Wednesday, 13 May 2009

Internet Marketing - How to Increase Website Traffic

There are numerous ways to increase website traffic. A very good and useful website is of no use until it reaches its intended audience. A successful running website getting targeted traffic is worth millions, while a dead website without any traffic is a waste of time and money. A website is a success only when it fulfils its purpose - it gets the traffic and attracts the visitors for whom it was created in the first place.

Getting traffic to your website may seem very difficult in the beginning. You need to put in regular effort to increase website traffic and keep it coming and growing on daily basis. It may seem like a lot of effort and especially in the beginning the results may be quite disheartening. You may put in all the required effort and use different ways to increase website traffic and yet it may seem to stand still. The most important thing is not to let the initial hard work discourage you, because the efforts will pay off in the end. Once you've started getting traffic and have gotten your website "mapped on the Internet", the traffic will increase even if you don't make any efforts for it constantly.

It's a fact that 20 per cent of your efforts will bring in 80 per cent of the results. So before you start doing anything else to increase website traffic, sign up for a google analytics account. It is free and easy to sign up with a gmail account and it allows you to collect various information about your website visitors. After that you can focus on increasing your website traffic and then you can monitor the results. Try different things and then focus on the things that work best. When something is bringing excellent results, focus on that and put more effort into bringing in even more traffic.

Internet marketing is excellent because of the fact that you can promote your website and get targeted traffic without any costs at all. You will of course have to spend time on it and put in the effort, but apart from that there's no investment required - there are hundreds of ways to get free targeted traffic to your website. So what can you do to increase website traffic?

One method of gaining targeted traffic to your website is search engine optimisation. It is quite an elaborate science on its own, but when done properly, it will bring excellent results. This is something you could outsource to an expert instead - it will cost you money, but it will pay off with the results. Search engine optimisation is a technique, where you modify your website content so, that the search engines will display your website when a potential visitor enters a relevant keyword into the search engine. So first you need to do some market research, find out the profitable keywords and then edit your content so that it will contain the optimal number of relevant keywords. The more relevant your content seems to the search engines spiders, the higher up your page appears in the search results. The search engine spiders assess your page according to number of criteria, one of them being the keywords.

Search engines also assign a search engine ranking to every website and that ranking also affects where your website appears in a particular search. There are a lot factors that have an impact on the ranking, like the keywords and other information - title, images, also the existing traffic and backlinks to your site. Therefore it is helpful to submit your website URL to search engines as well as various directories relevant to your website subject. For submitting to google, for example, use google webmaster tools - it helps to get your website crawled by the spiders in just a few days, while naturally this process can take much longer, especially when your website is new and isn't getting any traffic yet.

Another way of drawing traffic is by writing good informative articles about the subject of your website. This is called article marketing. Write good unique content on a particular subject and then submit your articles to different article directories. Below each article there is a resource box with author information - this is where you will put a few words about yourself and/or your website and a link to your website. Article are found by search engine spiders quite quickly, so you will get traffic from people, who are looking for information and find your article on the topic. If the article is interesting and useful, they click your link to get more useful information from your website. The most efficient articles are those which focus on one particular topic, which may be relevantly narrow or broader. It is useful to do some research before and include the relevant keywords in your article. Make the title clear and write the article so that people will get the answers they were looking for.

As I said above, backlinking is also useful to increase website traffic. Try to find blogs and forums relevant to the subject of your website. If you have something useful to say about the posts in a blog or forum, you can leave a comment and include a link to your website. However, first always read the rules on commenting and don't spam with your comments - post a comment only if it is relevant and useful.

Increasing your website traffic may seem to much effort in the beginning, but once you've established a position and get known as an expert in a particular field, the traffic starts increasing automatically - you just need to update your website and provide good useful content to the visitors. Get their questions answered and they will come back for me. Offer them more than they expect and they will be your loyal fans forever.

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Friday, 24 April 2009

Web 2.0 Traffic Strategies For Constant Massive Flow Of Free Targeted Traffic To Your Website

You may have the greatest website in the world, but its completely useless, unless people know about it. So once you've put up your valuable content, you need to get traffic to your website - you need people finding your website. And then you will need your visitors to like your content to come back again and again and also to recommend your website to others.

There are a lot of ways to generate traffic. The quickest way to get targeted traffic is of course paid traffic - like Adwords and similar PPC.
However, for long-term benefit you should start building up ways to get continuous targeted traffic flow to your website. Web 2.0 traffic strategies can help you get a lot of targeted traffic and best of all - these traffic strategies are all free. So web 2.0 traffic strategies are the best way of gaining traffic for anyone - whether you're just starting and have your first website up and running or whether you've been online for years. Web 2.0 is one of the most unique ways to have unstoppable traffic flowing into your site. It helps you to generate a traffic flow that is not only continuous, but is also constantly increasing.

There are tons of resources that you can use these days to increase the flow of traffic directed to your site. Some of these include Digg, Yahoo Answers, Squidoo pages, social networks, article marketing, press releases, blogs, videos, etc etc. The list is endless - you just need to choose a starting point, give a try to some of the web 2.0 traffic strategies and see the results. You need to find out what is working best for you and then improve that. There are several web traffic strategies and you can use many of them or rather, as many of them as you wish, in order to get your business going higher.

Web 2.0 traffic strategies are really amazing tools that let you set up a lot ways that direct people to your website. There is appropriate guidance available on how you can make free hosting, a blog, and other exciting ways to increase your traffic. There are free training lessons available on the net on how to do it big on the net and you can always find a coach to guide you through the different strategies, if they seem overwhelming at first sight.

You can search for the relevant information on Google, make the best use of the available free resources and try out different possibilities. For achieving the best results you need to monitor your efforts. You need to know, where the traffic is coming from, how long they stay on your website, which pages to they visit. If you're getting tons of traffic, but they leave your website almost instantly, you need to improve your content. If you're not getting enough traffic, you need to try out different resources. Maybe your writing skills aren't the best? Then you should outsource your blogging tasks, writing your articles or even creating your website content. Or you could also do a Google search for free tips on how to improve your writing.

A good resource for monitoring your traffic is Google analytics. It's a free tool that gives an overview on where your traffic comes from, how many visitors your website receives, how long they stay, which pages they visit, etc. It's easy and quick to set up, all you need is a free gmail account. For monitoring the traffic you need to copy-paste a short code on your website - you can do that with any website editor or even in Notepad.

If you're not sure where to start, I'd recommend starting by creating yourself a blog. Google search will again be handy for finding several free resources for that - blogger, wordpress etc. Blog is relevantly simple to create, but amazingly powerful. Search engines love the blogs, so they find new ones quickly and get them indexed. You don't need to have any particular skills for that - you can just write short posts on the subject related to your website. You can include your website links in your blog posts and that will generate traffic to your website, when someone reads your blog, finds it interesting and wants to know more. The most important thing to keep in mind about blogging is not to neglect it. When you've started blogging, you need to add new content on regular basis. The blog posts don't have to be long, but they need to be frequent. So before starting to blog, take some time to think about it. Plan your first posts and set yourself a schedule, then stick to it. You don't have to enter a new post every day, you may do it once or twice a week, every other week or at any other interval that is most convenient for you. But you need to plan that in advance and stick to the plan. If you neglect your blog, people will lose interest in it and it will do you no good. On the other hand, if you update your blog with valuable content often, the search engines will pick it up, it gets indexed, you will receive traffic and if you're good at it, you may soon have lots of fans, who come back to your blog frequently to read new posts, who follow you and recommend your blog through various social bookmarking tools - which are also part of web 2.0 traffic strategies.

So if you decide to start blogging, my advice is - do it right the first time. Take the time to think about it first - what you will write, how often you'll do it and also keep in mind your potential audience - who are you writing for?

If writing is your strong side, you could also write articles and submit them to different article directories.

There are so many resources offered by web 2.0 traffic strategies, all you need to do is discover those, give them a try and make the best use of them.

The best traffic you can get is free targeted traffic.

Learn more about Web 2.0 Traffic Strategies for Constant Highly Targeted Free Traffic to Your Website or Blog.

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Internet marketing - Tips for Starting Affiliate Marketing

If you're new to Internet marketing, one of the easiest ways to get started is affiliate marketing. You have no start-up costs, you don't need a website or a product and the average Internet user knowledge is sufficient to get you started.

So what is affiliate marketing? Affiliate marketing is promoting someone else's product and getting a commission for the sale. You choose a product that is already doing well and you promote that product. When someone buys the product from your link, you will get paid a commission. So you can basically start from nothing.

First of all you will need to find a product or several products to promote. The best way to find products in the Internet marketing niche is Clickbank marketplace. ClickBank is the online retail outlet for 10,000 digital product vendors and their 100,000 active affiliates. Go to Clickbank and sign up for a free account. Then open the marketplace, enter a keyword and do a search. Clickbank will produce a list of products relevant to your keyword. Under each product you will see information on how much commission you will make in dollars as well as the percentage of the product price. You will also see what percentage of the sales are made by affiliates (%refd) and the gravity of the product (grav:).

These are interesting figures, which you should pay attention to. For example, if the percentage of sales made by affiliates is low, it could mean that the product is not converting very well. The gravity shows the popularity of the product - the higher the gravity, the better the product has been doing for the last few weeks.

After you've found some products that seem interesting to you, do some more research on them. Go to sites like cbengine.com and cbtrends.com to find out, how the products are doing there. The gravity of the product on Clickbank marketplace doesn't always reflect how well the product is currently doing. Instead, you might find out on cbtrends.com that the product has a falling trend. That could mean that the product has been on the market for quite a while already and its sales are decreasing. You may also find new products with a highly rising trend, which don't have a high gravity on Clickbank marketplace yet. That means they were only recently launched and haven't built up the popularity yet, so it would be a good place for you to start promoting these.

When you've done your research and found the products that are doing well and that you'd like to promote, go back to Clickbank marketplace and find the product there. Then click on create hoplink below the product description. In the new window enter your Clickbank user ID and click on create hoplink. This link will be the link to your personal sales page - anyone buying through that link will make you a commission.

The next step - start promoting your links. There are tons of ways to do that. The quickest way to get targeted buyers is Adwords (Google's paid ads), but I don't suggest using adwords, if you have no experience in it. Instead of making huge sales commissions you could make a huge loss on your ads, if you don't know how to find the right keywords and place your bids for optimal results. Adwords is an entire science, so if you're interested, do a Google search on it and you will find hundreds of resources of information on that.

I would recommend to use other methods for promoting. You can use safelists and traffic exchanges. If you don't know, where to start, have a look here - it's the most comprehensive resource on lists I've ever seen.

You could also start a review blog for promoting your affiliate products. Blogs are free and easy to create (blogger.com, wordpress.com) and the best part - search engines love blogs. Blogs get indexed and ranked much quicker than regular websites, they get more traffic and higher visibility. The reason for that is that blogs are updated constantly with new content and search engines love content. Review blogs are a great way of promoting affiliate products. Write a blog post on each of the products you've chosen to promote. Try to be honest and precise in your reviews - bring out the characteristics of the product, but also what you don't like about the product. Honest opinion is worth much more than a bunch of empty hype and sales pitches. So if you think a product is priced too highly, be honest about it and say you'd rather like the price to be half of what is asked, but if you could afford the price, you'd buy it.

You can also have a look at more ways of promoting your products using free Web 2.0 Traffic strategies.

Good luck - looking forward to seeing you among top affiliates!

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Introduction to my Blog on Internet Marketing aka How To Make Money Online

Hi,

my name is Margot-Helena Kasari and I come from Tallinn, Estonia - a small country in Northern Europe.

First and foremost, I'm a mother of an adorable 4-year-old son. I've raised him by myself since the beginning and he is my biggest success and the sunshine of my life. He is also the reason for me to get up every day, do the best I can and constantly improve. He is also my reason for finding ways to offer him the best life I can. Right now I'm not yet at the point, where we'd have the freedom to do whatever we like whenever we like, but we're doing pretty good and getting better every day.

In addition to being a mother I'm doing several other things. I have a full-time job as a project manager in a translation agency. I own a small company and am freelancing as a translator and reviser. I'm also studying for a BA in law.

My most recent business is Internet marketing. I started looking at different possibilities how to make money online a few years ago. I've been doing Internet marketing seriously and taking it as a business for about a year. Similarly to almost every newbie in Internet marketing, I've also learned a lot of lessons along the way. I started out by complete trial and error. I joined almost every program I could find, I bought every new ebook and product that came to my attention, I tried to make money with everything and I failed. The result was that ended up spending 5 figures on various opportunities, products and advertising and made almost no return. My inbox was flooded with e-mails I didn't even have time to scan, let alone read. So at one point it was starting to affect my lifestyle - I was spending much more than I could afford and though my full-time job pays well, the money spent thoughtlessly started affecting my financial status. So I realised it is time to cut my losses and start anew. I quit several programs I had joined before and unsubscribed from a lot of lists that were not delivering any value, but only one sales pitch after another.

There are a few things you need to succeed in Internet marketing. You need persistence, determination, effort and skills. You need to want to succeed (desperately, if you wish) and that's most important. If you're taking it as a hobby, you might as well quit right away. You need to put in the effort and time required to succeed and you need to stay focused. You need to set your goals, divide your major goals into smaller timeframes and set a schedule. And then you need to follow your schedule and achieve your goals one by one. You need to take your Internet business as a real business and it will become one, allowing you to replace your full-time job with a full-time residual income at some point. How long it will take you to succeed will depends largely on your own commitment. So make sure your goals and schedule are realistic. Set your own pace and then stick to it. You can decide how much time you want to invest in the beginning and it will depend solely on your own availability. You may choose to spend 30 minutes or an hours a day or a few hours a week, but you have to allocate that time in advance and stick to it. You need to stay focused and not deal with other things during that time - it is so easy to get distracted by checking your e-mail every 15 minutes or browsing the web. Therefore it is important to set particular tasks and to-do list and follow it.

For succeeding in Internet marketing you also need the skills and knowledge. You need to learn and understand the basics and work your way up. There is no such thing as get rich overnight. If an opportunity is advertised to make you rich overnight, you can be sure that it's a scam. So if you're determined to succeed, be prepared to work for your success and be committed to achieving your goals.

After the row of failures in the beginning I knew my strategy and efforts needed to change for me to become a successful Internet marketer. I needed to focus on a few things instead of scattering my attention between a lot of opportunities, none of which got the time, dedication and promotion required for me to succeed in any of these. So far I had joined a lot of mailing lists - safelists etc, but I had no personal list.

So about 6 months ago I started building my list. I consider this the breaking point in my efforts. My list is the first thing that has actually allowed me to make some money. It's not that big yet, but it is growing steadily and I already have some loyal readers. I have a personal relationship with about 10% of the people on my list - we exchange personal e-mails and I help them any way I can. So I truly agree that the relationship with your own list is the biggest asset you can have in Internet marketing. You have to have a personal list to maximise your success. So if you don't have one yet, you should start building it as soon as possible. I will dedicate a later blog post to building your list, so that you'd have a starting point with a few options.

My second most important step in my Internet marketing road was joining Reality Networkers. It is truly the best residual income network with all the tools and support needed to succeed in Internet marketing. I will write a detailed post about Reality Networkers in the nearest future as well, but if you're eager to find out more right away, you can have a look here.

My third and my wisest decision ever was to join and coaching and mentoring programme with Chris Freville. It has only lasted slightly over a month, but has taught me so much already. I will be posting updates about what I've learned with the mentoring programme. One topic of the mentoring programme is list-building and getting free targeted traffic using Web 2.0 Traffic Strategies - check it out for some really valuable tips.

Stay tuned for my next posts!

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