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Posts Tagged ‘seo’

postheadericon Blog Traffic Strategies That Work

One of the most used blog traffic generation strategies is the PPP, or pay-per-performance method, which requires that you pay for the traffic generated only when that traffic results in some provable benefit.

The familiar PPC, or pay-per-click, form of traffic generation is a type of PPP, and with …

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how to start blogging,seo blogging software,paid blogs,create a blog,paid to post,rss submit

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You know all about search engine optimization as a blog traffic generation strategy, but is there anything else you can do to bring readers and potential customers your way.

One of the most used blog traffic generation strategies is the PPP, or pay-per-performance method, which requires that you pay for the traffic generated only when that traffic results in some provable benefit.

The familiar PPC, or pay-per-click, form of traffic generation is a type of PPP, and with Pay-per-click you are only charged if someone viewing one of your advertisements actually clicks it.

Google AdWords is presently the greatest server of pay-per-click ads, with a system which lets advertisers bid for keywords and then use them in small ads distributed on Google’s search and content networks.

Social marketing, while it does not qualify as a kind of pay-per-performance traffic generation technique, is nonetheless an effective means of generating blog traffic. You are engaging in social marketing any time you promote your service of product directly to other people social networking sites like MySpace, or do email or telemarketing.

Finally, there are literally dozens of viral traffic generation techniques; they include such things as providing the best possible service or product to your customers, doing everything you can to satisfy their needs, and letting word of mouth bring more traffic your way.

You can also practice viral traffic generation by offering free software or ebooks to but only to those individuals who have been referred to you. This approach to blog traffic generation depends on you’re offer successfully creating a “buzz’, although when something free is involved that is not difficult.

And by requiring a referral, nobody will get your freebie unless they first find someone else who has it. It’s a great way to exponentially increase the demand for whatever you are offering!

Of course search engine optimization is a necessity, but you can never have enough blog traffic generation techniques at your disposal if you want your blog to become a real money making tool!

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postheadericon Making Sense of Internet Marketing

The key components of an Internet marketing program include Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Search Engine Marketing (SEM), Paid Placement, Affiliate Marketing and Viral/Social Marketing. The goal of all of these is to increase a website’s traffic (number of people who visit) however each uses a different tactic to meet this goal. An effective Internet marketing program leverages a mix of these components to maximize their value at a particular point in the overall program.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is an attempt to increase your website’s ranking in ‘organic’ (non-paid) search results in Google™, Yahoo!™ and other search engines. Search engines use complex, proprietary algorithms to determine how a page ranks. In general higher ranking is achieved by optimizing the actual website content to increase its relevancy to certain search words (keywords). Additionally, SEO attempts to increase the website’s perceived ‘authority’ by acquiring quality links to your website from other complementary sites (back links). Finally higher ranking websites are highly visible to search engines meaning most or all of their web pages are indexed by the search engines.

Many aspects of a complete SEO effort can be outsourced, but some aspects are more effective when controlled by those most familiar with the product or service. SEO generally has a longer-term ROI than other Internet marketing methods because a website’s authority is generally built over time. It is important to know that SEO is never truly finished. Competition and buyer preferences change and evolve over time, therefore, the authority of a website changes and must be re-evaluated routinely.

Effectiveness of a SEO program is measured in terms of search result rank, search engine saturation and overall visibility. Result rank is determined by how high a website appears in organic results. Saturation is an indication of how much of a website is indexed by search engines and overall visibility shows how many references are found for a website.

Search Engine Marketing (SEM) essentially is a shortcut to increased search result rankings. By sponsoring links in search engine results, advertisers can ensure that relevant links are displayed along with search results whenever certain keywords are searched for. These are generally displayed above or in a separate column beside organic results. In these pay per click (PPC) programs advertisers bid to determine ranking and only pay when links are actually clicked by a visitor.

SEM can be, and probably is best, outsourced. Experienced SEM practitioners can maximize the results of a pay-per-click program by increasing the quality of website visitors. Additionally, knowledge of the bidding process and keyword selection can significantly reduce the amount paid per click-through over time.

SEM has the shortest term ROI as resulting traffic is immediate and measurable. The ability to tightly control expenses, all the way down to cost per click, makes the expense very predictable. Negatively, there is little if any residual value effect of SEM beyond potential relationships with new buyers. SEM is predominately a point in time exercise, although it can be very effective during a campaign.

Paid Placement is similar to traditional print or media advertising. Advertisers pay a fee to have their ‘ad’ displayed on a website or alongside search engine results. Ads are often ‘banners’ that include a marketing message that entices viewers to click the ad and be transferred to the advertiser’s website. Paid placement also includes sponsored links on content pages, paid reviews or ‘pop-up’ ads that appear before or on top of a content page.

Paid placement can include SEM tactics, but here the sponsored links appear on content websites rather than search engine results pages. Placement is based on relevancy of selected keywords and the displaying website’s content. The advertiser has limited control over where ads appear. Ads on content sites generally rank higher for lower bids than on search engine results.

Direct placement of ads on specific content sites is generally based on a set fee or per million impressions (displays). Direct placement allows an advertiser to specify specific website, durations and potentially exact placement on a page. This is most effective if a product or service would appeal to visitors of a specific website. For instance, Dell might place an ad on a computer buying guide website.

Purchase and management of direct placement ads can be outsourced, although it requires less expertise and oversight than SEM.

Affiliate Marketing allows website owners to resell products or services for a percentage or set fee commission. Commissions may be paid for sales, leads or even website visit referrals. Almost all major retail stores support affiliate marketing programs and generally use a third party service to manage the relationship with affiliates. While affiliate marketing allows a product or service provider to extend its marketing capability it is still responsible for all aspects of distribution.

Affiliate marketing can be outsourced in part or whole. Generally the affiliate marketer selects an affiliate management provider to handle acquiring and managing new affiliates.

Although not an absolute, Affiliate marketing tends to be most utilized by product or service providers who have a wide range of products to offer. This increases the likelihood that content site owners are going to assign valuable screen space to a product. Alternatively the provider may offer higher incentive commissions or target very specific content sites.

Viral/Social Marketing is similar to traditional ‘word of mouth’ advertising although done through websites. Marketers attempt create ‘buzz’ about their products by leveraging social networks, emails, blogs, videos or other venues that allow viewers to easily ‘spread the word.’ This form of Internet marketing is often associated with the term ‘Web 2.0′ because it tends to leverage more user driven venues and content rather than commercial content sites.

Viral/Social Internet marketing, much like SEO is an ongoing effort and similarly it is possible to outsource all or some efforts in this area. Development of complex marketing campaigns would likely be outsourced to a marketing firm specializing in leveraging the Internet, however, smaller campaigns and the tactical aspects could be handled internally or by your SEO/SEM partner.

In closing, an effective Internet marketing program will leverage some or all of these components in a complementary way. Each component brings visitors to a website through its own unique tactics, timeframe and cost. If planned and managed properly, each component can be utilized by the next one to create even greater value. A successful Internet marketing plan will consider the short-term, long-term and budgetary goals of the product or service provider, deploying the components that met those goals.

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postheadericon The Fastest Way To Make Money Online Today

In this article we are not going to mess around. The fastest way to make money online is available to anyone willing to work and has a small amount of money to spend on website hosting and an Autoresponder for future follow up.

Here is exactly what you need to get started making money online the fastest way. We are going to base this on having a blog, quality products, and a way to capture names and email addresses for future sales as well.

1. Quality hosting that you can grow with is the first thing you will need. We are not talking about some cheap hosting that will allow you to build a 10 page website. Your website is going to be a WordPress blog and you are easily going to build pages because all you have to do is type. You can expect to pay $10-$25 a month for quality hosting.

2. Your website is a WordPress blog so expect to pay someone around $60 to get you set up.

3. Join a quality Autoresponder company like Aweber. They will run you around $20 a month, but you are going to have your installer set up a capture form on every page that you can give away a free report in exchange for someone giving you their name and email address. Put a free report from one of your affiliate programs in it or write one of your own. Make sure it offers value to the reader.

4. Learn to love to write because blogging is all about writing about your products. This means you will need something to sell. If you do not have anything you can go and join for free affiliate programs on websites like CJ.com and AssociatePrograms.com

5. Join a couple of Internet marketing and affiliate marketing forums for free training. AssociatePrograms has the best forum for affiliate marketing and the WarriorForum offers the best Internet marketing advice.

6. To get traffic to your blog you are going to want to use three main forms of free, or nearly free, advertising. Social marketing, article marketing, and forum marketing. You can easily find advice on all three of these in the discussion forums we just listed.

Your strategy is very simple. Get your blog monetized with affiliate products. Start writing about these products. When you blog you can ping your posts. WordPress makes this very easy to do. You will also post your articles you just wrote on several relevant social networking websites and in article directories.

2 very good books on doing this are the Authority Black Book and Article Domination which you can Google search to find.

All totaled you will spend around $100 to get started and another $40-$50 a month for hosting and Autoresponder fees. If you master getting traffic to your blog and then have good products to sell you can quickly start to make money online without spending hardly anything out of your pocket to do it.

Summary: In this article we are not going to mess around. The fastest way to make money online is available to anyone willing to work and has a small amount of money to spend on website hosting and an Autoresponder for future follow up.

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postheadericon Get Your Traffic To Expode – Use Social Media!

If you’re like me, I got really tired of paying for my traffic and striving to get a higher search engine ranking. The competition is getting tougher and tougher. Although I am getting more successful with my Google and Yahoo Marketing campaigns and that’s mainly because I’m getting more experienced at it. But believe me, I’ve wasted a lot of money going through the learning curve.

But I’ve gotten smarter! I’ve found a way to generate a lot more traffic to my website and it’s absolutely free! Yes, I’m going to continue using my adwords, but not as much as I have in the past.

How did I get smarter? I kept hearing how social media was going to be the wave of the future when it comes to internet marketing. So I started setting up a couple of accounts on sites like Facebook, MySpace, UTube and Twitter. Started asking people to be my friends and guess what started to happen. You guessed it! I started getting a lot more traffic to my blog and websites, best of all, it’s free traffic. I don’t have to work at getting ranking anymore. The back links from my media sites helps me to rank even higher in the search engines than I did when I worked at it.

If you use social marketing correctly, it will drive big traffic DIRECTLY to your site from the social media sites that you get involved with…and that’s huge. After all, that is really the holy grail, isn’t it?

We all want more traffic to our site, right?

You may not realize it, but social media sites have more traffic than Google. And if you use the right strategies and tactics to put yourself in front of that traffic, then you don’t have rely on Google to get traffic to your sites. And best of all, you don’t have to worry about expensive AdWords campaigns or other forms of advertising.

Of course, let’s be real here… just because you start getting big traffic directly from the social media sites doesn’t mean you will abandon your Google rankings and stop all advertising. What it means is that you will be getting a lot more traffic, and the average cost of that traffic will plummet down to levels that are from the stone ages when it comes to the internet…. that’s what I call “back to the future”!

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postheadericon Why Hoping In Search Traffic Can Doom Your Business

Most reports peg search traffic at about 10% of total internet traffic. However, most businesses spend 90% of their website efforts on search engine optimization and marketing. Below I outline why this disproportionate emphasis on search traffic can be spell disaster for an online business.

If only 10% of people are searching, what are the other 90% doing? The majority are returning visitors. They may have found a site initially by search but now they return. If someone is comparison shopping, they’ll usually bookmark five or six sites, comparing each one with the others. There’s another small percentage that are simply typing in domains. Looking for lawn furniture? I’ll just type in lawnfurniture dot com. Another even smaller proportion actually type the domain name into a search box, then click on the domain in the search results.

I think as webmasters we get search engine tunnel vision when we’re marketing our businesses. When someone tells me they’re having trouble getting top 10 search positions, I usually ask about the other types of online marketing strategies they’re engaged with. The common response is, what else can I do?

There’s a lot you can do! The great thing about online marketing is that we’re only limited by our creativity. Social marketing is wide open for the creative and savvy marketer. What better way to get traffic than to create word of mouth referrals. How do most offline businesses get clients? Through word of mouth. It’s no different online.

How people get to your site is important. But, what you do with a visitor after they come to your site is even more important.

I would argue that our existing clients are our top marketing vehicles. Do you offer great service and support? You’ll get referrals. Are you hard to work with, arrogant, or stingy? You won’t get referrals. A happy client will tell one other person. An unhappy client will tell at least four other people.

One of the few points I think professional internet marketers get right is traffic diversification. Yes, they focus on getting free, organic search traffic but they also spend a great deal of time on list building, customer service, and word of mouth.

If your only focus is search traffic, sooner or later you’ll be disappointed. My business goal is to have as many traffic streams as I can develop. I’m slowly getting to a point where even if my search traffic went to zero, I’d still keep plugging along.

Search engine algorithms change all the time. Time spent surfing forums to find the best ways to beat search engines is time better spent on other marketing methods. Time spent tweaking a page for keyword density is time better spent handing out business cards with your website address.

For those of you stuck in a search engine rut, step back and look at your options. What else are you doing to drive traffic to your site? There are so many more options than we think if we would just look around.

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postheadericon How Forum Marketing Can Help With Link Popularity & Website Traffic

Forum marketing or Social Marketing can truly be another great hidden source to add to you’re over all Internet marketing. It is a place were people with similar interest gather to discuss all types of topics for that subject.

How affective is it for your Internet Marketing and generating website traffic?

Forum Marketing can help in many different ways when it comes to marketing your website, here is how:

First you want to find a discussion board or forum that is targeted to your website theme. Think of it like this would you market your website about jewelry to a forum about cooking? The answer is no.

Participating in forums can help you and your website build an expert status online by posting answers to questions others have in a specific topic.

Never posted in forums before?

First thing you should do before just jumping in and posting wildly, take a look around and see what other are posting about, view the set up and feel the mood of the forum.

Once you have a good understanding of the forum then you can start participating in this targeted marketing platform.

Note: There is a sign up process for most good forums. Process is simple and only takes a few minutes. Forums normally use sign in to help better monitor the forum and protect it from spamming.

Keep in mind that most forums do not allow advertising in their post and the regular participants of these forums can smell an ad from a mile away. This way of using the forums will not make you any friends so keep your content exactly that content. Add value to the forum by providing your own unique quality copy.

Forums allow a signature line were you can place a small description about your business along with a link to your website. Here is where your link popularity can climb and climb steadily as new post creates new fresh content that the search engines love.

Search engines pick up and index forum posts high so be sure to include important keyword rich topics and content in every forum posts so they will attract targeted traffic for your website through your popular keywords.

Consider Forum Marketing as part of you Internet marketing strategies, it can have many benefits for your website and business that you may not have thought about.

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