Work Yourself Up!

Twitter Your Way to Instant Traffic

Twitter is a different take on communicating that blends instant messaging with social networking.  With a mere 140 characters per post, you answer the burning question, “What are  you doing now?”

To answer this, you have to make the most of every word. You have to capture attention quickly in each “tweet” (the Twitter name for a post). Sign up for Twitter and send out notices to your friends and subscribers. 

The more people who follow your “tweets,” the more your following grows as their friends see your profile thumbnail on other people’s profile pages and click through to follow you as well.  Every time you post a new tweet, each of your followers receives it instantly on their computers or cell phones if they’ve set it up like that.

Sending regular tweets can help build loyalty among your followers. Don’t just send anything, make it count. If you write reviews on electronic games or develop accessories for Avatars, then you want to let your followers know when you have something new for them.

You can develop an almost fanatical group who are so intent on knowing what you have to offer that they hang on your every tweet. For info marketers, this intensity can develop into a loyal group of buyers who respond to your new offerings.

Friends who want to set up a meeting can use tweets to inform everyone of the time and place. You can also send a tweet to direct attention to your latest blog update or lens creation. Remember to save room to add the URL for your site.

This is important for creating interest in your site and developing your brand. Even with a short post, you can set up your identity in a way that draws more followers to your niche. Twitter is a delight to some and baffling to others.

You have to get into it to really get what’s happening. Look at other Twitterers and see how many ways they’re using tweets to set their brand, establish a persona, show expertise or drive traffic to their sites.

The instant gratification of Twitter is part of its addictive potential. When you choose to Twitter within your field, profession, hobby, sport or business, then you’ll see how to dispense an enormous amount of new information rapidly, one Tweet at a time.

Social Bookmarking to Grab Attention Online

Social bookmarking is the electronic version of leaving a breadcrumb trail. After all, you can have a great product, but without enough traffic, it’s just another nice site.  Even if you have a faithful marketing list, you constantly want to reach new online viewers.

The options for connecting with social bookmarkers are exploding.  That’s why you need to surf around and see what’s out there, then set up a series of “regular” social bookmarking accounts to use.

StumbleUpon is one of the leading social bookmarking sites that’s both easy to use and powerful. Once you create an account, you can add the toolbar interface.  Then all you do is click the Thumbs Up icon to recommend a site.  You can do this for your own sites, or ask your friends to submit a Thumbs Up rating for you. Besides the rating, you can add comments about the site.

Can you Digg it? That’s not just a line from a 70s movie - it’s a widely used social bookmarking site. Digg functions much like Stumble Upon with raters given the chance push the ratings of a site to the front page. Making it to the front page of Digg gets your information in front of thousands of viewers and it helps traffic flood in to read your newsworthy submission.

Clipmarks describes itself as “scissors for web pages.” As with other social bookmarking sites, you can submit items that are sent to the web - including to Facebook or to an iPhone. As a one stop service and huge time saver, sign up with OnlyWire.

You begin by installing a plugin for your browers, and then you only need a single click to submit your item to multiple sites. To make this work, you still need to sign up at bookmarking sites that you plan to use. After that, you can use OnlyWire to handle the multiple submissions.

Make sure your site viewers know how to rate your site. You can’t reward or bribe them for bookmarking your site. That’s the social bookmarking version of stuffing the ballot box at voting time.

You can put links to the bookmarking sites on your sites as a gentle reminder. And don’t be shy about submitting your new information to the networks yourself – just make sure you also submit other sites so that you don’t appear spammy. Let people know what you’ve got and where to find your site and they’ll share that information with others.

Another Free "Traffic Secrets" Video from John Reese

John Reese just released another free video to promote his Traffic Secrets 2 product.  He's got some great information on how to get better results with outsourcing.

This thing has some great info, so definitely check it out.  I outsource hundreds of projects per year and learned some really great stuff about how to better communicate with programmers and others that I hire.

How to Get More Traffic to Your Website

John Reese just released a series of free videos on how to get more traffic to your website.

John is a sharp guy and there are very few people at his level when it comes to generating web traffic.  If you could use more traffic to your web page, take a few minutes and check out his free videos.

5 Traffic Conversion Hot Buttons

Grabbing the attention of an online surfer is challenging enough, so you want to turn as many viewers as possible into actual buyers. And you want to entice buyers to become repeat buyers.

Once you’ve told the product story, how do you get them to push that “buy button” again? Here are some traffic conversion hot buttons to add to your site today:

1.    Expose your competition’s warts.  You can expect popular products to attract competitors. Study the competition and find the weaknesses or differences that you can exploit.  Do you deliver faster or offer discount shipping, give choice of downloads or CDs, gift wrap, ship internationally?  Let buyers know what sets you apart from your competitors.

2.    Go ahead - name drop!  Find a celebrity to endorse your product. Not necessarily a movie star, just people who are known and respected in your niche market. Send your product out to niche superstars and ask for their honest review as well as permission to use the comments on your website. You benefit for the star power of the endorsers.

3.    Prove it! Find research that advances your product in the marketplace. Even a basic study that shows “7 out of 10 people who regularly exercise are less likely to get prickly heat,” might be linked loosely to your product.  Make the connection reasonable. If there isn’t any research, make your own by using results from an online survey or poll.

4.    Test yourself. Create three different pitches that play on your main product. Use each page for 10 days. At the end of the month, compare results.  The pitch that captures the most buyers isn’t always the one you like the most. Remember, it’s about what clicks with the buyer - even if it isn’t your favorite.

5.    Befriend to win. Make sure that your sales copy creates a connection with your buyer.  You can make money with straight sales copy but you’ll make more money when you build a relationship with buyers. 

Let them into your life enough that they care about you and they will be more willing to invest in your products. You can set up a forum to discuss your niche interest or add short reviews from your buyers.

Feature a buyer with a photo and candid interview. When you give buyers reasons to drop by regularly, then you are developing a relationship. Needless to say, your “special offer” email gets read when others are sent to the trash folder.

Quality Of Traffic versus Quantity Of Traffic

A very important concept to constantly have in your mind when you are going about your daily IM activities is that your goal is to sell your product. Your goal isn't to generate a million zillion visitors in a day. No, not at all. What you want to do is make a sale. It is crucial to always remember that when you are going about your traffic generating activities.

The first thing to never be tempted by is someone who offers to send you 10000 visitors for say $67. These visitors are never going to buy from you and are just people who get paid a little percentage to visit your site for about half a second before immediately getting off again. It is a useless source of traffic and one that will never pay off.

Moving on from there you will want to have your focus on looking for targeted traffic and the more highly targeted the better. If you are trying some search engine optimization then it is a really good idea to think carefully about terms the people most likely to buy your product would put into a search engine. General terms tend to have a far lower conversion rate that of more specific terms. Usually more specific terms are longer and more easy to rank highly for so these are the best one's to go for. For example, 40 highly targeted visitors per day may produce a sale per day that would take 200 visitors from a more general keyword.

If you can target highly relevant forums and make interesting, informative and educational posts then even if the forum doesn't have that many members you can still make a lot of sales because you are giving people exactly what they want. This would be far better to do than go posting on a more general forum, albeit with a far bigger audience, hoping that people who want it happen to find you. Better to go and find them yourself!

In summing up remember to never lose sight of your goal which is to make sales, not to get the most traffic any website has ever got in the history of the web, and to do this all you need is a reasonable quantity of highly targeted traffic.

47 Social Bookmarks with One Tool

Social bookmarking is a powerful tool in promoting a website. But going through all of those social bookmarking sites is very time-consuming and downloading all toolbars is madness! That's where SocialMarker.com comes in, the free service designed to reduce the time and effort needed to socially bookmark a website.

Check it out...

Social Media Daily - Free Web 2.0/Social Media Traffic & Promotion Guide

Looking to get a handle on "Web 2.0" and social media stuff?  Need more web traffic?

"Social Media Daily" teaches you how to use Web 2.0 and social media to drive traffic to your website in an easy to implement step-by-step format.  FREE!

The thing I love about this is that you can easily outsource most of it for just a few bucks.  Definitely take a look.

Get the report.

3 Steps For Instant Traffic

So you have finally found a profitable niche, after hours of research and you’ve created a content based website for it. Or maybe you’ve worked a couple of weeks to create the ultimate e-book or report, have spent hundreds of dollars on graphic design and thousands on a killer sales letter.

You’ve clearly done your homework and have developed a small online business with high potential for great success. The only problem is, no matter how good the sales letter, the graphics or content, you won’t make a cent if potential customers never get to see your website.

Here are 3 proven steps on promoting your high quality website for instant targeted traffic:

1. Pay Per Click Advertising

This is without doubt the fastest way to get your site in front of thousands of potential customers. While most people use only Google Adwords it would be wise not to ignore Yahoo’s Search Marketing or MSN’s adCenter. Many internet marketers make this mistake and miss out on tons of top quality, low cost traffic.

If you don’t have a lot of experience with PPC you should read as much as you can on the subject before spending money. This type of advertising is very powerful, but if done incorrectly can lose you a lot of money. Read many articles on article directories such as ezinearticles.com and also do a search on Google for “perry marshall adwords” to learn more about PPC.

While doing PPC you will generate opt-ins, sales and even affiliates from your site – this is extremely valuable information so make sure you gather it.

2. Solo Ads

When you have a top quality site, with good conversion rates, buying a solo ad can be the easiest way for instant profit.

A solo ad is an email ad that you write (or hire someone to write it for you) and pay a webmaster with a highly developed subscriber list in your niche, a one time fee to send the ad to the entire list.

This is why it’s very important to have conversion data. Let’s say that after Step1, you realized your site has a conversion rate of 5%. This means that if you buy a solo ad for a list with 2000 subscribers, you’ll make somewhere around 100 sales. Depending on the price of your product, you can make a very nice profit with practically no extra work on your part.

To find places where to run solo ads, just use Google and search for “solo ads”, “buy solo ads” or “yourniche + solo ads”.

You can also search for sites in your niche that appear in top spots on Google, Yahoo and MSN and have an opt-in form. Contact the webmasters show them your product and offer to pay them in exchange for a solo ad.

3. JV Partners

We’ve practically started to talk about finding JV partners at the end of step2, but in step 3 we’re going to go even further with our proposal.

While solo ads are a great way for generating instant cash, wouldn’t it be great if those webmasters would keep promoting your product on their site and to their list on a regular basis? And with no extra effort or cash spent on your part?

It may sound too good to be true but actually it’s very achievable. After you run a few solo ads on different lists you should update your conversion information. Be sure to make a small report about this because you’ll need it.

All you have to do now is to approach the same or different webmasters and ask them if they’d like to become your affiliate. Give them a high commission percentage, the conversion report, the link to your site, banners, and the e-book or report you are selling.

If you do everything correctly, business owners will be more than happy to become your affiliate and practically do all the work of sending commissions your way.

Free Ways to Get Traffic

In real estate there is a saying that property selling is all about “location, location, location.” In the world of internet marketing and ecommerce it’s all about “traffic, traffic, traffic.” It doesn’t matter what you’re product offering is or how nice your website looks, you’re doomed if you don’t have a plan to get traffic.

You need traffic to succeed in this business and the more traffic you can get the more money you will be able to make. The trouble is that many would be internet marketers simply don’t take the time to draw out a plan to get traffic. There are several ways to get traffic to your website that won’t cost you much of anything.

Trading links with other similar or related websites is a great way to increase the volume of traffic to your website. Generally speaking, the more reciprocal links a website contains the more authority is given to that website in the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs).

The higher the authority of your webpage, the more traffic you will receive. Most experienced webmasters understand the importance of exchanging links and are therefore more than eager to share links with other webmasters. You can actually find link exchanges all over the internet by performing a simple search. Most link exchanges are free to use although some do charge a small membership fee.

Blogs have become increasingly popular over the years and many internet surfers now only search for blogs when doing a search for information. Blogs have become popular because they are considered trusted sources of information, much more so than commercialized websites. Starting a blog related to the theme of your website will draw to your main website.

By far the best choice for your business blog is Wordpress which is free and can be installed directly into a sub directory within your website’s domain. Social bookmarking is all the rage right now and having a blog will allow you to more easily take advantage of social bookmarking traffic.

Online forums are great places to network and meet other people who share your common interests. What many people don’t know is that forums are also great places to bring targeted traffic to your website.

Before you can start using forums to pull in traffic to your website you’ll first have to find a forum that is relevant to the theme of your website. Most forums allow you to receive traffic by permitting you to use a signature file within each of your posts. Your signature file contains a link that directs people to your website. Like link exchanges and blogs, most forums a free to join.