Sorry it’s been a long time since I’ve posted, but my son had some major surgery and is doing well, but I needed to focus on him.
My question for readers is how do you promote?
Here are some of the different methods I use for my sites:
- Blog postings
- Blog Comments
- Forum Comments
- Forum Sigs
- Pay Per Click (PPC)
- Banner Ads
- Text link ads (such as adbrite etc.)
- SEO efforts
- Press Releases
If you have any other ideas post them, or put links to your favorite ad networks.
Danny
In the world of the internet there are several different types of responses a server can send to a user. The most common is what is known as a “404 Error” or page not found. There’s also the horrible 500 error which is generally caused by an issue with the code or actual server. And one that is generally seen by all users, but not seen at all. It’s a set of 2 magical numbers, 301 and 302. What are they? Read on…
302’s are the first I’ll talk about since they are “Temporary”. This is used if you are working on a page lets say your “about us page” and you don’t want people or search engines to go there, but want them to come back later. You can 302 a page to a temporary page, and later stop forwarding it. For everyday users this really doesn’t do much, but for Google etc. This tells them come back later an re-index the original page you attempted to get too. So it’s very useful if you are developing a site and have links to a page and Google finds you.
But the more important one is a 301 redirect. This is a permanent forwarding, and tells search engines. “You found something that is now over here forever —-> Don’t index me, index the new page, oh and also if the page you were looking for had page rank, the new page should have it now.” This is very useful if you are pushing a new website out that will replace an existing one. A 301 can be from one domain to another or from one page in a domain to another. So if you are creating a new search engine friendly url and want to make sure any previous page that was indexed is now recognized as the new page you would use this.
example: http://www.dannycoburn.com/signup.php might get forwarded to http://www.dannycoburn.com/viri so any thing that was indexed on signup.php is now pushed to the new /viri directory.
The most IMPORTANT use of 301’s that you can possibly use for search engines is to ensure that all pages are viewed the same by the search engines. Did you know that http://dannycoburn.com and http://www.dannycoburn.com are 2 different pages? They don’t look like it but for some reason search engines will treat them differently. So what do you do? You need to make sure you 301 all non-www pages to their comparable www page. Want to see an example? Click this http://dannycoburn.com. You’ll see it adds the www.
If you are on an apache server (if you are on a linux host you probably are), here’s the code you put into your .htaccess folder
Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^yoursite.com [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.yoursite.com/$1 [L,R=301]
Until next time.
So I joined a nice group of folks for the 30 day challenge. It started today so you are only 1 day behind. Go over get started. I think Ed Dale and his crew are going to do a bang up job. A friend was part of it last year and their only disappointment was they felt they were left hanging at the end. But don’t worry about that anymore, seems like Ed will lead you down the path. If not, we’ll all be here together to work through it. So head on over to the official site! It’ll be great!
I’ve decided that I should right a little bit about analytics. We are often inundated with people talking about traffic, but what do we really want to know?
- Where is the traffic coming from
- What are the visitors doing
- What keywords are driving people to my site
- Are the visitors moving through the site where we want to go?
What tools should a person use?
Free is something that I feel is a great option. If you are using a host that has CPANEL you have access to AWStats, or are able to download it and install it on your server for free (http://awstats.sourceforge.net/#DOWNLOAD). This is what is known as a log analyzer. What it does is it looks at every action taken on your site as is recorded on the server through the log. This offers incredibly detailed information about everything that is happening, some things you don’t really want to see though. This not only shows users, but also bots. But you are seeing information that might not be able to help you make decisions. So what else is there?
Google Analytics. This is an incredible tool for free. The thing you have to do is place a tag onto every page. This is a javascript tag that should be put into the header (that’s where js belongs), but I highly recommend you place it in the footer, to prevent a google outage from handicapping your site. Google will allow you define goals, see keywords that bring in traffic, look at your ppc (especially for adwords), lets you do an overlay to see which links are clicked the most (not the best but good).
AWStats = good, Google Analytics = Great (http://www.google.com/analytics )
Next time I’m going to go deeper into Google’s tool since I believe it is the choice any marketer should use. Go get your account, and give me your feedback!
DC
A vast majority of marketers focus most of their time on Google. Why? Because they hold 75% of the US search market. So it makes a lot of sense to keep your eye on it. But what about the other 25%?
Let’s do a little math. If you figure there are 100 people competing to sell 1 product on Google. Let’s assume there’s 100 sales created, 1 sale per person selling it. Since Google makes up 75% of search lets say it also is 75% of the sales, so there would be a total of 133 sales. Of the 100 people competing on Google, about 25 would most likely be advertising on the other search engines. So that 33 sales will be split among 25 people, so greater than 1 sale per person. Therefore making more $ per advertiser. Are these hard figures? No, they are based on several years of SEM experience and from conversations I’ve had with many people in the industry. Google tends to cost more per click (Yahoo is expensive too), and other places are far cheaper.
The real lesson for this do not count out the other search engines, play with them if you are going to do PPC. I ran a campaign on Yahoo, Google and Ask. My least competitive market was Ask, and my lowest CPC was Ask, and guess what my highest conversion was Ask.
So just take a look at everything else around you. Google is great, but when you’re trying to sell remember do not overlook any possible customers.
Here are a few motivational quotes for everyone. They help to put thing in perspective, and keep you grounded. I’ll have more articles tomorrow or the next day, maybe even a downloadable report.
“Try not to become a man of success but rather to become a man of value.” - Einstein
“It is possible to fail in many ways…while to succeed is possible only in one way.” - Aristotle
“There is only one success - to be able to spend your life in your own way.” - Christopher Morely
There is a right way, and a wrong way to purchase traffic. You can use a service that guarantees you traffic (wrong way) or you can use a pay-per-click service (right way). Whatever you do, don’t fall for those websites that promise to deliver you thousands of hits in a twenty four hour period.
Let’s take a look at those services. First, you don’t know where or how they are generating the traffic. In most cases, the traffic is not targeted, meaning that it is possible that not a single one of those thousands of visitors has any interest in the topic of your niche. Finally, you can’t really be sure that the traffic is ‘real.’
But, there is a way to purchase real, targeted traffic. You can use Pay-Per-Click advertising, through a service such as Google AdWords. When you purchase traffic using this method, the traffic is targeted – and real. You don’t pay for a certain number of traffic, you pay for each click, as the name, pay-per-click, indicates.
Now, if you don’t know what you are doing, Pay-Per-Click can be expensive, and ineffective. It is important that you make sure that you write a targeted ad, first and foremost. It is also essential that you select the right keywords, and that you bid the right amount on those keywords.
Google AdWords really makes this very easy. You can type in your main keyword, and they will give you a list of other related keywords that apply as well. Next, when you set the amount you are willing to pay, per click, for each keyword, you can use the traffic analysis tools in Google AdWords to see where your ad will be listed, based on what you are paying per click, and how much traffic you can expect from it.
Raise your bid price until you see that you will be listed where you want to be (preferably the first page of search results). Again, PPC can be very expensive. Make sure that you know how much you can afford to spend on these ads each week, divide it by seven, and set a daily budget up in your AdWords account. Also specify how you want those funds spread out through the day.
There are entire courses written on the topic of Google AdWords. I advise that you take one, because there are a lot of elements and tricks that need to be learned to make AdWords work out well for you.
Again, don’t waste your traffic! Make sure that you are capturing first names and email addresses from the people that arrive at your website through PPC advertising!
Homework Assignment: Determine whether or not you want to purchase traffic or not, and if you do, find a good pay-per-click service, such as Google AdWords, and get set up.
Today, we are going to look at something that is still relatively new in the Internet Marketing arena: Social Bookmarking. Social Bookmarking is essentially using a social bookmarking service to bookmark your webpages or blog posts, so that other users of the bookmarking site can visit. When you bookmark a site, you tag it with keywords, and people can search for the keywords that reflect their interests at the social bookmarking site.
Does it work? Absolutely! In fact, this is a very fast way to generate really good traffic to your site – for free. Again, you will want to try to get them on your opt-in list, once they arrive at your site, so that you can bring them back again and again. Notice that I said ‘really good traffic.’ This is good traffic because the visitor finds your site by searching for the keywords that you’ve used when you bookmarked it. They are essentially looking for you. For this reason, it is important to use keyword tags, for each page, that are absolutely relevant to the content on that page. Don’t try to use unrelated keywords, this tactic simply won’t work.
There are numerous social bookmarking sites out there, and hitting them all, to bookmark each page of your website, could literally take days, if not weeks. Fortunately, there are social bookmarking services that will send your bookmarks and tags to numerous social bookmarking sites in one fell swoop.
You want a service that targets the best social bookmarking sites, and that service is Only Wire, at http://www.onlywire.com. Only Wire is free to use (another bonus). Getting set up with Only Wire takes a couple of hours, because you will need to go to each of the social bookmarking sites that it lists, register, and then put your username and password for each site into the list at Only Wire.
Once that is done, you will add the Only Wire icon to your browser toolbar (very easy to do – you just click, hold the mouse button down, and drag and drop it up there). Now, you are all set up. When you are ready to bookmark your pages, first go to the Only Wire site and login. Leave that window open. Open another window (tabbed browsers work great for this), go to your site, go to a page that you want to bookmark, and hit the icon.
You will be taken to the Only Wire add a bookmark page. Here, everything is filled in, except your keyword tags. List the keywords that are associated with the page you are bookmarking, and hit submit. You’re done with that page – move on to the next one. Nothing could be easier, and again, it is very effective.
Homework Assignment: Join Only Wire at http://www.onlywire.com . Register for each site on the list, and get Only Wire all set up. Add the bookmark icon to your browser toolbar, and go to each page of your website, click the icon, and add it to the social bookmarks and tag each page with keywords.
In this, day three of the five part traffic generation course, we are going to discuss how joint venture giveaways will help you generate traffic to your site. In fact, they do more than generate traffic. Joint venture giveaways will also help you build a large opt-in list, in a very short period of time, and you can bring those visitors back to your site time and time again.
Joining a joint venture giveaway is easy and free. You just need to find a giveaway, and these can be found through joint venture related forums, or through the search engines. Once you’ve found a giveaway, you need a free gift to give away.
This can be something that you create yourself, or have created for you, such as a free report, an audio, a video, or an ebook – or even a piece of software. It can also be a Private Label Rights product that you have. The important thing is that your gift has value to the people that will be downloading it.
You need an autoresponder and a website. Set up an opt-in page, which is often called a squeeze page or a capture page, on your site. Connect it to your autoresponder, and in your autoresponder, set up a list for the giveaway. Create your confirmation email and download for the gift email in your autoresponder.
Determine where the visitor will go, once they hit the submit button on your opt-in page. They can go to the first page of your site. They could be sent to a sales page for an affiliate product that you sell. You could set up a One Time Offer, or OTO, where they have one chance to purchase a product from you, at a special price.
Finally, when you are all set up on your end; submit your information to the host of the joint venture giveaway event. They will typically want the name of your gift, the URL of your opt-in page, a description of that gift, and the link to the graphic that represents your gift, such as a graphical ebook cover or CD cover.
While you will build a nice big list with the joint venture giveaway, remember that your purpose is to generate traffic as well. You don’t want people showing up, getting their gift, and leaving – never to be seen or heard from again. Your list resolves a lot of this, because you can use it to bring them back.
But at the same time, when your visitor is redirected after submitting the form, try to have them redirected to a page on your site that will immediately capture their attention, and keep them there for a while, even after they have been given their free gift.
Homework Assignment: Visit some joint venture related forums, and find at least one joint venture giveaway to participate in. Create your gift, create your opt-in page, and any other pages that you need for the giveaway, and watch the traffic roll in!
You’ve probably heard about Article Marketing and Forum Marketing. In fact, you may even be sick of hearing about it. But are you doing it? The reason that you hear so much about these two marketing techniques is that they work!
Yes, article marketing and forum marketing builds traffic slowly. There are faster ways to get traffic. But, when you build traffic using these methods as well, you are also building your credibility. You are drawing responsive people to your site, and if your site is doing its job as well, and you get those people on your list, you can draw them back time and time again.
Note: If you are not collecting email addresses at your website, the traffic that you bring there is essentially wasted. By building an opt-in list, you can bring traffic back to your site over and over again, and this is essential to online businesses. Email addresses and first names should be collected with an opt-in page, or with subscribe boxes located on every single page of your website!
Now, let’s start generating some traffic with articles. The concept is that you write an article, which should be anywhere from 350 to 750 words in length. You include an author’s resource box at the bottom of your article, and your website link is included in that resource box. You submit the article to article directories and ezine publishers.
If you can’t write, you can get article written for less than $10 each by a ghostwriter. If you don’t have the time it takes to submit articles, you can hire a service to do that for you as well. It is essential that you do article marketing, because it is viral. Your articles will be used on other people’s websites, blogs, and in their ezines – spreading the word about your site.
Forum marketing is also important. To do forum marketing, you find good, well populated forums that relate to your niche. You simply participate in those forums, and include a signature file at the bottom of all of your posts, that lead people to your website. Forum marketing does not take much time at all, once you’ve found the forums that you want to participate in.
Again, these are slow, but effective (and free) ways to generate traffic. But no matter how slow they are, they are essential to your overall online business because of the virility of these techniques, and the credibility that it gives you.
Homework Assignment: Write and submit one article, each week. Participate in your niche forums on a daily basis, posting one message in each forum per day, using a signature file that brings people to your website.