Use our free service to automatically submit your url to the
top search engines and regional directories. Fast and easy,
with a click of a button. Submittal to Excite, Go!, Hot Bot,
Fastsearch, Lycos, Northern Light, Webtop, Fireball, and others
Major Search Engines and Search Directories
Manually submit your web pages to the major search engines
and directories. Hand submission is practiced by many top
professionals. Submit directly to Yahoo! Directory and the
Open Directory Project (OD). Also, submit your web site to
the major crawler engines like FAST AllThe Web, Lycos, Hotbot,
AOL Search, MSN Network, AltaVista, and the rest of the top
search engines.
Popular Search Engines and CPC Search Directories
Manually submit your web pages to the major search engines
and cpc directories. Hand submission is practiced by many
top professionals. Submit directly to inktomi, Looksmart,
iWon, Zeal Directory, Overture, About.com, and the rest of
the top search vehicles.
75 Free Classified Ad Sites
Submit to 75 Free Classified Ad Sites. These are hand picked
and includes the top traffic producers. The list includes
the top free classified ad sites as well as the little known
and hard to find ad sites. Constantly updated.
Affiliate Program and Sponsors for Content
Used correctly, affiliate programs, ad sponsorships, and pay
for action programs, can be another way to generate traffic.
By providing book reviews, relevant products, industry articles,
or interactive live feeds, you are providing added content
to your site which your visitors will value. Note: I only
recommend programs that I use myself.
Other Promotion Resources
Learn other free ways to promote your web site.
Search engines, directories, and free for all link pages
are useful and effective in creating site awareness, but
they are just a piece of the promotion pie as you need to
explore the many other avenues to promote your site.
Web site awards, web rings, Top sites, opt-in email lists,
forums, press releases, and offline promotions are just
a few of the many, many options you have to create a web
presence.
Time
For A Search Engine Specialist?
Sometimes a SEO is the way to go.
There are many variables and contant changes happening everyday
with search vehicles and many frustrations that accompany
achieving top ratings. One solution is hiring a professional
who specializes in search engine optimization. The valuable
time and effort saved can prove to be very cost effective.
A professional can do the dirty work of creating web site
awareness on the search engines and you can do what you
do best, take care of your business.
Our
Professional.
Labels: Free web promotional resources free software download for webmaster
Keyword Live
AnalogX Keyword Live shows you the top 100 keywords and phrases being used on several popular search engines on the web - in real time!
Win95/98/NT.
Download:
236k file.
Zone Alarm - Free Firewall
The absolute best free protection you can have for your computer. Protect your computer and computer contents while online and offline. Protect Now!
Win95/98/NT.
Download: 1.6M file.
TypeItIn
Free
A great time saving tool. Free! You define buttons that will type in any information you want into any application. Fill out forms on the web, or process forms at work. Great tool for applications like creating HTML code or writing standard letters or emails.. Totally FREE!
Download: 372k file here. Win95/98.
Sam Spade
Best free tool for a webmaster! Features; Ping, NSlookup, who is, traceroute, finger, SMTP VRFY, website download,email header analysis, and more. Use this web tool to track spam, to monitor your website, to troubleshoot connection problems. This is a webmasters dream tool. And Free! Win95/98/NT.
Download:
1.80M file.
FTP - Commander 4.01
Finally a free FTP program. Not a professional one but very
funtional for free. Program allows to delete, to rename and to copy files; to create and to delete directories on FTP - server.
Win95/98/NT.
Download:
336k file. Win95/98.
NoteTab
Lite 4.9 (New)
Freeware version an award-winning text editor for Windows 95 and NT4. Create web pages, write source code, send e-mail, take notes, analyse text, read files, and much more!
Win95/98/NT.
Download:
1.84M file. Win 95/98.
Xenu's Link Sleuth (TM)
A spidering software that checks Web sites for broken links. Works better than alot of professional products. This is freeware link checker software that has more uses then you can shake a stick at. I use it to check for dead links, to study competitors, to check web site structure, and to compile a quick list of all site urls for search engine submission. You can even use this software to search categories in the Yahoo! Directory for dead links.
Win95/98/NT.
Download:
1.05M file.
Alias Software
A great new search and replace software designed for webmasters needing to update tons of web pages at once. A lot of features to maintain your ad codes and search boxes. This one webmaster tool has saved me thousands of hours and has paid for itself over and over. The block replace feature is powerful and can be customized for almost any use. Replace banner code, text code, copyrights, even partial code like getting rid of font tags on multiple pages. Every webmaster should have the Alias find and replace software in their toolbox. Try it Free!
Download FREE! Click Here!
Labels: free software download for webmaster Top 75 free classified advertisement sites
Commerce
Corner
1AmericaMall
Classifieds
5StarAds
Absolutely
Free
Cajun.com
Ad
Net!
Classifieds
Alana's
Classified Ads
American
Express
Angelfire's
Classifieds
Admatic
One
World Plaza
Australian
Jobs
Advice
Access-US
Bestmall
Classifieds
Photo
Ads
Classifieds
Central
Art
Link Cafe
Bluegrass
Shopper
Canine
Connections
Yahoo!
Classifieds
Classified
Ads
Centre
American
Ads
Biscuits'
Classifieds
Beaumont
Net
Comfind
Commerce
Corner
AdsByNet
Costa
Rica
MarketingAds
OppNet
Earthlink
Classifieds
WorldWide
Plus
Classifieds
Flea
Market
@ FUW
A-1
Money-
At-Home
Webovation
Free Ads
Coteazur
Free Classifieds
Ablewise
Classifieds
GeoCities
Free Classifieds
WorldMarket
Global
Classified Ads
Fresno
Mall
Shopping
Solutions
Globle
Home-Biz
Classified Ads
1st
Reply.com
Infoseek
Classifieds
International
Classified Ads
Hooverdog.com
Rlaj
Directory
Internet
Pet Connection
Ad
Track
Classifieds
Absolutely
Free
US
FreeAds
LOOT
Louisiana
Classifieds
Lycos
411
Classifieds
MarketPlace
1
Mall
Money
Making
Ads
MLM
Classifieds
Nerd
World
Classifieds
2BuySell
1Ads.com
CityBuyCity
Penny
Saver
USA
Asian
TradeMart
Very
Hot.com
Net
Nickel
HighForce
Earthlink
Classifieds
The
Globe
AdTrader
Cyber-Trader
Information
City
Free Ads
Zip
Mall
Auto-Submit
Your Web Site
Labels: Top 75 free classified advertisement sites click exchange of ad for high revenue
We recently announced that AdSense would start allowing Google-certified ad networks to bid for your display ad space in order to help you find new ways to generate revenue. You may have seen today's post by Neal Mohan on the Official Google Blog announcing the new DoubleClick Ad Exchange, and we'd like to take a moment to let you know how these two announcements fit together.
The Google-certified ad network capability is powered by the DoubleClick Ad Exchange that we announced today. Certified ad networks are Ad Exchange participants who have gone through an additional certification process in order to be able to to bid for your ad space through AdSense. We call this feature "yield management", because it offers you the most revenue for each ad that shows on your site in real time, regardless of whether it's Google or another certified party who can offer you the highest bid.
You don't need to change any of your account settings to start allowing these ads to compete. Also, you can continue to use the Ad Review Center to control which certified ad networks can appear on your site.
Opening AdSense to certified Ad Exchange participants means that more advertisers will be able to bid on your ad space. We believe this will ultimately help you earn more revenue for your sites.
Labels: click exchange of ad for high revenue Earn revenue from every ad impression
We've been hearing your requests for new ways to generate revenue in AdSense, and new ways to maintain control over the ads that appear on your sites. With that in mind, we're pleased to announce plans to give you the ability to allow multiple Google-certified ad networks to compete for display ad space on your site.
You may remember that we began to accept display ads served from qualified third-party vendors over a year ago, which helped increase the number of display ads competing on AdSense publisher sites. With this new change, participating ad networks can also bid in our auction to appear on AdSense sites. This new capability will help you generate the most profit for every ad that appears on your site, whether the ads come from AdWords advertisers or Google-certified ad networks.
Who are these ad networks? They're ad agencies and companies that partner with advertisers and publishers to buy and sell ads on sites they don't own themselves (much like AdSense). You'll now be able to allow advertisers from these networks to compete with AdWords advertisers for your ad space. All reporting and payments will still run through AdSense as they always have, and the available ad formats will be the same as those offered for AdWords ads.
We take the quality of ads delivered to your site seriously, so we'll be certifying all participating ad networks for adherence to our standards for user privacy, ad quality, and speed. You'll have control over which networks can show ads on your pages -- you can choose to opt out of receiving ads from specific networks, or all networks completely. This means you can continue to show ads from only AdWords advertisers if you like. Visit the Help Center to learn more about managing these account settings.
We'll slowly begin allowing ads from Google-certified ad networks to appear on AdSense pages over the coming months, so you won't see an immediate impact on your ads or earnings. As new networks are certified, you'll see them appear in your account. This feature will initially be available to publishers in North America and Europe, but we hope to roll it out to additional parts of the world in the future.
Finally, some ad networks use tools similar to Google's interest-based advertising to show more relevant ads to users on the sites they visit. We'll allow certified networks who comply with user privacy guidelines to show ads using these tools, but they won't be permitted to collect data from your site for the purpose of subsequent interest-based advertising. You'll be able to opt out of receiving ads based on user interests from these certified networks, and we have changed our requirements for third-party ad serving to reflect this.
We're dedicated to providing users with a positive experience, while helping publishers effectively monetize the ads appearing on their sites. We believe you'll find that more competition translates into better ads and increased revenue in the long run.
Labels: Earn revenue from every ad impression Tracking and effects of duplicate content
Duplicate content is a common occurrence on the web and in many cases can hurt search engine rankings. While the search engines may not always technically penalize webmasters for duplicate content, there are still a lot of ways it can hurt.
WebProNews is covering the Search Marketing Expo (SMX) East in New York, where representatives from the three major search engines (Google, Yahoo, and Bing) discussed how their respective web properties handle duplicate content issues. Following are some takeaways from each.
Duplicate Content in Google
The way Google handles duplicate content has been discussed a lot in recent memory. This is largely due to a video Google's Greg Grothaus uploaded, in which he discusses at length, the way Google handles a variety of different elements of the duplicate content conversation.
Joachim Kupke, Sr. Software Engineer of Google's Indexing Team reiterated much of what Grothaus said. He also said that Google has a ton of infrastructure for content duplication elimination:
- redirects
- detection of recurrent URL patterns (the ability to 'learn' recurrent url patterns to find duplicated content)
- actual contents
- most recently crawled version
- earlier content
- contents minus things that don’t change on a site
Kupke said to avoid dynamic URLs when possible (although Google is "rather good" at eliminating dupes). If all else fails, use the canonical link element. Kupke calls this a "Swiss Army Knife" for duplicate content issues.
Have you followed all the duplicate content rules and still been penalized?
Google says the canonical link element has been tremendously successful. It didn't even exist a year ago, and is has grown exponentially. It has had a huge impact on Google's canonicalization decisions, and 2 out of 3 times, the canonical tag actually alters the organic decision in Google.
Google says a common mistake is designating a 404 as canonical, and this is typically caused by unnecessary relative links. So, avoid changing rel="canonical" designations, and avoid designating permanent redirects as canonical.
Also, do not disallow directives in robots.txt to annotate duplicate content. It makes it harder to detect dupes, and disallowed 404s are a nuisance. There is an exception however, and that is that interstitial login pages may be a good candidate to "robot out," according to Kupke.
Kupke says that canonical works, but indexing takes time. "Be patient and we WILL use your designated canonicals." Cleaning up an existing part of the index takes even longer, and this may leave dupes serving for a while despite rel=canonical, Kupke adds.
At SMX, Google announced that cross domain rel=canonical is coming within this year. So for example, if the Chicago Tribune has an article on the New York Times, and the rel=canonical points to the Chicago Tribune then Google will only credit the Chicago Tribune with the content.
Duplicate Content in Bing
As far as how Bing views duplicate content, intention is key. If your intent is to manipulate the search engine, you will be penalized.
Sasi Parthasarathy, Program Manager of Bing says to consolidate all versions of a page under one URL. "Less is more, in terms of duplicate content." If possible, use only one URL per piece of content.
Bing isn't supporting the canonical link element (as a ranking factor) yet, but it is coming. They do say to use it, but it's just not really a ranking factor in Bing yet. Bing says that there has been an increase in the usage of canonical tags in the past 6 months, but adoption issues still exist. According to Parthasarathy, 30% of canonical tags point to the same domain (which is fine), and 9% use it to point to other domains. This could be a mistake or it could be manipulative. Bing says they will look for other factors to try and determine which it is.
Bing says canonical tags are hints and not directives. "Use it with caution," and not as an alternative to good web design.
With regards to www vs non-www, just pick one and stick with it consistently. Remove default filenames at the end of your URLs. Bing also says 301 redirects are your best friend for redirecting, use rel="nofollow" on useless pages, and use robots.txt to keep content you don't want crawled out.
Duplicate Content in Yahoo
If everything goes according to plan, you're going to need to worry about how Bing handles duplicate content if you're worried about how Yahoo handles it, but Yahoo's Cris Pierry, Sr. Director of Search, offered a few additional tips.
Pierry says descriptive URLs should be easily readable, and it's not a good idea to change URLs every year. In addition, use canonical, avoid case sensitivity, and avoid session IDs and parameters.
Pierry also says to use sitemaps, and submit them to Yahoo Site Explorer. Improve indexing by proper robots.txt usage, and use Site Explorer to delete URLs that you dont' want Yahoo to index. Finally, provide feeds to Yahoo Site Explorer, and report spam sites linking to you in Site Explorer.
Yahoo says metadata and SearchMonkey are enhancing presentation.
Labels: Tracking and effects of duplicate content e-course on creating traffic and conversion (Lesson 1)
Moving on - As the owner of a website design business, I have to
admit that I've seen it all when it comes to websites.
Some clients come to me with fancy, expensive sites, packed with
lots of Flash animation and high-end gadgets. The sites look great,
but sales are virtually non-existent.
While others have homemade sites they either created themselves or
with the help of a friend or relative (or the high school kid down
the street). These sites usually give a very unprofessional image
and don't perform.
And more than a few don't even have a website (and that's the kiss
of death in today's wired world).
Well, no matter where you are in the process of getting on the web,
this course will help you create a better, more successful website.
Since most of my clients tend to be businesses, we're going to
focus on creating commercial websites that increase sales and
generate more leads.
However, even if you have an informational website, you'll pick up
a few tricks from this e-course to help you attract and retain more
visitors.
We'll even talk about how your website can open up additional
revenue streams for you or your business.
So let's get started...
First, I want to share the two most important ingredients that
every commercial website needs...
Traffic and conversion.
Here are the short and sweet definitions:
Traffic is simply the people who visit your website, preferably
people who want what your business produces or sells.
And conversion means getting those people to perform a desired
action while they are visiting your site. That action might be
buying your product directly from your website using online
ordering or phone, or it could be contacting you by email, phone,
or online form for more information (in other words, a lead).
If your site has both traffic and conversion, then it's doing its
job and becomes an important asset to your business.
But, if either one of these ingredients is missing, then your
website (and business) is in trouble.
Let's take a closer look at traffic.
Quality traffic (also known as "targeted traffic") means visitors
who want what your business has to offer. If you have no traffic
coming to your website (a problem for MANY businesses), then
nothing happens. Having no traffic is as bad as not having a
website at all.
Likewise, if the people visiting your site don't really want what
you offer, then nothing happens.
For example, say you own a plant nursery. But the people who visit
your site are looking for furniture for a BABY nursery. You
certainly won't sell many tree seedlings, tomato plants, or
gardening supplies to new parents who are shopping for a crib.
We'll get more into how to find and attract visitors to your
website in Lesson 4 of this course. So keep checking this page. You can even bookmark this page at the top of this content or subscribe this page to your mail through second column using your email address.
And conversion is just as important as traffic.
That said; most people's websites are absolutely horrible at
conversion.
The first step is getting people to stay on your website long
enough to take the action you want them to take.
That's tougher than it sounds. For most websites, the average visit
lasts less than 30 seconds before the visitor clicks away.
A website that converts well will first capture a visitor's
attention through a combination of effective design (which includes
photos, graphics, and layout) with relevant copy (the text).
Once your website has a visitor's attention, the copy and design
should work together to persuade a qualified visitor to take the
action you desire.
Conversion is an interesting combination of art and science. And
what's really interesting is the fact that even small improvements
in conversion can mean a huge increase in sales and profits.
Increasing your site's conversion rate from 1% to 2% means DOUBLING
your results. That's twice as many sales or leads!
But don't worry if conversion rates don't mean much to you now.
We'll cover conversion in more detail in our next installment.
So, Check this page for more info on conversion. You can even bookmark this page at the top of this content or subscribe this page to your mail through second column using your email address.
Labels: e-course on creating traffic and conversion
Sunday, December 27, 2009
how SEO increase your traffic
Due to advent of the Internet and Internet marketing, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) has become very important. SEO is a process which makes a website get indexed, displayed and ranked better by search engines like Google. Usually small businesses do not have lots of money to promote their services. They can easily promote their services by taking service of any firm offering SEO India based.
Optimization of a website for search engine involves a whole lot of steps. It includes on-site optimization like having proper page title, meta description and meta keywords on the website pages. Off-page optimization includes submitting your website in various web directories. Then you can also go and promote your website in various social networking website and can submit your website in social book marking websites like Digg..
SEO is better that traditional marketing and advertising. To start with, it costs far less. All one has to do is optimize one’s websites for search engines. No need to spend money on a continuous basis after that. One can reap benefits of the hard work in the form of continuous web traffic to your website for a long period after doing SEO. The cost of SEO is less compared to traditional advertising. Even chances of selling a service or product online are better as people find your service when they are searching for your product online.
Optimization of a website for search engine involves a whole lot of steps. It includes on-site optimization like having proper page title, meta description and meta keywords on the website pages. Off-page optimization includes submitting your website in various web directories. Then you can also go and promote your website in various social networking website and can submit your website in social book marking websites like Digg.
You can get your website made by some professional firms that are specialized in website development and Internet marketing or SEO services. Make sure to also get SEO services so that people are able to find your services easily. There are lots of companies that offer SEO India based. Go for any of them.
Online search engines have become very important in our lives as more and more people search for information online. Prominent search engines include Google, Yahoo and Bing. Due to this various businesses can easily promote their products and services without spending lots of money using Internet marketing and search engine optimization (SEO).
This article is by one of the experienced internet marketer who don't want to give his name publically.
Labels: how SEO increase your traffic effective marketing tool - SEO
Now-a-days most of people look online for any information, product or services they want. Due to this various businesses can easily promote their products and services without spending lots of money using Internet marketing and search engine optimization (SEO).
When you make your website easy to be indexed, displayed and ranked better by search engines, this process is known as SEO. Website owners can easily opt for any service offering SEO India based. Online search engines have become very important in our lives as more and more people search for information online. Prominent search engines include Google, Yahoo and Bing.
SEO is cheaper and more effective compared to traditional marketing. It costs quite less to get SEO done by some service provider. There are various steps of SEO that when done properly help in the website ranking get better very soon. Another advantage is that when people go to your website from search engines they are more likely to use your product or services.
Now-a-days, any website which is not properly ranking in search engines loses out on web traffic and thus possible business. As of now search engines are a big source of web traffic for the most number of websites.
You can take help of various SEO companies to both make their website and put it online. They can help you have your own online presence buy making website and doing Internet marketing. Make sure to also get SEO services so that people are able to find your services easily. You can choose any company offering SEO India based.
Online search engines have become very important in our lives as more and more people search for information online. Prominent search engines include Google, Yahoo and Bing. Due to this various businesses can easily promote their products and services without spending lots of money using Internet marketing and search engine optimization (SEO).
This article is by one of the experienced internet marketer who don't want to give his name publically.
Optimization of a website for search engine involves a whole lot of steps. It includes on-site optimization like having proper page title, meta description and meta keywords on the website pages. Off-page optimization includes submitting your website in various web directories. Then you can also go and promote your website in various social networking website and can submit your website in social book marking websites like Digg..
SEO is better that traditional marketing and advertising. To start with, it costs far less. All one has to do is optimize one’s websites for search engines. No need to spend money on a continuous basis after that. One can reap benefits of the hard work in the form of continuous web traffic to your website for a long period after doing SEO. The cost of SEO is less compared to traditional advertising. Even chances of selling a service or product online are better as people find your service when they are searching for your product online.
Optimization of a website for search engine involves a whole lot of steps. It includes on-site optimization like having proper page title, meta description and meta keywords on the website pages. Off-page optimization includes submitting your website in various web directories. Then you can also go and promote your website in various social networking website and can submit your website in social book marking websites like Digg.
You can get your website made by some professional firms that are specialized in website development and Internet marketing or SEO services. Make sure to also get SEO services so that people are able to find your services easily. There are lots of companies that offer SEO India based. Go for any of them.
Online search engines have become very important in our lives as more and more people search for information online. Prominent search engines include Google, Yahoo and Bing. Due to this various businesses can easily promote their products and services without spending lots of money using Internet marketing and search engine optimization (SEO).
This article is by one of the experienced internet marketer who don't want to give his name publically.
Labels: how SEO increase your traffic effective marketing tool - SEO
Now-a-days most of people look online for any information, product or services they want. Due to this various businesses can easily promote their products and services without spending lots of money using Internet marketing and search engine optimization (SEO).
When you make your website easy to be indexed, displayed and ranked better by search engines, this process is known as SEO. Website owners can easily opt for any service offering SEO India based. Online search engines have become very important in our lives as more and more people search for information online. Prominent search engines include Google, Yahoo and Bing.
SEO is cheaper and more effective compared to traditional marketing. It costs quite less to get SEO done by some service provider. There are various steps of SEO that when done properly help in the website ranking get better very soon. Another advantage is that when people go to your website from search engines they are more likely to use your product or services.
Now-a-days, any website which is not properly ranking in search engines loses out on web traffic and thus possible business. As of now search engines are a big source of web traffic for the most number of websites.
You can take help of various SEO companies to both make their website and put it online. They can help you have your own online presence buy making website and doing Internet marketing. Make sure to also get SEO services so that people are able to find your services easily. You can choose any company offering SEO India based.
Online search engines have become very important in our lives as more and more people search for information online. Prominent search engines include Google, Yahoo and Bing. Due to this various businesses can easily promote their products and services without spending lots of money using Internet marketing and search engine optimization (SEO).
This article is by one of the experienced internet marketer who don't want to give his name publically.
Web Page Promotional Strategy
Web Based Promotional TechniquesWeb based promotional techniques are otherwise known as SEO techniques. If you have decided to or already started developing a website and also want to increase in the natural ranking in every search engine, then here follows some significant web based promotional techniques. Just check out these helpful techniques:
Tech 1. Google leads the industry.....
Though there are several search engines like Yahoo, MSN AltaVista and AllTheWeb, yet Google leads the industry with long strides. So whatever Web based promotional techniques you apply, it should fit Google. Otherwise, your website may loose its importance. The recent statistics says Google controls almost sixty percentage of internet traffic. Thus good result in Google means more traffic to your website and good business. Your significance will increase if your industry exists for a long time. So whenever you register domains for your website do it for four or five years. Your longevity creates a good impression. After all, first impression lasts long!
Tech 2. The First Step is Keyword/phrase analysis.....
When a visitor searches for any information in the Internet, first he/she types a query in the search box. This searched query is otherwise known as keywords. Search engines provide a list of WebPages which either contain the keyword or have some relevance to the keyword. So just think how vital the keyword analysis is for your website. There are several Keyword Analysis tools available online, for example; Google products like Adwords, Labs and Overture Inventory’s Keyword Selector tool. Analyze all the keywords and choose the most appropriate keyword for your website, one which attracts more visitors than the competitors.
Tech 3. Content Is The King, So Write Good Content.....
Just ask yourself a simple question; why should a visitor visit your website? Obviously, the answer will be; to receive valuable information. If you support this concept, then just go back to your site and go through all your WebPages. Your content should satisfy both visitors and search engines. If your content has managed a good balance between search engines and visitors, then your E-business is bound to be a great success! If your website does not have search engine friendly contents then sit down and start writing content by using your selected keywords and don’t forget to have a keyword density of 3 to 5 percent of the total number of words used in the content. Be careful not to repeat keywords more than 5%, you may fall into the trap of Keyword Stuffing- Keyword Stuffing is a Black Hat technique, for which your website might be penalized by Google or can be send to Google Sandbox. Other than the content, your targeted keyword should be present in the H1 and H2 tags, title tag, alt tags and all bold, italicized, underlined texts. Your keyword must appear in the first and the last 25 words of the content. Try to avoid images, because web crawlers can’t read images. So if you wish to put pictures then describe the picture in alt image tags. Another important factor that you should be worried about is duplicate content, don’t copy content from other website’s; Google may penalize for this attempt, too.
Tech 4. Link Campaigning Is the Best Way to Popularize Your Site.....
Link Campaigning is a vital web based promotional technique. More popular your site (i.e. your website’s link should be widely present in the Internet); more quickly the crawler it. The best way to popularize your site is getting links from other sites. This popularity can be achieved through link campaigning, blog posting, forum posting and article submission. Consequently your website will appear in the first few pages of the search engine result pages (SERPs.) Thus you attract more visitors to your website. Link campaigning can be done in three different ways; one-way, two-way and three-way link campaigning. Remember to use your targeted keywords in your anchor text and meta description. If you wish to get better search engine ranking then the web based promotional techniques discussed above will work magically for you.
20 steps to get Traffic from Social Bookmarking Sites
Before knowing the steps to get traffic from Social Bookmarking Sites, we need to have the list of some of the Social Bookmarking sites and I have collected top ten sites which are given as:
10 ) Newsvine
PageRank: 7
Monthly Unique Visitors: 104,117
Alexa Rank: 3,739
9 ) BlinkList
PageRank: 6
Monthly Unique Visitors: 146,858
Alexa Rank: 3,826
8 ) Fark
PageRank: 7
Monthly Unique Visitors: 212,274
Alexa Rank: 1,614
7 ) SlashDot
PageRank: 9
Monthly Unique Visitors: 282,967
Alexa Rank: 462
6 ) Reddit
PageRank: 7
Monthly Unique Visitors: 776,298
Alexa Rank: 838
5 ) StumbleUpon
PageRank: 8
Monthly Unique Visitors: 698,601
Alexa Rank: 316
4 ) Del.icio.us
PageRank: 8
Monthly Unique Visitors: 1,032,489
Alexa Rank: 201
3 ) Technorati
PageRank: 8
Monthly Unique Visitors: 3,563,581
Alexa Rank: 198
2 ) Netscape
PageRank: 9
Unique Monthly Visitors: 5,251,829
Alexa Rank: 562
1 ) Digg
PageRank: 8
Unique Monthly Visitors: 15,647,361
Alexa Rank: 91
Now lets learn about getting traffics from these pages.
Step 1: Pay attention to your Headlines
Many great articles go unnoticed on social bookmarking sites because their headline is not catchy enough. Your headline is the first (and very often the only) thing users will see from your article, so if you don't make the effort to provide a catchy headline, your chances of getting to the front page are small. Here are some examples to start with :-
Original headline : The Two Types of Cognition
Modified Headline : Learn to Understand Your Own Intelligence
Original headline: Neat way to organize and find anything in your purse instantly!
Modified Headline : How to Instantly Find Anything in Your Purse
Here is a good blog post that should help you with your headlines.
Step 2: Write a meaningful & short description
The headline is very important to draw attention but if you want to keep that attention, a meaningful description is vital. The description must be slightly provocative because this draws more attention but still, never use lies and false facts to provoke interest. For instance, if your write “This article will reveal to you the 10 sure ways to deal with stress once and forever and live like a king from now on.” visitors will hardly think that your story is true and facts-based. You also might be tempted to use a long tell-it-all paragraph to describe your great masterpiece but have in mind that many users will not bother to read anything over 100-150 characters. Additionally, some of the social bookmarking sites limit descriptions, so you'd better think in advance how to describe your article as briefly as possible.
Step 3: Have a great first paragraph
This is a rule that is always true but for successful social bookmarking it is even more important. If you have successfully passed Level 1 (headlines) and Level 2 (description) in the Catch the User's Attraction game, don't let a bad first paragraph make them leave your site.
Step 4: Content is king
However, the first paragraph is not everything. Going further along the chain of drawing (and retaining) users' attention, we reach the Content is King Level. If your articles are just trash, bookmarking them is useless. You might cheat users once but don't count on repetitive visits. What is more, you can get your site banned from social bookmarking sites, when you persistently post junk.
Step 5: Make it easy for others to vote / bookmark your site
It is best when other people, not you, bookmark your site. Therefore, you must make your best to make it easier for them to do it. You can put a bookmarking button at the end of the article, so if users like your content, they can easily post it. If you are using a CMS, check if there is an extension that allows to add Digg, Del.icio.us, and other buttons but if you are using static HTML, you can always go to the social bookmarking site and copy the code that will add their button to your pages. Here is a link that should help you add Links for Del.icio.us, Digg, and More to your pages.
Step 6: Know when to submit
The time when you submit can be crucial for your attempts to get to the front page. On most social bookmarking sites you have only 24 hours to get to the front page and stay there. So, if you post when most users (and especially your supporters) are still sleeping, you are wasting valuable time. By the time they get up, you might have gone to the tenth page. You'd better try it for yourself and see if it works for you but generally posting earlier than 10 a.m. US Central Time is not good. Many people say that they get more traffic around 3 p.m. US Central Time. Also, workdays are generally better in terms of traffic but the downside is that you have more competitors for the front page than on weekends.
Step 7: Submit to the right category
Sometimes a site might not work for you because there is no right category for you. Or because you don't submit to the right category – technology, health, whatever – but to categories like General, Miscellaneous, etc. where all unclassified stuff goes. And since these categories fill very fast, your chance to get noticed decreases.
Step 8: Build a top-profile
Not all users are equal on social bookmarking sites. If you are an old and respected user who has posted tons of interesting stuff, this increases the probability that what you submit will get noticed. Posting links to interesting articles on other sites is vital for building a top-profile. Additionally, it is suspicious, when your profile has links to only one site. Many social bookmarking sites frown when users submit their own content because this feels like self-promotion.
Step 9: Cooperate with other social bookmarkers
The Lonely Wolf is a suicidal strategy on sites like StubleUpon, Digg, Netscape. Many stories make it to the front page not only because they are great but because they are backed up by your network of friends. If in the first hours after your submittal you get at least 15 votes from your friends and supporters, it is more likely that other users will vote for you. 50 votes can get you to the top page of Digg.
Step 10: Submit in English
Linguistic diversity is great but the majority of users are from English-speaking countries and they don't understand exotic languages. So, for most of the social bookmarking sites submitting anything in a language different from English is not recommendable. The languages that are at an especial disadvantage are Chinese, Arabic, Slavic languages and all the other that use non-latin alphabet. German, Spanish, French are more understandable but still they are not English. If you really must submit your story (i.e. because you need the backlink), include an English translation at least of the title. But the best way to proceed with non-English stories is to post them on where they belong. Check this link for a list of non-English sites.
Step 11: Never submit old news
Submitting old news will not help you in becoming a respected user. Yesterday's news is history. But if you still need to submit old stuff, consider feature articles, howtos and similar pieces that are up-to-date for a long time.
Step 12: Check your facts
You must be flattered that users read your postings but you will hardly be flattered when users prove that you haven't got the facts right. In addition to sarcastic comments, you might also receive negative votes for your story, so if you want to avoid this, check you facts - or your readers will do it.
Step 13: Check you spelling
Some sites do not allow to edit your posts later, so if you misspell the title, the URL, or a keyword, it will stay this way forever.
Step 14: Not all topics do well
But sometimes even great content and submitting to the right category do not push you to the top. One possible reason could be that your stories are about unpopular topics. Many sites have topics that their users love and topics that don't sell that well. For instance, Apple sells well on Digg and The War in Iraq on Netscape. Negative stories - about George Bush, Microsoft, evil multinational companies, corruption and crime also have a chance to make it to the front page. You can't know these things in advance but some research on how many stories tagged with keywords like yours have made the front page in the last year or so can give you a clue.
Step 15: Have Related Articles / Popular Articles
Traffic gurus joke that traffic from social bookmarking sites is like an invasion – the crowds pour in and in a day or two they are gone. Unfortunately this is true – after your listing rolls from the front page (provided that you reached the front page), the drop in traffic is considerable. Besides, many users come just following the link to your article, have a look at it and then they are gone. One of the ways to keep them longer on your site is to have links to Related Articles / Popular Articles or something similar that can draw their attention to other stuff on the site and make them read more than one article.
Step 16: RSS feeds, newsletter subscriptions, affiliate marketing
RSS feeds, newsletter subscriptions, affiliate marketing are all areas in which the traffic from social bookmarking sites can help you a lot. Many people who come to your site and like it, will subscribe to RSS feeds and/or your newsletter. So, you need to put these in visible places and then you will be astonished at the number of new subscriptions you got on the day when you were on the front page of a major social bookmarking site.
Step 17: Do not use automated submitters
After some time of active social bookmarking, you will discover that you are spending hours on end posting links. Yes, this is a lot of time and using automated submitters might look like the solution but it isn't. Automated submitters often have malware in them or are used for stealing passwords, so unless you don't care about the fate of your profile and don't mind being banned, automated submitters are not the way to go.
Step 18: Respond to comments on your stories
Social bookmarking sites are not a newsgroup but interesting articles can trigger a pretty heated discussion with hundreds of comments. If your article gets comments, you must be proud. Always respond to commends on your stories and even better – post comments on other stories you find interesting. This is a way to make friends and to create a top-profile.
Step 19: Prepare your server for the expected traffic
This is hardly a point of minor importance but we take for granted that you are hosting your site on a reliable server that does not crash twice a day. But have in mind that your presence on the front page of a major social bookmarking site can drive you a lot traffic, which can cause your server to crash – literally! I remember one of the times I was on the front page on Digg, I kept restarting Apache on my dedicated server because it was unable to cope with the massive traffic. I have many tools on my site and when the visitors tried them, this loaded the server additionally. Well, for an articles site getting so much traffic is not so devastating but if you are hosting on a so-so server, you'd better migrate your site to a machine that can handle a lot of simultaneous hits. Also, check if your monthly traffic allowance is enough to handle 200-500,000 or even more visitors. It is very amateurish to attract a lot of visitors and not be able to serve them because your server crashed or you have exceeded your bandwidth!
Step 20: The snowball effect
But despite the differences in the likes of the different social bookmarking communities, there are striking similarities. You will soon discover that if a post is popular on one of the major sites, this usually drives it up on the other big and smaller sites. Usually it is Digg posts that become popular on StumbleUpon and Reddit but there are many other examples. To use this fact to your best advantage, you may want to concentrate your efforts on getting to the front page of the major players only and bet on the snowball effect to drive you to the top on other sites.An additional benefit of the snowball effect is that if your posting is interesting and people start blogging about it, you can get tons of backlinks from their blogs. This happened to me and the result was that my PR jumped to 6 on the next update.
Web promotion strategy
Another strategic decision in the area of promotion concerns the allocation of effort among the three different methods of promotion. Advertising refers to nonpersonal communication transmitted through the mass media (radio, television, print, outdoors, and mail). The communication is identified with a sponsor who compensates the media for the transmission. Personal selling refers to face-toface interaction with the customer.
Unlike advertising, personal selling involves communication in both directions, from the source to the destination and back. All other forms of communication with the customer other than those included in advertising and personal selling constitute sales promotion. Thus, coupons, samples, demonstrations, exhibits, premiums, sweepstakes, trade allowances, sales and dealer incentives, cents-off packs, rebates, and point-of-purchase material are all sales promotion devices. A variety of new ways have been developed to communicate with customers. These include telemarketing (i.e., telephone selling) and demonstration centers (i.e., specially designed showrooms to allow customers to observe and try out complex industrial equipment). The discussion in this article will be limited to the three traditional methods of promotion. In some cases, the three types of promotion may be largely interchangeable; however, they should be blended judiciously to complement each other for a balanced promotional perspective. Illustrated below is the manner in which a chemical company mixed advertising with personal selling and sales promotion to achieve optimum promotional performance: An advertising campaign aimed at customer industries, employees, and plant communities carried the theme, “The little chemical giant.” It appeared in Adhesive Age, American Paint & Coating Journal, Chemical & Engineering News, Chemical Marketing Reporter, Chemical Purchasing, Chemical Week, Modern Plastics, and Plastics World. Sales promotion and personal selling were supported by publicity. Editorial tours of the company’s new plants, programs to develop employee understanding and involvement in the expansion, and briefings for local people in towns and cities where USIC [the company] had facilities provided a catalyst for publicity. Personal selling was aggressive and provided direct communication about the firm’s continued service. USIC reassured producers of ethyl alcohol, vinyl acetate monomer, and polyethylene that “we will not lose personal touch with our customers.”
Development of an optimum promotion mix is by no means easy. Companies often use haphazard, seat-of-the-pants procedures to determine the respective roles of advertising, personal selling, and sales promotion in a product/market situation. Decisions about the promotional mix are often diffused among many decision makers, impeding the formation of a unified promotion strategy. Personal selling plans are sometimes divorced from the planning of advertising and sales promotion. Frequently, decision makers are not adequately aware of the objectives and broad strategies of the overall product program that the promotion plan is designed to implement. Sales and market share goals tend to be constant, regardless of decreases or increases in promotional expenditures. Thus they are unrealistic as guides and directives for planning, as criteria for promotional effectiveness, or even as a fair basis for application of the judgment of decision makers. Briefly, the present state of the art in the administration of the promotion function is such that cause-and-effect relationships as well as other basic insights are not sufficiently understood to permit knowledgeable forecasts of what to expect from alternate courses of action. Even identifying feasible alternatives can prove difficult.
Product Factors. Factors in this category relate principally to the way in which a product is bought, consumed, and perceived by the customer. For industrial goods, especially technical products, personal selling is more significant than advertising because these goods usually need to be inspected and compared before being bought. Salespeople can explain the workings of a product and provide on-the-spot answers to customer queries. For customer goods such as cosmetics and processed foods, advertising is of primary importance. In addition, advertising plays a dominant role for products that provide an opportunity for differentiation and for those being purchased with emotional motives. The perceived risk of a purchase decision is another variable here. Generally speaking, the more risk a buyer perceives to be associated with buying a particular product, the higher the importance of personal selling over advertising. A buyer generally desires specific information on a product when the perceived risk is high. This necessitates an emphasis on personal selling. Durable goods are bought less frequently than nondurables and usually require a heavy commitment of resources. These characteristics make personal selling of greater significance for durable goods than advertising. However, because many durable goods are sold through franchised dealerships, the influence of each type of promotion should be determined in light of the additional push it would provide in moving the product. Finally, products purchased in small quantities are presumably purchased frequently and require routine decision making. For these products, advertising should be preferable to personal selling. Such products are often of low value; therefore, a profitable business in these products can only be conducted on volume. This underlines the importance of advertising in this case.
Market Factors. The first market factor is the position of a product in its life cycle. The creation of primary demand, hitherto nonexistent, is the primary task during the introductory stage; therefore, a great promotion effort is needed to explain a new product to potential customers. For consumer goods in the introductory stage, the major thrust is on heavy advertising supported by missionary selling to help distributors move the product. In addition, different devices of sales promotion (e.g., sampling, couponing, free demonstrations) are employed to entice the customer to try the product. In the case of industrial products, personal selling alone is useful during this period. During the growth phase, there is increasing demand, which means enough business for all competitors. In the case of consumer goods, however, the promotional effort shifts to reliance on advertising. Industrial goods, on the other hand, begin to be advertised as the market broadens. However, they continue to require a personal selling effort. In the maturity phase, competition becomes intense, and advertising, along with sales promotion, is required to differentiate the product (a consumer good) from competitive brands and to provide an incentive to the customer to buy a particular product. Industrial goods during maturity call for intensive personal selling. During the decline phase, the promotional effort does not vary much initially from that during the maturity phase except that the intensity of promotion declines. Later, as price competition becomes keen and demand continues to decline, overall promotional perspectives are reduced. For a given product class, if market share is high, both advertising and personal selling are used. If the market share is low, the emphasis is placed on either personal selling or advertising. This is because high market share seems to indicate that the company does business in more than one segment and uses multiple channels of distribution. Thus, both personal selling and advertising are used to promote the product. Where market share is low, the perspectives of the business are limited, and either advertising or personal selling will suffice, depending on the nature of the product. If the industry is concentrated among a few firms, advertising has additional significance for two reasons: (a) heavy advertising may help discourage other firms from entering the field, and (b) heavy advertising sustains a desired position for the product in the market. Heavy advertising constitutes an implied warranty of product performance and perhaps decreases the uncertainty consumers associate with new products. In this way, new competition is discouraged and existing positions are reinforced. Intensity of competition tends to affect promotional blending in the same way that market share does. When competition is keen, all three types of promotion are needed to sustain a product’s position in the market. This is because promotion is needed to inform, remind, and persuade customers to buy the product.
On the other hand, if competitive activity is limited, the major function of promotion is to inform and perhaps remind customers about the product. Thus, either advertising or personal selling is emphasized. Hypothetically, advertising is more suited for products that have relatively latent demand. This is because advertising investment should open up new opportunities in the long run, and if the carryover effect is counted, expenditure per sales dollar would be more beneficial. If demand is limited and new demand is not expected to be created, advertising outlay would be uneconomical. Thus, future potential becomes a significant factor in determining the role of advertising.
Customer Factors. One of the major dimensions used to differentiate businesses is whether products are marketed for household consumption or for organizational use. There are several significant differences in the way products are marketed to these two customer groups, and these differences exert considerable influence on the type of promotion that should be used. In the case of household customers, it is relatively easy to identify the decision maker for a particular product; therefore, advertising is more desirable. Also, the self-service nature of many consumer-product sales makes personal selling relatively unimportant. Finally, household customers do not ordinarily go through a formal buying process using objective criteria as organizational customers do. This again makes advertising more useful for reaching household customers. Essentially the same reasons make personal selling more relevant in promoting a product among organizational customers. The number of customers and their geographic concentration also influence promotional blending. For a small customer base, especially if it is geographically concentrated, advertising does not make as much sense as it does in cases where customers are widely scattered and represent a significant mass. Caution is needed here because some advertising may always be necessary for consumer goods, no matter what the market perspectives are. Thus, these statements provide only a conceptual framework and should not be interpreted as exact yes/no criteria. Budget Factors. Ideally, the budget should be based on the promotional tasks to be performed. However, intuitively and traditionally, companies place an upper limit on the amount that they spend on promotion. Such limits may influence the type of promotion that may be undertaken in two ways. First, a financially weak company is constrained in undertaking certain types of promotion. For example, television advertising necessitates a heavy commitment of resources. Second, in many companies the advertising budget is, by tradition, linked to revenues as a percentage. This method of allocation continues to be used so that expected revenues indicate how much may be spent on advertising in the future. The allocated funds, then, automatically determine the role of advertising.
Successful strategy for website promotion
Creating a successful Internet presence involves much more than designing a great web site or having the "perfect" product. Listing your website with the Search Engines is your first step, however, you must not solely depend upon the Search Engines to bring you traffic. You must design a complete promotional strategy and work it every day.
A good way to organize your promotions is to set up a webpage, for your personal use, that will contain your complete strategy. This page should be stored on your hard drive and not uploaded to your server. Your page should contain four sections.
- Daily Promotions
- Weekly Promotions
- Monthly Promotions
- Miscellaneous Promotions
Each of these four sections should contain the appropriate information for each of your promotional resources such as, website name, user ID, password (if applicable) and hyperlinked web addresses for each website you plan to use for your promotions. This will enable you to open your webpage each day and visit each daily promotional link you have listed.
Your daily promotions should include posting your ads to a list of free classified ad and free for all sites. In addition, visit some popular discussion boards. Although you may not advertise on discussion boards, you can include your signature file with your post. There are several websites that will enable you to submit your classified ads and links to an entire network of sites with just one form. Here is a list of resources to get you started:
Yahoo Classifieds
AdlandPro Networked Classifieds 5000+
Web Sitings Networked Classifieds 40,000+
Epage Networked Classifieds 16,000+
SmallBizFFA 35,000+
FFA Network 10,000+
Free Submission 9,500+
MGA web 5,000+
Link Place 3,000+
Link Station 8,000+
USubmit 9,500+
Wizard 8,000+
URL Submitter 183,500+
For a complete listing of some of the top discussion boards, visit: web-source
Your weekly promotions should consist of placing a paid ezine advertisement and/or arranging ad swaps with fellow publishers. Visit the Free Directory of Ezines for all the information you'll need to place and/or swap ads with over 700 ezines. NETMASTERSOLUTION
To organize your ad placements and swaps, place the publication names, publisher names, ad dates and hyperlinked web addresses within your weekly promotions list.
Your monthly promotions should include writing an article in the area of your expertise, Search Engine submissions, promotional exchanges with similar websites and offline promotions. Writing Articles:
Writing articles that may be freely published with your bylines is one of the best promotional methods online. Your article may be published in hundreds of ezines, on websites or even in magazines. To learn more about writing articles for publication, read the article entitled, "Write For Publicity." http://www.web-source.net/write.htm
To organize your monthly promotions, place the names and hyperlinked web addresses for each of your promotional resources within your monthly promotions section.
Article Announcement Lists:
Article Announce
Subscribe: mailto:article_announce-subscribe@egroups.com
http://www.web-source.net/articlesub.htm
PublishInYours
Subscribe: mailto:PublishInYours-subscribe@egroups.com
http://www.egroups.com/group/PublishInYours
Articles Archive
Subscribe: mailto:articles_archives-subscribe@egroups.com
http://www.egroups.com/group/articles_archives
Free Content
Subscribe: mailto:Free-Content-subscribe@egroups.com
http://www.egroups.com/group/Free-Content
Article Submission Sites:
ideaMarketers
Free Content
Ezine Articles
Search Engines:
Yahoo
AltaVista
Hotbot
Lycos
Excite
InfoSeek
WebCrawler
NorthernLight
Promotional Exchanges:
To set up some promotional exchanges with similar websites, visit a Search Engine and type in a keyword that best describes your website. Visit some websites that are similar to yours, but not in competition. Contact the webmaster to discuss your promotional exchange. This may be a link exchange, joint venture, or whatever you both decide.Your miscellaneous promotions will include; running a press release, joining traffic generating programs, buying promotional products and advertising in newspapers, magazines, etc.
Press Release:
CanadaOne: It provides a free interactive press release builder.
Gebbie: It Press provides over 10,000 links to print and electronic media on the Internet.
Dr. Kevin Nunley: He will write your press release and send it to 5,000 media.
Gap Enterprises: It will enable you to send your press release to over 7,600 media. You write your press release or they'll write it for you.
Traffic Generating Programs:
Join some traffic generating programs to build a network of websites all linking to your website. WEB_SOURCE
Promotional Products:
IDit Plates - Put your web address on your vehicle. IDit Plates are a great way to continuously promote your web site. They look like chrome and blend in well with your vehicle.
Magnetic Signs - Full size magnetic signs for your vehicle. Get a customized sign that magnetically adheres to each side of your vehicle, advertising your website.
iPrint - Professional printing over the Internet.
PromoCity - Add your logo to any of over 500 promotional items.
Offline Promotions:
Place ads in newspapers, magazines, on the radio, TV, etc., Visit these links for complete listings:
NewsDirectory Newspapers
Newspapers Online
Once you've created your promotional webpage, open it up in your browser and add it to your favorite places or bookmark it for easy daily access. Set up a specific day for your weekly and monthly promotions and perform your miscellaneous promotions as needed.
Once you've implemented your promotional strategy and continuously work it each day, you'll be amazed with the results of your efforts. Consistency will be the key to driving massive traffic to your site.
E-mail marketing Campaign
Email marketing campaigns fail for many different reasons, but the most common mistake online marketers make is not designing the campaign in a manner to produce results. Over the past couple of years I’ve developed this list of key elements to ensure my email marketing campaigns are both profitable and successful. Now I’m going to share them with you so you’re email marketing campaigns will do the same for you.
1: Choose Your Mailing List Very Carefully
Any email marketing campaign is only as good as the mailing list used. There’s many different choices when determining the source of your mailing list so you want to be very careful when making this decision. Too many times email marketers believe the best way to produce results is by using shotgun marketing techniques with harvested email lists. The premise is based on large numbers and the law of averages, in that you’ll produce results simply by sending your ad out to as large a number of recipients as possible. This is a very ineffective way to produce results.
The key of choosing your list is based on your target market. You’re ad may be great but if your mailing list doesn’t consist of your target market, you just as well not send it out. You can use a very small targeted list and produce incredible response rates, depending on your ad, but you can get in the 15% to 35% response range. Before you purchase a mailing list, make sure the list owner can tell what market is represented on the list.
2: You Want To Produce Responses Not Sales
When you advertise, your goal is to get the prospect to respond by requesting more information about what you’re offering for sale. Too many times online marketers try to make the sale in their ad and all too often they fail. Your ad must focus on the most powerful benefits your prospect will gain from the purchase of your product and how they can get more detailed information. You want your ad to sound as if you’re talking with each prospect personally to get the best response rates.
3: Make Your Ad Brief And To The Point
In today’s fast paced society, people are busy and your email marketing needs to take this into consideration. Look to your own experience to help you out here. When you’re searching for initial information you don’t want to wade through a mountain of information, you want information that’s brief and to the point. You’ll have more time to go over the more detailed information in the sales material once you’ve made the initial inquiry.
If your ad rambles on and doesn’t get to the point quickly, your prospect will simply skip over your ad and move on to the next. Pick the most important benefits of your product and let your prospect know what they are and how they’ll solve their problems. Make sure your ad gets directly to the point about your offer. Don’t make your prospect guess about what you’re offering. How do you expect them to request more information if they don’t understand what you’re offering them? After reading thousands of ads, the most common mistakes are made in both the length of the ad and that it doesn’t get to the point.
4: Give Your Prospect An Incentive To Respond
The most powerful word in advertising is "Free!" When you make an offer of a free sample or report, your chances of getting a better response is dramatically increased. Discounts and limited time offers can also be used in your ads, but they’re best used in the sales letter when trying to produce an order. For the best responses, make your incentives immediate and short term. You want to create a sense of urgency when using incentives. If you can generate more ad responses using incentives, you’re increasing your chances for making more sales.
5: Include A Strong "Call To Action"
Have you ever read an ad that when you finished you couldn't figure out what to do next? This is a fatal mistake that’s made in many ads. Don’t be timid here, make sure your prospect knows exactly what to do if they want more details. You can have them send an email, visit your web page, call a phone number or any other method of delivery you’ve chosen, just make sure you give your prospect some options and make the call to action strong. This is an excellent place to combine an incentive.
6: Track And Record Your Responses
Developing a successful email marketing campaign isn’t just having a great ad, its having a great ad and knowing what kind of responses it’ll produce in a specific target market! Your ad might be very successful in one target market and less successful in another. But you won't know this if you don't "Track and Record Your Responses!" You can use special codes as department numbers or form numbers, but the best strategy I've used is in linking a specific ad to an autoresponder or web page. Make sure you always record the responses on a tracking form for evaluation and reference.
7: Follow Up With Every Response
It completely baffles me why an online marketer would spend their time, effort and money to advertise and then make no attempt to follow up with the prospects. You've created an interested prospect because they've asked to get more details, don't stake the success of your business on the fact that after they've read your sales letter, they'll place an order without you asking them for the sale again. If you don't follow up and ask for the sale again, you're passing up the opportunity of a 20% to 30% increase in your sales. I don't know of any business owner who wouldn't jump at the opportunity to increase their sales by 20% to 30% percent and you can accomplish this by just following up with your prospects!
8: Test Your Entire Email Marketing Process
The key to producing a successful email marketing campaign is: "To Test Your Entire Process!" Test, test, test, test! Think about this: Is your ad pulling the most responses it can or can it get a much larger response rate? You'll never know unless you test. Here's where you can take a small profit and create a fortune for your business. You want to take a systematic approach that'll give you quantifiable results for comparing specific ads, sales letters, markets and advertising mediums. But be very careful. Don't make wholesale changes, test each component in your process separately. Test, test and test some more! Be patient and be persistent!
9: Expect Questions From Your Prospects
No matter how well your ads and sales letters are written, you’ll still get questions. Online prospects are more educated and want more information before they make their buying decision. In fact, before I make a purchase online, I send an email to the advertiser asking anything, just to see what and how quickly they respond. You'd be amazed at how many times I never receive a reply. When you do respond, do it honestly and quickly. They're hot prospects when they ask a question, so get them the information they want and as quickly as possible, before they cool off. If you don’t want the sale just do nothing.
10: Set Reasonable And Achievable Goals
In most email marketing campaigns, a 1% to 3% response rate is considered very good. You can and will see better and worse response rates by carefully selecting a targeted email list. But you need to set reasonable and achievable goals for your campaign. If your goals are set too high and can’t be reached you’ll become disillusioned and stop marketing. You want to be able to reach some of your goals so set them up in steps to keep building from.
Final Thoughts
Once you begin your email marketing campaign you’ll begin to see for yourself which of these elements you’ve mastered and which ones you still need to work on. In to give your campaign the best possible chance for success, make sure you've considered and applied these 10 Key Elements. Make your selections carefully and with a specific goal in mind and soon you’ll find that you’re easily obtaining your email marketing goals and producing incredible profits from your online marketing campaign.
Tech 1. Google leads the industry.....
Though there are several search engines like Yahoo, MSN AltaVista and AllTheWeb, yet Google leads the industry with long strides. So whatever Web based promotional techniques you apply, it should fit Google. Otherwise, your website may loose its importance. The recent statistics says Google controls almost sixty percentage of internet traffic. Thus good result in Google means more traffic to your website and good business. Your significance will increase if your industry exists for a long time. So whenever you register domains for your website do it for four or five years. Your longevity creates a good impression. After all, first impression lasts long!
Tech 2. The First Step is Keyword/phrase analysis.....
When a visitor searches for any information in the Internet, first he/she types a query in the search box. This searched query is otherwise known as keywords. Search engines provide a list of WebPages which either contain the keyword or have some relevance to the keyword. So just think how vital the keyword analysis is for your website. There are several Keyword Analysis tools available online, for example; Google products like Adwords, Labs and Overture Inventory’s Keyword Selector tool. Analyze all the keywords and choose the most appropriate keyword for your website, one which attracts more visitors than the competitors.
Tech 3. Content Is The King, So Write Good Content.....
Just ask yourself a simple question; why should a visitor visit your website? Obviously, the answer will be; to receive valuable information. If you support this concept, then just go back to your site and go through all your WebPages. Your content should satisfy both visitors and search engines. If your content has managed a good balance between search engines and visitors, then your E-business is bound to be a great success! If your website does not have search engine friendly contents then sit down and start writing content by using your selected keywords and don’t forget to have a keyword density of 3 to 5 percent of the total number of words used in the content. Be careful not to repeat keywords more than 5%, you may fall into the trap of Keyword Stuffing- Keyword Stuffing is a Black Hat technique, for which your website might be penalized by Google or can be send to Google Sandbox. Other than the content, your targeted keyword should be present in the H1 and H2 tags, title tag, alt tags and all bold, italicized, underlined texts. Your keyword must appear in the first and the last 25 words of the content. Try to avoid images, because web crawlers can’t read images. So if you wish to put pictures then describe the picture in alt image tags. Another important factor that you should be worried about is duplicate content, don’t copy content from other website’s; Google may penalize for this attempt, too.
Tech 4. Link Campaigning Is the Best Way to Popularize Your Site.....
Link Campaigning is a vital web based promotional technique. More popular your site (i.e. your website’s link should be widely present in the Internet); more quickly the crawler it. The best way to popularize your site is getting links from other sites. This popularity can be achieved through link campaigning, blog posting, forum posting and article submission. Consequently your website will appear in the first few pages of the search engine result pages (SERPs.) Thus you attract more visitors to your website. Link campaigning can be done in three different ways; one-way, two-way and three-way link campaigning. Remember to use your targeted keywords in your anchor text and meta description. If you wish to get better search engine ranking then the web based promotional techniques discussed above will work magically for you.
20 steps to get Traffic from Social Bookmarking Sites
Before knowing the steps to get traffic from Social Bookmarking Sites, we need to have the list of some of the Social Bookmarking sites and I have collected top ten sites which are given as:
10 ) Newsvine
PageRank: 7
Monthly Unique Visitors: 104,117
Alexa Rank: 3,739
9 ) BlinkList
PageRank: 6
Monthly Unique Visitors: 146,858
Alexa Rank: 3,826
8 ) Fark
PageRank: 7
Monthly Unique Visitors: 212,274
Alexa Rank: 1,614
7 ) SlashDot
PageRank: 9
Monthly Unique Visitors: 282,967
Alexa Rank: 462
6 ) Reddit
PageRank: 7
Monthly Unique Visitors: 776,298
Alexa Rank: 838
5 ) StumbleUpon
PageRank: 8
Monthly Unique Visitors: 698,601
Alexa Rank: 316
4 ) Del.icio.us
PageRank: 8
Monthly Unique Visitors: 1,032,489
Alexa Rank: 201
3 ) Technorati
PageRank: 8
Monthly Unique Visitors: 3,563,581
Alexa Rank: 198
2 ) Netscape
PageRank: 9
Unique Monthly Visitors: 5,251,829
Alexa Rank: 562
1 ) Digg
PageRank: 8
Unique Monthly Visitors: 15,647,361
Alexa Rank: 91
Now lets learn about getting traffics from these pages.
Step 1: Pay attention to your Headlines
Many great articles go unnoticed on social bookmarking sites because their headline is not catchy enough. Your headline is the first (and very often the only) thing users will see from your article, so if you don't make the effort to provide a catchy headline, your chances of getting to the front page are small. Here are some examples to start with :-
Original headline : The Two Types of Cognition
Modified Headline : Learn to Understand Your Own Intelligence
Original headline: Neat way to organize and find anything in your purse instantly!
Modified Headline : How to Instantly Find Anything in Your Purse
Here is a good blog post that should help you with your headlines.
Step 2: Write a meaningful & short description
The headline is very important to draw attention but if you want to keep that attention, a meaningful description is vital. The description must be slightly provocative because this draws more attention but still, never use lies and false facts to provoke interest. For instance, if your write “This article will reveal to you the 10 sure ways to deal with stress once and forever and live like a king from now on.” visitors will hardly think that your story is true and facts-based. You also might be tempted to use a long tell-it-all paragraph to describe your great masterpiece but have in mind that many users will not bother to read anything over 100-150 characters. Additionally, some of the social bookmarking sites limit descriptions, so you'd better think in advance how to describe your article as briefly as possible.
Step 3: Have a great first paragraph
This is a rule that is always true but for successful social bookmarking it is even more important. If you have successfully passed Level 1 (headlines) and Level 2 (description) in the Catch the User's Attraction game, don't let a bad first paragraph make them leave your site.
Step 4: Content is king
However, the first paragraph is not everything. Going further along the chain of drawing (and retaining) users' attention, we reach the Content is King Level. If your articles are just trash, bookmarking them is useless. You might cheat users once but don't count on repetitive visits. What is more, you can get your site banned from social bookmarking sites, when you persistently post junk.
Step 5: Make it easy for others to vote / bookmark your site
It is best when other people, not you, bookmark your site. Therefore, you must make your best to make it easier for them to do it. You can put a bookmarking button at the end of the article, so if users like your content, they can easily post it. If you are using a CMS, check if there is an extension that allows to add Digg, Del.icio.us, and other buttons but if you are using static HTML, you can always go to the social bookmarking site and copy the code that will add their button to your pages. Here is a link that should help you add Links for Del.icio.us, Digg, and More to your pages.
Step 6: Know when to submit
The time when you submit can be crucial for your attempts to get to the front page. On most social bookmarking sites you have only 24 hours to get to the front page and stay there. So, if you post when most users (and especially your supporters) are still sleeping, you are wasting valuable time. By the time they get up, you might have gone to the tenth page. You'd better try it for yourself and see if it works for you but generally posting earlier than 10 a.m. US Central Time is not good. Many people say that they get more traffic around 3 p.m. US Central Time. Also, workdays are generally better in terms of traffic but the downside is that you have more competitors for the front page than on weekends.
Step 7: Submit to the right category
Sometimes a site might not work for you because there is no right category for you. Or because you don't submit to the right category – technology, health, whatever – but to categories like General, Miscellaneous, etc. where all unclassified stuff goes. And since these categories fill very fast, your chance to get noticed decreases.
Step 8: Build a top-profile
Not all users are equal on social bookmarking sites. If you are an old and respected user who has posted tons of interesting stuff, this increases the probability that what you submit will get noticed. Posting links to interesting articles on other sites is vital for building a top-profile. Additionally, it is suspicious, when your profile has links to only one site. Many social bookmarking sites frown when users submit their own content because this feels like self-promotion.
Step 9: Cooperate with other social bookmarkers
The Lonely Wolf is a suicidal strategy on sites like StubleUpon, Digg, Netscape. Many stories make it to the front page not only because they are great but because they are backed up by your network of friends. If in the first hours after your submittal you get at least 15 votes from your friends and supporters, it is more likely that other users will vote for you. 50 votes can get you to the top page of Digg.
Step 10: Submit in English
Linguistic diversity is great but the majority of users are from English-speaking countries and they don't understand exotic languages. So, for most of the social bookmarking sites submitting anything in a language different from English is not recommendable. The languages that are at an especial disadvantage are Chinese, Arabic, Slavic languages and all the other that use non-latin alphabet. German, Spanish, French are more understandable but still they are not English. If you really must submit your story (i.e. because you need the backlink), include an English translation at least of the title. But the best way to proceed with non-English stories is to post them on where they belong. Check this link for a list of non-English sites.
Step 11: Never submit old news
Submitting old news will not help you in becoming a respected user. Yesterday's news is history. But if you still need to submit old stuff, consider feature articles, howtos and similar pieces that are up-to-date for a long time.
Step 12: Check your facts
You must be flattered that users read your postings but you will hardly be flattered when users prove that you haven't got the facts right. In addition to sarcastic comments, you might also receive negative votes for your story, so if you want to avoid this, check you facts - or your readers will do it.
Step 13: Check you spelling
Some sites do not allow to edit your posts later, so if you misspell the title, the URL, or a keyword, it will stay this way forever.
Step 14: Not all topics do well
But sometimes even great content and submitting to the right category do not push you to the top. One possible reason could be that your stories are about unpopular topics. Many sites have topics that their users love and topics that don't sell that well. For instance, Apple sells well on Digg and The War in Iraq on Netscape. Negative stories - about George Bush, Microsoft, evil multinational companies, corruption and crime also have a chance to make it to the front page. You can't know these things in advance but some research on how many stories tagged with keywords like yours have made the front page in the last year or so can give you a clue.
Step 15: Have Related Articles / Popular Articles
Traffic gurus joke that traffic from social bookmarking sites is like an invasion – the crowds pour in and in a day or two they are gone. Unfortunately this is true – after your listing rolls from the front page (provided that you reached the front page), the drop in traffic is considerable. Besides, many users come just following the link to your article, have a look at it and then they are gone. One of the ways to keep them longer on your site is to have links to Related Articles / Popular Articles or something similar that can draw their attention to other stuff on the site and make them read more than one article.
Step 16: RSS feeds, newsletter subscriptions, affiliate marketing
RSS feeds, newsletter subscriptions, affiliate marketing are all areas in which the traffic from social bookmarking sites can help you a lot. Many people who come to your site and like it, will subscribe to RSS feeds and/or your newsletter. So, you need to put these in visible places and then you will be astonished at the number of new subscriptions you got on the day when you were on the front page of a major social bookmarking site.
Step 17: Do not use automated submitters
After some time of active social bookmarking, you will discover that you are spending hours on end posting links. Yes, this is a lot of time and using automated submitters might look like the solution but it isn't. Automated submitters often have malware in them or are used for stealing passwords, so unless you don't care about the fate of your profile and don't mind being banned, automated submitters are not the way to go.
Step 18: Respond to comments on your stories
Social bookmarking sites are not a newsgroup but interesting articles can trigger a pretty heated discussion with hundreds of comments. If your article gets comments, you must be proud. Always respond to commends on your stories and even better – post comments on other stories you find interesting. This is a way to make friends and to create a top-profile.
Step 19: Prepare your server for the expected traffic
This is hardly a point of minor importance but we take for granted that you are hosting your site on a reliable server that does not crash twice a day. But have in mind that your presence on the front page of a major social bookmarking site can drive you a lot traffic, which can cause your server to crash – literally! I remember one of the times I was on the front page on Digg, I kept restarting Apache on my dedicated server because it was unable to cope with the massive traffic. I have many tools on my site and when the visitors tried them, this loaded the server additionally. Well, for an articles site getting so much traffic is not so devastating but if you are hosting on a so-so server, you'd better migrate your site to a machine that can handle a lot of simultaneous hits. Also, check if your monthly traffic allowance is enough to handle 200-500,000 or even more visitors. It is very amateurish to attract a lot of visitors and not be able to serve them because your server crashed or you have exceeded your bandwidth!
Step 20: The snowball effect
But despite the differences in the likes of the different social bookmarking communities, there are striking similarities. You will soon discover that if a post is popular on one of the major sites, this usually drives it up on the other big and smaller sites. Usually it is Digg posts that become popular on StumbleUpon and Reddit but there are many other examples. To use this fact to your best advantage, you may want to concentrate your efforts on getting to the front page of the major players only and bet on the snowball effect to drive you to the top on other sites.An additional benefit of the snowball effect is that if your posting is interesting and people start blogging about it, you can get tons of backlinks from their blogs. This happened to me and the result was that my PR jumped to 6 on the next update.
Web promotion strategy
Another strategic decision in the area of promotion concerns the allocation of effort among the three different methods of promotion. Advertising refers to nonpersonal communication transmitted through the mass media (radio, television, print, outdoors, and mail). The communication is identified with a sponsor who compensates the media for the transmission. Personal selling refers to face-toface interaction with the customer.
Unlike advertising, personal selling involves communication in both directions, from the source to the destination and back. All other forms of communication with the customer other than those included in advertising and personal selling constitute sales promotion. Thus, coupons, samples, demonstrations, exhibits, premiums, sweepstakes, trade allowances, sales and dealer incentives, cents-off packs, rebates, and point-of-purchase material are all sales promotion devices. A variety of new ways have been developed to communicate with customers. These include telemarketing (i.e., telephone selling) and demonstration centers (i.e., specially designed showrooms to allow customers to observe and try out complex industrial equipment). The discussion in this article will be limited to the three traditional methods of promotion. In some cases, the three types of promotion may be largely interchangeable; however, they should be blended judiciously to complement each other for a balanced promotional perspective. Illustrated below is the manner in which a chemical company mixed advertising with personal selling and sales promotion to achieve optimum promotional performance: An advertising campaign aimed at customer industries, employees, and plant communities carried the theme, “The little chemical giant.” It appeared in Adhesive Age, American Paint & Coating Journal, Chemical & Engineering News, Chemical Marketing Reporter, Chemical Purchasing, Chemical Week, Modern Plastics, and Plastics World. Sales promotion and personal selling were supported by publicity. Editorial tours of the company’s new plants, programs to develop employee understanding and involvement in the expansion, and briefings for local people in towns and cities where USIC [the company] had facilities provided a catalyst for publicity. Personal selling was aggressive and provided direct communication about the firm’s continued service. USIC reassured producers of ethyl alcohol, vinyl acetate monomer, and polyethylene that “we will not lose personal touch with our customers.”
Development of an optimum promotion mix is by no means easy. Companies often use haphazard, seat-of-the-pants procedures to determine the respective roles of advertising, personal selling, and sales promotion in a product/market situation. Decisions about the promotional mix are often diffused among many decision makers, impeding the formation of a unified promotion strategy. Personal selling plans are sometimes divorced from the planning of advertising and sales promotion. Frequently, decision makers are not adequately aware of the objectives and broad strategies of the overall product program that the promotion plan is designed to implement. Sales and market share goals tend to be constant, regardless of decreases or increases in promotional expenditures. Thus they are unrealistic as guides and directives for planning, as criteria for promotional effectiveness, or even as a fair basis for application of the judgment of decision makers. Briefly, the present state of the art in the administration of the promotion function is such that cause-and-effect relationships as well as other basic insights are not sufficiently understood to permit knowledgeable forecasts of what to expect from alternate courses of action. Even identifying feasible alternatives can prove difficult.
Product Factors. Factors in this category relate principally to the way in which a product is bought, consumed, and perceived by the customer. For industrial goods, especially technical products, personal selling is more significant than advertising because these goods usually need to be inspected and compared before being bought. Salespeople can explain the workings of a product and provide on-the-spot answers to customer queries. For customer goods such as cosmetics and processed foods, advertising is of primary importance. In addition, advertising plays a dominant role for products that provide an opportunity for differentiation and for those being purchased with emotional motives. The perceived risk of a purchase decision is another variable here. Generally speaking, the more risk a buyer perceives to be associated with buying a particular product, the higher the importance of personal selling over advertising. A buyer generally desires specific information on a product when the perceived risk is high. This necessitates an emphasis on personal selling. Durable goods are bought less frequently than nondurables and usually require a heavy commitment of resources. These characteristics make personal selling of greater significance for durable goods than advertising. However, because many durable goods are sold through franchised dealerships, the influence of each type of promotion should be determined in light of the additional push it would provide in moving the product. Finally, products purchased in small quantities are presumably purchased frequently and require routine decision making. For these products, advertising should be preferable to personal selling. Such products are often of low value; therefore, a profitable business in these products can only be conducted on volume. This underlines the importance of advertising in this case.
Market Factors. The first market factor is the position of a product in its life cycle. The creation of primary demand, hitherto nonexistent, is the primary task during the introductory stage; therefore, a great promotion effort is needed to explain a new product to potential customers. For consumer goods in the introductory stage, the major thrust is on heavy advertising supported by missionary selling to help distributors move the product. In addition, different devices of sales promotion (e.g., sampling, couponing, free demonstrations) are employed to entice the customer to try the product. In the case of industrial products, personal selling alone is useful during this period. During the growth phase, there is increasing demand, which means enough business for all competitors. In the case of consumer goods, however, the promotional effort shifts to reliance on advertising. Industrial goods, on the other hand, begin to be advertised as the market broadens. However, they continue to require a personal selling effort. In the maturity phase, competition becomes intense, and advertising, along with sales promotion, is required to differentiate the product (a consumer good) from competitive brands and to provide an incentive to the customer to buy a particular product. Industrial goods during maturity call for intensive personal selling. During the decline phase, the promotional effort does not vary much initially from that during the maturity phase except that the intensity of promotion declines. Later, as price competition becomes keen and demand continues to decline, overall promotional perspectives are reduced. For a given product class, if market share is high, both advertising and personal selling are used. If the market share is low, the emphasis is placed on either personal selling or advertising. This is because high market share seems to indicate that the company does business in more than one segment and uses multiple channels of distribution. Thus, both personal selling and advertising are used to promote the product. Where market share is low, the perspectives of the business are limited, and either advertising or personal selling will suffice, depending on the nature of the product. If the industry is concentrated among a few firms, advertising has additional significance for two reasons: (a) heavy advertising may help discourage other firms from entering the field, and (b) heavy advertising sustains a desired position for the product in the market. Heavy advertising constitutes an implied warranty of product performance and perhaps decreases the uncertainty consumers associate with new products. In this way, new competition is discouraged and existing positions are reinforced. Intensity of competition tends to affect promotional blending in the same way that market share does. When competition is keen, all three types of promotion are needed to sustain a product’s position in the market. This is because promotion is needed to inform, remind, and persuade customers to buy the product.
On the other hand, if competitive activity is limited, the major function of promotion is to inform and perhaps remind customers about the product. Thus, either advertising or personal selling is emphasized. Hypothetically, advertising is more suited for products that have relatively latent demand. This is because advertising investment should open up new opportunities in the long run, and if the carryover effect is counted, expenditure per sales dollar would be more beneficial. If demand is limited and new demand is not expected to be created, advertising outlay would be uneconomical. Thus, future potential becomes a significant factor in determining the role of advertising.
Customer Factors. One of the major dimensions used to differentiate businesses is whether products are marketed for household consumption or for organizational use. There are several significant differences in the way products are marketed to these two customer groups, and these differences exert considerable influence on the type of promotion that should be used. In the case of household customers, it is relatively easy to identify the decision maker for a particular product; therefore, advertising is more desirable. Also, the self-service nature of many consumer-product sales makes personal selling relatively unimportant. Finally, household customers do not ordinarily go through a formal buying process using objective criteria as organizational customers do. This again makes advertising more useful for reaching household customers. Essentially the same reasons make personal selling more relevant in promoting a product among organizational customers. The number of customers and their geographic concentration also influence promotional blending. For a small customer base, especially if it is geographically concentrated, advertising does not make as much sense as it does in cases where customers are widely scattered and represent a significant mass. Caution is needed here because some advertising may always be necessary for consumer goods, no matter what the market perspectives are. Thus, these statements provide only a conceptual framework and should not be interpreted as exact yes/no criteria. Budget Factors. Ideally, the budget should be based on the promotional tasks to be performed. However, intuitively and traditionally, companies place an upper limit on the amount that they spend on promotion. Such limits may influence the type of promotion that may be undertaken in two ways. First, a financially weak company is constrained in undertaking certain types of promotion. For example, television advertising necessitates a heavy commitment of resources. Second, in many companies the advertising budget is, by tradition, linked to revenues as a percentage. This method of allocation continues to be used so that expected revenues indicate how much may be spent on advertising in the future. The allocated funds, then, automatically determine the role of advertising.
Successful strategy for website promotion
Creating a successful Internet presence involves much more than designing a great web site or having the "perfect" product. Listing your website with the Search Engines is your first step, however, you must not solely depend upon the Search Engines to bring you traffic. You must design a complete promotional strategy and work it every day.
A good way to organize your promotions is to set up a webpage, for your personal use, that will contain your complete strategy. This page should be stored on your hard drive and not uploaded to your server. Your page should contain four sections.
- Daily Promotions
- Weekly Promotions
- Monthly Promotions
- Miscellaneous Promotions
Each of these four sections should contain the appropriate information for each of your promotional resources such as, website name, user ID, password (if applicable) and hyperlinked web addresses for each website you plan to use for your promotions. This will enable you to open your webpage each day and visit each daily promotional link you have listed.
Your daily promotions should include posting your ads to a list of free classified ad and free for all sites. In addition, visit some popular discussion boards. Although you may not advertise on discussion boards, you can include your signature file with your post. There are several websites that will enable you to submit your classified ads and links to an entire network of sites with just one form. Here is a list of resources to get you started:
Yahoo Classifieds
AdlandPro Networked Classifieds 5000+
Web Sitings Networked Classifieds 40,000+
Epage Networked Classifieds 16,000+
SmallBizFFA 35,000+
FFA Network 10,000+
Free Submission 9,500+
MGA web 5,000+
Link Place 3,000+
Link Station 8,000+
USubmit 9,500+
Wizard 8,000+
URL Submitter 183,500+
For a complete listing of some of the top discussion boards, visit: web-source
Your weekly promotions should consist of placing a paid ezine advertisement and/or arranging ad swaps with fellow publishers. Visit the Free Directory of Ezines for all the information you'll need to place and/or swap ads with over 700 ezines. NETMASTERSOLUTION
To organize your ad placements and swaps, place the publication names, publisher names, ad dates and hyperlinked web addresses within your weekly promotions list.
Your monthly promotions should include writing an article in the area of your expertise, Search Engine submissions, promotional exchanges with similar websites and offline promotions. Writing Articles:
Writing articles that may be freely published with your bylines is one of the best promotional methods online. Your article may be published in hundreds of ezines, on websites or even in magazines. To learn more about writing articles for publication, read the article entitled, "Write For Publicity." http://www.web-source.net/write.htm
To organize your monthly promotions, place the names and hyperlinked web addresses for each of your promotional resources within your monthly promotions section.
Article Announcement Lists:
Article Announce
Subscribe: mailto:article_announce-subscribe@egroups.com
http://www.web-source.net/articlesub.htm
PublishInYours
Subscribe: mailto:PublishInYours-subscribe@egroups.com
http://www.egroups.com/group/PublishInYours
Articles Archive
Subscribe: mailto:articles_archives-subscribe@egroups.com
http://www.egroups.com/group/articles_archives
Free Content
Subscribe: mailto:Free-Content-subscribe@egroups.com
http://www.egroups.com/group/Free-Content
Article Submission Sites:
ideaMarketers
Free Content
Ezine Articles
Search Engines:
Yahoo
AltaVista
Hotbot
Lycos
Excite
InfoSeek
WebCrawler
NorthernLight
Promotional Exchanges:
To set up some promotional exchanges with similar websites, visit a Search Engine and type in a keyword that best describes your website. Visit some websites that are similar to yours, but not in competition. Contact the webmaster to discuss your promotional exchange. This may be a link exchange, joint venture, or whatever you both decide.Your miscellaneous promotions will include; running a press release, joining traffic generating programs, buying promotional products and advertising in newspapers, magazines, etc.
Press Release:
CanadaOne: It provides a free interactive press release builder.
Gebbie: It Press provides over 10,000 links to print and electronic media on the Internet.
Dr. Kevin Nunley: He will write your press release and send it to 5,000 media.
Gap Enterprises: It will enable you to send your press release to over 7,600 media. You write your press release or they'll write it for you.
Traffic Generating Programs:
Join some traffic generating programs to build a network of websites all linking to your website. WEB_SOURCE
Promotional Products:
IDit Plates - Put your web address on your vehicle. IDit Plates are a great way to continuously promote your web site. They look like chrome and blend in well with your vehicle.
Magnetic Signs - Full size magnetic signs for your vehicle. Get a customized sign that magnetically adheres to each side of your vehicle, advertising your website.
iPrint - Professional printing over the Internet.
PromoCity - Add your logo to any of over 500 promotional items.
Offline Promotions:
Place ads in newspapers, magazines, on the radio, TV, etc., Visit these links for complete listings:
NewsDirectory Newspapers
Newspapers Online
Once you've created your promotional webpage, open it up in your browser and add it to your favorite places or bookmark it for easy daily access. Set up a specific day for your weekly and monthly promotions and perform your miscellaneous promotions as needed.
Once you've implemented your promotional strategy and continuously work it each day, you'll be amazed with the results of your efforts. Consistency will be the key to driving massive traffic to your site.
E-mail marketing Campaign
Email marketing campaigns fail for many different reasons, but the most common mistake online marketers make is not designing the campaign in a manner to produce results. Over the past couple of years I’ve developed this list of key elements to ensure my email marketing campaigns are both profitable and successful. Now I’m going to share them with you so you’re email marketing campaigns will do the same for you.
1: Choose Your Mailing List Very Carefully
Any email marketing campaign is only as good as the mailing list used. There’s many different choices when determining the source of your mailing list so you want to be very careful when making this decision. Too many times email marketers believe the best way to produce results is by using shotgun marketing techniques with harvested email lists. The premise is based on large numbers and the law of averages, in that you’ll produce results simply by sending your ad out to as large a number of recipients as possible. This is a very ineffective way to produce results.
The key of choosing your list is based on your target market. You’re ad may be great but if your mailing list doesn’t consist of your target market, you just as well not send it out. You can use a very small targeted list and produce incredible response rates, depending on your ad, but you can get in the 15% to 35% response range. Before you purchase a mailing list, make sure the list owner can tell what market is represented on the list.
2: You Want To Produce Responses Not Sales
When you advertise, your goal is to get the prospect to respond by requesting more information about what you’re offering for sale. Too many times online marketers try to make the sale in their ad and all too often they fail. Your ad must focus on the most powerful benefits your prospect will gain from the purchase of your product and how they can get more detailed information. You want your ad to sound as if you’re talking with each prospect personally to get the best response rates.
3: Make Your Ad Brief And To The Point
In today’s fast paced society, people are busy and your email marketing needs to take this into consideration. Look to your own experience to help you out here. When you’re searching for initial information you don’t want to wade through a mountain of information, you want information that’s brief and to the point. You’ll have more time to go over the more detailed information in the sales material once you’ve made the initial inquiry.
If your ad rambles on and doesn’t get to the point quickly, your prospect will simply skip over your ad and move on to the next. Pick the most important benefits of your product and let your prospect know what they are and how they’ll solve their problems. Make sure your ad gets directly to the point about your offer. Don’t make your prospect guess about what you’re offering. How do you expect them to request more information if they don’t understand what you’re offering them? After reading thousands of ads, the most common mistakes are made in both the length of the ad and that it doesn’t get to the point.
4: Give Your Prospect An Incentive To Respond
The most powerful word in advertising is "Free!" When you make an offer of a free sample or report, your chances of getting a better response is dramatically increased. Discounts and limited time offers can also be used in your ads, but they’re best used in the sales letter when trying to produce an order. For the best responses, make your incentives immediate and short term. You want to create a sense of urgency when using incentives. If you can generate more ad responses using incentives, you’re increasing your chances for making more sales.
5: Include A Strong "Call To Action"
Have you ever read an ad that when you finished you couldn't figure out what to do next? This is a fatal mistake that’s made in many ads. Don’t be timid here, make sure your prospect knows exactly what to do if they want more details. You can have them send an email, visit your web page, call a phone number or any other method of delivery you’ve chosen, just make sure you give your prospect some options and make the call to action strong. This is an excellent place to combine an incentive.
6: Track And Record Your Responses
Developing a successful email marketing campaign isn’t just having a great ad, its having a great ad and knowing what kind of responses it’ll produce in a specific target market! Your ad might be very successful in one target market and less successful in another. But you won't know this if you don't "Track and Record Your Responses!" You can use special codes as department numbers or form numbers, but the best strategy I've used is in linking a specific ad to an autoresponder or web page. Make sure you always record the responses on a tracking form for evaluation and reference.
7: Follow Up With Every Response
It completely baffles me why an online marketer would spend their time, effort and money to advertise and then make no attempt to follow up with the prospects. You've created an interested prospect because they've asked to get more details, don't stake the success of your business on the fact that after they've read your sales letter, they'll place an order without you asking them for the sale again. If you don't follow up and ask for the sale again, you're passing up the opportunity of a 20% to 30% increase in your sales. I don't know of any business owner who wouldn't jump at the opportunity to increase their sales by 20% to 30% percent and you can accomplish this by just following up with your prospects!
8: Test Your Entire Email Marketing Process
The key to producing a successful email marketing campaign is: "To Test Your Entire Process!" Test, test, test, test! Think about this: Is your ad pulling the most responses it can or can it get a much larger response rate? You'll never know unless you test. Here's where you can take a small profit and create a fortune for your business. You want to take a systematic approach that'll give you quantifiable results for comparing specific ads, sales letters, markets and advertising mediums. But be very careful. Don't make wholesale changes, test each component in your process separately. Test, test and test some more! Be patient and be persistent!
9: Expect Questions From Your Prospects
No matter how well your ads and sales letters are written, you’ll still get questions. Online prospects are more educated and want more information before they make their buying decision. In fact, before I make a purchase online, I send an email to the advertiser asking anything, just to see what and how quickly they respond. You'd be amazed at how many times I never receive a reply. When you do respond, do it honestly and quickly. They're hot prospects when they ask a question, so get them the information they want and as quickly as possible, before they cool off. If you don’t want the sale just do nothing.
10: Set Reasonable And Achievable Goals
In most email marketing campaigns, a 1% to 3% response rate is considered very good. You can and will see better and worse response rates by carefully selecting a targeted email list. But you need to set reasonable and achievable goals for your campaign. If your goals are set too high and can’t be reached you’ll become disillusioned and stop marketing. You want to be able to reach some of your goals so set them up in steps to keep building from.
Final Thoughts
Once you begin your email marketing campaign you’ll begin to see for yourself which of these elements you’ve mastered and which ones you still need to work on. In to give your campaign the best possible chance for success, make sure you've considered and applied these 10 Key Elements. Make your selections carefully and with a specific goal in mind and soon you’ll find that you’re easily obtaining your email marketing goals and producing incredible profits from your online marketing campaign.
List of popular directories to submit sites
Directory is a virtual container within a digital file system, in which groups of files and other directories can be kept and organized.
A typical file system may contain thousands (or even hundreds of thousands) of directories. Files are kept organized by storing related files in the same directory. A directory contained inside another directory is called a subdirectory of that directory. Together, the directories form a hierarchy, or tree structure.submitting a page in a directory is not an easy task for new comer, so I have tried to make the directory submission quiet easy, which may help all the internet user throughout the globe.
You can simply click on the links below and fill out the required form and submit it.
List of library
LIBDEX
LIBTECH
List of article directories
A typical file system may contain thousands (or even hundreds of thousands) of directories. Files are kept organized by storing related files in the same directory. A directory contained inside another directory is called a subdirectory of that directory. Together, the directories form a hierarchy, or tree structure.submitting a page in a directory is not an easy task for new comer, so I have tried to make the directory submission quiet easy, which may help all the internet user throughout the globe.
You can simply click on the links below and fill out the required form and submit it.
List of library
LIBDEX
LIBTECH
List of article directories
How to get High traffic and real visitors to web page or blog?
My traffic-building strategy isn’t based on tricks or techniques that will go out of style. It’s mainly about providing genuine value and letting word of mouth do the rest. Sadly, this makes me something of a contrarian today, since I happen to disagree with much of what I’ve seen written about traffic-building elsewhere. I do virtually no marketing for this site at all. My visitors do it for me, not because I trick them into doing it but simply because they want to.
Here are 10 of my best suggestions for building a high traffic web site:
1. Create valuable content.
Is your content worthy of being read by millions of people? Remember that the purpose of content is to provide value to others. Do you provide genuine value, and is it the best you’re capable of providing?
When I sit down to write, I sometimes imagine myself standing on an outdoor concert stage before an audience of a million people. Then I ask myself, “What shall I say to this audience of fellow human beings?” If a million people each spend five minutes on this site, that’s nearly 10 person-years total. I do my best to make my writing worthy of this differential. I don’t always succeed, but this is the mindset that helps me create strong content.
Think about the effect you want your writing to have on people. Since I write about personal growth, I want my writing to change people for the better. I want to expand people’s thinking, to raise their consciousness, and to help them eliminate fear from their lives. If my writing doesn’t change people’s thinking, actions, or awareness, then my value isn’t being transferred well enough.
When you focus on providing real value instead of churning out disposable content, your readers will notice. And they’ll refer others to your site — in droves. I typically see at least 10 new links to my site appearing each day (mostly via trackbacks but also via vanity feeds). I’m not going out and requesting those links — other bloggers just provide them, usually because they’re commenting on something I’ve written. Many fellow bloggers have also honored StevePavlina.com with a general recommendation for the entire site, not just links to my individual blog posts. It’s wonderful to see that kind of feedback.
Strong content is universally valued. It’s hard work to create it, but in the long run it generates lots of long-term referral traffic. I’d rather write one article I’m really proud of than 25 smaller posts. It’s been my experience that the best articles I write will outperform all the forgettable little posts I’ve made. Quality is more important than quantity. Quantity without quality, however, is easier, which is one reason so many people use that strategy. Ultimately, however, the Internet already contains more quantity than any one of us can absorb in our lifetimes, but there will always be a place for good quality content that stands out from the crowd.
If you have nothing of genuine value to offer to a large audience, then you have no need of a high-traffic web site. And if there’s no need for it, you probably won’t get it. Each time you write, focus on creating the best content you can. You’ll get better as you go along, but always do your best. I’ve written some 2000–word articles and then deleted them without posting them because I didn’t feel they were good enough.
2. Create original content.
Virtually everything on this site is my own original content. I rarely post blog entries that merely link to what others are writing. It takes more effort to produce original content, but it’s my preferred long-term strategy. I have no interest in creating a personal development portal to other sites. I want this site to be a final destination, not a middleman.
Yes, there’s a lot to read on this site, more than most people can read in a day, but there’s also a lot of value (see rule #1). Some people have told me they’ve read for many hours straight, and they leave as different people. I think anyone who reads this site for several hours straight is going to experience a shift in awareness. When you read a lot of dense, original content from a single person, it’s going to have an impact on you. And this content is written with the intention to help you grow.
Although I’m not big on competing with others, it’s hard to compete with an original content site. Anyone can start their own personal development web site, but the flavor of this site is unique simply because no one else has had the exact same experiences as me.
While I think sites that mainly post content from others have the potential to build traffic faster in the beginning, I think original content sites have an easier time keeping their traffic, which makes for a more solid, long-term foundation. Not everyone is going to like my work, but for those that do, there’s no substitute.
3. Create timeless content.
While I do occasionally write about time-bound events, the majority of my content is intended to be timeless. I’m aware that anything I write today may still be read by people even after I’m dead. People still quote Aristotle today because his ideas have timeless value, even though he’s been dead for about 2300 years. I think about how my work might influence future generations in addition to my own. What advice shall I pass on to my great grandchildren?
I tend to ignore fads and current events in my writing. Wars, natural disasters, and corrupt politicians have been with us for thousands of years. There are plenty of others who are compelled to write about those things, so I’ll leave that coverage to them.
Will the content you’re creating today still be providing real value in the year 2010? 2100? 4000?
Writing for future generations helps me cut through the fluff and stay focused on the core of my message, which is to help people grow. As long as there are people (even if our bodies are no longer strictly biological), there will be the opportunity for growth, so there’s a chance that at least some of what I’m creating today will still have relevance. And if I can write something that will be relevant to future generations, then it will certainly be relevant and meaningful today.
In terms of traffic building, timeless content connects with people at a deeper level than time-bound content. The latter is meant to be forgotten, while the former is meant to be remembered. We forget yesterday’s news, but we remember those things that have meaning to us. So I strive to write about meanings instead of happenings.
Even though we’re conditioned to believe that news and current events are important, in the grand scheme of things, most of what’s covered by the media is trivial and irrelevant. Very little of today’s news will even be remembered next week, let alone a hundred years from now. Certainly some events are important, but at least 99% of what the media covers is irrelevant fluff when viewed against the backdrop of human history.
Ignore the fluff, and focus on building something with the potential to endure. Write for your children and grandchildren.
4. Write for human beings first, computers second.
A lot has been written about the optimal strategies for strong search engine rankings in terms of posting frequency and post length. But I largely ignore that advice because I write for human beings, not computers.
I write when I have something meaningful to say, and I write as much as it takes to say it. On average I post about five times per week, but I have no set quota. I also write much longer entries than most bloggers. No one has ever accused me of being too brief. My typical blog entry is about 1500–2000 words, and some (like this one) are much longer. Many successful bloggers would recommend I write shorter entries (250–750 words) and post more frequently (20x per week), since that creates more search engine seeds for the same amount of writing. And while I agree with them that such a strategy would generate more search engine traffic, I’m not going to take their advice. To do so would interfere too much with my strategy of delivering genuine value and creating timeless content. I have no interest in cranking out small chunks of disposable content just to please a computer. Anyone can print out an article to read later if they don’t have time to read it now and if the subject is of genuine interest to them. Part of the reason I write longer articles is that even though fewer people will take the time to read them, for those that do the articles are usually much more impactful.
Because of these decisions, my search engine traffic is fairly low compared to other bloggers. Google is my #1 referrer, but it accounts for less than 1.5% of my total traffic. My traffic is extremely decentralized. The vast majority of it comes from links on thousands of other web sites and from direct requests. Ultimately, my traffic grows because people tell other people about this site, either online or offline. I’ve also done very well with social bookmarking sites like del.icio.us, digg.com, and reddit.com because they’re based on personal recommendations. I’ve probably had about a dozen articles hit the del.icio.us popular list within the past year, definitely more than my fair share.
I prefer this traffic-building strategy because it leaves me less vulnerable to shifts in technology. I figure that Google ultimately wants to make it easy for its visitors to find valuable content, so my current strategy should be in alignment with Google’s long-term strategy. My feeling is that Google would be well-served by sending more of its traffic here. But that alignment simply arises from my focus on providing value first and foremost.
5. Know why you want a high-traffic site.
I write because my purpose in life is to help people become more conscious and aware — to grow as human beings. I don’t have a separate job or career other than this. Because my work is driven by this purpose, I have a compelling reason to build a high-traffic web site, one that aligns with my deepest personal values. More web traffic means I can have a bigger impact by reaching more people. And over the course of the next few decades, this influence has the potential to create a positive change that might alter the future direction of human civilization. Most significantly, I want to help humanity move past fear and for us to stop relating to each other through the mechanisms of fear. If I fail, I fail. But I’m not giving up no matter how tough it gets.
Those are big stakes, and it might sound like I’m exaggerating, but this is the level at which I think about my work today. Everything else I do, including building a high traffic web site, is simply a means to that end. Today I’m just planting seeds, and most of them haven’t even sprouted yet. A high traffic web site is just one of the sprouts that came about as a result of pursuing the purpose that drives me. But it is not an end in itself.
What will you do if you succeed in building a high-traffic web site? If you someday find yourself in the privileged position of being able to influence millions of people, what will you say to them? Will you honor and respect this position by using it as a channel to serve the highest good of all, or will you throw that opportunity away to pursue your own fleeting fame and fortune while feeding your audience disposable drivel?
Although I launched this web site in October 2008, I’ve been writing articles since 1998, and feedback has allowed me to understand how small slices of my writing have affected certain people in the long run. After reading something I’ve written, people have quit their jobs, started their own businesses, changed religions, and ended relationships. While some people might find this level of impact ego-gratifying, for me it intensifies my feeling of personal responsibility for my writing. I’ve seen that I’m able to have an impact on people, so I damned well better make it a good one.
This “why” is what drives me. It’s what compels me to go to my computer and write something at 3am and not stop until 10am. I get inspired often. The no.1 reason I want more traffic is that it will allow me to help more people. That’s where I direct my ambition for this site, and consequently I’m extremely motivated, which certainly plays a key role in taking action.
6. Let your audience see the real you.
My life and my writing are intricately intertwined, such that it’s impossible to separate the two. When someone reads this web site, they’ll eventually come to know a great deal about me as a person. Usually this creates a skewed and inaccurate impression of who I am today because I change a lot over time — I’m not the same person I was last year — but it’s close enough. Getting to know me makes it easier for people to understand the context of what I write, which means that more value can be transferred in less time.
I’ve told many personal stories on this site, including my most painful and difficult experiences. I don’t do this to be gratuitous but rather because those stories help make a point — that no matter where you find yourself today, you always have the opportunity to grow in some small way, and no matter how small those changes are, they’re going to add up over time to create massive lifelong growth. That’s a lesson we all need to remember.
When I find ways to turn some of my darkest experiences into lessons that might help others in similar situations, it actually transforms those painful memories into joyful ones. They take on new meaning for me, and I can see that there was a positive reason I had to endure such experiences, one that ultimately serves the highest good of all. Oddly, I now find that it was my darkest times that help create the most light for others.
With respect to privacy, I don’t really care much for it. I do respect other people’s right to privacy, so when people tell me personal stories via email, I don’t turn around and re-post them to my blog. But I’m OK with being rather un-private myself. The need for privacy comes from the desire to protect the ego, which is a fear-driven desire, and fear is something I just don’t need in my life. My attitude is that it’s perfectly OK to fail or to be rejected publicly. Trying to appear perfect is nothing but a house of cards that will eventually collapse.
I think allowing people to know the real me makes it possible to build a relationship with my audience that’s based on intimacy and friendship. I dislike seeing people putting me on too much of a pedestal and using labels like “guru” or “overachiever.” Such labels create distance which makes communication harder. They emphasize our differences instead of our similarities. Communication between equals — between friends — is more effective.
More genuine communication means better connections with your audience, which means more repeat traffic and more referral traffic. This isn’t a manipulative game though, and excessive or overly dramatic self-disclosure for the purpose of linkbaiting will only backfire. Your reasons for storytelling must be to benefit your audience. The traffic benefits are a positive side effect.
7. Write what is true for you, and learn to live with the consequences.
If the stuff I’ve written on this site means I’ll never be able to run for a political office, I can live with that. I’m willing to write what is true for me, even if it goes against my social conditioning. Being honest is more important to me than being popular. But the irony is that because bold honesty is so rare among civilized humans, in the long run this may be the best traffic-building strategy of all.
People often warn me not to write things that might alienate a portion of my visitors. But somehow I keep doing the opposite and seeing traffic go up, not down. I don’t treat any subjects as taboo or sacred if they’re relevant to personal growth, and that includes diet and religion. It’s no secret that I’m a vegan ex-Catholic. Do I alienate people when I say that torturing and killing defenseless animals for food is wrong? Perhaps. But truth is truth. I happen to think it’s a bad idea to feed cows cement dust and bovine growth hormone, to pack live chickens into warehouses where the ammonia from their feces is strong enough to burn their skin off, and to feed 70% of our grain to livestock while tens of thousands of people die of hunger each day. I also think it’s a bad idea to pay people to perform these actions on my behalf. It really doesn’t matter to me that 999 people out of 1000 disagree with me. Your disagreement with me doesn’t change what went into producing your burger. It’s still a diseased, tortured, chemical-injected cow, one that was doomed to a very sad life because of a decision you made. And you’re still responsible for your role in that cow’s suffering whether you like it or not.
That last paragraph is a good example of the kind of stuff I write that makes people want to put me in a cage, inject me with hormones, and feed me cement dust. It wouldn’t surprise me terribly if that ends up being my fate.
I write what is true for me, regardless of public opinion. Sometimes I’m in the majority; sometimes I’m not. I’m fully aware that some of my opinions are unpopular, and I’m absolutely fine with that. What I’m not fine with is putting truth to a vote.
I take the time to form my own opinions instead of simply regurgitating what I was taught as a child. And I’m also well aware that there are people spending billions of dollars to make you think that a burger is not a very sad, diseased, tortured, chemical-injected cow. But I’m going to keep writing to help you remain aware of things like that, even though you may hate me for it. That defensiveness eventually leads to doubt, which leads to change and growth, so it’s perfectly fine. I’m good at dealing with defensiveness.
I don’t worry too much about hurting people’s feelings. Hurt feelings are a step in the right direction for many people. If I’m able to offend you so easily, to me that means you already recognize some truth in what I’ve written, but you aren’t ready to face it consciously yet. If you read something from me that provokes an emotional reaction, then a seed has already been planted. In other words, it’s already too late for you.
My goal isn’t to convince anyone of anything in particular. I’m not an animal rights activist, and I don’t have a religion to promote. My goal is to awaken people to living more consciously. This requires raising people’s awareness across all facets of their lives, so they can make the big decisions for themselves. It requires breaking social conditioning and replacing it with conscious awareness and intention. That’s a big job, but someone has to do it. And if I don’t do it, then I have to admit I’m just part of the problem like all the other hibernating bears.
A lot has been written about the importance of transparency in blogging, and truth is the best transparency of all. Truth creates trust, and trust builds traffic. No games, no gimmicks… just plain old brutal honesty. Even the people that say they hate you will still come back, and eventually those people will become your most ardent supporters. Even if they don’t agree with you, they’ll learn they can trust you and that your intentions are honorable, and trust is more important than agreement.
8. Treat your visitors like real human beings.
Even though I’m sitting at my computer writing this, seemingly alone, I know you’re a real human being reading it on the other end. My apologies to sentient androids who may be reading this years after it’s been written. You aren’t just a number in my web stats. Despite the technology involved and the time-space differential between my writing and your reading, there’s still a human-to-human connection between us that transcends time and space. And that connection matters to me. I feel its presence whenever I do my best writing.
While I imagine being on a stage in front of a million people when deciding which topic to write about, once I actually get going, I imagine having a one-on-one conversation with a friend. This means revealing some of myself and being honest, as the last two points already addressed, but it also means genuinely caring about you as a person. And that’s perhaps one of the best kept secrets of my success as a blogger. I actually care about helping you grow. I want you to become more conscious and aware. I want you to experience less fear in your life. And my concern for your well-being isn’t conditional upon you liking me.
I happen to think we have a lot more similarities than differences. Based on what I know about myself, I imagine you’d like your life to be better tomorrow than it was yesterday. I imagine you’d like to be happier, more fulfilled, and more at peace with yourself. I also imagine you’re living below your potential and could use some help overcoming fear and solving certain problems to enable you to tap more of that potential. And finally, I imagine you wouldn’t believe me if I said you can have it all for only $19.95 (as well you shouldn’t).
The reason I work so hard to create original content and then give it away for free is because I want to help as many people as possible. I genuinely care what happens to this beautiful planet and to the people who live here. It’s possible I actually value your life even more than you do. This is the kind of motivation that never wanes. I sometimes lose sight of it when I get caught up in the details, but the connection is always there, waiting for me to tap into it whenever I want. This provides me with a wellspring of creative ideas and an inexhaustible passion for contribution.
I don’t need to play stupid marketing and sales games with you. There’s nothing for you to buy here. Even if I add some products in the future, I’m not going to try to manipulate you into buying something you don’t need with a slew of false promises. I might make more money in the short-term by doing that, but it would sever our genuine connection, create a wall between us, and reduce the level of impact I’m able to have. Ultimately, that approach would lead to failure for me, at least in terms of how I define success. I can’t help you grow if I violate your trust.
I cannot force anyone to grow who doesn’t want to. But there are a lot of people on this planet who are now ready to let go of low-awareness living and start pushing themselves to the next level of human existence. And they need help to get there because it’s a difficult journey, and there are strong forces working against it.
Real human beings helping real human beings is ultimately what traffic growth is all about. That’s precisely what a link or a referral is. If you align yourself with the intention of genuinely helping people because you care, you’ll soon find yourself with an abundance of traffic.
9. Keep money in its proper place.
Money is important. Obviously I have bills to pay. Money pays for my computer, my high-speed internet connection, my house, and my food. I just returned yesterday from a vacation that money paid for. My Girl friend and I had a great time partly because we didn’t have to worry about money at all on the trip. We did everything we wanted to do without being hampered by a lack of funds. And this web site paid for it.
It’s important that I generate some money from my work, but it’s not necessary that I extract every possible dollar. In fact, relative to its traffic levels, I’m seriously under-monetizing this site. But money is only a means to an end, not an end in itself. Making a positive contribution to the world is a lot more important to me than money. Money can be useful in achieving this objective, but human relationships are far more important. The funny thing is that the less I rely on money, the more of it I seem to have.
I’m already making more money than I need to pay my bills, and my income from this site keeps going up each month. If I simply keep doing what I’m doing, I’ll probably end up becoming fairly wealthy. But money is an extremely weak motivator for me. Very little of what I do today has a profit motive behind it except to the extent that money will fuel more important goals. That tends to confuse certain people because some of my decisions align with earning money, but many don’t. While I do consider myself an entrepreneur (at least it’s less isolating than “guru”), I only see money as a tool for enhancing and expanding my contribution.
While many entrepreneurs pursue money for the purpose of becoming wealthy, I chose a different route. I sought to earn money for the purpose of increasing my freedom. I don’t want to get myself stuck in a pattern of working for money, so I’m constantly turning down opportunities to make money that would restrict my freedom. For example, I don’t do any consulting or coaching. Consequently, my calendar contains very few fixed appointments. This doesn’t mean I’m idle. It just means I spend my time doing what I freely choose to do instead of what others would have me do. I require this level of flexibility to do my best work.
By paying close attention to how I earn money and not just how much I earn, I keep money in its proper place. This allows me to stay focused on my purpose without getting wrapped up in less important concerns like building a brand, closing sales, or doing phony marketing.
I dislike it when other people use one-dimensional sales and marketing tactics on me, so I avoid using these techniques on this site. I’ve sort of unplugged myself from the current capitalistic system and set up a side system of my own that I find much more congruent with conscious living. I would love for other people to have the same level of freedom I enjoy each day. I’m sure I’ll continue to improve my approach over time, but it’s working wonderfully so far. Imagine having a business with no products, no inventory, no sales, and no customers, but still generating an abundant positive cashflow.
Since the income generation is largely on autopilot, I can focus my time and energy on creating content instead of on doing marketing or trying to sell something. And being able to devote so much time to content creation without worrying how I’ll pay my bills makes it a lot easier to build high traffic.
Some business models make it very challenging to build traffic. You have to spend a lot of time and energy just on lead generation, and then maybe you try to monetize those leads by selling a product or service. It’s always an uphill struggle.
I give all my best content away for free. Word of mouth does the rest. So my traffic building strategy is more like flowing downstream. It hasn’t been a struggle for me at all. And once you have sufficient traffic, it isn’t that hard to monetize it without becoming an ogre.
We’ve all heard the expression, “Build a better mousetrap, and they’ll come.” And we’ve also heard marketing and sales people say that this is just plain wrong — you have to market and sell that mousetrap effectively too. I say they’re all wrong. My approach is the equivalent of, “Build a better mousetrap and give it away for free, and they’ll come — and they’ll bring friends too.”
10. If you forget the first nine suggestions, just focus on genuinely helping people, and the rest will take care of itself.
One thing that turns me off about typical self-help marketing is that authors and speakers often position themselves as if they’re the opposite of their audience. I’m successful and you’re not. I’m rich and you’re not. I’m fit and you’re not. You need me because something is lacking in your life, I have exactly what you lack, and if you pay me (and make me even richer and you poorer), I’ll show you how you can have it too. And if it doesn’t work for you, it just means you’re even more of an idiot than the people who provided my testimonials.
I’m sure you’ve heard this sort of nonsense many times before.
All of this I’ve-arrived-and-you-haven’t stuff is stupid. It suggests that life is about destinations and that once you’ve arrived, you’re done growing and can just relax and sip fruity drinks for the rest of your life. But there’s more to life than border crossings. If you go from single to married or from non-millionaire to millionaire, that’s fine and dandy. Crossing the border into parenthood was a big one for me. But that’s only one day of my life, and to be honest, I didn’t have much control over it except for a decision made nine-months earlier (and it seemed like a pretty attractive idea at the time). What about all those other days though?
Growing as a human being is something I work on daily. I’m deeply passionate about my own growth, so naturally I want to share this part of the journey with others. If I start marketing myself with the “I’m successful and you’re not approach,” I hope someone will come put me out of my misery, since that would mean I’m done growing and ready to die. I don’t expect to ever be done growing as long as I exist as a human being. There are always new distinctions to be made and new experiences to enjoy. And yes… plenty of mistakes to be made as well.
One of the great benefits of focusing on helping others is that it gets fear out of the way. Without fear you become free to just be yourself. You’re able to take intelligent risks and remain detached from any specific outcome because the journey is more important to you than the specific stops along the way. Personally it’s not the destinations that excite me but rather the unfolding process of discovery. I love the anticipation of wondering what lies around each new bend.
If we are to help each other, we need to be partners in the pursuit of growth, not opponents. So it makes no sense to put up fake walls between us. The ego needs walls to protect it, but if we can get past the fear-based needs of the ego, we’ll make a lot more progress.
There are plenty of things I could do with this site that would make me more money or grow traffic faster in the short-term, but I won’t do them because they’ll just put more distance between us. I’ll be on my side, you’ll be on your side, and we’ll each be slightly afraid of the other. I’ll be worried that maybe you won’t buy what I’m selling, and you’ll be worried about getting ripped off or taken advantage of. We’ll just be drinking yet another round of fear, which is exactly the opposite of what we need to grow.
One of my biggest challenges in life right now is figuring out how to help enough people switch their primary polarization from fear to love. Our emotions are an energy source for us (they drive our actions), and most of the world is still driven by fear energy. Watching TV news is a good example; we can actually feel energized by watching others suffer. Hurting animals is another example; we eat their fear for breakfast. But there’s another fuel for human consciousness, and perhaps the best way to describe it is unconditional love. This isn’t the squishy emotion of romantic love — it’s a sense of connection to everything that exists and a desire to serve the highest good of all. Unconditional love, when it becomes one’s primary fuel, cultivates fearlessness. In this state you still have the biological fight-or-flight response, but you aren’t driven by emotional worries like fear of failure or fear of rejection. You feel perfectly safe regardless of external circumstances. And when you have this feeling of unconditional safety, you’re truly free to be yourself, to embrace new experiences, and to grow at a very fast pace.
Personal growth is not a zero-sum game. If you grow as a human being, it doesn’t harm me. In fact, ultimately if all of us grow as individuals, it’s going to make this whole planet better for everyone. When enough people switch their primary polarization from fear to unconditional love, this planet will become a true paradise. That’s a good thing for all of us, one that’s more important than all the money in the world.
Perhaps you have a less ambitious goal for building web traffic than raising human consciousness and working towards world peace. That doesn’t matter. You can still make helping others your primary focus, and if you do that, you’ll find it relatively easy to build a high-traffic web site. If you align yourself with serving the highest good of all, you’ll receive plenty of help along the way, and best of all, you’ll deserve it.
Do your best to help your visitors out of genuine concern for their well-being, and they’ll help you build your traffic and even generate a nice income from it. It’s as simple as that.
Here are 10 of my best suggestions for building a high traffic web site:
1. Create valuable content.
Is your content worthy of being read by millions of people? Remember that the purpose of content is to provide value to others. Do you provide genuine value, and is it the best you’re capable of providing?
When I sit down to write, I sometimes imagine myself standing on an outdoor concert stage before an audience of a million people. Then I ask myself, “What shall I say to this audience of fellow human beings?” If a million people each spend five minutes on this site, that’s nearly 10 person-years total. I do my best to make my writing worthy of this differential. I don’t always succeed, but this is the mindset that helps me create strong content.
Think about the effect you want your writing to have on people. Since I write about personal growth, I want my writing to change people for the better. I want to expand people’s thinking, to raise their consciousness, and to help them eliminate fear from their lives. If my writing doesn’t change people’s thinking, actions, or awareness, then my value isn’t being transferred well enough.
When you focus on providing real value instead of churning out disposable content, your readers will notice. And they’ll refer others to your site — in droves. I typically see at least 10 new links to my site appearing each day (mostly via trackbacks but also via vanity feeds). I’m not going out and requesting those links — other bloggers just provide them, usually because they’re commenting on something I’ve written. Many fellow bloggers have also honored StevePavlina.com with a general recommendation for the entire site, not just links to my individual blog posts. It’s wonderful to see that kind of feedback.
Strong content is universally valued. It’s hard work to create it, but in the long run it generates lots of long-term referral traffic. I’d rather write one article I’m really proud of than 25 smaller posts. It’s been my experience that the best articles I write will outperform all the forgettable little posts I’ve made. Quality is more important than quantity. Quantity without quality, however, is easier, which is one reason so many people use that strategy. Ultimately, however, the Internet already contains more quantity than any one of us can absorb in our lifetimes, but there will always be a place for good quality content that stands out from the crowd.
If you have nothing of genuine value to offer to a large audience, then you have no need of a high-traffic web site. And if there’s no need for it, you probably won’t get it. Each time you write, focus on creating the best content you can. You’ll get better as you go along, but always do your best. I’ve written some 2000–word articles and then deleted them without posting them because I didn’t feel they were good enough.
2. Create original content.
Virtually everything on this site is my own original content. I rarely post blog entries that merely link to what others are writing. It takes more effort to produce original content, but it’s my preferred long-term strategy. I have no interest in creating a personal development portal to other sites. I want this site to be a final destination, not a middleman.
Yes, there’s a lot to read on this site, more than most people can read in a day, but there’s also a lot of value (see rule #1). Some people have told me they’ve read for many hours straight, and they leave as different people. I think anyone who reads this site for several hours straight is going to experience a shift in awareness. When you read a lot of dense, original content from a single person, it’s going to have an impact on you. And this content is written with the intention to help you grow.
Although I’m not big on competing with others, it’s hard to compete with an original content site. Anyone can start their own personal development web site, but the flavor of this site is unique simply because no one else has had the exact same experiences as me.
While I think sites that mainly post content from others have the potential to build traffic faster in the beginning, I think original content sites have an easier time keeping their traffic, which makes for a more solid, long-term foundation. Not everyone is going to like my work, but for those that do, there’s no substitute.
3. Create timeless content.
While I do occasionally write about time-bound events, the majority of my content is intended to be timeless. I’m aware that anything I write today may still be read by people even after I’m dead. People still quote Aristotle today because his ideas have timeless value, even though he’s been dead for about 2300 years. I think about how my work might influence future generations in addition to my own. What advice shall I pass on to my great grandchildren?
I tend to ignore fads and current events in my writing. Wars, natural disasters, and corrupt politicians have been with us for thousands of years. There are plenty of others who are compelled to write about those things, so I’ll leave that coverage to them.
Will the content you’re creating today still be providing real value in the year 2010? 2100? 4000?
Writing for future generations helps me cut through the fluff and stay focused on the core of my message, which is to help people grow. As long as there are people (even if our bodies are no longer strictly biological), there will be the opportunity for growth, so there’s a chance that at least some of what I’m creating today will still have relevance. And if I can write something that will be relevant to future generations, then it will certainly be relevant and meaningful today.
In terms of traffic building, timeless content connects with people at a deeper level than time-bound content. The latter is meant to be forgotten, while the former is meant to be remembered. We forget yesterday’s news, but we remember those things that have meaning to us. So I strive to write about meanings instead of happenings.
Even though we’re conditioned to believe that news and current events are important, in the grand scheme of things, most of what’s covered by the media is trivial and irrelevant. Very little of today’s news will even be remembered next week, let alone a hundred years from now. Certainly some events are important, but at least 99% of what the media covers is irrelevant fluff when viewed against the backdrop of human history.
Ignore the fluff, and focus on building something with the potential to endure. Write for your children and grandchildren.
4. Write for human beings first, computers second.
A lot has been written about the optimal strategies for strong search engine rankings in terms of posting frequency and post length. But I largely ignore that advice because I write for human beings, not computers.
I write when I have something meaningful to say, and I write as much as it takes to say it. On average I post about five times per week, but I have no set quota. I also write much longer entries than most bloggers. No one has ever accused me of being too brief. My typical blog entry is about 1500–2000 words, and some (like this one) are much longer. Many successful bloggers would recommend I write shorter entries (250–750 words) and post more frequently (20x per week), since that creates more search engine seeds for the same amount of writing. And while I agree with them that such a strategy would generate more search engine traffic, I’m not going to take their advice. To do so would interfere too much with my strategy of delivering genuine value and creating timeless content. I have no interest in cranking out small chunks of disposable content just to please a computer. Anyone can print out an article to read later if they don’t have time to read it now and if the subject is of genuine interest to them. Part of the reason I write longer articles is that even though fewer people will take the time to read them, for those that do the articles are usually much more impactful.
Because of these decisions, my search engine traffic is fairly low compared to other bloggers. Google is my #1 referrer, but it accounts for less than 1.5% of my total traffic. My traffic is extremely decentralized. The vast majority of it comes from links on thousands of other web sites and from direct requests. Ultimately, my traffic grows because people tell other people about this site, either online or offline. I’ve also done very well with social bookmarking sites like del.icio.us, digg.com, and reddit.com because they’re based on personal recommendations. I’ve probably had about a dozen articles hit the del.icio.us popular list within the past year, definitely more than my fair share.
I prefer this traffic-building strategy because it leaves me less vulnerable to shifts in technology. I figure that Google ultimately wants to make it easy for its visitors to find valuable content, so my current strategy should be in alignment with Google’s long-term strategy. My feeling is that Google would be well-served by sending more of its traffic here. But that alignment simply arises from my focus on providing value first and foremost.
5. Know why you want a high-traffic site.
I write because my purpose in life is to help people become more conscious and aware — to grow as human beings. I don’t have a separate job or career other than this. Because my work is driven by this purpose, I have a compelling reason to build a high-traffic web site, one that aligns with my deepest personal values. More web traffic means I can have a bigger impact by reaching more people. And over the course of the next few decades, this influence has the potential to create a positive change that might alter the future direction of human civilization. Most significantly, I want to help humanity move past fear and for us to stop relating to each other through the mechanisms of fear. If I fail, I fail. But I’m not giving up no matter how tough it gets.
Those are big stakes, and it might sound like I’m exaggerating, but this is the level at which I think about my work today. Everything else I do, including building a high traffic web site, is simply a means to that end. Today I’m just planting seeds, and most of them haven’t even sprouted yet. A high traffic web site is just one of the sprouts that came about as a result of pursuing the purpose that drives me. But it is not an end in itself.
What will you do if you succeed in building a high-traffic web site? If you someday find yourself in the privileged position of being able to influence millions of people, what will you say to them? Will you honor and respect this position by using it as a channel to serve the highest good of all, or will you throw that opportunity away to pursue your own fleeting fame and fortune while feeding your audience disposable drivel?
Although I launched this web site in October 2008, I’ve been writing articles since 1998, and feedback has allowed me to understand how small slices of my writing have affected certain people in the long run. After reading something I’ve written, people have quit their jobs, started their own businesses, changed religions, and ended relationships. While some people might find this level of impact ego-gratifying, for me it intensifies my feeling of personal responsibility for my writing. I’ve seen that I’m able to have an impact on people, so I damned well better make it a good one.
This “why” is what drives me. It’s what compels me to go to my computer and write something at 3am and not stop until 10am. I get inspired often. The no.1 reason I want more traffic is that it will allow me to help more people. That’s where I direct my ambition for this site, and consequently I’m extremely motivated, which certainly plays a key role in taking action.
6. Let your audience see the real you.
My life and my writing are intricately intertwined, such that it’s impossible to separate the two. When someone reads this web site, they’ll eventually come to know a great deal about me as a person. Usually this creates a skewed and inaccurate impression of who I am today because I change a lot over time — I’m not the same person I was last year — but it’s close enough. Getting to know me makes it easier for people to understand the context of what I write, which means that more value can be transferred in less time.
I’ve told many personal stories on this site, including my most painful and difficult experiences. I don’t do this to be gratuitous but rather because those stories help make a point — that no matter where you find yourself today, you always have the opportunity to grow in some small way, and no matter how small those changes are, they’re going to add up over time to create massive lifelong growth. That’s a lesson we all need to remember.
When I find ways to turn some of my darkest experiences into lessons that might help others in similar situations, it actually transforms those painful memories into joyful ones. They take on new meaning for me, and I can see that there was a positive reason I had to endure such experiences, one that ultimately serves the highest good of all. Oddly, I now find that it was my darkest times that help create the most light for others.
With respect to privacy, I don’t really care much for it. I do respect other people’s right to privacy, so when people tell me personal stories via email, I don’t turn around and re-post them to my blog. But I’m OK with being rather un-private myself. The need for privacy comes from the desire to protect the ego, which is a fear-driven desire, and fear is something I just don’t need in my life. My attitude is that it’s perfectly OK to fail or to be rejected publicly. Trying to appear perfect is nothing but a house of cards that will eventually collapse.
I think allowing people to know the real me makes it possible to build a relationship with my audience that’s based on intimacy and friendship. I dislike seeing people putting me on too much of a pedestal and using labels like “guru” or “overachiever.” Such labels create distance which makes communication harder. They emphasize our differences instead of our similarities. Communication between equals — between friends — is more effective.
More genuine communication means better connections with your audience, which means more repeat traffic and more referral traffic. This isn’t a manipulative game though, and excessive or overly dramatic self-disclosure for the purpose of linkbaiting will only backfire. Your reasons for storytelling must be to benefit your audience. The traffic benefits are a positive side effect.
7. Write what is true for you, and learn to live with the consequences.
If the stuff I’ve written on this site means I’ll never be able to run for a political office, I can live with that. I’m willing to write what is true for me, even if it goes against my social conditioning. Being honest is more important to me than being popular. But the irony is that because bold honesty is so rare among civilized humans, in the long run this may be the best traffic-building strategy of all.
People often warn me not to write things that might alienate a portion of my visitors. But somehow I keep doing the opposite and seeing traffic go up, not down. I don’t treat any subjects as taboo or sacred if they’re relevant to personal growth, and that includes diet and religion. It’s no secret that I’m a vegan ex-Catholic. Do I alienate people when I say that torturing and killing defenseless animals for food is wrong? Perhaps. But truth is truth. I happen to think it’s a bad idea to feed cows cement dust and bovine growth hormone, to pack live chickens into warehouses where the ammonia from their feces is strong enough to burn their skin off, and to feed 70% of our grain to livestock while tens of thousands of people die of hunger each day. I also think it’s a bad idea to pay people to perform these actions on my behalf. It really doesn’t matter to me that 999 people out of 1000 disagree with me. Your disagreement with me doesn’t change what went into producing your burger. It’s still a diseased, tortured, chemical-injected cow, one that was doomed to a very sad life because of a decision you made. And you’re still responsible for your role in that cow’s suffering whether you like it or not.
That last paragraph is a good example of the kind of stuff I write that makes people want to put me in a cage, inject me with hormones, and feed me cement dust. It wouldn’t surprise me terribly if that ends up being my fate.
I write what is true for me, regardless of public opinion. Sometimes I’m in the majority; sometimes I’m not. I’m fully aware that some of my opinions are unpopular, and I’m absolutely fine with that. What I’m not fine with is putting truth to a vote.
I take the time to form my own opinions instead of simply regurgitating what I was taught as a child. And I’m also well aware that there are people spending billions of dollars to make you think that a burger is not a very sad, diseased, tortured, chemical-injected cow. But I’m going to keep writing to help you remain aware of things like that, even though you may hate me for it. That defensiveness eventually leads to doubt, which leads to change and growth, so it’s perfectly fine. I’m good at dealing with defensiveness.
I don’t worry too much about hurting people’s feelings. Hurt feelings are a step in the right direction for many people. If I’m able to offend you so easily, to me that means you already recognize some truth in what I’ve written, but you aren’t ready to face it consciously yet. If you read something from me that provokes an emotional reaction, then a seed has already been planted. In other words, it’s already too late for you.
My goal isn’t to convince anyone of anything in particular. I’m not an animal rights activist, and I don’t have a religion to promote. My goal is to awaken people to living more consciously. This requires raising people’s awareness across all facets of their lives, so they can make the big decisions for themselves. It requires breaking social conditioning and replacing it with conscious awareness and intention. That’s a big job, but someone has to do it. And if I don’t do it, then I have to admit I’m just part of the problem like all the other hibernating bears.
A lot has been written about the importance of transparency in blogging, and truth is the best transparency of all. Truth creates trust, and trust builds traffic. No games, no gimmicks… just plain old brutal honesty. Even the people that say they hate you will still come back, and eventually those people will become your most ardent supporters. Even if they don’t agree with you, they’ll learn they can trust you and that your intentions are honorable, and trust is more important than agreement.
8. Treat your visitors like real human beings.
Even though I’m sitting at my computer writing this, seemingly alone, I know you’re a real human being reading it on the other end. My apologies to sentient androids who may be reading this years after it’s been written. You aren’t just a number in my web stats. Despite the technology involved and the time-space differential between my writing and your reading, there’s still a human-to-human connection between us that transcends time and space. And that connection matters to me. I feel its presence whenever I do my best writing.
While I imagine being on a stage in front of a million people when deciding which topic to write about, once I actually get going, I imagine having a one-on-one conversation with a friend. This means revealing some of myself and being honest, as the last two points already addressed, but it also means genuinely caring about you as a person. And that’s perhaps one of the best kept secrets of my success as a blogger. I actually care about helping you grow. I want you to become more conscious and aware. I want you to experience less fear in your life. And my concern for your well-being isn’t conditional upon you liking me.
I happen to think we have a lot more similarities than differences. Based on what I know about myself, I imagine you’d like your life to be better tomorrow than it was yesterday. I imagine you’d like to be happier, more fulfilled, and more at peace with yourself. I also imagine you’re living below your potential and could use some help overcoming fear and solving certain problems to enable you to tap more of that potential. And finally, I imagine you wouldn’t believe me if I said you can have it all for only $19.95 (as well you shouldn’t).
The reason I work so hard to create original content and then give it away for free is because I want to help as many people as possible. I genuinely care what happens to this beautiful planet and to the people who live here. It’s possible I actually value your life even more than you do. This is the kind of motivation that never wanes. I sometimes lose sight of it when I get caught up in the details, but the connection is always there, waiting for me to tap into it whenever I want. This provides me with a wellspring of creative ideas and an inexhaustible passion for contribution.
I don’t need to play stupid marketing and sales games with you. There’s nothing for you to buy here. Even if I add some products in the future, I’m not going to try to manipulate you into buying something you don’t need with a slew of false promises. I might make more money in the short-term by doing that, but it would sever our genuine connection, create a wall between us, and reduce the level of impact I’m able to have. Ultimately, that approach would lead to failure for me, at least in terms of how I define success. I can’t help you grow if I violate your trust.
I cannot force anyone to grow who doesn’t want to. But there are a lot of people on this planet who are now ready to let go of low-awareness living and start pushing themselves to the next level of human existence. And they need help to get there because it’s a difficult journey, and there are strong forces working against it.
Real human beings helping real human beings is ultimately what traffic growth is all about. That’s precisely what a link or a referral is. If you align yourself with the intention of genuinely helping people because you care, you’ll soon find yourself with an abundance of traffic.
9. Keep money in its proper place.
Money is important. Obviously I have bills to pay. Money pays for my computer, my high-speed internet connection, my house, and my food. I just returned yesterday from a vacation that money paid for. My Girl friend and I had a great time partly because we didn’t have to worry about money at all on the trip. We did everything we wanted to do without being hampered by a lack of funds. And this web site paid for it.
It’s important that I generate some money from my work, but it’s not necessary that I extract every possible dollar. In fact, relative to its traffic levels, I’m seriously under-monetizing this site. But money is only a means to an end, not an end in itself. Making a positive contribution to the world is a lot more important to me than money. Money can be useful in achieving this objective, but human relationships are far more important. The funny thing is that the less I rely on money, the more of it I seem to have.
I’m already making more money than I need to pay my bills, and my income from this site keeps going up each month. If I simply keep doing what I’m doing, I’ll probably end up becoming fairly wealthy. But money is an extremely weak motivator for me. Very little of what I do today has a profit motive behind it except to the extent that money will fuel more important goals. That tends to confuse certain people because some of my decisions align with earning money, but many don’t. While I do consider myself an entrepreneur (at least it’s less isolating than “guru”), I only see money as a tool for enhancing and expanding my contribution.
While many entrepreneurs pursue money for the purpose of becoming wealthy, I chose a different route. I sought to earn money for the purpose of increasing my freedom. I don’t want to get myself stuck in a pattern of working for money, so I’m constantly turning down opportunities to make money that would restrict my freedom. For example, I don’t do any consulting or coaching. Consequently, my calendar contains very few fixed appointments. This doesn’t mean I’m idle. It just means I spend my time doing what I freely choose to do instead of what others would have me do. I require this level of flexibility to do my best work.
By paying close attention to how I earn money and not just how much I earn, I keep money in its proper place. This allows me to stay focused on my purpose without getting wrapped up in less important concerns like building a brand, closing sales, or doing phony marketing.
I dislike it when other people use one-dimensional sales and marketing tactics on me, so I avoid using these techniques on this site. I’ve sort of unplugged myself from the current capitalistic system and set up a side system of my own that I find much more congruent with conscious living. I would love for other people to have the same level of freedom I enjoy each day. I’m sure I’ll continue to improve my approach over time, but it’s working wonderfully so far. Imagine having a business with no products, no inventory, no sales, and no customers, but still generating an abundant positive cashflow.
Since the income generation is largely on autopilot, I can focus my time and energy on creating content instead of on doing marketing or trying to sell something. And being able to devote so much time to content creation without worrying how I’ll pay my bills makes it a lot easier to build high traffic.
Some business models make it very challenging to build traffic. You have to spend a lot of time and energy just on lead generation, and then maybe you try to monetize those leads by selling a product or service. It’s always an uphill struggle.
I give all my best content away for free. Word of mouth does the rest. So my traffic building strategy is more like flowing downstream. It hasn’t been a struggle for me at all. And once you have sufficient traffic, it isn’t that hard to monetize it without becoming an ogre.
We’ve all heard the expression, “Build a better mousetrap, and they’ll come.” And we’ve also heard marketing and sales people say that this is just plain wrong — you have to market and sell that mousetrap effectively too. I say they’re all wrong. My approach is the equivalent of, “Build a better mousetrap and give it away for free, and they’ll come — and they’ll bring friends too.”
10. If you forget the first nine suggestions, just focus on genuinely helping people, and the rest will take care of itself.
One thing that turns me off about typical self-help marketing is that authors and speakers often position themselves as if they’re the opposite of their audience. I’m successful and you’re not. I’m rich and you’re not. I’m fit and you’re not. You need me because something is lacking in your life, I have exactly what you lack, and if you pay me (and make me even richer and you poorer), I’ll show you how you can have it too. And if it doesn’t work for you, it just means you’re even more of an idiot than the people who provided my testimonials.
I’m sure you’ve heard this sort of nonsense many times before.
All of this I’ve-arrived-and-you-haven’t stuff is stupid. It suggests that life is about destinations and that once you’ve arrived, you’re done growing and can just relax and sip fruity drinks for the rest of your life. But there’s more to life than border crossings. If you go from single to married or from non-millionaire to millionaire, that’s fine and dandy. Crossing the border into parenthood was a big one for me. But that’s only one day of my life, and to be honest, I didn’t have much control over it except for a decision made nine-months earlier (and it seemed like a pretty attractive idea at the time). What about all those other days though?
Growing as a human being is something I work on daily. I’m deeply passionate about my own growth, so naturally I want to share this part of the journey with others. If I start marketing myself with the “I’m successful and you’re not approach,” I hope someone will come put me out of my misery, since that would mean I’m done growing and ready to die. I don’t expect to ever be done growing as long as I exist as a human being. There are always new distinctions to be made and new experiences to enjoy. And yes… plenty of mistakes to be made as well.
One of the great benefits of focusing on helping others is that it gets fear out of the way. Without fear you become free to just be yourself. You’re able to take intelligent risks and remain detached from any specific outcome because the journey is more important to you than the specific stops along the way. Personally it’s not the destinations that excite me but rather the unfolding process of discovery. I love the anticipation of wondering what lies around each new bend.
If we are to help each other, we need to be partners in the pursuit of growth, not opponents. So it makes no sense to put up fake walls between us. The ego needs walls to protect it, but if we can get past the fear-based needs of the ego, we’ll make a lot more progress.
There are plenty of things I could do with this site that would make me more money or grow traffic faster in the short-term, but I won’t do them because they’ll just put more distance between us. I’ll be on my side, you’ll be on your side, and we’ll each be slightly afraid of the other. I’ll be worried that maybe you won’t buy what I’m selling, and you’ll be worried about getting ripped off or taken advantage of. We’ll just be drinking yet another round of fear, which is exactly the opposite of what we need to grow.
One of my biggest challenges in life right now is figuring out how to help enough people switch their primary polarization from fear to love. Our emotions are an energy source for us (they drive our actions), and most of the world is still driven by fear energy. Watching TV news is a good example; we can actually feel energized by watching others suffer. Hurting animals is another example; we eat their fear for breakfast. But there’s another fuel for human consciousness, and perhaps the best way to describe it is unconditional love. This isn’t the squishy emotion of romantic love — it’s a sense of connection to everything that exists and a desire to serve the highest good of all. Unconditional love, when it becomes one’s primary fuel, cultivates fearlessness. In this state you still have the biological fight-or-flight response, but you aren’t driven by emotional worries like fear of failure or fear of rejection. You feel perfectly safe regardless of external circumstances. And when you have this feeling of unconditional safety, you’re truly free to be yourself, to embrace new experiences, and to grow at a very fast pace.
Personal growth is not a zero-sum game. If you grow as a human being, it doesn’t harm me. In fact, ultimately if all of us grow as individuals, it’s going to make this whole planet better for everyone. When enough people switch their primary polarization from fear to unconditional love, this planet will become a true paradise. That’s a good thing for all of us, one that’s more important than all the money in the world.
Perhaps you have a less ambitious goal for building web traffic than raising human consciousness and working towards world peace. That doesn’t matter. You can still make helping others your primary focus, and if you do that, you’ll find it relatively easy to build a high-traffic web site. If you align yourself with serving the highest good of all, you’ll receive plenty of help along the way, and best of all, you’ll deserve it.
Do your best to help your visitors out of genuine concern for their well-being, and they’ll help you build your traffic and even generate a nice income from it. It’s as simple as that.
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