You Can All Get Stuffed!

by admin on June 8th, 2009

Traffic. A source of income and motivation for some and frustration and annoyance for others. For me, traffic is like some kind of Nirvava: something you always want but can never get. Not anymore!

I am sick of trying to get people to read my work, my masterpieces. From this moment on I will post only for myself.

Before I made this decision I tried every possible method to attract visitors to this site. I put my blog in dozens of directories, I became a member of several forums, I linked to other blogs, I commented on other blogs, and I joined traffic exchange sites (Blog Explosion). These in particular became a place that I now direct my anger. To get one visitor you have to visit two other sites. And the visitors that you do get are more concerned with moving on to the next site so that they get their own visitors!

The one thing that really annoys me above all else is blogs that actually do get traffic (Good old Australian tall poppy syndrome). They seemingly do nothing and yet, they reap the rewards for it.

After reading many ‘How to get traffic’ articles and failing, I have decided to go the opposite direction, away from the popular path. In a phrase: ‘You can all get stuffed!’

Russ Egan
http://s-bend.blogspot.com

Link Exchanges for Website Promotion

by admin on June 8th, 2009

Why Should I Exchange Links?

Links brings interested visitors and potential customers to your website. Links also help in increasing your popularity and are helpful in gaining better search engine positioning as search engines lay great emphasis on link popularity. The World Wide Web is a huge network of websites and it is impossible to browse the web without appropriate links. By displaying links on your website and by getting your link displayed on other websites, you are helping expand this web.

Types of Links

Links discussed here are of two types:

1. Text Links: A written description of your website, with a hypertext link to your site.

2. Graphic Link: Banners or buttons hyperlinked to your website.

For many reasons, text links have an advantage over graphic links. Text links do not take any time to load and are quickly indexed by search engines.

The first thing you need is a good text link. A good text link is one which describes your website, its content, products or services in a simple and easy-to-understand manner, in minimum possible words. Write out a simple, yet effective copy for your text link. It is advisable to keep 4-5 different texts ready so that you have different text links all over the web. Exactly similar text links on many websites may cause you to get banned from certain search engines.

Where to place links?

Ideally, you should have a separate page for links or resources which should be linked to, from your index page. It is not advisable to place links on your homepage as we do not want our visitors to click on links and leave our websites as soon as they enter!

Finding Sites to Exchange Links With

Link exchanges are most beneficial when websites are of similar nature. For example, if you sell handbags, a customer looking for handbags on another handbag website is more likely to be interested in visiting your website than a customer of a website selling drill machines. Here is how to find the appropriate websites to exchange links with:

1. Search for websites on search engines. Type in the main keywords of your business (for e.g. handbags) and you will get a list of websites in the same industry. Visit their websites and see if they have a ‘links’ page. That page will also contain information on how to request a link exchange.

2. If you find a ‘links’ page on a website, take time to visit all the websites that are linked. If those websites have exchanged links with the website you are visiting, they are sure to be interested in exchanging links with other websites i.e. yours.

3. On your own ‘links’ page, mention info about how people can request link exchanges with your website. Mention a specific email address where they can contact regarding link exchanges or use a contact form. You will start receiving link exchange requests and it will be up to you to decide which websites are worthy of linking to.

4. Ask for link exchanges in the message forums and newsgroups you visit regularly. Owners of similar websites will be glad to respond.

About the Author:

Lata Tokhi is a successful website publisher with a network of popular websites. She shares her internet success secrets with you at http://www.MomTycoons.com

Visit some of her other popular websites at http://www.DotComWomen.com, a Home & Lifestyle website and an online community and http://www.Celebrating-Christmas.com, a complete Holiday portal.

Link Swapping – There IS A Better Way

by admin on June 5th, 2009

Do you ever wonder what the point is in spending all this time, energy and money trying to spread your website link around?

Do you get a sinking feeling in your stomach every time you have to shell out more money for clicks that give you impressive numbers but lead nowhere?

Are you weary of crazed marketing types clamoring to swap links with you when you know that there’s no *real* interest in what you offer?

Link distribution makes sense if you want to get more exposure and watch your website climb higher on the search engine hierarchy, sure. Being highly and permanently visible is vital to the long-term growth of your business. Buying your way to a big, fat subscriber list will help you to feel popular and loved.

But what good is that sky-high Alexa rank if the people who are clicking on your site have little to no interest in your product anyway?

Having a website that’s widely visited by people who are only mildly concerned with what you do, is like having tons of people who claim to be your friends but no one to call up when you want to get close and personal.

Do you ever wish for an improved kind of link swapping, one that not only spreads your link far and wide on the Web, but also leaves your reader with a little golden nugget of who you are and what you can do for them?

Do you ever wish for a widespread marketing campaign that will reach your target audience… the ones who are emotionally connected to your product and willing to pay cash for it? But let me guess… you don’t want to invest money in hiring a team of advertising strategists?

It’s time to pay homage to the Internet Gods… because they heard your prayers and the answer is finally here.

IT’S ARTICLE MARKETING.

People have a really hard time grasping what article marketing is all about, for some reason.

If they’re writers, they want to just go on a meandering ramble about whatever strikes their fancy. They forget about the fact that Article Marketing is a primo opportunity to reel in a hearty helping of hot buying prospects by way of fresh content that’s specifically geared to one pool of consumers. They forget that scrabbling their musing is not really going to help to that end.

If they’re marketers, they think: Oh, I don’t have the time or inclination to write. So they go back to shelling out big bucks for impersonal linking strategies that reach General Audience only, and that’s no way to be a good marketer. That’s no way to build the power of your brand.

If you’ve never written an article with the intention of having it picked up and spread around the internet with your business URL at the bottom, go directly to Ezinearticles.com right now, create an author account, and write one immediately.

Once you’ve done that, a strange, peaceful sensation may steal over you. This peaceful experience you’re having is one that comes with knowing you communicated just the right message to the right people. This, dear marketer, is the stuff that Branding Dreams are made of.

So, Article Marketing. Read all about it! Find out about the hottest linking craze on the net that will make you a standout in your niche. Then… map out a campaign, plan to pitch your product… and start writing those articles!

The sky is wide open, what will you do next to help your business?

Copyright 2005 Dina Giolitto. All rights reserved.

Dina Giolitto is the author of ARTICLE POWER: Create Dynamite Web Articles and Watch Your Sales Explode… a 49-page manual covering every aspect of article marketing on the web. Learn about article marketing, copywriting and more at http://www.wordfeeder.com

The Miraculous Conversion

by admin on May 26th, 2009

http://www.ideavirus.com

The recent bloodbath among online content peddlers and digital media proselytisers can be traced to two deadly sins. The first was to assume that traffic equals sales. In other words, that a miraculous conversion will spontaneously occur among the hordes of visitors to a web site. It was taken as an article of faith that a certain percentage of this mass will inevitably and nigh hypnotically reach for their bulging pocketbooks and purchase content, however packaged. Moreover, ad revenues (more reasonably) were assumed to be closely correlated with “eyeballs”. This myth led to an obsession with counters, page hits, impressions, unique visitors, statistics and demographics.

It failed, however, to take into account the dwindling efficacy of what Seth Godin, in his brilliant essay (“Unleashing the IdeaVirus”), calls “Interruption Marketing” – ads, banners, spam and fliers. It also ignored, at its peril, the ethos of free content and open source prevalent among the Internet opinion leaders, movers and shapers. These two neglected aspects of Internet hype and culture led to the trouncing of erstwhile promising web media companies while their business models were exposed as wishful thinking.

The second mistake was to exclusively cater to the needs of a highly idiosyncratic group of people (Silicone Valley geeks and nerds). The assumption that the USA (let alone the rest of the world) is Silicone Valley writ large proved to be calamitous to the industry.

In the 1970s and 1980s, evolutionary biologists like Richard Dawkins and Rupert Sheldrake developed models of cultural evolution. Dawkins’ “meme” is a cultural element (like a behaviour or an idea) passed from one individual to another and from one generation to another not through biological -genetic means – but by imitation. Sheldrake added the notion of contagion – “morphic resonance” – which causes behaviour patterns to suddenly emerged in whole populations. Physicists talked about sudden “phase transitions”, the emergent results of a critical mass reached. A latter day thinker, Michael Gladwell, called it the “tipping point”.

Seth Godin invented the concept of an “ideavirus” and an attendant marketing terminology. In a nutshell, he says, to use his own summation:

“Marketing by interrupting people isn’t cost-effective anymore. You can’t afford to seek out people and send them unwanted marketing, in large groups and hope that some will send you money. Instead the future belongs to marketers who establish a foundation and process where interested people can market to each other. Ignite consumer networks and then get out of the way and let them talk.”

This is sound advice with a shaky conclusion. The conversion from exposure to a marketing message (even from peers within a consumer network) – to an actual sale is a convoluted, multi-layered, highly complex process. It is not a “black box”, better left unattended to. It is the same deadly sin all over again – the belief in a miraculous conversion. And it is highly US-centric. People in other parts of the world interact entirely differently.

You can get them to visit and you get them to talk and you can get them to excite others. But to get them to buy – is a whole different ballgame. Dot.coms had better begin to study its rules.

About the Author

Sam Vaknin is the author of Malignant Self Love – Narcissism Revisited and After the Rain – How the West Lost the East. He is a columnist for Central Europe Review, United Press International (UPI) and eBookWeb and the editor of mental health and Central East Europe categories in The Open Directory, Suite101 and searcheurope.com.

Visit Sam’s Web site at http://samvak.tripod.com

Top 5 Ways To Generate Low-Cost Website Traffic

by admin on March 18th, 2009

The following information in this article should be exactly what you are looking for and I hope it helps you.

There is one tried and tested rule in generating income for your website: A regular stream of website traffic.
If no one goes to your website, it hardly bares a chance of generating an income. Lots of sites have tried and failed in doing so, and these result in the sites passing. It takes capital to support an income generating website; it also takes capital to create capital.
BUT, it doesn’t take a large caboodle of money to create website traffic for your site.

Ever think how does big hit sites push traffic top their site?
The majority of them are spending tons of money to push the traffic to their sites, investing in lots of advertising campaigns and alternate forms of marketing schemes and gimmickries.
This is all profitable because, in fact, they are what they are now, high earning, big hitting websites.
You don’t need to do this if you don’t necessarily have their resources. There are various ways to create low cost website traffic without having to run through what you don’t have or can’t afford. Lots of people have relied on high cost methods to create a steady stream of website traffic and ended up losing their shirt over it.
Here I present to you the Top five ways to create low cost website traffic that could assist your site a whole lot. Even if you just get a tiny percentage of productive visitors in to client ratio it still works particularly if you get a high amount of website traffic.

Swap Links
This is a tried and proven technique to increase traffic. Rarely will you see a site where there is no link to another site. Most webmasters are inclined to exchange links with other sites so that they may increase more public awareness about their sites. You’ll shortly see and feel the quick surge of the traffic coming in to your site from other sites.
A major requirement in swapping links with other sites is having the same niche or content as the other site. They should share a common subject so that there is continuity in the providing of service and information to what interests your target traffic.
Exchanging links also boosts your chances of obtaining a top ranking in search engine results. It is generally known that search engines ranks high sites that have inbound and outbound theme-related links. With a top ranking place in the search engines, you will create more traffic in your website without the high costs.

Traffic Exchange
This is like exchanging links but on a different higher level. This may cost a bit more than exchanging or trading links but could be made cheaper because you get to earn credits. You can use those credits when viewing others traffic, while you earn credits when someone views yours.
Traffic Exchange services are the watching of another’s site or page. This is done vice versa where a site can use your sites contents and so can you to his or her site. You both benefit from each others efforts to generate traffic. The other sites visitors can go to your pages and learn more about your site as well as theirs. Once again the public awareness of your sites existence is boosted.

Write and Submit articles
There are lots of e-zines and online encyclopedias in the internet which provides free space for articles to be submitted. If you require to save costs, you can do the articles yourself. There are many freelance writers who are able to write for you for a low fee, but to save money, it is expedient to do those articles yourself.
Create articles that are themed along with the niche of your site. Write something that you have knowledge on so that when they read it, they can experience your knowledge on the subject and will be keen to go to your site. Create articles that produce tips and guidelines to the subject or niche your site has.
Include a resource box at the end of your article that can link them to your site. Write a little about yourself and your site. If you provide a light, information-laden and interesting article, they will go to your site for more.

Make a Newsletter.
This may seem like hard work because of all the articles you may need to use to put together a newsletter but on the contrary, this is not so. There are many writers and sites that are inclined to provide free articles as long as they can get their ‘Authors Bio’ in on your newsletter. This also provides free advertising for them as well.
As your newsletter gets circulated , you can widen your public awareness and create an opt-in list that can regularly visit your site.

Join Online Communities and Forums
This only requires your time and not much else. You can share your knowledge and expertise with many online communities as well as your website. You can get free advertising when you go to forums that have the same subject or niche with your site.
Share your two cents and let them see how knowledgeable you are with the subject. As you create your reputation, you also create the reputation of your site, making it a reputable and honest business that could be frequented and trusted by many people.

Thanks for finding my site and reading my article. If you want to learn more then keep looking around my site.

________________________________________
Author Bio:

This Article was written by David Hill.
Tens of Thousands of Articles and Resources can be found at;
http://www.articlepro.co.uk

This article is available for re-print
This Article and Author Bio: MUST be kept entire and in place without alteration, either in part or in full.

David Hill is an Analytical Chemist.
He has written Articles for several years.
All his articles are available freely but the resource box, and the article content itself, must be intact, in place and not amended!

How to Build a Website that Get Free Traffic

by admin on January 21st, 2009

How to get FREE traffic and vistors to your website without spending advertising cost? The answer is to get good search engine ranking. But how to get your keywords ranked high? Here is the process you can follow for every web page:

Step 1: Choose your topic

You can get ideas from all sorts of places: books, magazines, newspapers, newsletters,your competitors’ web sites…

Step 2: Keyword research

This is the step newcomers to Internet marketing often miss out. Before you write a single word, you need to find out what words people are typing into search engines.

One place you can start your keyword research without paying a cent is http://inventory.overture.com and http://www.pixelfast.com/overture/

You can type in various phrases and find out how many searches were done last month at Overture. And find out the top bid price also.

You’ll probably find related phrases you hadn’t thought of.

For example, for “dvd” it tells us there were 2769664 searches at Overture’s network of sites last month. This is a VERY popular topic. You can also see a lot of DVD related phrases.

Step 3: Research the competition

Go to google, type the phrase you’ve selected, and have a quick look at the top 10 sites listed.

Fid the top 10 sites and study them whether they optimized their website well.

Then you can decide how you can compete with them and out ranking them. Step 4: Write your article.

With your pre-searched key phrase, it’s time to write an article. Also use several synonyms. Search engines like that.

You can put some affiliate links into the article, promoting a product you’re really enthusiastic about. Step 5: Build your web page

he page should be very simple, no fancy flashes.

Remember put key words or key phrases into your title, description, keyword list.

Put key phrased for ALT tag also.

Use the article you finished from step 4.

Step 6: Linking to Other Site

The more good links you’ve acquired to your site, the better chance you’ll have of success.

After finish one page, you can build 10 more pages by using same technique for your first page. If you deliver good contents, your website will be recognized by google eventually and get high ranking for your key words or key phrases.

Dr. Ken Envoy did great job and created a online website builder – build website with No HTML knowledge required, no ftp necessary. The amazing site builder will put all the above steps into one place: brainstorming key words, find high KEI phrases, website optimizations, and it teaches you how to get high ranking and get free traffic. The software itself will tell you whether your page meet SE’s requirements and get good ranking in the long tem. If you want to get more details for the best online website builder, you can visit http://www.best-internet-businesses.com. More than half of site builder owners have high ranking in search engines.

Julia Tang publishes “Smart Online Business Tips” Newsletter which
helps people to start, run and grow Internet businesses. To get tips,
tactics, reliable business opportunities and promotional tools, plus over
$200 free bonuses, you can visit http://www.best-internet-businesses.com

Urchin- A Tracking Software

by admin on August 29th, 2008

Urchin is a web site analytics solution used by web site owners and marketers to better understand their users experiences, optimize content and track marketing performance. Urchin tools are available as a hosted service, a software product and through large web hosting providers. These products are used by thousands of popular sites on the Internet.

Products

1. Urchin 6 On Demand

2. Urchin 5 Software.

3. Urchin 4.

Urchin 6 On Demand

How many visitors you get from ads and keywords is not sufficient information. But urchin 6 tool shows you which keywords and ads refer your best customers. This tool shows you how your best customers navigate your site. It closes the loop on ad spend and revenue to calculate your marketing and website ROI. This tool increases conversions which helps in making more profits. It is easy to use and it simply tag your pages and paid URLs, and your reports are updated with the latest information throughout the day.

Features

1. Site Overlay- It browse your website with Urchin metrics overlaid directly on your links and you can immediately see the popularity and effectiveness of each link on every page of your site. Its powerful reports shows the effectiveness of your site design in a visual method that is instantly understandable.

2. Funnel Visualization- It eliminate bottlenecks in your checkout and conversion processes and reduce abandonment. Pinpoint where visitors leave your funnels and find out where they go.

3. Advanced Visitor Segmentation- This tool defines your own custom segments such as geographic location and new versus returning visitors. It compares visitor behavior, conversion metrics, and trends for individuals or groups of visitors.

4. Trend Reporting- Its compare metrics across months, days, weeks, or any two arbitrary date ranges. Urchin shows you whether you are up or down for each metric.

5. Analysis Options- It provides report data on the fly and compare visitor segments, examine data over time, and view Lifetime Visitor Value. Drill down to view individual visitors, sessions, and click paths.

6. Key Performance Summaries- Urchin 6 on demand provides executive-level view of traffic quality and quantity trends. Quickly identify problems. Discover new opportunities. Compare referrals, regions, revenue, conversions, campaigns, and keywords.

Benefits

Urchin software not only benefits the client but other persons in the organization also like executives, marketing professionals, content and web developers, ecommerce and merchandizing specialists and IT staff.

1. Executives

a. Get ROI on all online initiatives throughout your organization from a single, centralized source.

b. Understand the effects of long-range trends and overall strategies for your ad campaigns, website initiatives, merchandising, and e-commerce.

c. Reduce your management burden. Simply sign up and Urchin turnkey On Demand solution starts tracking for you.

2. Marketing Professionals

a. Capture the most conversions at the lowest possible cost. Maximize ROI on ad spending and find out which ads, keywords, search engines, referrals, and email blasts deliver the highest quality traffic.

b. Target high return regional markets and market segments.

c. Test creative in ads, emails, and on your website.

3. Content and web Developers

a. Demonstrate the value of usability improvements

b. Show how design decisions affect conversions and improve website ROI.

This article is sponsored by: www.softwarereviewblog.c om