Top 7 Ways to Drive Floods of Traffic to Your Website What you are about to read was first put together as a bonus for the launch of Traffic Travis version 4. As you go through, you will learn seven completely different options for getting traffic to your website. We don’t go into fine details for every method (whole books could be written on any one of the techniques). Instead, our goal is to give you a solid grasp of the fundamentals. Rather than weigh you down with endless detail. We aim to give you enough knowledge to get off to a fast (and informed) start no matter the methods you choose to follow. This book will have you breeze past the first few steps in the learning process, which are always the hardest. If you enjoy this report, let us know. We love to hear back from readers.
Warm regards, Mark Ling, and the team at Traffic Travis.
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Top 7 Ways to Drive Floods of Traffic to Your Website Top 7 Ways to Drive Floods of Traffic to Your Website By Mark Ling - founder of TrafficTravis.com The success of any website rests on one thing – traffic. Online marketing starts and ends with the all-important question of how to get people to visit your site. The most successful marketers are always testing and learning new ways to get traffic to their websites. There are literally thousands of methods and techniques used by marketers and business owners to drive traffic far too many for one person to try them all. This is why I wrote this report, to share with you the 7 best methods I use to drive floods of traffic to my websites.
Who Am I Anyway? For those of you that don’t know me, my name is Mark Ling and I’ve been a successful Internet marketer for the better part of the last 12 years. In that time, everything in my life has changed. I got married to my wonderful wife Michelle:
And we had our first child, my son Benjamin:
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Top 7 Ways to Drive Floods of Traffic to Your Website
I even got my dad into Internet Marketing – at the ripe old age of 57. He’s in his 60’s now and he does quite well for himself in a variety of niches:
Internet marketing has allowed me to do everything I love in life and to spend more time with the people I love. That alone makes it a fantastic opportunity and one that I wholeheartedly recommend to anyone looking to finally leave their day job behind. So, how did I get here? What breakthrough occurred 12 years ago to set me down this path? It was a friend of mine named Charlie and a website he built about Melissa Joan Hart.
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Top 7 Ways to Drive Floods of Traffic to Your Website Here’s what happened. My buddy Charlie was experimenting with building websites. He created a site about Melissa Joan Hart, and a few days later got an email from “The One and Only Dating Network” asking if he wanted to place a banner ad on his site. He would receive a 50% commission for any sales he generated, so Charlie created a simple banner ad that said something to the effect of “Get a Girlfriend like Melissa Joan Hart” and within a few weeks, he started getting checks in the mail for about $50 every month. Now, that may not sound like a lot, but Charlie hadn’t done anything – he had just created a simple website and placed a banner on it. One afternoon of work for $50 in his pocket every month. I was floored – I wanted to do the same thing and soon enough I was replicating his success and then some, creating my own websites and making a ton of money on the side. I started creating my own affiliate websites in dozens of different niches, learning how to get higher search engine rankings, building funnels for email marketing and much more.
As you can see, I’ve been pretty successful in the last 12 years. These are just two of many Clickbank accounts I use to generate income with my websites. I’m not showing you these to brag, but to show you the kind of thing you can do if you put your mind to it and get a decent amount of traffic to your websites. 5
Top 7 Ways to Drive Floods of Traffic to Your Website I’ve even managed to parlay my success into television appearances in New Zealand promoting and talking about my Jamorama.com guitar site or my Rocket Languages learning products.
Having an online business is a fantastic way to live the life you’ve always dreamed of. Not necessarily one with million-dollar chateaus or fancy sports cars, but with the friends and family you love and the opportunities you’ve always wished you had. Now, let’s take a closer look at how to start landing some traffic.
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Top 7 Ways to Drive Floods of Traffic to Your Website My Basic Money Making Formula Here’s a little doodle I put together showing the simple formula I use to make money with my websites:
This is the formula I’ve been using since 1999 to create websites, generate traffic, and build up my profits. Sure, there has been a lot of change since then, as new technology, new tools and new methods have come along. But through all that change, the formula at the heart of my business has remained the same. That's important. On the internet, there's always something new to learn and do. But if you look at the most successful businesses (online or off) you'll find that more often than not, they are the ones who have a simple plan, execute that plan well, and avoid distractions. Basically, I attract potential prospects to my website, put them into a 'prospect pleasing machine' where they receive valuable content (either through a blog or email newsletters) and then reinvest some of the money I make to build more websites and generate more traffic. It’s a simple process, but boy oh boy does it work!
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Top 7 Ways to Drive Floods of Traffic to Your Website The key is knowing what to invest in (especially when it comes to traffic). There is paid advertising, Search Engine Optimization, product development, and adding more valuable content to keep your prospects coming back for more. If you get it right, you can begin to scale up very quickly and start making much more money. Get it wrong, and you'll be spinning your wheels.
Traffic and Rankings at a Glance Let me show you a few of the things I’ve been able to do using this simple formula, both in Google rankings and in the amount of traffic I receive. Here’s an example of my ranking in Google right now for the term “dog aggression”. This search term alone gets more than 27,000 searches each month and I appear in the top 5 results (sometimes as high as number 1 as these results change frequently):
If you visit the site, you'll see it's simple enough. The layout is pleasing but basic and I’ve listed quite a few reviews for top dog training and dog aggression solving products. The key to its success is the value I give on the site and the traffic generating methods I use. 8
Top 7 Ways to Drive Floods of Traffic to Your Website Here’s another site I’ve managed to do well with on Google. It’s one of my relationshipsaving websites which as of writing appears at number 1 for “save marriage tips”:
This term gets more than 3,000 searches each month in Google and represents a very profitable niche. Ranking isn’t everything though. What about the actual traffic you can get using the tips in this guide? We can get a good idea of the total traffic a site gets by visiting Alexa.com – the most popular and well known traffic ranking site on the Internet. Here's what Alexa.com has to say about a few of my websites: Salehoo – I have an Alexa Ranking of 15,616 for this website (designed for wholesale supply and eBay/auction site users). Any site under 300,000 on Alexa gets a good amount of traffic. Any site with a ranking of under 100,000 is pretty darn good. After all, there are literally billions of websites so this represents the cream of the crop.
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Top 7 Ways to Drive Floods of Traffic to Your Website Traffic Travis – Traffic Travis, the free software I’ve created to help Internet marketers research both SEO and PPC search terms, has an Alexa ranking of 8,648 – even lower than Salehoo. This is because the software has become very popular and is downloaded thousands of times on a regular basis.
Affilorama – My affiliate marketing website, Affilorama, has the lowest Alexa rank of them all with a 4,685.
I know how to drive traffic to websites. Now, it’s just a matter of showing you how it’s done. In the next few pages, I’m going to show you my 7 favorite methods for driving traffic to your websites. No one method is necessarily better than the rest, but you may find certain strategies work better for your sites than others. Also, keep in mind that we can’t cover everything in minute detail as you could write a book on each one. But, for now, you will have a good idea of what to look for and how to get started on the right foot.
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#1 – Free Search Engine Traffic Number one on the list is free search engine traffic – what you get when you’re able to get first page listings for your website on major search engines. Just like I showed you with my dog aggression and save marriage tips websites. When it comes to getting free traffic, there are four key areas you need to focus on: 1. 2. 3. 4.
Choose the right keywords On page optimization Off page optimization Maintain the pulse of the website
If you do all four things right, you’re practically guaranteed boatloads of free traffic from the search engines. The real key is to make sure the search traffic you get is relevant and ready to convert.
Choosing Your Keywords Why are keywords so important? Let’s think about it for a second – what’s the point in getting all that free traffic if the people coming to your site aren't interested in what you have? Here’s an example: I had a student a while back that created a dog training website which he managed to get ranked very highly for “Golden Retriever”. He received TONS of traffic to his website because of that ranking, but he wasn’t getting nearly as many sales as he would have liked. Sure, he made a few here and there, but for the traffic he was getting, his income was much too low. So, he came to me asking why – why would a website with so much traffic fail to make many sales? I took one look at his strategy and knew exactly what was wrong. He was targeting too broad of an audience. Someone doing a search for “golden retriever” doesn’t necessarily want or need a guide about training their golden retriever. Heck, they may not even own a golden retriever. It could be someone looking for pictures of the breed or someone else trying to decide whether to buy one or not. Conversion Rate vs. Volume When choosing a keyword, the most important factor is not the amount of traffic you get. Far more important is how well the keyword converts. A keyword that doesn’t get you sales isn’t worth spending much time trying to rank for. 11
Top 7 Ways to Drive Floods of Traffic to Your Website Let’s stay in the dog training niche for the moment – I found out a long time ago that if I tried to rank for keywords like “dog aggression”, “dog biting”, or “stop dog jumping” I did much better than when I went after more general terms like “dog training” or specific dog breeds like "golden retriever". Remember, “dog aggression” gets around 27,000 searches a month, while “dog training” gets more like 1 million. That’s almost 40 times as many searches, and yet, we’re more likely to make money by targeting 'conversion-ready' keywords that people search for when they need an honest solution to their problems.
People searching for “dog aggression” are likely to have a real problem. Maybe their dog bites people or maybe he growls and snaps at children. Having a dog with an aggression problem is not fun; there is huge pressure to address the problem right away. And the owner of that dog will most likely be willing to pay for a solution that works. The same is not necessarily true for someone just looking to train a new puppy. How to Identify the Best Keywords There are a handful of keywords that stand out from the pack as the best for any new website. These include:
Product Names – When someone searches for a product by name, they are probably ready to buy. They might need to find somewhere to buy that product or they are looking for a review of that product so they can justify the purchase. Either way, targeting a product name keyword will bring you traffic that’s ready to spend.
Author Names – The same is often true of author name keywords. Anyone searching for an author name is likely looking for specific products from that author.
Problem Keywords – Going back to our dog training example. If someone has a problem – a real problem that needs an immediate solution - they’re going to pay top dollar to have it fixed. This includes things like “lose belly fat”, “cure yeast infection”, “marriage crisis”
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Top 7 Ways to Drive Floods of Traffic to Your Website and anything else you can think of that represents a big time problem in a niche.
Information Seeking Keywords – These terms don’t convert quite as well as the problem keywords, but they do convert. “How to play guitar’ or “learn French” are information seeking topics for which a lot of great products exist. As an information marketer, your job is to connect people with the information they want, and this is where you’ll do it. Pretty much anything in the “how to” field fits this category.
These aren't the only keywords you’ll ever target. Some of you might be in a local niche. For example, a Dentist in Albuquerque, New Mexico shouldn’t try to go after “tooth pain”. They should go after terms that relate to their geographical area and the services they offer. Always be on the lookout for keywords that convert better, regardless of the volume of traffic they could receive.
On Page Optimization The next key area is on-page optimization. This is really not too difficult. The main idea is that you show the search engines that your website is related and relevant to the keywords you have chosen for you content. Let’s take a look at another of my sites as an example:
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Top 7 Ways to Drive Floods of Traffic to Your Website This is a site for a World of Warcraft guide called Zygor’s Leveling Guide – it’s designed to help players level up faster in the online game, World of Warcraft. If you’re not familiar with the niche, there are more than 11 million people who play this game every month and the market for these types of products is surprisingly large.
If you take a look at my site, which is a general World of Warcraft site (WoWBlackBook.com), you’ll see that I use the keyword I’m trying to optimize for (zygors guide review) in a few key places:
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Body Text Headlines Links to the Page in Anchor Text
You can also see that I show up as the number 1 result in Google when you search for the keyword, “zygors guide review”. It’s not a super high volume keyword, but remember that terms like this (product names) tend to convert very well. We can dig a little deeper with the help of Traffic Travis. If you don’t have it already, you can download the free edition from TrafficTravis.com Traffic Travis makes it easy to quickly gather a lot of data about your site. Specifically, we can easily check how well WoWBlackBook.com is optimized for “zygors leveling guide”. First, open up Traffic Travis and click on the 'Create New Project' button.
Then give the project a name, enter the URL of the site, and enter the keywords you are targeting for that site. In this case I'm only interested in one, "zygors leveling guide".
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For now, I'm just going to leave the search engine as Google (US), we can always add more later on. Click save project and Traffic Travis will go to work analyzing the site based on what we've just told it. This can take a minute or two as it works its magic... Once it's done, click the MySite tab up top.
We then see a list of the pages on the site. If I haven't already told Traffic Travis the location of all my site pages I can do that now by clicking the import pages button.
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I can then tell Traffic Travis either the location of the sitemap, or else manually enter the pages I want to track. I'm only interested in one page right now. The ‘Zygor's guide review’. So that's what I paste in here.
Traffic Travis then shows all the key stats for the pages we've entered, including: Pagerank, the total backlinks, the page warnings, keywords, and SEO warnings.
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Right now we are only interested in the on-page warnings. Traffic Travis runs each page through a series of checks based on common best practice for on-page SEO. In this case I've only got one page warning. Of course, knowing that does no good if you can't take a closer look at what that warning is. To dig deeper, I can simply click the number. Traffic Travis then gives a detailed breakdown of how the page performs for that particular keyword.
In this case, it's telling me that the meta description could be longer and a little more descriptive.
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Top 7 Ways to Drive Floods of Traffic to Your Website Overall though, I'm very happy with how well optimized this page is. The keyword appears in the headlines, in the title tag and in the body of the text; all the little things that help in getting to the number one ranking in Google. This is an extremely powerful tool. I've seen people with sites on Page 3 or 4 of Google run a simple analysis with Traffic Travis and after fixing a few mistakes on their site, move all the way to page 1 of Google - easy as that. If there are flaws on your website holding you back, Traffic Travis will point them out for you. For some low competition niches or specialty keywords, sometimes this is all you need to do to push your site to page 1.
Other Cool Things You Can Do With Traffic Travis Since we’re talking Traffic Travis, I want to point out a couple of cool things this software will do that will make it a lot easier to get traffic for your website. Keyword research in particular is a fantastic feature in the Traffic Travis software. Remember, you can get your own copy of Traffic Travis here.
When you open up the research tab in Traffic Travis (pictured above) and enter a search term in the box, you can generate a list of related terms. I set the search results relatively low in this example, but using the professional version you can get up to 2000 results per search.
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As you can see, a quick search for “dog training� provides a good number of results in this niche. You can also get an idea of the commercial value of these keywords with the Average PPC cost and competition levels. And if you highlight the keywords you like, you can then save them for later by clicking the add button at the bottom. This will add those keywords to your saved list for the current project. You can then do another search and add more terms as you find them. This is powerful, especially when looking for terms you will use for PPC advertising or for free traffic generation in the search engines.
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Top 7 Ways to Drive Floods of Traffic to Your Website Off Page Optimization The next key to getting search engine traffic is off page optimization. This is the biggest and most powerful of the four keys in this chapter. When you get this right, it shows the search engines that other websites consider yours a good source of information. I’m not going to go too in-depth on this topic because you’d need a forklift to carry the book that would come out of it; there are a LOT of things we could talk about here and each and every one of them is important. For now, though, I just want to describe the basics and how it will help you. Off page optimization is basically the process of getting links to your website from outside sources. This would include links from directories like DMOZ or Yahoo!, article directories like EzineArticles or ArticleDashboard, or forums and blog posts where you can leave comments. There are literally dozens of ways to get backlinks to your website, and the methods you use will depend largely on your niche and what terms you want to rank for. Basically, what you’ll do is take the keywords you discover using Traffic Travis and create links in which those keywords are anchor text. That means the actual text used in the link would be your keyword, like this: Visit my website for dog aggression tips In this case, the anchor text is “dog aggression tips”. If I wanted to optimize my website for that keyword term, after making sure my on-site optimization is right. I would start to build backlinks from other websites while using this term in the anchor text. There are quite a few other details to consider here as well, including the Page Rank and traffic ranking of the sites you get links from, the number of links your competition has, and the volume of links you generate. However, for now, know that link building is an essential process that you will need to get very familiar with if you want to get and keep your top search engine rankings. I should also mention that when you purchase the professional version of Traffic Travis you also get a special bonuses interview I conducted with one of the world’s premiere SEO experts. In this interview, he goes into detail about 18 different backlinking strategies, complete with where to get your links, how to format them, and how to ensure they have the proper anchor text. This interview is amazingly valuable – in my opinion it is well worth the price of Traffic Travis by itself.
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The Pulse of Your Website The fourth key to free search engine traffic for your website may not apply to every website or every niche. Some of you may not need to worry about this at all. But for those that can, there are a LOT of great opportunities here to generate boat loads of free traffic. So... what is a pulse? A website has a pulse when it does more than just sit there, doing nothing for months or years at a time. When you build a website, it has fresh content and new pages that are filled with the results of you hard work. But, after a few months, that content starts to age. In some niches, you can dramatically increase your traffic by cycling fresh content through your website on a daily, weekly, or even monthly basis. This is when your website has a pulse. It’s alive and constantly growing. Google has invested millions (if not billions) of dollars to buy traffic results from data gathering services like Alexa. They’ve developed toolbars and web browsers with the sole purpose of gathering usage statistics from their users. The idea is simple – if someone goes back to a website over and over again, that site must be incredibly valuable. So Google rewards the site with higher rankings for its search terms. Giving your website a pulse means you create fresh, valuable content on an ongoing basis, and that attracts repeat visitors and helps you get better in search engine rankings.
Which Is Best? One of the first things anyone asks me when I talk about getting search engine traffic is which of these keys is 'best'. But that’s really the wrong way to look at it. Focus on only one and you won't see anywhere near the same results as if you implement all four keys. Having said that, if I could only do one of those things, it would be off-page link building. Because if you get that right, you will almost always see positive results.
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Top 7 Ways to Drive Floods of Traffic to Your Website You should of course also complete the on-site optimization tasks that Traffic Travis suggests so that you have a solid “A” rating in the web page analysis tool. However, that’s a task you only have to do once. After you’ve done that, you should focus heavily on getting backlinks to your website, and if it fits, work on adding new content to your site and giving it a pulse. No matter what market you are in or what type of site you build, free traffic is built on two things – content and backlinks. Leverage both of these and you’ll be well on your way to creating a successful, traffic generating site in no time. Don’t get too overwhelmed right now. This is a lot of information to digest and a lot of potential tasks to do. This guide isn’t meant to be used as a step by step guide, but as an overview – a general look through the ways you can get traffic to your website and start growing in your niche. The details will come with time and as you gain experience.
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#2 - PPC Traffic So far we’ve covered what it takes to get free traffic for you website. But what if you want to speed things up? That’s where Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising comes in. There are many ways to get paid traffic online – we’ll cover at least one more in a later step. But by far the most popular and arguably the most effective way to pay for your traffic is PPC advertising. So just what is PPC advertising? Remember when I showed you my number one ranking for “zygors guide review” in Google?
Technically, I’m the second result on the page, because above me are a couple of sponsored listings or PPC ads that someone has placed using Google's AdWords program. One of them is the Zygor’s Guide brand itself advertising for a top keyword for their guide (or possibly an affiliate using the domain name in their ad copy). Instead of going through all the hard work of optimizing the website, getting backlinks and giving their site a pulse, the advertiser has created an ad in Google AdWords and bid on this particular keyword. 24
Top 7 Ways to Drive Floods of Traffic to Your Website The higher their bid, the higher they appear in the advertisement placings. And when someone clicks on the ad, the advertiser is charged their bid price for that click. Here’s another example for a popular weight loss sub-niche, “lose man boobs”:
As you can see, an ad pops up for Gynexin.com/manboobs, and on the right, you’ll find a collection of other ads that are listed for the same keywords:
The key to effective PPC advertising is to get your conversion rate as high as possible. This means you want as many clicks as possible to convert into purchases of your product. To make money, you can’t spend more on advertising than you receive in revenue from those ads. I have 5 tips to help you maximize your profits.
5 Tips for Mastering PPC Traffic Generation These tips are designed to help you maximize your return on investment and get as many conversions as possible from your PPC campaign. The higher your profit margin, the faster you can grow your business. 1. Separate Search Matches and Content Matches into Separate Campaigns There are two different ways to place an ad with a PPC advertising network – either in the search network (what we were looking at for our “lose man boobs” search) or in the content network.
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Top 7 Ways to Drive Floods of Traffic to Your Website The search network is relatively straightforward. You choose specific search terms you want to appear for and your ads show up when someone searches for those terms (or related terms depending on your keyword match types). The content network is slightly different. Let’s take a look at one of my other websites for a moment:
This is an informational site I created with an opt-in for hair care advice. As you can see, on the side of the screen I’ve placed a collection of Google ads using the AdSense network. Anyone can sign up for the AdSense network and start showing ads on their website. Google then places ads based on the relevance to the content on the site, and the site owner earns a commission on any clicks made by visitors. If you choose to advertise in the content network, you’re telling Google to place your ads on sites like this. For the most part, we should avoid that because we have far less control over how and when our ads are shown. Because you can’t choose to make exact matches for your keywords, your ads may appear on sites that have no relation to your niche. People may still click, but because 26
Top 7 Ways to Drive Floods of Traffic to Your Website the traffic is less targeted, your conversion rates will take a dive, along with your quality score (when people then leave your site). That said, the content network can be an effective tool, but only if you optimize your campaign specifically for the content network. So if you want to use both search and content network PPC ads, set up separate campaigns for each. 2. Geotarget Your Campaigns This is really, really important. You can waste a lot of money by paying the same for your ads in every region of the world. Let me give you an example. I live in New Zealand, and if I don’t geotarget my campaign, my ads could easily show up in India, Nigeria, Budapest, or Russia. Not only are these countries completely different audiences, they don’t necessarily have the same demographics or number of English speaking buyers. You might have a conversion rate in the United States or the UK of 1 in 50, but when your ad shows in India or the Philippines it might be 1 in 10,000. If you don’t geotarget your ads, you’ll pay a LOT of money for clicks that are not worth nearly as much to you.
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Top 7 Ways to Drive Floods of Traffic to Your Website There are exceptions of course (make sure you adjust for your particular niche), but in the information product niches where I advertise, I recommend you stick with the major English speaking countries – the United States, Canada, UK, Australia, New Zealand, Ireland, and South Africa. You can even advertise in some heavily ex-pat populated locations like Japan, France, or Germany, but make sure you pay close attention to your conversion rates – even consider creating separate campaigns for each region to see how your ads perform there. One final note here – if you have a local business that relies on geographical searches in towns and provinces or states instead of countries, Google AdWords has fantastic tools for more detailed geotargeting. You can use postal codes, municipalities or even set custom parameters on a map. 3. Spy On The Competition One of the biggest barriers to entry in PPC advertising is data collection. You can research and prepare an account for weeks or months. But eventually you're going to have to dive in and start testing. Most of the time, this will cost you some money up front as you learn your niche, remove low performing keywords, adjust your bids, and improve quality scores. However, you can skip much of the learning curve by spying on your competition, monitoring the terms that work for them and how often they repeat ads. To do this we begin with the research tool in Traffic Travis to create a list of potential keywords. Then we select the ones we're interested in and save them to our project.
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Top 7 Ways to Drive Floods of Traffic to Your Website
Now we switch over to the PPC research tab, go into the Adwords competition section and simply click the update button.
Traffic Travis will search out all the ads for all the keywords in our list. It takes a few minutes to gather data on every keyword, so grab a snack or take a moment to stretch. Once the process is done, you'll see the following screen:
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As you can see, we now have a tremendous amount of data to work with. It found the number of current ads for each keyword and the advertisers that are using that keyword. You can save your project too, and come back in the future to check these again (but more on that shortly). You can keep an eye on as many keywords as you want here. I have only used a couple of hundred here, but if you want to place 2,000 or 3,000 for a full blown PPC campaign, Traffic Travis will handle it easily enough. With more keywords it'll take a while to work its magic and gather all the data, but once it's done the data is invaluable. Next we want to take a closer look at the sites advertising on our keywords. When we click the 'by website' tab we get the following screen:
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Top 7 Ways to Drive Floods of Traffic to Your Website
Here we can see a list of all the websites advertising on our keywords. As you can see, thedogtrainingsecret.com is advertising on 65 of the terms on our list. While dogproblems.com is advertising on 28 of them. When we click on the advertiser website, the menu on the right shows exactly what keywords they are targeting at that time. And if you click on each term, you can see which position the ad was appearing as well as the actual ad copy used. This is invaluable, because we now have that data saved. When we come back in 30 or 60 days to review, we can see which terms are profitable and which ones have been dropped. Can you see how much money this can save you? Instead of spending hundreds of dollars on test advertising, you can simply let others do most of the heavy lifting while using their results to make better decisions for your own campaign. And you can do this for as many keywords and advertisers as you like. Effectively create an entire campaign from scratch using competitor data. This tool can save you hundreds of dollars in misplaced ad spend when used properly - trust me. 4. Use Google Image Advertising 31
Top 7 Ways to Drive Floods of Traffic to Your Website Remember when I told you to keep your content and search network marketing separate? This is the main reason why. With Google image advertising we can place targeted image ads on specific sites and drastically increase our conversion rates. The key is to find content network sites that rank highly in Google for the specific search terms we’re trying to target. So, instead of letting Google choose a handful of sites at random to show our ads on, we will do a little research, find sites that show up on the top page of Google (Ideally in the top 4 slots) and tell them to place our ads there. Let's have a look how this works in Traffic Travis.
I’m going to open the AdSense Finder and enter the terms that I want to place ads for. In this example, I’ve chosen “lose belly fat”, “lose man boobs”, and “lose pregnancy weight”. You can enter as many terms as you want to the list, but I’ll keep it simple for now.
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Once you enter your terms, click OK and the search tool will look for websites that show up highly in Google for these terms and that are members of the Google Content Network.
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These results show that there are a handful of sites that match our needs. Now we want to focus on two pieces of data: 1. The Search Ranking 2. The Ad Type Personally I've found that the best sites to target are those ranked 1-4. That’s not to say that you’ll get bad results with a ranking of lower than 4, but if the site is in the top 4, you know for a fact that the website is a good match for your term (or it wouldn't be ranking that highly). And, you’ll pay about the same for each click no matter which site you appear on, so why not choose the sites that perform best? The Ad Info refers to the size of the image ad that you’ll place. If you create a 300x250 image ad, you want to choose sites that have a spot that size available.
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If you can use an image ad on that particular site, it will say “link” and show a box size on the right of the results. If you see “text” that means the site only allows text ads. The results for this in Traffic Travis look like this:
Not ideal. Before you write down the URL of the sites and add them to your Content Network matches in AdWords, take a look and see where the ads will appear. Sometimes they don’t appear properly or they are in an out of the way location where eyeball traffic is low. I’ve chosen MotleyHealth – a site that has two image ad options – one at 300x250 and another at 160x600.
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If we visit the specific URL and scroll down to find the image, we find this ad:
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Top 7 Ways to Drive Floods of Traffic to Your Website This is a great example of an image ad – simple, targeted and large enough to draw attention from the visitors to the site. Which one of these do you think is more likely to attract clicks? The Image ad:
Or the text ads on my HairCutAdvice.com site:
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Top 7 Ways to Drive Floods of Traffic to Your Website This is a great way to generate targeted traffic and boost your conversion rates and ROI. Keep in mind too that weight loss is a highly competitive niche – there are limited spaces to market in and the prices for those clicks will be quite high. Most other niches are less competitive, especially for this type of advertising. You’ll find that niches like dog training are not as image based – this is low hanging fruit with a LOT of profit potential. 5. Test, Test, and Test Again to Improve ROI and CTR Last but not least on my list for PPC advertising is testing. Every successful PPC campaign I’ve ever seen had one thing in common. They were always being tested, even after they were profitable. You should always have two versions of every ad running in your campaign. Every major ad network – Google, Yahoo! and MSN included – allows you to do this. The reason you use two ads is that you can then compare them to each other and make adjustments. If you write just one ad and set it up to run without another ad to test against, you risk missing out on opportunities for improvement. With two ads, you can compare them, and then use the ad which performs best. Then you create another new ad and compare it to the winner of the last round. Ideally, as weeks and months go by, your ad will become more and more effective. If you never end the process of tweaking and adjusting your ad, you’ll never stop improving your ROI and conversion rates. PPC advertising can be tricky, but it can be tremendously profitable for your business when you get it right. We won’t go too much more in-depth in this space (I could write an entire book on this topic), but there are quite a few opportunities to expand and improve your performance with ads and free traffic. Don't feel like you need to use paid advertising to be successful online. I didn’t use paid advertising until years into my Internet marketing career. Before that I was very successful just using free search engine based traffic and you can be too. Paid advertising simply gives you the opportunity to leverage your profits to generate larger volumes of immediate traffic. If you have the money to invest and want to push your site forward quicker, PPC is the way to go.
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#3 - Email Marketing This is a huge one – this is where you build up the value of your online business and where the real money is made. Email is where my business really took off all those years ago. The idea is simple enough. It takes a lot of time and/or money to get prospects to visit your website in the first place. If you collect a name and email, you then have the ability to reach out and communicate with a percentage of those people any time you choose. Not everyone who visits your site will buy something the first time they visit. Many of them might need to return three, five, or even ten times before they decide to make the leap and buy something. Email marketing lets us reach out to those hesitant prospects, offering more valuable information along with a friendly call to action which brings them back to your blog, sales page, or social networking profile.
5 Email Marketing Tips There are hundreds of ways to take advantage of email marketing. But I want to share with you the five tips I feel are most important for you to understand to be successful with an email marketing campaign. 1. Use a Free Report, Software, or 6 Part Mini Course to Capture Leads I love how well this works. People won't just give you their email address for no reason. An 'ethical bribe' is a key part of getting someone to sign up for your list. Most of you reading this report did just that. That’s likely how you received this free report. Imagine what you would have done if you were simply asked to sign up for an email list without this incentive - If I simply put together a popover or squeeze page and asked you to sign up for my email list so you could get some interesting information at some point in the future. Not only is there no incentive, there’s no sense of urgency. Most people don’t sign up for things with the promise of some return in the future. They do it when there is an immediate reward. That’s what makes opt-in bribes so successful. Here’s an example of an opt-in squeeze page I created:
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Top 7 Ways to Drive Floods of Traffic to Your Website
This is located at www.meetyoursweet.com/attract-men - there is a version for “attract women” too. On this page, you’ll find a collection of headlines and bullet points targeted toward my prospects, promoting a 6 part mini-course to help women learn about “meeting, attracting, and keeping a great man!” With a catchy headline, a few bullet points showcasing the benefits of the mini-course, and a simple opt-in box, I can grow my list rapidly. There are a lot of ways to do this. You can give away software like I do with the free version of Traffic Travis, or you can do a six part mini course as I did with Meet Your 40
Top 7 Ways to Drive Floods of Traffic to Your Website Sweet or you can even create a free report filled with valuable information. There is no single “best” way to attract sign ups – do what works best for your niche. Then you can create a signup box on a squeeze page; add a popover to your website or an exit popup that asks people if they really want to leave your site – there are a lot of options here to help you get people on your list. 2. Give People Great Value and Create an Autoresponder that Helps Automate The Process A lot of people get lazy and spend a few dollars on cruddy content in their email marketing campaign or in their incentive and then wonder why they have such a high unsubscribe rate or why their prospects never convert. The problem is that they forget who is going to be receiving those emails – they are all are real people with real problems. If you hire someone who doesn’t speak English well to write 100 articles and then load them into an autoresponder and forget about it, you probably won’t convert those prospects and it has nothing to do with the niche – it’s because your content just doesn’t offer enough value. You have to go OVER THE TOP with quality – especially in the first month of an autoresponder. I never skimp on quality in my content because I know that the more value I can give, the more people will grow to trust me and be happy the next time they get an email from me. If you sent out poorly written content every week, why would they want to open your message, let alone buy something you were selling? What reason would they have to think that the product is any good? Autoresponders Make It Simple The best part about email is that you don’t need to work around the clock to provide value to your list. With an autoresponder, you can load up your list with 10-15 emails (or more if you want to get well ahead of the curve) and then let the autoresponder do the work. If you’re looking for a good autoresponder, my favorite is MailPush, or Aweber (they’re the same service). They provide easy to use, reliable delivery and the price is good for beginners. One thing to keep in mind is that you can send your prospects pretty much anything you want. If you want to provide videos, power point slides, or free software, all the better. 41
Top 7 Ways to Drive Floods of Traffic to Your Website The more valuable content you provide, the easier it will be to convince them to follow a link you provide in your call to action. And because you’re using an autoresponder, the email follow-ups are sent automatically – you need do very little beyond creating that content and generating that initial traffic to your site. 3. Have a Call to Action in Every Email A good call to action can be anything – it doesn’t have to be a sales pitch. You should send emails out every 3-5 days (and even more often when the list is new), but you may not want to sell something in every one of those emails. However, you shouldn’t pass up the chance to allow them to do something at the end of your email. It doesn't have to be a pitch for a product. It might be a link to a related post on your blog, a mention of a related website, an opportunity to follow you on social media, and so on. If someone has opened one of your emails, your job is to follow-up with that reader and give them something to do next. Don't leave them hanging. Remember that you’ve just provided highly valuable content to them in the form of a free report, mini course of software tool and you’re following up with content rich emails. Asking them to click a link or read a blog post isn’t a big deal. A lot of marketers get nervous at the prospect of actually asking someone to do something in their emails. But, people are used to sales pitches. Every day, when we sit down and watch TV, we see about 22 minutes of TV show and 7 minutes of commercials. A quarter of everything we watch is a sales pitch, and while most of us ignore (or fast forward through) those commercials, we don’t stop watching the show because they’re there. If people unsubscribe from your list because they don’t want to read your calls to action, don’t worry. Those people are not likely to have ever bought anyway. Even if 30 in 100 people unsubscribe it’s not a bad thing. It just means you’re narrowing down your list to the people who are happy to receive the free stuff and information you send them every day. These are the prospects that will respond and eventually make you money.
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Top 7 Ways to Drive Floods of Traffic to Your Website 4. Achieve Big Sales through Hard Sells, Scarcity, Participating in Launches, Running Webinars and/or Adding Great Webinar Replays to your Autoresponder If you want to drive some really big sales, you can up the ante with some hard-hitting emails and free content. Not only can these build the relationship with your readers, they help to create a sense of trust about what you have to offer. You know what you’re talking about so if you recommend a product, why not check it out? When you’ve developed that level of trust, people will gladly read about a product you think they can benefit from. Scarcity is a simple tactic that works in almost any email you send – one of the best tricks I’ve found is to offer a free report as a bonus when someone follows through on a call to action. “Use this link to sign up for Jim’s Dog Training Guide in the next 48 hours and receive my free Alpha Dog Training guide.” This works extremely well in almost any aspect of marketing, but especially well when marketing via email since you can follow up every few hours and remind them of the time limit. Webinars are powerful because they provide instant value, but with the added benefit of integrating your voice or face into their learning process. They learn directly from you and can then take that knowledge and use it immediately. At the end of a video you can easily pitch a product as well, the same as you would in an email. 5. Run a Blog and Send People Back through Email to Build Rapport This combines a couple of things we’ve already talked about. First, you’re using a call to action to cash in on the readership you’ve generated with valuable email content. Second, you’re getting people to return to your website and maintain its pulse – showing Google that you have recurring, valuable content that people want to keep reading. After that, you can drive people to leave comments, taking an extra step towards building rapport. They get to know you better, and you can respond to their comments on the blog and show you’re engaged. A great way to improve the performance of your blog is to send out your blog posts in email autoresponders. Aweber has a tool that allows you to automatically update your list whenever a new post is written. Or you can write updates manually with the broadcast feature and tell people that you have a new post. Either way, you drive traffic back to your site, generate added trust, and build rapport with your readers. 43
Top 7 Ways to Drive Floods of Traffic to Your Website Beyond the Basics There is a lot more you can do with email marketing to increase the value of each visitor to your site. You can tweak your subject lines, work on follow-ups, write new headlines, or adjust your soft sells. However, the best way I’ve found to really take advantage of this tool is to just get out there and start gathering email addresses. For me, email marketing is one of the single most important aspects of my business. When I started using email marketing, I managed to double my sales in roughly 90 days. For four years I didn’t use email marketing at all and I was successful, but when I started putting the ideas I've just shared with you here into action, my business took off like I never would have imagined. The key is that you don’t need fresh traffic. You already generated traffic and now you can use email marketing to get the absolute most out of every single person who visits your website. Some people won’t buy anything until they hear from you three, four, or even five times – with email marketing you can make those follow-ups easy and almost automatic.
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#4 – Offline Traffic Methods I’ll admit that I’m not an expert in getting offline traffic, but for those that put it to good use, this can work extremely well. Specifically, what I’m talking about when I say offline traffic is things like:
Direct Mail Text Messaging Radio TV Magazines Authoring a Book
Many Internet marketers have a bad habit of assuming that the only way to get traffic and generate income is through our websites and search engines. But, in reality, you can turn the momentum you generate online into a stream of profit potential offline as well. Direct Mail Direct mail is one of the most common offline marketing methods. Well before anyone started using autoresponders and building websites, people were sending direct mail messages to prospects at home. This method still works incredibly well for those that have the tools in place to gather (or purchase) home addresses from qualified leads. One of the bonuses included with Traffic Travis Professional Edition is actually an interview I did with one of the premier experts in integrating offline traffic generation into an online marketing plan. The interview runs about 90 minutes or so and covers all of the ways he’s been able to more than double his income with offline methods of traffic generation. One method is sending out free CDs to people using a site called Kunaki.com. When I say free, he does charge shipping and handling to make sure they are serious enough to be potential customers (and that they have a credit card). He then knows they are interested in his niche, have the means to buy and he has something else very valuable too- their mailing address. Follow-ups can then be made via mail with a sales letter sending them to a website or asking to call directly. It’s incredibly effective. Especially since practically no-one else does this.
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Top 7 Ways to Drive Floods of Traffic to Your Website Another option is simply to buy lists of names and addresses. These lists come from many sources including magazine subscribers, offline opt-in lists or online membership databases. You can use these lists to send a sales letter to, or a popular way to do it is to send out postcards with an offer and link back to your website. Voila – you gain instant traffic for the cost of postage. The key is finding the right lists. Other Offline Marketing Personally, I haven’t done much in the way of offline marketing. I’ve appeared in a number of TV and radio spots obtaining PR for my company and I’m currently considering writing a (print) book for added publicity, either this year or next year. This method is has been highly successful for many marketers. Because it’s so easy to self-publish on Amazon and because the eBook market is taking off so fast with devices like the Kindle and iPad, users can instantly publish and generate interest in a book they’ve written. Once a book has garnered enough readership, you can easily turn that success into a traditional publishing deal with a brick and mortar publisher. This is a fairly advanced tactic that may not work for everyone, but if you are interested in brand building and have a good level of knowledge in your niche, it can be incredibly effective and quite a bit of fun.
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#5 – JV / Affiliate Traffic For those with your own products, one of the most effective ways to generate traffic to your site is to create an affiliate program and develop JV partnerships. You can dramatically increase your traffic without doing much additional work, allowing you to focus on improving conversion rates for your product and starting your next big project. For me, JV and Affiliate traffic generation is a huge part of launching new products successfully. For those interested in making it work for them, here are six tips I recommend you keep in mind. 1. Provide an Extensive Range of Resources for Your Affiliates When you create resources that help people sell your products, you make it easy for them to succeed. And when they are successful, you make money – everybody wins. Here is an example of what I mean:
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Top 7 Ways to Drive Floods of Traffic to Your Website This is the affiliate resources page for Meet Your Sweet (www.meetyoursweet.com/affiliates). Here, I’ve placed a variety of valuable tools that help my affiliates sell the Meet Your Sweet line of product. They can easily access and use follow-up emails, images, reviews, banner ads, keywords lists, swipe articles and much more.
The goal here isn’t just to help people be successful, but to give them enough motivation to go out there and really try. Most affiliates who just copy and paste affiliate resources don’t make a lot of sales right away, but it gives them a jump start and once they have invested enough time is invested into a campaign, they are going to keep at it until they are successful. Your job is to help them keep at it and eventually find that success. 2. Pay High Commissions and/or Give Prizes to Top Affiliates In the same vein, you want to pay your affiliates really well for their work. Imagine you’re about to start promoting a product as an affiliate. You run across two products – one with a commission rate of 40% and one with a commission rate of 70%. Which one will you choose? Of course it’s the second one. The one that stands to make more money for you. This is about more than just the upfront incentive to attract more affiliates though. High commission rates provide your affiliates with enough of a monetary reward to reinvest and drive even more traffic to your site. 48
Top 7 Ways to Drive Floods of Traffic to Your Website And before you start asking why you’re giving up so much of the profits, think of it this way – would you even get those sales if you didn’t have affiliates driving traffic to your site? The Internet is a really big place – there’s no guarantee you’ll get nearly as many sales if you go it alone. With affiliates, you can worry about maintaining product quality and conversion rates, not generating traffic. Prizes to Top Affiliates Another great way to drive affiliate participation is to offer prizes to those who sell the most products. Usually, I will reduce my commissions a bit and save the extra money for a prize pool. This way, you can offer really big prizes for top producers. The goal here is to incentivize their participation. When they go to Clickbank and look at 200 products in a niche, how can you make your product stand out instead of dozens of others? 3. Get on the Phone with Your Top Affiliates and Bend Over Backwards to Help Them This one is pretty simple – if you want to really help your affiliates succeed, be there for them whenever they need something. Call them, talk to them, discuss their problems, and help them move forward and be successful. Too many marketers assume that because their affiliates are making money nothing else needs to be done. They think the money affiliates make is incentive enough to keep selling. But, remember these people are making you money. You should be their best friend – help them do everything they possibly can to be successful and you will in turn be more successful. 4. Create an Autoresponder Sequence that Gives Quality Tips and Further Resources for Your JVs This allows you to automate the process of keeping in touch with your affiliates. Sometimes, when you’re busy, it’s easy to forget that people are out there in the trenches getting traffic to your site. But, just because you’re busy doesn’t mean you should ignore them. With an autoresponder, you can load up messages well in advance and send them out as necessary to help affiliates continue their work. Send out new swipe emails, update them on new products, and give them a heads up if you plan on holding a promotion. 49
Top 7 Ways to Drive Floods of Traffic to Your Website They will take you more seriously and ultimately work harder to promote your products when you stay in touch and create a strong relationship. 5. Continue to Work Hard on Your Conversion Rates This one is very simple. If you have 100 or 1,000 or even 5,000 people out there promoting your website for you, you probably don’t need to worry so much about getting traffic. Those affiliates will work tirelessly to bring you traffic that you pay nothing for, but only if you reward them with sales. If someone spends $100 in Google AdWords to send you 400 visitors and they only manage to convert 1% of those visitors, they’ll be lucky to break even (depending on how much your product sells for). However, if you work tirelessly to increase and maintain high conversion rates so that your affiliates can make a healthy profit on all the traffic they generate, they’ll keep working, bringing in even more people to your site. So, split test your landing page, add new features, talk to existing customers and keep working every day on building a site that drives sales no matter where the traffic comes from. The more you do this, the better your affiliates are compensated and the harder they will work. 6. Build a Strong List So You Can Reciprocate to Your Top JVs When you launch a new product, the top affiliates for that product are usually product owners themselves. That means they have lists of prospects and products they want to sell. So, to reciprocate all the hard work they do for you, it’s a good idea to create a strong list of prospects for your product and use it to promote other people’s sites. As you grow in this industry, you can leverage these lists for big time JV cross promotions. Imagine if you have a list of 10,000 people and a JV partner has a list of 8,000 people. Two or three emails sent to your lists will generate huge commissions for both parties and it requires almost no work on either side – that’s the power of list marketing combined with JV partnerships. I could go on for a long time about JV partnering and affiliate marketing. I’ve been on both sides of the commission line and can tell you that this system works wonders when properly implemented. For now, just keep in mind that if you ever launch a product, you absolutely need to leverage the power of commission based traffic – your profits will scale faster than they ever could without the help of dedicated affiliates and JV partners.
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#6 – Viral Traffic Next on the list is viral traffic. This is an interesting one because a lot of the time, it’s tough to define. After all, how do you make something “go viral”? How do you convince people that something is worth sending to their friends, and then convince their friends to do the same, over and over again until thousands or hundreds of thousands of people have read, watched, or used your product? While we can’t define exactly how something goes viral, we can definitely learn from past successes and do certain things that encourage people to share something with their friends. Here are five tips I’ve learned over the years that have helped me create incredibly popular tools and websites. 1. Create Something of Great Value for Free that People will Want to Tell Others About This is the easiest way to send something viral, but it’s also the least defined. After all, what do you make that will be so valuable to one person that they send it to their friends? The easiest way I can describe this is to show some examples. Traffic Travis First up is Traffic Travis. Our Traffic Travis free edition software is free to download. Specifically, on CNet, it has been downloaded more than 200,000 times and a CNET editor gave it 4.5/5 stars.
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Top 7 Ways to Drive Floods of Traffic to Your Website Why does it get passed around so much? Because A) It’s incredibly good software that offers value to anyone building a website and B) It’s free. We hit on the perfect blend of value and accessibility that makes this such a popular tool for anyone in any niche. Affilorama Viral tools can be anything; it doesn’t need to be software. Take Affilorama.com for example. I created Affilorama with the sole goal of providing valuable, free content to readers wanting to get into affiliate marketing.
The website has more than 100 hours of free video lessons covering everything from list building to writing headlines, to creating mini sites and promoting free content. It’s a great tool set and it’s completely free.
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Other people would have sold this package of content for hundreds of dollars and it would have been successful, but I wanted to make the paid stuff even better and the result is a website in the top 5,000 on Alexa that acts as a viral traffic sponge. The Interview with God There’s a good chance you’ve already seen this site because it was such a successful viral portal for so many years. Launched in 2001, the site has received millions of visitors in the last decade and at one point was generating a tremendous amount of profit for its owner.
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But, despite its massive success, The Interview with God is not a complex website. It’s a simple screensaver/presentation that offers an inspirational message. But, that’s all the site contains. It’s very simple and yet it draws massive numbers of visitors from throughout the world to this day (albeit at a slightly slower pace than a few years ago). How to Go Viral There is no specific formula for how to create a viral product that will immediately wind up on millions of desktops around the globe. Sometimes you fail and other times you get lucky. But, if you remember two crucial things, you'll do okay - Make it quality. And make it easy to get. Free content, even if it requires an email address to access is enticing. Make it super useful and you may have a viral tool on your hands. 2. Tell a Friend Software There is a simple way to get people to share your content or products with other people. On your website or your blog posts, integrate “tell a friend” software. This software allows your prospects to enter email addresses of their friends and send them a copy of whatever you’re giving away:
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The key here is to incentivize the process. Offer them a free report or a discount of some sort if they enter enough email addresses. The email is actually sent from their email address (opting them into your list isn’t allowed), and the software can be integrated into almost anything you want to sell – from PDF downloads to a piece of free software you upload to Cnet. 3. Resale Rights If you create a powerful free report or PowerPoint presentation, one way to spread it quickly is to offer full resale rights to anyone who downloads it. What does this mean? It means you allow them to distribute it, sell it, offer it to their readers, or anything else they want to do with your free report. In exchange, they must leave your branding in place within the report. This might be a link back to your website or an affiliate link to your product. You can even encourage them to rebrand the product with their name and website, so long as they provide an affiliate link to promote your products. This is an extremely effective way of generating viral traffic to your website, because it not only taps into people looking for free stuff, it offers them a way to make money with that free stuff. Just remember how important quality is when creating this content. If you create a product to give away to your prospects in hopes that they will use it as a bonus or sell it as part of a package, you need to make sure the product has a lot of value. That might mean one or two outrageously good ideas in a 10 page report, or a 100 page report that covers a topic extremely in-depth. Just make sure there is value. 4. Retweet and Other Social Media buttons on Your Posts
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Top 7 Ways to Drive Floods of Traffic to Your Website This is very simple and probably something you already do if you have a blog, but regardless, it’s very effective. Almost anyone who reads your blog or visits your website is likely to have a Facebook and/or Twitter account. To tap into the power of those social media profiles, place Retweet, Like and Share buttons on your posts so they can easily offer access to their friends and followers.
Facebook even allows you to integrate Facebook Commenting into blogs and websites now – users can login with their Facebook account and leave a comment on your site which can then be syndicated back to Facebook with a link to your site. There are a lot of ways to integrate social media into your marketing plan. The more you do, the more likely your content is to go viral. 5. Press Releases Last but certainly not least is the press release. This classic form of public relations is a standard part of any web marketing campaign, but it goes above and beyond by allowing you to target a wide distribution. Most people when they produce a press release for the Internet just want a few links and a quick boost to their search engine ranking. However, if you write a press release for a newsworthy story, you drastically increase the chance that your release gets picked up by an online, local or even a national news source. Heck, if you can get your press release syndicated in Google News or Yahoo! you can generate huge amounts of traffic. Press release distribution can be done on a number of sites such as PRweb.com or Bizwire.com. The largest distribution channels tend to cost 56
Top 7 Ways to Drive Floods of Traffic to Your Website money, but they also heighten your chances of getting picked up by a major print or online news source.
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#7 – Media Buys The last method I'll talk about is the media buy. A media buy is a very simple method that can have a huge impact on your traffic in a very short period of time, but be aware that media buying costs money – sometimes quite a bit of it. This is the kind of advertising where you can generate thousands upon thousands of visitors to your site in just a few days, but before we get to that point, I want to lay out exactly what you’re dealing with because it can get pricey very fast if you’re not careful. What is Media Buying? A media buy is when you purchase an insertion on a website or in a newsletter and pay either a cost per impression or a flat monthly fee. Instead of using networks like Google AdSense to place ads, larger websites tend to sell their ad space directly. You can buy that space for a set fee per month through a broker website and sometimes directly through the site owner. BuySellAds.com A great example of a media buy service is BuySellAds.com :
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Top 7 Ways to Drive Floods of Traffic to Your Website Buy Sell Ads is a marketplace of sorts where you can purchase advertising space on a website. The massive collection of websites with available ad space represents a fantastic opportunity for our media buy campaign. To get started, click on “Buy Ads�.
From here, we can browse the inventory and then look for sites in different niches. Make sure to look carefully for sites that match your niche.
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Of course, just because a site doesn’t appear on BuySellAds doesn’t mean they don’t sell ad space. If you see a website on which you would like to advertise, even if you don’t see an ad on the current site, feel free to email the site owner and ask about their advertising policy. You may find that they just haven’t thought about it yet and you can get a great deal by being the first to buy ad space from them. Of course, media buying isn’t solely about buying ads on large websites. You can also purchase ad space in newsletters that go out via email or on blog posts. Sponsored blog posts are a fantastic way for niche bloggers to make money and for you to get direct, targeted traffic to your site. 5 Tips for Media Buys
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Top 7 Ways to Drive Floods of Traffic to Your Website While media buying is a great way to get a lot of traffic very fast, there are some downsides as well. Of the seven methods of getting traffic we’ve discussed, this should be the last one you try, if only because of the high cost of entry. You need cash to use this method and there is a good chance you could lose that cash if you don’t pick the right site or the right opportunity. If you do pursue media buys, here are five tips to keep in mind. 1. Only Embark on Media Buys if You Are Prepared to Lose at Least $1,000 Up Front in Testing Media buys are pricey. At a glance we can see that some of the ads on BuySellAds cost upward of $500 or more for a month of exposure and those probably aren’t the biggest and most visible ads on the site. Be prepared to lose money – sometimes upward of $5,000 or even $10,000 if you’re not careful. Consider this the cost of your education as you adapt to the learning curve. This is not a game to play if you are tight on cash or are trying to stay close to a budget. 2. Media Buys Usually Are Most Successful in Wide General Niches like Weight Loss and Make Money Online There is a reason that so many people promote products in these two niches – they are highly profitable and have a nearly endless supply of new buyers year after year. So, when you purchase ad space in these two niches, your prospects are not only more likely to click the ad, they’re more likely to convert. That means you’ll pay more money for those ads and it’s easier to find sites on which to place your ads. Don’t be too discouraged though. If you are in a smaller niche, you can still make money with media buys. You just need to research and choose your targets carefully. Using Quantcast Quantcast is a powerful research tool that provides demographic data on any website in its database. For example, we can take a website we found on BuySellAds.com and put it into Quantcast to learn about its traffic and demographics.
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When we put the site name into Quantcast we find the following demographics:
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Of these numbers, the most important to me are the age, income, and gender of the visitors. If you’re aiming for an ad in the weight loss niche, historical data tells you that women over 35 tend to be the best target demographic. Every niche has a good audience, and your job is to find out who they are and what they are looking for. Keep in mind that some sites won’t display data for non-US traffic, so it’s good to check first and see what percentage of visitors come from each country. It’s possible to test for these demographics without the data, but I like to have that data first. It’s a lot of money to spend without at least a partial guarantee that the right people will see your ads. Just remember; if you choose a niche that isn’t as big as “make money online” or “weight loss”, make sure it’s targeted. Choose a related site that has visitors who are likely to click on your ad. 3. Customize Your Ad to the Website You’re Targeting I always go back to my buddy Charlie and his Melissa Joan Hart website when I think about this. Instead of using the generic banner ad sent to him by the dating network, Charlie created his own banner customized to his website.
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Top 7 Ways to Drive Floods of Traffic to Your Website You should do the same. Unlike with Google AdWords, you know exactly where your ad will be displayed, so you can choose how your ad looks and how it will be targeted to your particular audience. How you do this depends largely on your audience, so make sure to do your research beforehand. 4. Check the Demographics of the Website’s Audience Before Placing an Ad Be thoughtful when choosing websites. For example, if you happen to sell a dating product, you don’t have to buy media space only on sites related to relationships and dating. You could place that ad on a video game site or a PHP programming site and target the site’s most likely demographic. For example: “Tired of being stuck at home coding until the wee hours of the morning? Get out, get social, and find your soul mate. Click here!” It’s not a perfect example, but you get the idea. We targeted the specific demographic for this website and then linked it back to our product. You can do the same for almost any niche. 5. If a Media Property is Sold Out, Try to See if They’ll Make a New Placement for You Don’t be discouraged just because a website didn’t have space, or you couldn’t afford the space that they did have. Remember that these sites are trying to sell ad space. If you offer money for a space that they haven’t designated, there’s a good chance they will accept your offer. For example, if you notice there’s a small 100x50 space on the top right corner of the site that is near other ads but not currently being used, why not send them an email and offer to purchase that space? Just because the same size space on the other side of the screen is sold out doesn’t mean you can’t advertise on that website. Never give up before seeing if they can accommodate you. One Last Note on Media Buys Media buys are popular because they can provide massive surges of traffic from a key demographic. But, they are also expensive and there is no guarantee that the surge of traffic you get will buy your product. That’s why you need to do your research and carefully choose which sites you place ads on. This is a great tool, but only if you’re prepared for possible heavy losses as you learn about your niche. When you get to that point, this can help you really amp up your 64
Top 7 Ways to Drive Floods of Traffic to Your Website profitability. It may not happen tomorrow or next month, or even this year, but eventually media buys could be a big part of your marketing plan. In general, you can’t go wrong with any of the traffic generation methods outlined in this book. I’ve been using these strategies for more than a decade. And I can tell you that with the help of everything you’ve just read, I continuously and repeatedly find success in dozens of niches. This isn’t a comprehensive resource by any means. If you feel overwhelmed, remember that this is just a primer. You can take these ideas one at a time and build your marketing plan from the ground up – there’s no need to try everything at once. But, when you approach your website systematically and build traffic bit by bit, you will find success in ways you didn’t imagine before. So, be persistent and learn from your mistakes – in due time you’ll be well on your way to producing a profitable, successful traffic generation plan for your website.
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Top 7 Ways to Drive Floods of Traffic to Your Website Traffic Travis Version 4.0 Every traffic generation method in this report has one thing in common. You need accurate data to be successful. That’s why I created Traffic Travis.
We’ve built the software from the ground up to provide an intuitive, easy to use interface with even more data collection options than in previous versions. I’ve already told you about a couple of the bonuses you get with purchase of Traffic Travis. You get interviews with an offline marketing expert and another with an SEO genius explaining 18 different link-building strategies. You’ll also receive a nearly 2 hour interview from a fellow marketer who has successfully built and now runs an SEO consulting business to the tune of $2 million per year. I also go into much greater detail about specific email marketing strategies (and the psychology behind them) in a special presentation. The bonus content you get with Traffic Travis 4.0 is worth the price of entry alone – even if you weren't getting the software. Getting Great Value Imagine you start PPC advertising for your website and end up paying around $0.25 per click for traffic. For the price of the Traffic Travis version 4.0 package, you'd be able to get 388 visitors to your website.
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Top 7 Ways to Drive Floods of Traffic to Your Website If Traffic Travis helps you get just 388 visitors to your website, it will have paid for itself and then some. Combined with the sage advice you get in those bonuses you’re going to be able to get much more than a mere 308 visitors - we’re talking about a difference of thousands here. As you can tell, I’m extremely proud of what we’ve done with this new version of the Traffic Travis software. I hope you’ve enjoyed this guide and that you’ll at least drop by and check out Traffic Travis and what else this software can do for your online business. Have a wonderful day and hopefully I’ll see you in the member’s area soon!
~Mark Ling, Founder of Traffic Travis
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