BOOST SEO RANKING AND TRAFFIC

Traffic From Blogging

Blogs are a wonderful way of getting traffic and building relationships – either with your own blog or through other peoples.

Blog Commenting

This is one of my personal favorites and it works extremely well.

Visit other blogs in your niche and then add comments to posts which you feel you can contribute to (this can be a question, challenge, feedback, or an addition to the post).

The secret is to make your comments engaging and thoughtful, and then include a link in the box provided back to your website.

The chances are you‟ll already know some popular blogs in your niche, but if you don‟t then they‟re easy to find using Google.

After a while, if you regularly comment on a particular blog you can also begin to build a relationship with the blog owner, which could lead to backlinks, interviews or the chance to appear as a guest blogger. Another benefit of posting regularly is that many blogs have a „Frequent Commentators‟ box or similar – giving you extra exposure.

It‟s always good if you‟re the first person to leave a comment on a particular post because that means you‟ll be at the top and more likely to get read. If you sign up to a blog's RSS feed, you will be automatically updated when a new blog post is published, so this is easy as long as you‟re quick.

Another good strategy is to find posts which appear to be popular (posts which already have a lot of comments) and add an additional one. The reason for this is that people keep coming back to these posts and you can find yourself getting traffic back to your sites YEARS after the original post was made.

The best piece of advice I can give with blog commenting is to simply join in the conversation. Add your own personal thoughts to the original post and try to make your comments interesting and worth reading. Don‟t just post one liners (e.g “great post”) as this is boring and people will see through the fact that you‟re only doing it to advertise your website and get your link on there. Post an intelligent response to the original post and people will start to think “this person is worth checking out” and they will .

Guest Blogging

Becoming a guest blogger on a popular blog can get you tons of exposure. After a little while of posting valuable comments, send an email to the blog owner letting them know how much you enjoy their blog and after a couple of email exchanges ask if you can do a guest post on their blog. The worst they can say is 'no', but in my experience more often than not the answer will be an unequivocal 'yes' – it‟s free content for them (many marketers are extremely busy and don‟t post to their blogs as often as they would like, so you‟re really doing them a favor.) Make it a condition that you can include a link in the article back to your website and you‟ll generate a lot of highly targeted visitors, whilst boosting your credibility because you‟ll become associated with the other marketer or blog and thus making you an authority source.

Start Your Own Blog

Having your own blog is pretty essential for an internet marketer and they are GREAT for generating traffic. You can link directly to your sites from your blog pages, whilst mentioning your products, services (or including affiliate links) in your blog posts. A good blog can give you a centre point in your business. It builds a community around you and your websites, and the search engines LOVE them. Your posts will get indexed pretty quickly, and you‟ll get lots of traffic from the links you have in there.

Submit RSS Feeds

Once you have a blog, submit the RSS feed of your blog to as many sites as you can. The more sites that you can include on your RSS feed the better, as there will be more opportunities for people to find and click through to your blog. A list of good RSS feed sites can be found here: 

http://www.rss-specifications.com/rss-submission.htm

Get Pinging

Always ping every blog post that you create to help spread the news of your new blog post far and wide over the internet. Try http://www.pingomatic.com

Facebook

Using a Facebook Page to Promote Your Blog

A Facebook fan page is an ideal way to promote your blog. Social networking is rife with opportunities to drive traffic, particularly to kick start a viral marketing campaign. Facebook has two specific tools which can assist greatly with this – Facebook pages and Facebook applications.

The most important thing to remember when creating Facebook Pages and Applications is to give people a good reason to join. It could be a free report, money off a product or even 1 cent to everyone who joins.

Facebook Pages

Facebook fan pages can be set up on practically anything. It could be a product, brand or service, but my favorite type are off the wall ones, like “Sleeping with One Leg Out the Cover” and “Flipping the Pillow to Get to the Cold Side”.

Can you see the viral potential of a quirky Facebook page? One wacky idea can lead to a huge viral following, and lots of traffic. If you sold bedding products, the above examples would be very clever.

According to Facebook, there are already 1.4 million fan pages, which collect more than 1 million new fans everyday. That is powerful stuff, particularly as the traffic for these pages are ready and waiting on Facebook.

Once you create a Facebook page (via http://www.facebook.com/pages/create.php) you can get instant traffic to the websites you put onto your Facebook page by clicking the 'suggest to friends' link.

Next invite people to join your new Facebook page, as when they join their status will show that “[Joe Bloggs] became a fan of [Facebook page name]” and even more people will see this and join, thus viral marketing is unleashed.

I think that the best approaches that you can take to create viral Facebook pages are the wacky idea, something „human‟ such as “I like driving in the dark”, or a Facebook page dedicated to things that people are passionate about, like tattoos or piercing.

If you need ideas, then looking at places like Yahoo Answers can give you lots of inspiration. Remember, Facebook users love fun and wacky stuff.

Facebook Applications

Please do not skip this option and assume that this method of marketing is far too technical to even consider – it isn‟t. In fact it‟s very easy to create a Facebook Application by using the application tool found here: http://apps.facebook.com/appstudio/wizards.php

You can create any of the following applications:

Games are very popular, and so are quizzes. This tool enables you to create your own application without you needing to know any sort of programming.

You can put links to your own websites within the application to get the traffic

to go to your websites.

Facebook applications are very popular and many people love adding applications to their profile, hence the reason that they are so viral. Once again, any application downloaded will show up on the Facebook status bar, which aids viral marketing.

So get your thinking caps on and get creating applications that go Facebook wide. This is one of the best kept secrets in internet marketing.

Twitter

Using Twitter to Generate Traffic 

Twitter is a wonderful tool which can help you drive traffic to your various websites. Let‟s look at how to do it…

You may or may not have a Twitter account already, but for the purposes of this report, we'll start at the very beginning.

It's very easy and free to sign up at http://www.Twitter.com.

The one thing you really need to concentrate on is your profile and your one line bio. You have to make yourself sound exciting in 160 characters, as this is what many people will read in making their decision on whether to follow you or not.

You might also want to consider creating a background in order to differentiate yourself and offset yourself from other Twitter users. Some people create backgrounds that have all their contact details on so that their followers know how to get in contact in other ways than just using Twitter.

Now you are ready to tweet. Before you start looking for followers, make sure you have at least a few tweets to your name as an empty page is a turn off when asking people to follow you.

Tips on Tweeting

A quick warning here! Do not send out too many promotional tweets. A good ratio to have is 9 informational tweets to 1 promotional tweet. This way you will not lose too many followers and keep attracting new ones.

To establish yourself on Twitter, you will want to post lots of good content on your Tweets. You can send your followers links to other articles, press releases, blog posts etc to get even more visitors to your websites.

Try to keep your posts interesting and personal as this will let people find out more about you and your business. People do business with people they know and trust - and Twitter helps us achieve this.

Ensure that you regularly post tweets, as the more you tweet the more traffic you can send to your websites. Followers are more likely to stick with people who twitter regularly, so set up some kind of tweeting schedule.

A good way to convert followers into customers is to send tweets about free seminars, or video training that they can attend, with a small sales pitch at the end.

Re-tweeting is a good habit to get into as well, as this will help you get followers. Re-tweeting is where you tweet about another tweet that somebody else made. By re-tweeting what you find interesting it provides value to your followers, and if they like what you refer them to they will begin to trust you. You will also start to build good relationships with the original tweeter, who may very well return the favor and re-tweet your interesting tweets.

Finding Followers

Next, we need to find followers. Over the long term, the best way to do this is to post great content. If your tweets are interesting enough, people will follow you without you having to do too much work.

But in the early days how DO you get people to follow you?

A good strategy is to look at the other people who are operating in your niche. Find them on Twitter and then look at who their followers are and follow them.

You should find that quite a few people will return the favor and follow you back.

Once you‟ve got a few followers, you become more credible to other Twitter users. Post good content and make your Tweets interesting and you can easily start to build a loyal following.

Twitter Tools to Help

In an ideal world, we could easily spend hours on Twitter, but this is not always possible and there are tools available to help us make the most of Twitter.

Some people send tweets every day, and although this is a good idea we don't always have the time. A tool called Future Tweets (found at http://futuretweets.com) means we can automatically post prepared tweets at predetermined times.

There are so many tools available for Twitter – way too many to mention here, so do a Google search for 'Twitter Wordpress plug-in" and "Twitter tools business" to open your eyes to the amazing variety of what is available.

Twitter Checklist

Here is a little Twitter checklist that you can keep next to your computer to help you make the most of Twitter as a traffic generating tool:

- Shout to the world that you‟re on Twitter

- Send informational tweets regularly. (Remember our ratio - 9 informational: 1 promotional)

- Re-tweet any good tweets you come across

- Reply to the tweets addressed to you, as this builds relationships

- Pay attention to the kind of tweets you‟re sending (make them personal and sometimes talk about every day stuff. People love gossip.)

- Listen to what people are tweeting - can you help?

- Build relationships.

Forum

Forum is an excellent way to generate traffic for free, whilst once again boosting your reputation and making you seem like an expert in your field. Get it wrong however and you may find yourself being banned from the forums quite easily, but get it right and in my experience you‟ll see some pretty good results.

Forum marketing is a great traffic generation method. Not only can you get good backlinks from your keyword rich signature, you will also get lots of curious people clicking through your signature link, and it opens up many opportunities to network with people.

- First, you need to determine your niche and find appropriate forums to join. You want to find ones where posts are made on a regular basis, so don't bother with any that haven‟t had any new posts in the last week.

- Be sure to read the forum rules, as most have their own specific policies and they can vary greatly from forum to forum. If no signatures are allowed, then I would probably avoid the forum, unless it was very busy and could be used for networking purposes.

- Create an interesting signature that uses your main keywords and your unique selling proposition to direct people to your website. Always check the forum rules, as it may be that you are not allowed to have a signature until you have x number of posts. It is good to put some thought into what you want to convey in your signature. If you can make it attention grabbing but not „salesey‟ then you should get plenty of clicks.

Article

submitting your websites to is Web 2.0 sites, like http://www.squidoo.com and http://www.wetpaint.com These get indexed by the search engines very quickly and they have high page ranks associated with them.

It makes no difference what market you're in, find someone who has a better page ranking and has a good status within that niche and submit articles to them.

Getting More Views on EzineArticles.com

Lots of people still view and use sites like EzineArticles – it‟s excellent for traffic. Here are a couple of ways to get even more traffic from these sites…

We have all seen (at the bottom of each article) “Most Viewed” and “Most Published” and probably thought “how come I can never get on those bits.” Well here is how!

The easier of the two to get into (with a little trick) is the Most Published section. You will need the EzinePublisher URL from your article, which you will find at the top right hand side of the page (after you have already submitted it, obviously). At the top of your article, there is a list of icons, and below the printer icon is a link that says “EzinePublisher”. Click this and get the URL to this link.

What you need is for people to click onto this EzinePublisher link and that is how you get into the “Most Published” section. So now you have it, you need to promote this EzinePublisher URL to as many of the different social bookmarking sites as you can - Mixx, Reddit, Digg, Propeller etc. This can be done semi-automatically at Onlywire.com.

Tutorial

You can write tutorials for almost anything, so if you have a website that relates to web development, SEO, marketing or internet marketing, graphic design, wordpress or programming etc then use tutorials to get swarms of traffic to your site.

Write some good, detailed, useful tutorials and submit them to the following sites:

http://www.instructables.com

http://www.tutorialized.com/

http://www.webdesignbooth.com/

http://tutorial-index.com/

http://www.tutorialsgarden.com/

Traffic From Press Releases

Press releases are great for getting numerous backlinks and traffic to your website fast. It‟s a technique I have used numerous times to great effect – yet not many people in the internet marketing world are doing it!

Just be sure to pick a good keyword for your press release, using the keyword research method described later on in this report, and make sure that your press release is actually NEWSWORTHY – which in my opinion is the most important thing. Ask yourself why somebody would be interested in your press release. If it‟s all about your product or your company then chances are that people won‟t be.

The advice offered here can help you get onto the first page of Google News with ease, but first, let's look at the benefits of getting onto Google News:

- A press release on Google News will send you a lot of traffic, and there is also the potential that a journalist could pick up your news story and help you spread it internet wide.

- Your press release will be indexed all over the place. This is not only Google, but Yahoo, Ask and a whole selection of other search engine bots.

- Google News has a Page Rank of 9, so you'll get great link juice from submitting your press release to them. There are also lots of websites that syndicate Google News, so the potential for great backlinks and traffic is huge.

Video Traffic

Videos are great for traffic – and they are becoming ever more effective by the day.

Why not turn your articles into videos?

When you think about it, quite a few people either don‟t like reading or they just prefer to watch and listen to a video. So turning your articles into video form gives you access to these people.

The easiest way to do this is by doing a Powerpoint presentation and recording it with software such as Camtasia (which is available on a free trial.)

All you have to do is pop on your headset and read your article aloud (it helps if you can somehow make it sound like you‟re not reading from the page – quite easy with a bit of practice.)

If you‟re camera shy then don‟t worry because you don‟t even need to show your face, or alternatively you could get someone else to do it.

If it helps you can put in screenshots to aid and visually enhance what you‟re saying. This is especially useful if it's something technical where it helps to show images or diagrams to get the message across clearly.

Once you have created your video you should submit it to as many video sites and video directories as you can. Try the usual suspects first - YouTube.com or Tubemogul - where you can submit your video to various different sites for free (and obviously these sites get TONS of traffic – the potential is absolutely huge!)

Doing this alone will create traffic for you, but with certain sites, you can dramatically up the amount of views the video gets by adding video responses to other peoples videos which you come across and find useful. YouTube is one such site, so let's go through what you do to add video responses on YouTube.

Firstly submit your video, then find another video that relates to yours and has lots of views to it. Once you've found a related video you like, look below it for a section called “Video Responses” and on the right hand side of this will be a link that says “Post a Video Response”.

Click this link and you will go to a page where you can post your response. In the middle of this page is a link that reads “Choose a Video.” From here choose the video and click on “Respond With This Video”.

Now you can return to the related video you chose and you will see that your

video is listed in the Video Responses section. That's it really – it‟s not only simple but this can get you thousands more views to your video, which will in turn create amazing amounts of traffic. Please however make sure you choose a video that is related to the topic of yours (and is of good quality), otherwise you probably won‟t get the results you‟re looking for.

Social Bookmarking

People bookmark their content, so that it is indexed on Google and other people get the opportunity to rate the content. But how many people strive to get onto the first page of Digg, Mixx, StumpleUpon etc? In my opinion this is where the real traffic can be generated.

It is easy to get on the front page and get more views if you know the secret sites to help you do just this. There are four that I'm going to tell you about right now: SocialElves, StumbleUpon Ads, Mechanical Turk and Short Task.

SocialElves

SocialElves is a social media marketing agency dedicated to helping you get onto the front page of Digg. Not only do they add plenty of Diggs to up the rating of your story, but they offer help in constructing a good story to post on Digg, to get it to the front page and make it stick.

If you want to get on the front of Digg, within the next 48 hours, then I recommend that you try http://www.socialelves.com. This is a paid service, but very effective.

StumbleUpon Advertising

StumbeUpon advertising is a little like Adwords in that you pay 5 cents per view of your website. They will direct targeted visitors to your website, and it is a very useful and cheap way to get relevant traffic to your free gifts, paid products and contests. You can get more details here: http://www.stumbleupon.com/ads/

Mechanical Turk & Short Task

I expect that many of you have heard of Amazon Mechanical Turk (https://www.mturk.com/mturk/welcome), but Short Task (http://www.shorttask.com/) is a little less well known and does the same job.

The downfall of Mechanical Turk, at the present time, is that you can only post jobs if you are a US resident. Short Task is open to people all over the world.

Many people do not realize the marketing power of these sites, as you can get people on these sites to do almost every simple task you can think of for mere cents.

If you want people to Digg your content, you can ask them to do this and get enough Diggs to appear on the front page.

If you want people to vote for a video or leave comments on YouTube, you can set up a HIT on Mechanical Turk, or a task on Short Task, very easily. You just need to have a little look at what other people are doing and charging for a similar task to yours, then follow the online instructions to set up your own HITS or Tasks.

These are indeed exciting finds, which can be utilized for very cheap traffic generation, with little work on your part. Basically, they are really cheap outsourcing sites.

Join in with NING

This is surely one of the internet‟s best kept secrets.

Go to http://www.ning.com and do a search to find a community in your niche. When you find one with over 1000 members, come right back here, so I can tell you how to utilize this fantastic traffic source.

Ning is a social networking site of sorts, so you will need to get involved, add some friends and create a profile, but it is so much more than your average Facebook (although Facebook is also a good place to generate traffic, as we discussed earlier in the report.)

What makes Ning special is that it is a community of targeted people in your niche and every time you post articles, blog posts or videos it will be displayed on the front page of that community for all to see. This means there are going to be a whole lot of eye balls looking at your content. This is powerful stuff and best of all it‟s free.

Create some good content and post it to Ning. Have a look at the communities and get a feel for the kind of things people offer in your niche. Check out what is popular and post some content.

GET TRAFFIC IN A HURRY

When you want traffic in a hurry, this is a great fast system to start the traffic flow to your website.

Choose a competitive keyword and set up a page on your website or blog with the selected phrase scattered over the page or post.

• Submit the web page or blog post to a number of social bookmarking sites through http://www.onlywire.com or http://www.socialposter.com. If this is your first time to these sites, you will need to spend some time signing up to each of the individual social bookmarking sites. This is the only time you'll need to do this, as the logins will be recorded permanently on these sites, to use as often as you need.
• Ping your website with http://www.pingomatic.com
• Create a blog at http://www.blogger.com, with your keyword used in the blog name, and create a short post with the chosen keyword, linking to your website or blog post.
• Ping your blogger post with http://www.pingomatic.com
• Submit the RSS feed of the blogger post to RSS feed directories You can find a list of places to submit your RSS feeds here: http://www.rss-specifications.com/rss-submission.htm
• Write a press release about your new website page or blog post (using selected keyword) and submit to http://prlog.org, http://free-press-release.com, http://www.prfire.co.uk, http://www.fgnpr.com and http://www.pitchengine.com
• Now bookmark the press release when it's published, on one of the sites with OnlyWire or SocialPoster and ping it with http://www.pingomatic.com
• Write a keyword optimized article about your new web page or blog post and submit to some Web 2.0 sites like http://www.squidoo.com and http://www.wetpaint.com. You can find a list of web 2.0 sites at http://www.go2web20.net/ and pick out a couple more places to submit your article if you like. You need to submit your article to Web 2.0 sites, rather than article directories, as they are published almost instantly, whereas article directories usually take a few days to publish an article.
• Take your article, press release, or both, and use them to create a short video with a voice-over and slides with the key points.
• Submit the video(s) to http://www.youtube.com and http://www.realpeoplerealstuff.com.You can also use the free video submission tool at http://tubemogul.com/ to submit to more video sites.
• Submit a classified ad with your chosen keyword to http://www.oodle.com, http://www.craigslist.org and http://www.usfreeads.com
• Join a forum in your niche, which has a lot of forum members and make a few posts with your signature advertising your web page or blog post, using your keyword.
• Using your article or press release as a base and create a podcast on http://www.blogtalkradio.com
• Lastly, Twitter about your new web page or blog post.

Source : www.searchengineoptimizationjournal.com