Archive for March 14th, 2007

How To Build A Traffic Highway To Your Website

Every internet business needs traffic and lots of it. Traffic is the lifeblood of online businesses, therefore, any program you under-take to build a successful company or business online must incorporate numerous traffic generating strategies.

Assuming that you now have excellent products or service to market and all other internal plans well in place, now is the time to get down to real business of directing targeted traffic to your website.

The following tips are designed with you in mind to help creating the website traffic that is so essential to sales and profits online. Advertising is the key to internet marketing and search engine traffic will be the backbone or the main source for that continuous flow.

Yahoo/Overture and Google Adwords are excellent paid advertising to build traffic. It is unlikely that you will get the required website traffic without utilizing some of these paid advertising services, Overture and Yahoo, being so popular, it is futile not to avail yourself of their services.

Search engine advertising has brought real success to thousands of online businesses, why not yours? PPC or (Pay Per Click) is the term given to this way of advertising. With proper keyword selection related to your products or services this advertising method could be just what you need.

Another traffic building tool is to exchange website links with other businesses, this is called reciprocal linking and both parties normally benefit from this exchange of links related in some way to the business. When sites link to each other, they both share in the traffic generated by the efforts of each other. The more reciprocal links exchanged the more traffic that could be generated.

Viral Marketing:

This is a free or inexpensive way to spread the word on the internet about your company, business, product or service. This could be perceived as a sneaky way to advertise, by attaching your company name, product or link to certain media such as a funny video, entertaining games, interesting articles or gossip. People who are attracted to this kind of creative entertainment will pass it on to friends, relatives and acquaintances thus spreading the word wide and far.

Optimizing your website content for high ranking

Search engines rank your site based on well placed keywords and keyword phrases in your site content. Therefore the content on your site should be well optimized to take advantage of this requirement to rank high in search engine results. So, be warned when you write the content for your site.

Write and publish Articles about your business.

Submit your articles to article directories and publishers since they will have a large circulation of sites that will read and distribute the articles, giving you the exposure needed to generate much traffic. Write about special features of your business, product or service. Also include a resource box with your sites description and services plus a link to your website at the end of the article.

Become members of forums and online communities:
As members of these communities, you can write and post helpful articles along with a signature file with links to your business. This builds your credibility online, while creating much needed one way links to your site. This could boost your website ranking and traffic substantially.

Finally, publish a newsletter, as a credible and trusted net marketer, your readers will share this with many others thus creating loyal repeat visitors to your site and you will be able to market to this list forever. This list of traffic building tools is by no means final, with some imagination and creativity more ways can be found to add to these marketing strategies on and off line. (Selvyn Patterson - adsenseprofitsource.com)

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Making Money From Blogging Takes Time

I’ve been reflecting today upon the long term nature of having a business that makes money from blogging.

I am regularly asked by bloggers in their start up phase why they are not earning enough money from their blogs to go full time.

While I usually can find a variety of reasons - in the majority of cases it tends to come back down to the length of time that they’ve been blogging.

Why is length of time in successful entrepreneurial blogging for money so important?

There are a few reasons that come to mind:

* Quantity of content - I’ve been blogging for almost 3 years (in fact November will see me hit this mark) and in that time I’ve added over 11,000 pages of content. This is 11,000 possible entry points to my blogs in search engines. This quantity of content does not just appear.

* Search Engine Optimization - It takes significant time to become an authoritative and highly ranked site in the eyes of search engines. While it might be possible to rank highly on lower paying topics - to rise to the top of a competitive area is rarely achieved quickly unless you have a high profile, a lot of cash or get very lucky (or know something I don’t about SEO).

* Reputation - Building a reputation for yourself in real life takes significant time - the same is true for the online profile of you and/or your blogs. Good reputation builds incoming links, opportunities, bookmarks, RSS subscriptions, advertiser goodwill and loyal readership.

* Network - Connected with a good reputation comes good relationships and a network of contacts. Two years ago if I had wanted to start a new blogging project with someone else I would have had little chance of convincing anyone to join me - but since that time I’ve worked hard at my relationships with fellow bloggers (and other online and offline contacts) to the point now where my problem is becoming too many opportunities to collaborate.

* Web Smarts - I shudder when I look back at my first blogging efforts and how naive, ill-informed and poorly run they were. I have a long way to go when it comes to learning about the web, blogs, design, writing etc - but over time my own skills and knowledge in these areas have grown. You can read all the books, blogs and articles you want on blogging (and I’d encourage you to do so) - but so much of what you can learn about blogging for money has to come from on the job experience - which again only comes with time.

So if your goal is to grow a substantial online business - one of my main piece of advice is to take a long term view of it. While a very small percentage of successful online business people do seem to make it big overnight - the examples of this are increasingly becoming fewer and farer between. I believe you can still realistically expect to grow your business (at least to some extent) but think its worth reminding ourselves that like most things - successful blogging comes as a result of hard work, determination, smart decisions and time.

A few quotes to end with:

“Patience, persistence and perspiration make an unbeatable combination for success.” - Napoleon Hill

“Someone has defined genius as intensity of purpose: the ability to do, the patience to wait… Put these together and you have genius, and you have achievement.” - Leo J. Muir

“Genius is eternal patience.” - Michelangelo

Source: ProBlogger

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