Thursday, January 13, 2011

Introduction

Click Here!



Advertising your business effectively on the internet is still the
single most important skill to learn for any business to survive online.
So why is it so difficult to find the effective advertising sources you need?
I probably don’t have to tell you that the internet is full of free advertising. It
comes in many forms, from websites that advertise other websites, to text-box
ads on the sides of pages, to spyware, spam, blogs, bookmarking tools, & autosurfing…
There are almost too many ways to get visitors to your website or blog
now, because creative entrepreneurs are figuring out new ways to do it daily.
This industry has grown so large in fact that there are even many FREE ways to
get traffic to your website. Legitimate traffic for free… And plenty of it, too. This
represents an awesome opportunity for new business owners without a huge
advertising budget.
That’s what this Encyclopedia is all about. I’ve spent years exploring, building,
and testing these resources, and I’m going to share them all with you today. I’m
even going to review them all for you with quick-glance indicators that reflect
each free traffic source’s:
Quantity (How many visitors you can get.)
Quality (How Targeted the Visitors can be to your niche.)
Time to Delivery (How fast all of your traffic can arrive.)
They will be rated on a scale of one to five, 5 being the best possible. A Zero rating means that it’s not applicable.
It is my goal for this book to be a completely indispensable handbook for all online businesses that advertise.
A common misconception that many webmasters have is that all free forms of
traffic are very low in quality. Some will even quote the instances that software “bots” will be delivered as a visitor instead of a human.
Scams do happen from time to time, there’s no dismissing it. All of the traffic methods reviewed in this encyclopedia however, are genuine methods that are
usually scam free. A great benefit about using free advertising is that there’s no reason for a scammer to try to target you, since you’re not a paying customer. No
credit card number, no scam. A mild case of spyware is the worst you should
expect. (So get your anti-Spyware and anti-virus up to date before trying some of these!) The fascinating thing is that research has revealed that these forms of traffic are not usually just cheap, un-targeted surfers. There’s plenty of free Pay-Per-Click traffic out there, just as targeted as Google’s AdWords. In fact, when you get down to the “P” section, I’m showing everyone reading this book exactly where they can pick up their own free 100,983 visitors in paid, WELL-TARGETED
traffic! There are also free ways to get incredibly large amounts of traffic, that only require a modest amount of your time working on the front end. SEO, Link Building, and Article Marketing all can make your site the most popular site on the net for your niche market, yet they don’t cost a single penny to do correctly.
Furthermore, targeted traffic isn’t the only traffic you’ll ever likely need. I’m sure you would be ok with a couple hundred thousand semi-targeted or Non-targeted
visitors on your site tomorrow, building up your Alexa Ranking and showing the world how powerful a draw your website has… Also, with those kinds of
numbers, you stand to make more than just a sale or two, no matter how
unrelated the referring site is. I’m going to spill the beans on a method to do just that for you under the “Traffic
Exchanges” section. The rest of this book is just as useful, in fact, what I’ve mentioned here are not the only juicy bits! However, juicy or not, you must choose a strategy for your marketing efforts and stick to it, because different strategies require different types of advertising.
What it all comes down to is which KINDS of traffic you need for your marketing strategy. You’ll be sure to find a few in this eBook to fit your needs. So before we get started, let me reiterate that every technique in this encyclopedia is completely free for you to use to drive some form of traffic to your website with. All techniques listed here have been tested, not just by me, but by other online marketers and even ratings services in some cases.
There are no sources of traffic here that require you to use a credit card. (Unless you upgrade to some premium level of service, of course.) With these free
services alone, anyone easily build up enough traffic to their site to make you wonder how Google can charge so much for AdWords listings!
So why am I giving this knowledge away for free, instead of hoarding all the traffic for myself? I thought you might ask that… I certainly would.
You’ll find the answer to that question here under the letters “E” and “V” - This isa Viral eBook, which is one of the methods with the highest “Quantity” & “Time to Delivery” out of all free traffic generation types that there is. Yes, I’m getting tons of free traffic from this eBook, because it is so jam-packed with useful
information. Keep that in mind as you read any section of this book; no matter which of the methods you use to drive your traffic, it all works out in the end that the only real way to convince anyone online to visit your website is to offer them
something valuable.
Anyway, I hope you find this Encyclopedia as useful as many of my past readers
have, and that it helps to make your business a huge success, no matter what
that business is. I’m rooting for you, and if you ever need any advanced tactics
on any aspect of your Home Business, swing by the Home Biz Factory and I’ll be
sure to have just the training you’re looking for, all for free.
To Your Surefire Success!
Luke W Parker
The Surefire Success System
The Home Biz Factory

Affiliate Programs

If you have a website that sells a product online, and you’ve
built in a fair amount of room into your price for it, then you
have an opportunity here to use a GREAT free traffic source.
In fact, running your own Affiliate Program helps you in more ways than one. By
signing up affiliates to go out and sell your product for you, you’ll not only build a
huge salesforce, (assuming you make your offer tempting for them) but you will
also be building hordes of one-way, targeted links back to your website as they
advertise in the various places.
Drawbacks?
You must be very persuasive to get an interested following to do serious selling
for your product.
To overcome this issue, simply build more room into your price so that the
monetary gain for your affiliates is too tempting for them to refuse. 50%
commissions are quite standard these days on informational products, with some
products go all the way up to 100% commission structure, so that the seller can
build up a newsletter list.
I would have to say that, especially when dealing with Clickbank (the #1
infoproduct marketplace for affiliates) 75% commissions to your affiliates is the
way to go. That’s just because there are so many products out there competing
for an affiliate’s attention… So since 75% is the maximum that clickbank allows,
you’ll soon learn that affiliates will swarm to these products first and you’ll build
up a sales force (and incoming links) quickly. –And you can always turn down the
commission later.
Naturally, if your product is not available for online delivery (i.e. software only)
then the ability to attract affiliates will be much more difficult for you… Not
impossible though, because some affiliates understand the importance of offering
their readers a full range of products built around a central niche theme.
Having an affiliate program that offers multiple tiers helps as well. There isn’t an
affiliate marketer alive who wouldn’t like to earn residual income from the work of
others.
There are two different ways to get started with your own affiliate program. Both
can be free, and of course you pay your affiliates out of sales afterwards.
The most common form of affiliate program is when a webmaster loads software,
usually some form of PHP or Perl script onto the server, integrating it with the
website. These have been sold for years to webmasters and lately have even
been offered for free.
The second type is a service run off-site, through providers such as
ClickBank.com, Commission Junction, or PayDotCom. (There are many
other, non-free ones too.) They do the added work for you of helping your
products get found by more affiliates, and they even feature your product in an
online marketplace of theirs. Naturally, they want their cut of the product’s sale
too, usually in the range of 4% to 8%. (Some let you even split that fee with your
affiliates.)
These services may be more effective in the long run for the average infoproduct
seller, but quite often they do not offer the flexibility that many
webmasters need to best promote their own product line. In those cases, using
server-side software scripts is the only way to go.
Finding a free copy of your own Affiliate program software to load onto your web
server is quite painless, as there are now several different scripts to choose from.
To find your own script, simply google the phrases “free affiliate program
software” or “free affiliate management software.” They should both return helpful
results for you.
Naturally, you’ll have to investigate each one in depth to see if it runs on your
particular server in your software environment. No matter which way you go,
there will be plenty of research involved; this is not something you can start up in
the next 20 minutes. (More like 2-7 days.) Once it starts though, assuming you
make your offer attractive enough, this could really bring in hordes of traffic
immediately.

Article Marketing (A Subset of Link Building)

Writing articles about your topic of interest and sending them
out to article directories, other websites, and eZines to
publish is an almost ideal way to gain free advertising. I really
can’t recommend it enough for long-term link building campaigns. All you need is
time & writing skills for this self-compounding method to make your website one
of the most respected and authoritative sites on the net.
I realize that this method has been out in the open and even done to death over
the last couple of years, especially with the popular trend called “Bum Marketing,”
however I find that a lot of people who have tried Article Marketing quickly give it
up before seeing any success.
It seems that everyone sets out writing articles, no matter if they do it themselves
or pay someone to do it for them, by submitting one or two articles to the main
article directories found in the more popular article submission software suites,
such as Brad Callen’s great, free Article Submitter software.
Some sort of article submission software is pretty much necessary because it
can take a long time to submit an article to even a handful of websites… The
automation that all of these softwares offer are not just ‘set-it and forget it,’ and
you Don’t want them to be! The way that the Article directories are set up, you
will most definitely still have to go to each site and make sure it populates all the
right fields properly. (But the software makes that much faster.)
The main problem that people have with any article submission software is that
when most people first try them, (I am certainly guilty of this myself) they want to
‘test the waters’ to see if the technique works or not before they commit to it fully.
With most purchases you make in your life, this is a fair strategy - but not when it
comes to an article submission campaign. The real benefit in sending out your
articles is by doing it in bulk, over time.
What proponents of Article Marketing have so far failed to tell me (but I learned
for myself the hard way) is that one or two articles out there pointing back to my
website, no matter how many directories I send it to, is only going to help an itsybitsy,
teeny weenie bit, and then slowly fizzle away.
More than likely it won’t even send a single visitor to my site… It will only help my
PageRank a bit, for a while.
This of course assumes that I haven’t gotten it published by an eZine owner who
has a really big list… Since there is no way to be sure that you can get it
published by an eZine owner with lots of influence, we won’t depend on it for this
example. Think of that as a surprise bonus you can sometime get with this
system, if it happens at all.
The way to surely succeed with articles is to have an article submitted to all the
directories EVERY WEEK, all linking back to the same website. This of course
takes time and patience, which is the only reason that so many people fail at this
strategy.
I don’t feel it’s worth my time every single week to write and submit an article, I’ve
got more important things to do with my life. Worse yet, I’ve so far made a living
from informational AdSense publishing (VRE) sites, so running an article
campaign for each of these 250+ small websites is simply impossible.
However, over the last year I’ve tested 10 different campaigns of article
submission for 10 of those sites, and the one result they all had in common was
that bulk, regular submissions are the key.
I hired someone on rent-a-coder to submit my articles for me once a week for 3
months, and right now (4 months later) a few of those sites are #1 in Google with
no other promotion except for link directory submissions.
It’s a prime example of the tortoise and the hair… But in the first and second
months of the campaign, I was sure my turtle was asleep!
For more advanced instruction on Article Marketing specifics, I even made a film
walking you through the process. You can check that out here:
How to Generate Serious Website Traffic with Article Marketing
Enjoy!

AutoSurfing

A great method to bring in tons of completely
uninterested traffic. See “Traffic Exchanges”

Blasting - (Scam Alert!)

This generic term is sometimes used loosely for sending out
large amounts of (assumed non-spam) email, such as to
multiple eZines or Safelists. See “eZines.”
However, there is a lesser-understood ‘technique’ called Blasting that scammers
commonly use to sell software. Beware any Software that claims to “Blast” your
website out to large numbers of directories, other websites, classified Ads, FFAs,
or even “free” eZine publishers. If they are charging money for this software or
service, you won’t ever hear from them again.
If they aren’t charging money for it, then they’re harvesting your email address
and you’ll be the next “blastee.”

Blogs (A subset of Link Building)

These great tools act as duplicate websites that are extremely
easy and free to set up, and can generate traffic very quickly.
All you need is some content, not even very good content,
and you’ve got a great “Second site” for the search engine to follow your links to
and from.
Ever since Google bought Blogger.com, Googlebot has paid a lot of attention to
what’s happening in “the Blogosphere.” Search engines still love to spider Blog
content more often than other types of websites, since blogs were invented to be
easy for SE Spiders to traverse in the first place.
A unique feature of even the free blogs like Wordpress & blogger is that you can
set them up to automatically “ping” certain Search Engines or even social
bookmarking sites to request that the spider comes out for another visit every
time new content is added.
However, the hype about blogs has mostly died down now. (Thank goodness!) At
first it was well justified, and then a method of website marketing called “Blog and
Ping” was overused in early 2006 by most of the Internet Marketers of the time.
It involved making tons of blogs with almost no content in them except a link to
their website, and then setting them all to ping immediately… This caused
Google to hold an emergency war council and now the Ping feature is only
marginally better than not at all. –It is still an advantage over normal websites
though!
The other great thing about a Blog is that you can get attention to it, not just by
pinging but with any of the thousands of social bookmarking tools, per POST, not
per website, which is a powerful thing. There are many marketers who are using
Wordpress blogs installed on their own servers to generate 4,000 unique visitors
every day right now! –Not peaks, but Constant traffic… Although they do have to
come up with good content daily for that to stay at that level.
You can read a lot more about Web 2.0 and Social bookmarking in later
chapters, including how they relate to blogs, but the thing to decide at this point is
if you want to build a huge, high-tech blog yourself, or if you just want to use
other’s blogs for some easy traffic.
Check out this service by none other than Mike Filsaime: The Free Advertising
Blog. It’s an interesting example of a blog turned into a free-for all ad posting
site. He’s basically just allowed anyone to sign up for free and start posting their
ads, even in full HTML. –With a few hundred or thousand blog postings a day, I
get the idea that no one’s ever going to read these things… But since it’s a Blog,
you know Googlebot will!
A BLOG with thousands of posts a day?? Let’s just say that the jury is still out on
how long this will last. –But you might as well sign up and get your free one-way
link to your sites with it while they’re still valuable.
The reason I mentioned Free Ad Blog wasn’t just to build downlines, but I wanted
to demonstrate a point; it’s easy to find blogs that are watched by search engine
spider constantly, so you can submit one-way links back to your site. This is by
no means the only blog online that will let you post for free.
So, a big bloggin’ operation or simply small blog hit n’ run jobs; It’s up to you how
to use weblogs. They are extremely flexible & powerful when coupled with social
bookmarking tools, and the Blogosphere is growing exponentially, daily. But no
matter which you choose, I recommend you start somewhere, because we’re all
going to be blogging eventually if we still have a need for any traffic.

Blog Comments - (A subset of Link Building)

Much like Forum Marketing, commenting on other people’s
Blogs is a great way to build incoming links and also network
in your niche.
Finding blogs that are on your niche topic is as easy as going to Blogger’s search
at: http://search.blogger.com, to a great tech head’s site called Technorati:
http://technorati.com, or directly to Google’s whole web Blog Search at:
http://blogsearch.google.com.
Once you’ve found a blog that is on your topic, I recommend bookmarking it and
the others you find into the same folder so you can watch them from time to time.
What’ you’re looking for is a question that you can answer. If you simply make a
posting that sounds like an advertisement, they you’ll be spamming the blog, and
surely the blog’s owner will delete it, and may even ban your IP address.
The trick is to answer a question someone else asks with your business being
part of the solution. You want to show off your expertise without sounding too
arrogant, and of course you want to get a link in. Always offer help and advice,
and only market yourself when it’s part of a solution to someone else’s question.
The real benefits of this method are long term, as you want to be found by both
SE Spiders and humans alike, talking authoritatively on your niche subject. No
one blog posting will bring in tons of visitors, however, and you aren’t going to
find the ‘ripe’ questions out there every day.