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.

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.

New figures out on search advertising spend from Efficient Frontier show Google continues to dominate the market, stats that will no doubt complicate the company’s goal to gain approval of its deal with Yahoo on search ads. However it is interesting how in Japan, it’s a much more 50/50 market split with Yahoo, showing that Google does have weaknesses.

For the second quarter of 2008, Google had 77.4% of the search advertising spend, according to data tracked by Efficient Frontier, which manages ad campaigns for a wide variety of large advertisers. The data covers 23 billion ad impressions and 390 million clicks. Google’s share includes a small percentage of contextual ad spend (which is not search), as does Yahoo’s. You can see these broken out in the share chart below for Q2 2008

Read the full article here: http://snurl.com/30bxy

If you’d like to learn more about searchengine and generating traffic head over here: http://snurl.com/2zcr6

Affiliate marketing began just four years after the world wide web was launched, originally popularized by well known companies such as CDNOW or Amazon.com. Google’s Adsense is also a very well known type of affiliated marketing, but is not really considered as true affiliate marketing as the adverts usually centers around the theme of the website they are displayed (known more as contextual advertising.) Google does not also directly sell a specific product, but generates money in other ways.

Affiliate marketing is highly cost-effective, and in effect costs both the advertiser and the affiliate nothing, while having the potential of bringing in a very large form of income for both parties. While pay per click (or cost-per-click) mentioned above can present a risk to the advertiser, the cost-per-sale (CPS) system has very little or no risk at all for both parties, and is therefore preferred.

When an affiliate joins in with an e-commerce merchant of some sort (be it a subscription service, a shopping site etc…) payment is received through referrals done from the affiliate’s website – done through the following methods

1)Pay-per click systems  basically, the affiliate displays adverts on their site and is paid when a customer or internet user clicks on that website

2)RSS feeds or blogs – even personal sites can sit under this category. Blogging is fast becoming a staple form of marketing and promotion, and affiliate marketing partners well with this form of online communication

3)Comparison sites and shopping directories – such as review sites or legit advertising sites

4)Loyalty sites – this is when a reward system is in place via a cash back or points back system (or charitable donations)

5)Coupon sites that focus strictly on marketing and promotions

6)Email lists – legit email lists to subscribers of the affiliate’s website etc – NOT spam

7)A registration path – when a person registers with a specific site, be it for a newsletter or subscription, offers from other companies are represented and advertised

8)Networks – there are many affiliate marketing networks. Some even function on a multi-tier or multi-level marketing sort of set up.

Wikipedia defines it as:

A social network service focuses on building online communities of people who share interests and activities, or who are interested in exploring the interests and activities of others. Most social network services are web based and provide a variety of ways for users to interact, such as e-mail and instant messaging services.

Social networking has revolutionized the way we communicate and share information with one another in today’s society. Various social networking websites are being used by millions of people everyday on a regular basis and it now seems that social networking is a part of everyday life. The main types of social networking services are those which contain directories of some categories (such as former classmates), means to connect with friends (usually with self-description pages), and recommender systems linked to trust. Popular methods now combine many of these, with MySpace and Facebook being the most widely used in North America; Bebo, MySpace, Skyrock Blog, Facebook and Hi5 in parts of Europe; Orkut and Hi5 in South America and Central America;and Friendster and Orkut in Asia and the Pacific Islands. CouchSurfing is a new type of social network called hospitality exchange networks.

Some of the major social networking sites on the web include (but are not limited too): facebook, twitter, myspace, squidoo, youtube, linkedin etc.  The basic principle lies in you link to people that have something similar to you.  For example if you are reading this go ahead and follow me on twitter, 99% of the time I generally find it useful to return the follow since we probably have something similar in common, we want to make some money online.

How do you take advantage of these social networks?  How much time does it take?  While I do not use social networks to their fullest, it can take a significant amount of time for someone to go around and make multiple updates a day.  I like twitter since you cannot do lengthy updates!  (I’m lazy), you can make a blog post and point people to it.  For sites like myspace you need to be more diligent on making friends and growing your network, just like on twitter.

Your best bet is to find one site you want to focus on and jump in and start to build  your network there.  Once you feel comfortable with it go to the next.  It is important that you don’t simply sell your wares, or you’ll be slapped down.  It is important to become part of the community and not a thorn in it’s side.  Another great place to get known is on forums that focus on your interest, so if it’s gaming find a forum that works for you.  Become a contributor and then you can put your site in your signature to grow awareness.  If you contribute, people will click on your link to see what else you have to say.

Again social networking is not rocket science it is simply finding people that have a common interest and sharing your ideas with them in a constructive meaningful fashion.

I’m learning more about this daily so I’m sure I’ll have more to say on it soon.

But enough about the research, how do you start to rank?

1. Use key phrases multiple times in your content
2. Use internal site links to that page using your term
3. Get links for quality external sites to your page
4. Use basic HTML formats like H1′s and title tags to emphasize phrase

When you are writing your article/page/blog make sure you are aware of what you are looking to be ranked for and use it a few times in the body. Also make sure you use it in the title and header of the article. It’s important that Google knows that the content is the primary reason for sending some one to this page. One of the most important things to understand is that you should not over stuff the phrase onto the page. If you use it every other word, the search engine will throw it out knowing that it’s simply being put there for ranking. While there’s debate of the % the phrase should be used it can be anywhere from 3% – 7% of the content. I tend to lean towards the lower side to prevent spamming penalties.

When you are creating your webpage you can feel free to link to your own pages using key phrases to pass it along to other pages. So if you want to rank for “best noodles in vegas” create a link on your home page that points to that article with that term as the clickable text. Also repeat this on other authority web sites. One way to find them is simply go to Google and type the term in and see who comes up. Contact them and see if you can get a link exchange with them. Some will want to charge you, but be weary as Google’s getting smarter about purchased links!

I mentioned headers and titles but wanted to stress how important these are to Google. With everything on the web being pretty, it’s important to realize Google is a color blind dog, they don’t care what the biscuit looks like, they only care if it tastes good. A trick I was once taught was to remove the style sheet and see what the page looks like to Google and the other engines. If you use an H1 the text is the largest on the page and is therefore more important to the read (stands out). Same goes for Google. But only use 1 per page. If you feel you need more start using H2, H3 etc. The higher the number the more you can have on the page. The title which should be one of the first pieces of HTML will define part of how you show up on Google as will the meta description. Use these as they also add weight to your page for those terms.

Is this all you need to do for SEO? Of course not, but it’s a great start for a first timer and is a base understanding. Feel free to leave a comment, I’ll try to answer anything I get.

Today’s focus will be on Articles and other methods to drive traffic to your site. While social networking could fall into this article, I’m going to dedicate more time to it in a separate one later.

What are some of the methods to drive free traffic to your site?

• You can ask friends to show up
• You can post links in directories
• You can create articles
• Add signature and post in forums

Can asking friends really help?  Yes in someways it can.  If you are running a site that contains forums, the more people you get to sign up and post the more likely new members that come across your site are to join.  Nobody wants to go to a forum to talk to no one.  There are services out there that will accept payment to fill your forums with seeded posts.  I have never used one but they are out there, just search some on google and you’ll find a few.

Posting links in directories will allow you get start getting some inward links to your site.  It is important to understand that google doesn’t always favor some of these directories, but several it does consider authoritative.  It is important to do  your research, see what googles PR is for the directory and choose wisely.  If you have a site on pets it doesn’t make sense to get a link in a computer directory, and the more of these little “mishaps” you have the more likely Google will penalize you for those actions.

Creating articles is a good road, but a pain.  You might want to promote yourself but the best sites are very particular about what you are allowed and how many links you can have etc.  I’ve learned that the hard way.  It is important to make sure you have plenty of keywords in your article that you are interested in having people find you under.  So if you want people to find you for “internet marketing” make sure you have that phrase a few times in your article.  If you are not looking for internet marketing, but online marketing make sure you use that phrase often as well.  It is important to understand that these short tail phrases are more difficult to rank for an phrases like “home based internet marketing” are easier for you to show up on Google.  The reason “home based internet marketing” is called long tails is because it has at least 3 words, usually 4 words in the phrase.  They are less often type, but much more targeted.

Adding links in your signatures on forums.  If you are a pet site and you have a pet site you want to promote get active with pet communities.  Don’t go off pandering your goods from day one, but become a known expert in that field.  This way people get used to you, and you are not spamming the forums.  After you post several posts feel free to make a comment about your site, or simply put it in your signature.  Now depending on how the forum is set up, every time your signature is viewed by Google you have some links from that post going to your site.  So again y our are building authority in the eyes of the community, but also in the eyes of Google.

Let me know if you have any questions on this one!

1. Introduction
2. Affiliate Marketing
3. Traffic Methods – PPC
4. Traffic Methods – Free
5. Search Engine Optimization
6. Social Networking

Introduction to Internet Marketing:

While I would not consider myself an expert in making money by selling products online (yet), I am an expert on the internet and marketing on it. In my professional career I work marketing on it every day. My goals are to obtain leads, increase sales, make sites more visible and purchase 3rd party advertising. I am responsible for a multi-million dollar budget, so it makes it hard to simply turn around and do marketing on my own as my habits need to be changed from work to personal. I have to be much more fickle with my own money while starting out. Now that you have a little on me…

Internet marketing is a large ocean of opportunity. It is estimated that 1.4 BILLION people use the internet and that’s only 21% of the world population, and it continues to grow daily. So that is a potential customer base larger than any single market. If you have a product that is of interest to .1% that is still 1.4 MILLION customers that are interested in what you are selling.

Internet marketing is about using different methods to help people find something they want, and hopefully that is something you have to sell. There are many different methods that I will talk about in the next few posts, but suffice it to say it will not be exhaustive. If you want to get started today check out traffic tactics world, it has a lot of information to offer if your just starting out.

Up Next: Affiliate Marketing

Michael Cheney, one of the most-respected names in Internet marketing, has been online since 1995 and is the man behind the 6-Figure launches of AdSense Videos and 11 Days To List Profits. He has unveiled a new videos product – “Michael’s Traffic Videos” which covers everything to do with traffic and comes with 100,000 instant ad credits and a tailored Fast-Track To Traffic Action Plan.

We managed to grab some time with him recently and quiz him on his favorite topic – traffic.

You’ll get a lot out of this interview including a killer 40-page E-book on traffic that Michael has written to help you avoid the Top 20 Traffic Disasters!

So let’s get started.

Q. Firstly Michael, thank you for joining us today in your busy schedule.

A. Hey no problem. Good to be here.

Q. We all know that traffic is important but could you just explain a bit about traffic for the beginners out there?

A. Sure. Traffic is the lifeblood of any business online. Without it you just die. We all know that. But what a lot of us don’t realize is that just like everything else on the Internet traffic changes very quickly. That is, the methods of getting traffic are changing all the time and that’s where people get caught out.

Q. What do you mean by “caught out”?

A. Well people fall into the trap of thinking that just because they know one or two traffic generation methods that they are some sort of traffic master. In reality just because you know how to start a pay per click campaign or a little bit about search engines doesn’t make you anywhere near a traffic expert. I’m trying to spread the word that there is a massive array of traffic tactics that most people aren’t even aware of, let alone using or mastering.

Q. Can you give us some examples?

A. Sure. Offline for example. You might immediately think that getting traffic is a purely online activity but the truth of the matter is that there are lots of things you can be doing offline to get people into your website. And it’s usually these sorts of areas that are being under-utilized and therefore there is less competition for that traffic as well.

Q. So by offline you mean advertising offline?

A. Not necessarily. That is one method, yes, but I’m thinking of more creative ways to get people into your website. It all comes down to the fact that having asked people on my list it came as no surprise that most people want to know about free rather than paid traffic sources. I’ve had to become an expert in free ways of getting traffic in my time online.

Q. What do you mean – I thought you were running a successful online business with lots of cash flow?

A. I am. But it’s not always been this way. When I first started out in 1995 I had nothing. No money to play with. Just my own initiative and imagination.

Q. So are you saying you’re against paying for traffic online?

A. No. No I’m not saying that at all. What I’m saying is that, especially when you first start out, you always want to focus on the free methods. You get the traffic in for free, make some sales and then you can reinvest some of that money into paid methods of getting traffic. This speeds up the process.

Q. So what particular offline methods are you referring to – can you give us some examples?

A. There’s one tactic I used that costs nothing to implement, is relatively quick and ended up getting me thousands and thousands of targeted visitors into my websites. When I’ve shared this tactic with other marketers at seminars they’ve started laughing and slapping their foreheads when they saw how easy it was. They were also embarrassed that they had failed to use this tactic. It was quite amusing.

Q. So are you going to tell us what this method is?

A. No! (laughs) It’s in my course! I truly believe in rewarding those people that are most eager to learn so instead of giving away all my traffic tactics in interviews like this I’ve put some of them in an E-Book I’ve written. It is free though if people want to get it.

Q. So how can people get hold of it?

A. It’s called “How To Avoid The Top 20 Traffic Disasters” and you can get it by going to Michael’s Traffic Videos – you’ll see it mentioned on that page.

Q. What’s in it?

A. Well I really wanted to raise the bar on a free E-Book so I spent a lot of time creating it. It’s 40 pages long and stuffed with juicy content on what NOT to do when it comes to traffic. As far as I’m concerned too many people out there tell you what you should do but not what you shouldn’t do. That’s where this E-Book comes in.

Q. Okay. I think we’re about done is there anything else you want to tell everyone?

A. Just that if they are serious about getting more traffic into their website they need to goto Michael’s Traffic Videos and get that free E-Book.

Q. Cool. Well thanks for your time Michael and speak to you soon.

A. My pleasure. Speak soon.