Blog Commenting for Traffic

A great way to get some extra traffic and backlinks to your site is through leaving comments on related blogs.  When you comment on a blog, there are usually three fields you need to fill out - name, URL, and comment.  In the name field, you should generally put the name of your site or some keyword anchor text, although some people say that’s rude and you should just use your name.  In the URL you can put the site you’d like traffic and backlinks to.  And then you should leave a comment that relates to the post you’re commenting on.  Please don’t leave generic comments like, “Nice post.”  or, “I agree.”  Actually READ the post and leave a thoughtful comment.  Not only will it help your comment stick, but you’ll be doing the right thing.

One thing to note: if you are commenting on blogs that have “nofollow” on comment links, you won’t be getting the full benefit of the link.  Sure, you may get some traffic straight from the link, but you won’t be getting any link juice.  If you want to maximize the benefit you get from your comment posting, you should try to locate “dofollow” blogs.

There is a dofollow blog directory here:  http://www.dofollowblogs.com/

There are other ways to find dofollow blogs.  If you search Google you’ll come up with a few.  While it’s certainly not necessary to post only on dofollow blogs, it certainly helps you get the most out of the time you spend commenting on blogs.

Also, don’t use those autoposters that post comments on blogs for you.  They can’t possibly match the comments up to the posts they are commenting on, and not only will your posts likely be deleted quickly, but you’ll be looked at as a spammer and people won’t be willing to visit your site.  If you post manually with a quality comment that is on topic and knowledgeable, you’ll be more likely to get actual visitors from your post and not just a backlink.

StumbleUpon, Digg, and Others

Social bookmarking started on very small sites several years ago, but they eventually took off when sites like Digg and StumbleUpon brought the technique to the mainstream internet.  These sites allow users to post links to sites they like, vote on sites that others post, and browse through the favorites of other people.  In essense, you’re sharing your favorite bookmarks with the world instead of just keeping them on your computer.

Because these sites allow practically indescriminate linking, you can add your own sites and vote for them - but there’s a catch.  Because sites are user-moderated, they’re going to get lost in the shuffle quickly if no one else votes for them.  It takes a pretty hefty number of votes to really get a site noticed, so if your site isn’t very interesting, it’s probably not going to get very many votes, which means it’s not going to get a lot of traffic.

One important aspect of marketing on social bookmarking sites is making friends.  Most social bookmarking sites let you have a small to moderate-sized list of friends whose links you can vote for.  If they see you voting for their links relatively often, they just might be willing to vote for yours.  Plus, if you manage to become friends with some “super users” - their votes count more than regular users.  (Note: this doesn’t apply to ALL social bookmarking sites, just some.)  Super users are basically regular users who have done a LOT of voting and have a good mix between their positive and negative votes.

One word of caution: don’t bookmark a ton of pages from the same site on the same account.  This can appear to be spammy to the sites and get you banned, and it’s also rumored to be problematic with regards to search engines who might also feel you are spamming.  Spread links out over multiple accounts, or just stick to bookmarking your very best articles and pages.

Twitter Commands

Twitter is an exceptional way of marketing to your target audience while creating awareness of your website or product through passive social marketing tactics.

One of the fundamental mistakes that new marketers, venturing into the world of Twitter often make, is the belief that the “more the merry”, and when it comes to sending out broadcasts (otherwise known as “tweets”) that is definitely not always the case. In fact, I know of many marketers and consumers will who remove someone who is sending out too many tweets. While it’s important to be consistent and active, it’s equally as important to balance out the number of tweets you send with the type of information being published.

For example, if you are interested in developing a reputation on Twitter as someone worth following, and you want to retain the interest of those on your list, you will want to do your best to provide entertaining, useful and informative tweets, rather than always sending out promotional ones.

People within social communities lose interest quickly, especially if they believe that those people on their own lists are only interested in marketing to them.  Keep in mind that many people join social communities for the joy of meeting similarly minded individuals to both network with and learn from, and if you want to stand out from the crowd, you need to take care of how frequent your messages are, as well as how often you are offering something of value.

Here are a few twitter commands that will help you begin utilizing the power of the Twitter community:

fav username

This will make the users last update as a favorite, and also save them for you under the “Favorites” link in your stats area on your main page.

If you wish to remove a stored favorite, just click on the “Favorites” link and you will see the tweet, along with the username of the person and a yellow star under their post.

@your-friend Hi, how are you doing? Long time, no talk!

The @ symbol is placed directly in front of the username of the person you are attempting to message.

d your-friends-username how are you doing?

The letter ‘d’ represents ‘Direct” and the message will be sent directly to the username I specify in my message.

Follow your-friends-username

Typing this into your Instant Messenger system will ensure that you receive updates and alerts from ‘your-friends-username’ (replace this with an actual username of someone on your list).

If you wish to disable receiving updates from a specific user you use the off ‘leave’ command like this:

leave your-friends-username

If you wanted to retrieve the profile information for a specific user on Twitter you use the WHOIS command:

whois your-friends-username

Information pertaining to this specific user will be displayed provided they have included a Twitter profile.

get your-friends-username

This command will load an info box with their current status message.

You nudge someone by typing in: nudge username

Sitemaps & SEO

Creating a site map for your website is a very important aspect of on-site search engine optimization, by helping website crawlers (otherwise known as ’spiders”) discover your website pages, inner pages and navigation menu by following your sitemap through its inner structure.

A site map is basically a table of contents for your website, describing the different pages available and the content/topics discussed within your different sections.

A site map makes it easier for both the public to navigate through your site but also for effectively indexing your site within the search engines.

You can create a very simple site map or design a complex structured map, it’s entirely up to you.  Regardless what you decide to go with however be sure that you always use plain text links as search engine spiders have a difficult time reading Javascript.

You should also consider adding a text link on the front page of your website as well, enabling both visitors and spiders to easily locate it.

Using anchor text links will also help you when it comes to search engine optimization, and adding descriptive content rather than just a page of links will also boost your ranking.

You should also organize your site map into categories, remembering that this table of contents will be viewed by your visitors and not just search engine spiders, so focus on making sure it’s comprehensive and easy for your guests to understand and utilize effectively.

Create a Sitemap for your site:
http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/

Marketing on Facebook

Facebook is a social network.  A social network is a website with various features that allow people to connect, network, and socialize.  Generally you get to have a profile, add photos, and chat with other users.  There may be additional features that let you create groups or clubs, manage events, and send messages to your friends.

Facebook is undoubtedly the best social network for marketers at the moment.  Facebook is much more lenient about marketing than other social networks, and if you are careful and you follow their rules, you can get a lot of quality traffic from them.  They have a massive number of users that is growing very rapidly, and the overall quality of the site and its visitors is quite high.

Marketing on Facebook (and other social networks) requires a lot of real interaction and socializing in order to be truly successful.  You can’t just make a huge friends list and spam the heck out of them and expect to see good results.  For one thing, you will probably get banned very quickly like this.  While Facebook is more friendly to marketers than other social networks, they can’t allow rampant, blatant spamming or no one would use their network!  For another thing, the best results come from people who actually trust you, because they will be much more likely to buy the things you recommend if they like you and they feel like they know you personally.

Groups are a very important part of marketing on Facebook.  You should join several groups in your niche, and ideally start one of your own.  While joining groups that already have a lot of members is great, nothing beats having the control of running your  own.  When you run your own group, no one can moderate you as long as you stick to Facebook’s rules, which means you can market in any way you choose.

EzineArticles Tutorial

EzineArticles.com is the most popular article directory online. Thousands of online marketers focus on submitting dozens of highly targeted articles into the ever-growing database available at EzineArticles.com every single day.   As a way of generating free traffic to squeeze and landing pages, there is no better method than article marketing.

To begin, you will need to sign up for a free Ezine Articles account. You can do so by visiting: http://www.EzineArticles.com

Step 1: On the registration page you will need to fill in your complete information, including your name, email address, website URL, and your password. Use a unique password on each article directory website, for security reasons. Once you have filled in the registration form, your account will be instantly created.  Click on the “Members Login” link to log into the article site.

Step 2: Once you are logged in, you will see several tabs and links that will take you to various areas of the publisher’s center. You should fill out the authors’ bio, profile page and your resource box before you submit your first article. That way, you can attach the resource box to each article as you go along.

Most of the article directories allow you to create multiple resource boxes. That way, you can associate a different resource box to specific articles in the event you wish to direct people to different websites or individual pages of your site.

At EzineArticles, you can access this area from under the “Profile Manager” area.

Once you have spent some time adding in your author profile, your resource boxes and perhaps uploading your photo, it’s time to submit your first article!

Under the “Article Manager” tab you will see a drop down menu that includes a link to “Submit New Article”. Click that to begin.

The article submission area contains a few different areas. The first section requires that you select a specific category. You want to be careful to choose a category that best fits your article.

As you can see, there are quite a few different categories and sub-categories to choose from, however, be careful to choose the correct category based on the topic of your article for best results (people will be searching for information within select categories using keywords).

In my example, I am submitting an article into “Movies/TV” by initially choosing the category and sub category.

Then, when I create my article I will add in relevant keywords within the title of the article as well as the content itself.

You want to try to get everything right the first time because even though you can change the category that your article is submitted into, as well as your article itself if you wish to edit or modify it, each time you make any changes, your article will be set to “Pending” and will require re-approval which can take some time, so do your best to choose the right category and proof read your article prior to submitting it.

At EzineArticles you are limited to 200 words in this teaser copy area, so be sure to include content that will entice your reader to continue onto the full-length view of your article.

Note: Formatting Options
After you have entered in your article content, you can use different commands to bold certain text, or add style to your article if you are familiar with HTML.

With most article directories, all submissions must be manually approved. The staff simply verifies that your article is original and that you are not writing an article simply to promote a product or a website which is why it’s very important to focus on writing informative, useful and well-written content.

Traffic 101

There are many ways in which you can begin generating traffic to your website or blog. Let’s begin by taking a look at some of the more popular techniques:

Niche Marketing Based Traffic

This is when you chisel down into the markets and determine a sub niche that you wish to target. For example, instead of weight loss (a mainstream niche), you should dig down into the niche and instead, focus on “teen weight loss”, or “weight loss after pregnancy”. The more focused your niche, the easier it often is to rank higher in the search engines as well as generate traffic to your website.

Another example of chiseling into a broad niche would be that of relationships. Rather than creating a campaign focused on relationships in general, you would select a specific type of relationship (marriage, divorce, online dating, getting your ex back, seduction, etc).

Niche Marketing is very important because it allows you to know what your ideal prospect is, and once you have that information, your marketing efforts will be laser targeted towards capturing as much of that traffic as you can.

PPC (Pay Per Click) Advertising

This is when you purchase advertising with companies like Google Adwords or Yahoos’ Overture, and pay for every click made by someone viewing your ads and visiting your website.

The concept is a very simple one. You simply bid on specific keywords that you are looking to rank for and your advertisement will appear on the Sponsor Listings sidebar on sites like www.Google.com whenever someone searches for your keywords or keyword phrases.

Viral Marketing

Viral marketing is accomplished when you create a marketing campaign around a topic that becomes “buzz worthy”.  This can be done with controversial tactics, taking an opposing view, or in creating something entertaining, comical or interesting to the large majority of your market.

While Viral Marketing is often one of the best forms of marketing due to the weight in which your campaign is carried by referrals and word of mouth, setting up effective viral campaigns is not always so easy, especially when you are forced to create a strategy that is likely to stand the test of time, as well as consistently motivating others to carry your message for you, (hence, ‘viral’).

Social Marketing

Marketing to social communities like www.FaceBook.com, www.Digg.com or www.Twitter.com is a free form of advertising that can be warmly received if introduced in a careful, sociable way.  Within social marketing campaigns, you must approach your market using a slightly different angle, ensuring that you are offering useful, free information mixed in with your promotional campaigns.  Failure to balance being the two can result in an immediate failure of your campaigns. Still, if done correctly, a website can instantly launch with wild success all from within small social groups.

Search Engine Optimization

The king of traffic, search engine optimization and marketing. Known as the prime source of traffic due to its organic nature, SEO is one of the most important aspects of Internet Marketing, starting with on-site SEO (elements you tweak on your website itself) and off-site SEO, which consist of back links and other forms of generating consistent traffic through higher ranking and added weight.

What is PageRank?

PageRank, also known as PR, is an indicator of a number of factors.  It is commonly thought that the higher the PageRank of a website, the higher they will place in Google.  While that is mildly true to an extent, PR isn’t the only factor in how well a site ranks.

Every page on the internet has a base PageRank.  A brand new site has a PageRank, and it can pass that PageRank on to other pages, including pages on the same site.

The amount of PageRank passed to a site is mainly dependent on how many links there are on that page.  If the page has 10 links going out, then each page it links to will get more PR “juice” than they would if there were 50 outgoing links on the page.

A page’s PR increases as more pages link to it, but it’s not just about the quantity of links.  There are actually several variables that help determine a page’s PR:

1. The number of pages linking to it.
2. The PR of the pages linking to it.
3. The number of outgoing links on those pages.
4. The “quality” of those pages.
5. And other factors.

It’s not enough to simply get links to a page, but you also need to find quality pages that have good PR and don’t have a large number of outgoing links.  Additionally, it helps if the pages that link to your page are relevant, i.e. within the same niche as your page.

You should note that having a high PageRank does not automatically mean you will rank well in Google.  You will notice after some research that lower PR sites often rank better than higher PR sites, because PageRank is only one small factor among many that determine how well a page ranks.  While it’s a good thing to have a high PageRank, you shouldn’t concentrate on it.  There are plenty of factors that matter much more than PR itself.

Backlink Sources for SEO

Getting backlinks is one of the most difficult parts of SEO.  Most websites aren’t willing to hand out links to anyone that asks, especially if they are a reputable site with good PR.  You’re probably not going to be able to gain very many links as a new site, so you’ll prett much be on your own as far as building backlinks.

There are a few ways you can create your own backlinks, without having to rely on the charity of other webmasters.  You can get links from other websites without waiting for the site owner to give it to you, and you can also build your own.

Blog Comments

One way to get backlinks from high PR websites is to comment on blogs, remembering to put your URL in when you leave the comment.  Don’t put a link in the comment itself, just put the URL in where it will hyperlink your name.  You should be sure to make your name a keyword phrase rather than your own name, because the anchor text used to link to you is important.

You should know that not all backlinks from blogs will count.  Most blogs have their comment links set to “nofollow” by default.  That means the search engines won’t follow those links.  You should make sure to look for “dofollow” blogs.  There are tools you can use to find these, just search Google for “dofollow blogs” and you will find a number of resources.

Web Directories

Most directories are pretty low quality and aren’t particularly relevant to any specific topic, but there are  few exceptions.  DMOZ.org is a very popular directory that has great PR and is a very beneficial backlink to have.  It is also notoriously difficult to get into, but you shouldn’t let that keep you from submitting.  It’s free and only takes a few moments.

The Yahoo directory charges a lot of money for commercial websites to be listed, but it can be worth it if you anticipate your site being very popular and/or profitable.

Niche website directories may not have the high PR of Yahoo or DMOZ, but if they are highly related to your niche the relevancy can be especially beneficial.

Squidoo and HubPages

Squidoo and HubPages are two websites that you can use to build your own pages online for free.  You can put up simple pages in your niche and use them as a source of backlinks for your main website.  Since they have good PR and authority, you have the added benefit of the pages potentially ranking well and bringing you extra traffic.

Other Sources

There are many ways to get backlinks.  You can buy links on websites for a few dollars per month.  You can exchange links with other webmasters in your niche.  You can write articles and submit them to article directories, or offer to write articles for high PR blogs in exchange for a link.

If you’re willing to get creative, you can find sources your competitors wouldn’t think of.  That could end up giving you an edge that they don’t have, which might propell you above them in no time!

Writing Effective Articles

If you want to make the most out of your article marketing efforts, then you need to be writing the most effective articles possible.  It’s not enough to simply write an article about a particular topic.  You need to write an article that is useful and interesting, but also leaves the reader writing more (which you will provide for them with a link to your site.)

Let’s say you have a website about acne.  You might write an article called “5 Common Acne Treatments”.  But you don’t want to discuss the most effective option, because then the reader will have no reason to visit your website.  What you would want to do is talk about 5 common treatments that aren’t always particularly effective.  You might talk about washing the face with soap, using pimple creams, different types of medicated pads, etc.  Then in your bio box you might put something like, “Have you tried all of these treatments but nothing has worked?  Get the dish on the most effective acne treatment available at www.YourAcneTreatmentSite.com!”

This method is very powerful, because you’ve established with the article that you know something about the topic, but you haven’t given them that big solution they are looking for.  The solution is only found at your site.  The article should be useful, especially for someone who hasn’t yet tried one of the 5 methods you outlined, but the main solution fo the problem should not be included.

The main purpose of an article is generally to get people to click the link in your bio box.  If the article doesn’t accomplish this, it will be useful only as a backlink.  If you want your articles to be as effective as possible at generating traffic, you need to be sure to write articles that get people to read them, but require them to visit your website to get the ultimate solution.

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