Google Reader recently added a “social networking” capability to Google’s feed Reader online app.
Here’s a screeen shot
The great thing about this is when you click the “X people liked this post” you’ll see a list of names. The names lead to profiles. The profiles lead to links. Why is this important: OpenID users are “filtering” themselves based on content they like. Talk about a targeted marketer’s dream come true…
Whenever a webpage lets users post live links that link out to sites outside, it’s a marketing opportunity. I’ll let you fill in the blanks on how to turn this into $$$.
Remember, folks: Don’t be evil. Use this awesome opportunity for good–use it to network and build relationships. Those are the kinds of traffic deals that pay off for the long haul.
Webmasterlabor.Com is testing out a new service to add to its portfolio of traffic generation services. As a subsidiary, we were tasked with testing out this service. Here are the results:
Facebook Traffic Service Analysis
Methodology: Create a facebook friend with thousands of friends. Send a link to friends to get traffic. This particular facebook page has a wide range of fans. Mostly females. Mostly over 20 years of age.
Site used for testing: We have a lightly promoted blog that is part of our site incubation program. It is an academics blog that targets individuals who want to go back to school. It is a blog that is in the very early stages of development and hasn’t been integrated to webmasterlabor’s traffic building processes. In other words, it’s the perfect candidate for a traffic test.
These are our findings:
Speed of delivery: Almost instant. Once the link was sent out , the blog started getting traffic.
Traffic Targeting: There is no targeting on the supply end–the fanbase for the page is what it is. Any targeting must be done on the demand side. We didn’t use a new theme for the target blog nor did we pick out a deep link that is targeted to the readers. This lack of targeting on our end had an impact on the results.
Traffic Improvement: There was a dramatic improvement from the day before. We used very very specific ad text so the traffic was pretty much “self-filtered”.
Traffic Quality: Due to the lack of targeting, the bounce rate was very high. Average stay was under 10 seconds. Most of the traffic was from the UK. Regardless, the blog saw a steep rise in daily income.
Income Improvement: The blog went from less than 20 cents per day to over $1 per day. Fivefold increase. The blog was very lightly promoted before. Almost no linkbuilding.
Conclusion: Tweak your site first. Make sure it matches the demographics and geography of the traffic source. Both content and language should appeal to the fanbase. Text should be highly specific so your traffic is self-filtering. One possible improvement would be to offer a service that does CUSTOM FANBASE recruitment.
For further inquiries regarding this service, contact Webmasterlabor.Com here
This is the third installment of our 5-part series analyzing the “Top 50 ways to Drive traffic to your Site”. The previous installments: Part 1 and Part 2.
21. Participate in a banner or link exchange program.
How it works: In exchange for showing a free link exchange network’s banners on your site, the network will give you credits to show your banner on another site’s pages. This system works on a credit system--your banner’s appearance on another site depends on how many times you show the network’s banners on your site.
Pro: Free. Some networks are sorted by category so you have SOME control over where your banner will appear.
Normally, these banner exchange networks are very flexible and they allow you to drop out anytime.
Con: Categorization is still a hit and miss affair. If your site’s niche is fairly well-known and popular, it will be easier to find banner exchange programs that can deliver targeted traffic to your site. However, if you are a longtail blogger or niche product/service marketer, this traffic generation method might be of little value because your category is not included or might not match the “closest related” category the network might put your site in. Another problem with this method is that banners, generally speaking, don’t perform as well as text ads. Text ads are direct and, with the right copywriting skills, more descriptive and persuasive than banner ads. There IS such a thing as banner ad burnout. Internet users have been ‘trained’ by saturated banner and Google Adsense adveritisng to ignore ad spaces. To fully leverage this traffic generation method and compensate for bad category targeting and bad conversion rates due to “banner blindness”, you would have to publish a whole lot of ads on your pages--this will make your blog/page look really bad and might turn off your site’s visitors.
WARNING: link exchange programs (and traffic exchange programs in general) can be cheated through the use of bots that run their fake hits through a proxy bank. The page views look like they are coming from different computers when they are actually just coming from one computer. These computers keep loading the pages where the banners are located so it registers as an “impression” in the banner network. The network then shows the bnaner at another site. Beware of this practice because you might end up just wasting your time and feeding your traffic to someone else.
22. Create a desktop application or webscript and give it away for free.
How it works: Your applications (desktop or server-based) draw users who need a one-time download or regular site visitors who repeatedly use your free webscript. Applies to firefox plugins, too.
Pro: You attract a highly specific population--people who need to use your application/webscript. This is a “self-filtering” traffic pool since only people who are interested in your software/script will come to your site to download/use it. This specificity allows you to show ads or site content that fits this target audience’s needs. One category of sites that routinely use this method to get traffic and generate ad views are “Free SEO tool” type sites. iWebtool is a very good example of a “tool traffic”-driven site. You can pair Aweber.com’s newsletter services with every giveaway of your downloadable application, firefox plugin, or “free lifetime membership” to your password-protected script to create a mailing list. The mailing list could yield sales for a long time.
Con: Scripts/software cost money. For every giveaway you plan to market, you’ll have to spend money on development fees. Another problem with this traffic method is that it assumes you know what kind of free tool people would flock to your site for. No one wants to spend thousands of dollars on tools that end up being used by very few people. One workaround to this problem would be to run surveys on your sites asking your users what online task they’d like to save time on. Build your specs based on these surveys. Another approach would be to consider your own experiences and come up with script specs that will save you time and effort.
23. Purchase the misspellings or variations of your domain name, or those of your competitors.
How it works: When people misspell the domain name of your site or your competitor’s, they end up on a page not found page. By buying mispellings you direct these searches to your site. Common “misspelling traffic” methods involve reserving names that sound alike (example: youtube.com vs. utube.com), plural vs singular, and taking out a repeated letter in a domain (example: hello vs. helo).
Pro: Relatively cheap way to, depending on your ‘target’ domain, get a lot of traffic. You are basically feeding off the established traffic/buzz of your target domain. The more traffic your target domains get, the higher your traffic load. Based on forum posts, this method works best for sites where the main domain holder also has an affiliate program like casino and adult sites.
Con: Depending on the domains you target, some domains may be protected by trademark law. ICANN regulations provide that if you register a trademarked domain and the trademark owner contests your registration, your domain (and its traffic) will be transferred over to the trademark owner after ICANN strips it from you. However, if there is NO trademark AND the domain is NOT distinctive (example: made up of commonly used words or words that are commonly used together), you have a good chance you can keep the domain. Another consideration to keep in mind--typo domains/variation domains ARE NOT free. Since they cost money, you might lose a lot of money if you register typos/variations that don’t get much traffic. There’s really no way to tell which of a domain’s variation will pass an ROI test. With the end of domain tasting (you register a domain, test it out for traffic, and ask for a refund after five days if the ROI is not there), domain buying in general has become a more costly proposition. For investment and traffic purposes, domaining used to be one of easiest ’slam dunk’ ways to make money online. Not anymore. The barrier to entry has gone up dramatically with the death of domain tasting.
24. Buy a domain name related to your niche that is already receiving traffic and forward it to your site.
How it works: There’s many sites (I recommend Hunting Moon and PDDW--I went to college with the guys behind these excellent services) that list domains that get traffic, have backlinks, and/or already have page rank. You buy a domain with these qualities and set up a redirect page going to your site using .htaccess
Pro: Very effective way to get highly targeted traffic. Very low effort required.
Con: Pricing is all over the place--from very cheap to very expensive. A lot of targeting is required on your part to make sure that the domain pays for itself. Always keep return on investment in mind. Also, Page Rank might be lost if you just redirect the page.
25. Pass out business cards with your domain on them everywhere you go.
How it works: Get cards printed with your domain name, description of what your website is all about, and hand them out.
Pro: Good way to piggyback on the impact face to face connections have in establishing credibility/rapport. More people are willing to enter into long term deals with someone they’ve met in person. Business cards also let you graphically set the tone/level of professionalism of your business’ image.
Con: Obviously not free. Not only do you spend money for printing out the business cards, design and layout and copywriting also cost money. However, the biggest problems with this traffic method are: No targeting and Bad conversion. The way the traffic method was written, you are supposed to randomly give out your cards “everywhere you go.” Bad move. Unless you’re going to a very specific business convention, giving out business cards randomly will get you very little results because the people you’re giving your cards to might not be your target audience/market. Go to a convention and you’ll have a better shot because these people ‘filtered themselves’--for example, only people interested in comics would go to Comic Con. Distributing your cards to targeted inviduals helps eliminate the second problem inherent in giving away business cards for traffic--conversion from physical card to actual site visit. For someone to type in a domain in a browser after hearing about it or reading a card or brochure, takes a lot of convincing. Just because someone knows a domain name, it doesn’t mean they automatically type it in a browser. They must have a REASON to do this. That’s why targeted card distribution works--only people with a NEED for or genuine interest in your service/product/content will type your domain in a browser.
Overall, we recommend this method for B2B (business to business) websites if the webmaster/publisher distributes the cards at a convention or some sort of industry meeting. For business to consumer websites, the ROI might not be there.
26. Start and affiliate program and let your affiliates send you visitors.
How it works: Affiliate programs are business arrangements where you pay other webmasters/website publishers for sending you sales/leads/emails/downloads. Each individual referring account is tracked by the affiliate management script you install on your pages or, if you don’t want a custom solution, you can use affiliate marketing programs’ own proprietary tracking systems. For examples of these programs, try share a sale or Commission Junction. The webmasters post your tracked link code on their sites, pages, software, or whichever way they promote online and whatever traffic comes in is tracked by the system. You pay only for results--no sale/lead/info collection no payment. Simple as that.
Pro: You only pay for results. You piggyback on the efforts and expertise of webmasters. Whatever expertise and efficiency they possess work to benefit you. Depending on how you set your affiliate system up, payouts and accounting are a breeze since everything is automated and stored in a database. It is also easy to change advertising materials if you’re using the right platform.
Con: The biggest problem with a standalone affiliate program is recruiting the right affiliates. Not all webmasters cater to your target audience. Not all webmasters run sites that are in your niche. How do you find them? How do you recruit them? Thankfully, there’s many webmaster forums available. Just do a search for “affiliate marketing forum” and you’re bound to get a list of these sites. Create an account on these sites and, if allowed, put a banner or text ad for your affiliate program in your “signature” line (your “sig”). Make targeted forum posts that emphasize your niche. Another way to get affiliates is to get your affiliate program site listed in affiliate marketing directories--just do a search for that term and you should be able to get a lot of listings of these types of directories. Finally, another way to get your affiliate program publicized is to hire an affiliate program promoter to find forums and directories and submit/market your program aggressively.
Affiliate recruitment is not a problem if you choose to use a network-based affiliate program. These websites have a recruited base of thousands of affiliates (example: cj.com and shareasale.com), all sorted into categories. When you join their network, they send out an announcement to webmasters in your niche category.
Regardless of whether you’re using an affiliate network or you run a standalone affiliate program, you will still face the following challenges when running an affiliate program: competition from other programs, dealing with webmaster recruitment conversion, and improving your active webmasters’ conversions.
Competition from other programs: Unless you’re selling products/offering content/offering services that are truly unique, chances are there will be other programs offering the same items as you. You can compete based on price, quality guarantees, and selection. Meet this challenge head on--don’t shy away! Get nice banners designed, get effective marketing copy written, and give away FREE CONTENT to your affiliates. Give your marketers the right to distribute your free ebooks, free articles, free images, and whatever else you can put your domain or live link on. Free content establishes credibility with the target customers. Free content is also viral as it gets passed on from one circle of influence to another. With each transmission, there’s a chance that a reader will connect with the materials and click on a link to get more information.
Dealing with webmaster recruitment conversion: It’s a fact of life in online marketing--the webmaster productivity funnel. For every 100 webmasters you market to, only a few will bother signing up to your program. Of the few that you managed to sign up, only a small percentage will actually install your affiliate code and send traffic. Of the few that are sending traffic, only a few will send substantial traffic or traffic that converts. Of these, only a few will remain with your program. Each stage in this funnel needs your active intervention if your affiliate program is to become successful. Here’s what you need to do: Maximize the number of webmasters you market to--join as many forums and submit to as many affiliate marketing directories as you can. Get your base number of potential webmaster recruits as high as possible. The higher the base, the higher the number of recruits (regardless of the dismal recruitment ratio). Use effective banners and convincing text link copy to increase your recruitment ratio. Advertise that you give out free content or tools or other goodies that either minimize the webmasters’ time or costs.
Improving existing affiliates’ peformance and improving webmaster retention: Once you’ve got webmasters to sign up--make sure to personally ask them how you can help them directly. Make a webmaster resource tool page which list tools that your affiliate webmasters can use to generate sales (content, traffic tools, and conversion tools). Establish a relationship and never let up. You can outsource this affiliate management tasks to a cheap virtual assistant company. Once the webmasters are sending traffic, aggressively monitor their performance and send them optimization tips and tricks. Offer them specialized landing pages or custom materials. Once they are sending sales, continue the conversation by brainstorming with them on how they can increase their site’s conversion ratios. If you take this proactive approach, you can minimize the negative effects of the webmaster productivity funnel.
27. Start a page on social bookmarking sites
How it works: Many social bookmarking sites are DO FOLLOW and have PAGE RANK. Many are also highly categorized and also very tag-driven. You submit your site to these services and list out the keywords, description, and tags you want your URL to be indexed with. This combination of factors give user-submitted links is Social Bookmarking sites an SEO boost. Just how much of a boost is open to debate nowadays since Google has reportedly started downgrading the SERP boosting effectiveness of social bookmarks in general.
Here’s a quick video explanation of how social bookmarks work
Pro: Free. You also get direct traffic from the social bookmark services’ installed base of thousands if your content is compelling and viral enough. You get a lot of flexibility on which tags you can use. Great for pairing main keywords and subkeywords. Great for building backlinks to a rotating set of keywords.
Con: Very time consuming. Automated tools are prone to banning due to the fact that automation tends to miss certain “guerrilla” tactics that manual seo linkbuilding employs. Depending on the site but sometimes filing your site under the wrong categories can render your submission worthless.
How it works: Just judging by the mammoth page views that Susan Boyle’s tryout at “Britain’s Got Talent”, Youtube delivers traffic--and lots of it! To use this method, you simply upload your video, send a notification to your newsletter subscribers, socially bookmark the video, send out notices on social networking sites, post about it on forums, and otherwise get the views up. The more REAL views the video gets, the more Youtube itself will publicize it to its other members. This drives more traffic to the video and upward spiral is created. How do you get traffic? Through links in the video description and in your channel page.
Pro: Explosive traffic if the video is compelling enough. You can put links that link out of youtube in the description page for the video and in your channel page (linked to your username). You can also improve your channel’s and videos’ traffic by using an attractive profile image (that don’t run afoul Youtube’s Terms of Service and copyright laws, of course) and postinga lot of comments on highly popular videos. Click here to get more Free YouTube Traffic Tips.
Con: You have to know how to boost your video’s page views if, for some reason, your video is not compelling enough. While you can do it using real traffic, there’s also automated bots available online that are very tempting. Don’t use them unless you’re prepared to risk getting your url banned on youtube. Youtube traffic is free but the cost of producing a compelling video may NOT be free. It depends on what kind of video you plan to use--funny video, tutorial, etc. Also, general Youtube traffic may not be the way to go. Untargeted traffic produces crappy conversions, normally. Sometimes the Zen Buddhist mantra of “Less is More” applies and it might apply to this traffic generation method--better to create a highly specialized and targeted video with similarly discriminating tags and get a few but high converting clicks than a video that will appeal to everyone (like the Susan Boyle video above) but generate few sales.
29. Conduct and publish surveys to your website.
How it works: Post a free survey on a topic that is relevant to your website’s topic/theme. Post the results. Publicize the results via Digg and press releases. People interested in the same topic/theme will come to your site to see the poll or read your analysis.
Pro: Great traffic generation method to use with the traffic method of issuing a press release. Not only do some press release sites publish categorized backlinks, they can also be used to publicize “newsworthy” events such as survey findings. Many news sites and agencies can also link to you or mention your poll in their surveys.
Con: The survey itself is free but the publication (via press releases) may not be. Also, the reason many scientific surveys and accurate polls get a lot of publicity is because of the credibility of the organizations running such polls. Also, the value of a poll depends on the sampling quality and, depending on the topic, quantity of the people taking the poll. So if your traffic pool is general in nature, their opinions on a particular specialized topic might not carry much weight with news agencies and sites.
30. Find joint venture partners that will send you traffic.
How it works: You find websites that already get a lot of traffic and you set up a special affiliate deal with them that gives them a larger payout or higher level of affiliate support as you would normally give to a regular affiliate. This deal might also involve a larger amount of custom content you produce for that affiliate. It can also involve a lot more customization. Generally, the discussion above regarding affiliate marketing applies to this traffic method as well. The scale just happens to be larger.
Pro: and Con: Generally, the same concerns as the affiliate marketing traffic generation method discussed above.
This entry is a continuation of our 5-part critique of the “Top 50 Ways to Drive Traffic to your Site.” Read the first installment of the series.
11. Add a link in your email signature to your website. It’s a free and easy way to get a little more traffic.
How it works: Configure your email client’s signature system to include your hyperlinked title or your raw URL along with a text description. Wherever your email ends up, someone can see your link and click it. Specially helpful if you send email to a groupmail system or you pass along a lot of annoying chain emails. Your sig is automatically added to the bottom of your email. Your link goes wherever the email goes.
Pro: Your signature adds a certain professionalism to your emails. If you use a sig when doing link exchange solicitations, it helps in establishing your credibility and legitimacy. Groupmail and chainmail emails bearing your signature often travel the globe many times over and going through tons of inboxes--provided the chainmail is viral enough. There’s no CAN SPAM provisionsagainst that because the email is non-commercial in nature and sent only from friend to friend In the case of groupmail, group members opted to receive email from the group.
Con: This traffic generation method depends heavily on how much you use email. If you only communicate with a small group of friends or a small business circle and the nature of the emails are fairly mundane, there’s very little chance your email will “surf’ the massive interbranching networks of friends’ emails. The “viral” ability of email, just like the viral ability of web content, depends in large part on the quality and nature of the email. Even if you were to consciously pass on chainmails, many of your friends in your address book might resent you for forwarding that crap. Overall, email signatures yield low traffic and have no obvious SEO/linkbuilding value (unless it gets published on a web page). Thankfully, creating and using email signatures doesn’t involve much time and can piggyback on your daily email activities. Otherwise, the traffic produced would not be worth the time involved.
12. Make a custom 404 error page for your website redirecting people to your home page.
How it works: When you update your site and delete pages or change file names or change directory structures, your visitors’ web browsers can’t find the page they were looking for and a 404 page appears. If you have a static website, use .htaccess to set redirect your 404 to your homepage. Here’s sample 404 redirection code.
Pro: Simple. Straightforward and easy. Great way to preserve traffic instead of wasting it on a bland/linkless 404 page.
Con: Tracking the lost/missing url the user was trying to access isn’t recorded. This information would be useful because it would tell you what page(s) you need to rebuild or at least tell you about the content your audience is looking for.
13. Use PPC search engine advertising.
How it works: You place a bid range for your keyword. If the user runs a search on the keyword, the search engine will show your ad based on your bid compared to other bidders and other considerations such as the quality of your landing page, etc. The 5 most popular pay per click providers are Google’s Adwords, Yahoo’s Overture, and the smaller players: Miava (formerly known as FindWhat.Com), 7Search.com, and Adbrite. All of them work on a similar model. However, Google Adwords has added features you may want to know about. Here’s an official Google Adwords video on how their auction works.
Pro: If you pick the right keywords, you can drive a lot of targeted traffic to your site/page in a very short amount of time. You can finetune your campaign to quickly find keyword combinations that produce the best Return on Investment (ROI). Here’s a great video on how to use Google Analytics to maximize your Adwords ROI
Con: Obviously not free. Also, it can get quite pricey if your click through rate is bad and your landing page’s Quality Score is not very good. There used to be a very common business model where you buy cheap keywords at a few pennies per click from Adwords and point the traffic to a page targeting higher paying keywords with Adsense ads. The profit is the difference between the per click rate Adsense payout and the per click cost from Adwords--factoring in conversion rates. This is called Adsense Arbitrage and it used to be extremely easy and lucrative. Google’s changes to their Quality Score plus wholesale elimination of many big Adsense accounts of arbitrage player has pretty much destroyed this business model. Many of the survivors moved on to Yahoo Publisher Network--buy cheap adwords keywords and dump them on YPN pages. There’s also the IAC workaround to this. Unfortunately, it’s not as lucrative as before. Regardless of whether you’re playing the arbitrage game or not, the Google Adwords Quality score system poses a formidable hurdle to webmasters who want cheap and easy traffic. You have to have a clear understanding of your target audience and the ROI of your keywords for you to make PPC ad buys work out for you (or just to break even).
14. Add a “bookmark this site” link to your webpages.
How it works: Add a small piece of code to your site which adds you to your users’ browsers’ bookmarks. Here’s one way to do it.
Pro: Nice and simple. Very quick to do.
Con: No real disadvantage but you may want to spice things up by using a nice looking graphic. Also, simple browser-based bookmarks just add your bookmark to the user’s browser--it isn’t public. You may want to add Sociable or other social bookmark plugins to your blog or use a standalone social bookmarking code for non-blog website. Why social bookmarks? Instead of just saving the bookmark in one person’s browser, the saved bookmark is searchable in a central site and can be accessed by other users. It also has SEO backlinkbuilding benefits. Here’s a good video on how social bookmarking works.
15. Have a tell-a-friend form on your site.
How it works: Nothing works better than word of mouth. We see ads all the time but we pay more attention to ads that our friends have vouched for or recommended. Why? It takes less effort and resources than personally investigating and researching something. Someone else already did the work for us. This is human nature. This dynamic plays out not just in buying products/services but also in meeting new friends and establishing new relationships.
In the online context, “Tell a Friend” boxes consist of simple code that you add to your site and your users enter their email address and name. There’s a box underneath where they can list out the recipients who they want to know about your site. The admin/setup of these boxes allows you to specify the message that is sent to the recipients. Here’s one free tell a friend script.
Pro: Free. Very easy. Great way to maximize your traffic--you’ve spent time and effort to get a person to visit and read your site. Maximize that visit’s value by giving that person an opportunity to voluntarily recruit people in his/her circle of influence to visit your site. Doesn’t take too long to set up.
Con: Established and l337 (“elite”) webmasters think is so 1996, cheesy, and “Old School.” Not all visitors would recommend--the numbers may be very minimal. Also, it doesn’t work for certain types of sites like adult, penis enlargement, or gambling or other types of “private” content. Regardless of these “drawbacks”, every little bit of traffic helps and “Tell a Friend” is an easy, free way to leverage your existing traffic’s friend network to get more traffic to your site. Moreover, the conversion rate for refer a friend type systems depends on the quality of your website content. If you have quality content, your content has a higher chance of going ‘viral’ through referrals.
16. Send articles to ezine publishers that includes a link to your website.
How it works: Many ezine sites have page rank and they pass some of this along to your target site when they publish your article. The links are usually included in the “About the Author” section.
Pro: Mostly free. You control the targeting level of your article since you can massage the keyword you’re targeting in the title and in certain areas of the article body. You can put up to two links in the about the author section to target differing pages on your target site. Many ezine sites have direct traffic so you can also get direct traffic. These articles can also be configured to sell directly so you can set your links to be redirect pages for affiliate sales landing pages.
Con: If you’re doing this for linkbuilding make sure you keep in mind Page Rank and Do Follow. The sites you are submitting to must have both of the above characteristics or else you might be wasting your time trying to build backlinks there. However, if you are trying to get sales from the articles, linkbuilding is irrelevant since you’re trying to convert the readers of these article ezine sites. Make sure you categorize your article correctly. Miscategorized articles don’t do too well both for linkbuilding and direct sales. See our prior installment and read up on the article submission section to see other “Con” drawbacks to this method.
17. Hold a crazy contest and make it go viral.
How it works: Sponsor a contest on your blog/site and publicize it. The contest terms must involve having the participants visit your site to either get more information or to register. You don’t have to offer money. Depending on your target audience, digital goods like ebooks or free services or links on your site should be enough.
Pro: Relatively inexpensive way to get new site visitors. Also, you can use the contest to build your newsletter/lead sheet by requiring contestants to give their name and email address. You can use free newsletter sites for this or use professional mailing list managers.
Con: There’s too many contests taking place on the Internet already. There’s even sites that just focus on contests. Users may already be burned out from too many contests. Even if your site users are not burned out on contests, contests are NOT by definition viral. Just because you’re giving away a prize, it doesn’t mean people are automatically going to flock to you. Successful contests focus on psychological triggers in their target audience to spread the word. It will take time, effort, and a lot of user profiling to get an idea as to what these triggers may be.
18. Give away a freebie (ebook, report, e-course) to keep people coming back to your site.
How it works: Figure out the key “secrets”, tips, methods, or special content that your users would want to PAY FOR and give it to them free. They have to sign up and register for your newsletter so they will be notified when the next installment is ready.
Pro: Low cost. You have to spend money on custom web content copywriting for the ebook/report/course materials. However, you leverage that cost by having users coming back to your site get the latest updates. You also get viral marketing benefits if your users share these ebooks with others since your ebooks will have your links in them. Remember to put links to your newsletter sign up page--let your ursers drive more users to your newsletter. This creates an exponential effect.
Con: It will take some effort to determine the content that your users would want so bad as to sign up to a newsletter to get it. This is not an easy “a priori” issue. It requires that you listen to your users’ feedback and create a real relationship with them. This is not for ‘drive by’ web publishers that just want to profit quickly from their users. Also, you have to structure your ebook distribution so that it does result in your users coming back to your site--return traffic is key. You can’t just give out the materials once and they never come back. Maybe instead of an ebook, the better approach would be to convert part of your site into a password-driven member content area. This means they will come back to your site for updates. It depends on whether you make money via site ads. If you make your money from direct links, newsletters should be good enough and there’s no need for the user to come back to your site.
19. Add an RSS feed to your blog.
How it works: The Old School way of viewing web content is that you have to type in the address in your browser or look up your bookmarks to visit the site you want to go to. Once at the site, you read the content. You waste a lot of time if there’s no new items/updates. RSS revolutionizes this process by having the content of sites you like COME TO YOU instead of the other way around. By installing RSS on your blog or site, you leverage the power of this great way of reading and distributing website content. Here’s a great video that explains it:
Pro: Very easy to do. Use wordpress or blogger, they have RSS feeds built in. Wordpress uses RSS 2.0 and other versions. Blogger.com uses the atom.xml format. Once your blog is up, submit your feeds to feed aggregation sites so your content “teasers” will be published at these sites or show up in the blogs of their subscribers. If you don’t know where to submit, you may want to use a blog RSS feed submitter service. Always ask for a report after they complete the work.
Con: Lots of scumbags will try to LEECH your feeds. There’s even wordpress plugins to put ‘blogging on autopilot.’ Why would they do this? Laziness. It takes time and effort to write quality category-relevant content. So they use RSS feed aggregators like icerocket to find niche-specific content and get the content through the feeds. They also strip out all links. What do they do with the content? One way is to post on their own blogs with their own ads--you provide the content, they make the money. Sucks, no? The other way is to post you content as updates on their sites for SEO purposes. Both of these practices HARM you because the content on your site might get dinged with duplicate content penalties and you don’t make any money/benefit from your content. How to fix this problem? Run your entries periodically through copyscape. Find where the duplicates are and investigate. Report the thieves to their hosts so their webhosting companies will close them down. Another solution is to set up your feed to produce only summaries--people will have to click on the link to go to your site and read the full entry.
20. Submit your site to any related niche directories on the net.
How it works: There’s many link directories on the internet that list, describe, and categorize websites. You merely just fill out a submission form and they review your site for quality. If they approve your submission, your link appears on their database--hyperlinked to your target url. Oftentimes, there’s a short description next to the link.
Pro: Relatively easy way to get backlinks. Not exactly free but cheap enough if done by a directory submission service. If you’re going to submit to only ONE directory, it must be DMOZ.
Con: Categorization is key. If you can, find directories that focus specifically on your category. These are very rare considering the tons of content categories available. Plan B is to find directories that have specific enough categories in their multi-category database. Make sure these directories have Page Rank and they allow search engine robots to FOLLOW the links to their specific listings. Submissions can be tedious. For best results, use differing descriptions for your site, rotate your titles, and submit deep links. One final note: Google and other search engines have continuously eroded the SEO value of directory-based links. However, these can be partly offset by highly targeted categorization, rotated links, and custom descriptions.
Photo Credits: KevinDooley
Here are the remaining items on the list which will be critiqued and analyzed in PARTS 3 through 5 of this 5 part series.
21. Participate in a banner or link exchange program.
22. Create a software program and give it away for free.
23. Purchase the misspellings or variations of your domain name, or those of your competitors.
24. Buy a domain name related to your niche that is already receiving traffic and forward it to your site.
25. Pass out business cards with your domain on them everywhere you go.
26. Start and affiliate program and let your affiliates send you visitors.
27. Start a page on social bookmarking sites such as www.wowzza.com .
The unattributed list below has been circulating in forums and reprinted on many “make money online” blogs since 2008. We’re reprinting it here to comment on each method individually. This particular reprinted list is from the reprint at iBanter — we’re reprinting the list here for “Fair Use” purposes of commentary and analysis.
1. Write and submit articles to the article directories.
How it works: The directories have Page Rank and they pass some of it to the links in the “About the Author” sections of the articles they publish.
Pro: Most article sites are free. Fairly straightforward and simple to do. Good for backlinks and direct traffic. For best results, pick only high value/high PR/highly categorized sites and submit manually.
Con: You run the risk of duplicate content penalties if you submit the same article to too many sites. Also, it helps tremendously if the article is categorized correctly and the article site’s permalink structure is search engine friendly. Using automated submitters produce less results than manual and ‘cherry picked’ submissions. If you’re not a writer, writing the articles might be a challenge. Fortunately, leased website copywriters are available for as low as $175 per month.
2. Leave comments on other people’s blogs with a backlink to your site.
How it works: The blog has Page Rank and it passes it through links in the body of commenters’ posts or in the hyperlinked names of the commenters.
Pro: Very effective way of getting backlinks from High Page rank sites.
Con: Wordpress comments are by default NO FOLLOW so link juice is not passed. Even if NO FOLLOW is deactivated (such as on this blog), the link builder cannot just use his/her keyword as a name. Many blogs require a real name only. Others require a name and allow for the keyword to follow. Example: “Jim – Funny Video Site”. For best results, the blog must be in the same category as the site you’re building links for. For Blogger/blogspot.com, comments are NO FOLLOW by default as well.
How it works: Yahoo Answers lists commonly asked questions regarding a particular topic. You answer a question in your site’s niche/category and stuff the useful and informative answer with keywords. You put your link as a ‘Source’. Yahoo’s own user database has tons of people that would click your source link so you get direct traffic.
Pro: Free. Great way to tap into Yahoo’s user base. Good for targeted direct traffic. Keyword-driven search results yield targeted traffic.
Con: The links don’t use text titles so SEO value is limited to begin with. Yahoo has since made the links NO FOLLOW which destroyed these links Google SEO value. Works best for frequent users not drive by “contributors”.
4. Post in forums and have a link to your site in your signature.
How it works: Whatever Page Rank the forum has is sometimes (depending on a few factors) shared with the links users place in the body of their posts or, to a lesser extent, their signature text links.
Pro: Free. Very easy way to get backlinks. You set your signature and you forget it. The more you post, the greater your links proliferate. Good addition to a daily linkbuilding routine if you visit and post on forums habitually. Some direct traffic.
Con: Link value is diluted by the tons of other links posted by other users. Signature-based links carry less weight than ‘in content’ (in post) links. The value of your backlink is greatly affected by how closely the forum you’re posting on meets the content category of the site you’re linkbuilding for. Also, many forums are now using NO FOLLOW tags for links, in post links, or both.
5. Write a press release and submit it to www.PRWeb.com .
How it works: PRWeb has a Pagerank of 7 and it passes on some of its page rank to links embedded in the categorized press releases published on its site.
Pro: Fast and relatively easy way to get a backlink from a trusted site. Not only do you get a backlink, your press release might be picked up sites that monitor PRWeb for category-specific releases.
Con: PRWeb is NOT free. The cheapest available package is $80. $80 for a backlink located on a site that has tons of other backlinks to other sites. To get full media distribution, you have to pay $360. You can get many more backlinks at cheaper rates from SEO linkbuilding services. However, periodic backlink building using PRWeb is probably a good idea to give new sites a good backlink start.
6. Advertise your website in the appropriate category on www.CraigsList.com .
How it works: Craigslist has a nice Page Rank. Posting your ad (with anchor text) in the right category lets Craigslist passes some of Craigslist’s link juice to your site.
Pro: Free. Backlinks from a nicely categorized high value site. Good for backlinks and direct traffic.
Con: Due to excessive spamming of Craigslist, posting has become more difficult since posters need a Phone Verified Account in order to post. This is quite a hassle specially if you’re not based in the US. Beware of scammers selling fake PVAs. Also, Craigslist employs some anti-spam measures.
7 . Give an unbiased testimonial on a product/service that you have used in exchange for a backlink to your site.
How it works: Highly popular or established product pages will have Page Rank. By posting your domain on their site they pass some of this PR to you.
Pro: Free.
Con: To get full SEO benefits, the product/service must be somewhat related to the niche/category of the site you are building links for. Finding relevant high page rank product/service sites can be time consuming. You are filtering for a) category b) Page Rank and c) do follow. Thankfully, there’s some tools that can make this task easier.
8. Start a blog and submit it to the 100’s of free blog directories.
How it works: Submission to any directory can result in some of those directory sites passing their PR on to your site.
Pro: Free. Third Party publishers that “leech” content off RSS feeds sometimes post your entries with your links intact.
Con: This opens you up to RSS hijackers which scrape your content and strip your links. You can protect yourself from this by setting up your blog to publish only summaries. This setting is in the “READING” section of WP setup. RSS feed hijacking can get so bad that the thieves sometimes rank higher than you for the keywords of your entry!
9. Manually submit your website to the major search engines.
How it works: Submitting your site to search engines reduces their effort in finding you. Once you’re in their database, they can index your pages, and rank them.
Pro: Saves the search engines time. Not like they care
Con: Based on personal experience and other webmasters experiences posted on forums, you get indexed faster if you submit to some key sites other than search engines. There’s even reports of submitted sites sitting for WEEKS without even one visit from Googlebot. Instead of submitting to the search engine, submit your site map using Google’s webmaster tools and submit to some major DO FOLLOW sites.
10. Optimize each page of your website for a particular keyword or search phrase.
How it works: Search engine spiders tend to be literal and, until recent developments, linear in their approach. You have to spoonfeed them as to where to go on your site and suggest what keywords to pick up. This makes for a more ‘directed’ system.
Pro: Free. Relatively straightforward.
Con: You need to expend some time and effort to find the right keywords for each section. Competitor analysis helps a lot but in order to beat your competition you have to find the right combination of keywords and subkeywords that have less competition from which you can build a backlink critical mass. This can lift your rankings for more competitive keywords.
This is the third installment of our 5-part series analyzing the “Top 50 ways to Drive traffic to your Site”. The previous installments: 
This entry is a continuation of our 5-part critique of the “Top 50 Ways to Drive Traffic to your Site.” Read the 
The unattributed list below has been circulating in forums and reprinted on many “make money online” blogs since 2008. We’re reprinting it here to comment on each method individually. This particular reprinted list is from the reprint at
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