardless if it be a want or need. If they are interested in what you have to offer them, the higher the likelihood they will buy what you are offering.

People never buy anything that they don’t either want or need.

3. Do Not Abuse This Permission

By not abusing the permission you have been granted I mean, do not make them regret opting in to receive you mailing list.

• Try not to send them an email everyday. An email once a week will do, and while two mailings in a week might be pushing it, you would likely get away with it as long as it is content that they would very much appreciate receiving.
• Make sure to also have a section in your email that clearly tells them how they can opt out of your newsletter if they no longer want to receive any more emails from you. That way you can minimize Spam complaints against you, if they know that they can easily opt out of your list if they no longer believe your content to be important to them or simply do not want to receive any more messages from you.
• Always protect the privacy of your subscribers. Do not share or sell their information to other parties.

4. Get Them to Interact

Social marketing has become a key strategy for a lot of Fortune 500 companies in getting their message across to their customers. We have the Web 2.0 phenomenon to thank for that. The internet has changed the way people find information, products and services… and has also opened up more mediums for marketers to channel their messages. We have always known that people have an opinion on just about everything, and the internet of today makes it very easy to voice that opinion.

Always try to get your recipients to do something in your newsletter; this can be as simple as asking them direct questions and being receptive to their responses or as highly engaging as getting them to join your network or community and participate in discussions, unknowingly promoting your product or service for you on these social sites and creating a buzz for you that can go viral.

A highly interactive person on your mailing list has a higher chance of buying compared to someone with whom you have had no interaction with. Marketing is relationship building.

Those are very simple points to keep in mind when implementing a newsletter. These will keep people on your mailing list longer, and the longer a person stays on your mailing list, the more useful content they receive from you, the more you gain their trust, and the higher the chance they buy something from you.

Have you ever received any of those messages on Facebook? It can get really annoying. So here are those tips and a few links to good places to read up on Facebook Marketing.

Tip 1 – Do Not Hard Sell

Facebook Marketing is not the process of adding people to your network, then sending them messages about investing or buying something as soon as your friend request gets accepted. Moreover, if they declines, please do not ask them for referrals or names of other people that you can pester. You are annoying people instead of getting them interested in what you are promoting.

Read the line above carefully, and note that the key word there is “interested.”

If people are not interested in what you have, they will not buy. If people do not feel a need for what you have, they will not buy. If people are not interested nor have a need for what you have, neither will they ever want to refer other people to you.

Tip 2 – Content Relevant to Your Audience is Key to Getting Attention

If you are selling a product or service through Facebook, you do not get people’s attention by messaging each and every one of them asking if they want to try your product or service. Instead, create and upload useful and helpful information such as articles, video or links on your profile page that your prospects will find important to them.

The best articles are always informative articles that zero-in on a specific need, problem or situation that they encounter or are in, that needs a solution. By providing valuable content to people on your network, you not only build and sustain a relationship with them but build TRUST.

People buy brands they trust. People buy from people they trust.

Tip 3 – Be Passionate About What You Post

Many times I see Facebook profile pages that look like they were half heartedly done. It gives me the impression that the person who created them did so not because he liked it, but did because his boss told him to do it as a way of getting more leads or potential business for the company. People see through that.

Be genuine, be real. Put your passions on your Facebook profile. I think it goes without saying that, it would be an advantage if you truly love your job and love what you do, because it will show in what you are posting on your profile page. When you write about something you are passionate about you will never run out of things to write, because you will always find something interesting to say… something that other people will also find interesting.

Tip 4 – Treat Your Friends as Friends and Not Leads or Prospects

I have heard many people talk about bumping into their Facebook friends on the street or somewhere but they never say hello. Facebook friends who initiated an a friend request even! What is the point of having someone on your FB friend list if you cannot even say hi or see eye to eye in the real world. People forget that, marketing is about relationships. This often happens when some person trying to sell something simply adds people to his friends list in order to try and pitch a product or service.

Everyone hates a salesman, but everyone likes to have a friend.

Tip 5 – Grow Your Network

For any social marketing effort to work, there is one thing you would need to do consistently… and that is to grow your network continuously. Apart from that, make sure to post useful content that people on your network would enjoy and find useful.. be helpful and make time to interact with people on your network. Again, marketing is about relationships… look at a person as a person and not as a lead.

So here are a few links to pages on Facebook Marketing which I like.

Facebook Marketing by Ron Jones talks about promoting your Facebook profile and fan pages. I especially liked the part about engagement and conversation. After all, social marketing IS about engagement and conversation.

Dosh Dosh Facebook Marketing: Articles and Resources talks about using FaceBook for Brand Exposure, Traffic and Sales and presents a good number of resources as well.