Is this through luck? That is even more remote. It takes good business sense and a lot of help and team effort. Most importantly, it is the eagerness to succeed and the determination to learn and the willingness to invest in a lot of hard work and some money.

The Very Basic

Without traffic, all your effort would go to waste. Every business needs customers, without them you wouldn’t have anyone to sell your products to. In the internet world traffic is the walk in customer. The more traffic you have the more people would be able to sell your products to.

But like any business that’s in every corner building or in the mall, not everyone that goes in will buy, but the greater of number that do come in to browse your merchandise, the greater number of people that will buy your products. It is a simple and known fact.

But, how do you get traffic, traffic large enough that could make a small percentage of eventual buyers enough to make a good profit. Many big companies generate traffic of tens of thousands a day and a measly ten to fifteen percent actually buys, but that small percentage is enough to provide them with good business.

Many of these success stories get their traffic from paying others. Yes that’s right; you have to spend money to make money. Advertising is the key. The more people that knows that your site exists; the more people would of course go to your site, that’s common sense.

While there are many ways that can get you advertising for free, this do not generate the same high volume as those methods that are getting paid. These paid advertisements include advertising schemes by Google and Yahoo.

The Value of Searches

The search and will be the easiest and fastest medium in finding what a person needs in the internet. Search engines have been very popular because they provide a vital service to many people. They are free and easy to use. With this popularity, they get many visitors and clicks that they are the most common sites that people go to. It is easy to understand why so many companies would pay to advertise with these search engines.

Search engines provide information to the millions of users that they have each day. They provide links to many sites that a user may be looking for. If your sites link pop up in the high ranks of the search results page, you get a great chance that they will go to your site. While search engine optimization is a cheaper and low cost way to get your site a high rank, paying for advertisements will ensure that you will be on the top ranks.

When you pay for your advertisements, it is like paying for your traffic. This may sound like not such a good idea, but the payoffs would tell a different story. When you pay for your traffic, you are guaranteed of a consistent traffic flow to your site. You will never go with an empty sales day.

Paying for your Traffic

Usually, you will be charged with the number of hits a link gets when your ads is clicked, this is called pay per click. For some search engines, you will be charged with the number of times your ad shows up when a certain keyword or keyword phrase is searched. It is imperative that you have good keyword content in your ad. There are many tools that aid you in using the right keyword for the right moment.

All the money you spend in paying for your traffic will not be for naught. You will get an impressive boost in traffic which will also result to a great boost in your sales figures. Paying for your traffic would be a really good idea and you will get all the benefits it has to offer.

This is one virtue a site must possess to lead the race in the ruthless competition in the Internet based business. With so many competition and rivalry going on, every method of marketing must be employed and utilized.

It doesn’t matter if you have a killer product or a fantastically designed website, if people don’t know that you exist, it doesn’t matter, and you are not going to make it big. Worse of all, you business could just get killed.

While there are so many methods and schemes used by so many e-commerce sites today, there are still some of those that can help you with an extra boost in the popularity ratings. One of these is the so called Viral Marketing.

While the term Viral easily depicts a virus, a word very much dreaded by all computer owners, it is not what it seems. You do not actually use a computer virus to spread your business; on the contrary it just might kill you. Everyone has had enough of all those pop up ads and spywares.

Viral Marketing Overview

Viral Marketing also known otherwise as Viral Advertising is a marketing technique used to build the public awareness of one’s product or company. They use many forms of media to reach out to the public without actually promoting the product by riding on in other forms of addictive means that could get a person hooked and be obliged or amused to actually pass it on, with the product or company advertisement along with it.

In a nutshell, companies ride on the idea that if people like the content of a media they will pass it on to their friends and family. They sponsor the certain media, such as a cool flash game, funny video, amusing story and such, which one may pass on to another with the company brand or logo or the products description or any other content to help promote the company or its product.

Viral marketing has become a popular means of advertising and marketing because they are relatively low cost. To avoid being tagged as spam mail, viral marketing counts on the eagerness of one person to pas on the product. If a person sees the name of the person they know as the sender, they won’t block it and open it as well.

Many companies offer incentives such as discounts and rebates when they help in spreading their viral marketing. They rely on the number of recipients a viral marketing gets from one person in determining the amount or number of incentive they can be attributed with.

Using Viral Marketing to your advantage

The main and foremost advantage of viral marketing is that you get a lot of publicity and public awareness about your site and your company. You get to generate a flow of traffic that are potential customers. With a little ingenuity and imagination, plus some incentives or prizes, you can reach out to a great number of people and announce your existence.

Most every site and companies are catching on to the effectivity of Viral Marketing and Advertising. Not using it could kill your business. Along with other schemes and methods in promoting your site, like Search Engine Optimization and such, viral marketing could easily push you ahead in the rating games.

Viral Marketing could be a sneaky way to get people to know about you and your company. You get them to pass your advertisement along. They are also very low cost that not investing in it could be downright a business suicide. All it takes is a great idea, a good addicting game, a funny story many ideas are still out there. Create a gossip or a buzz, many movies are promoted by using scandals and gossips to make them moiré popular. Remember the movie “The Blair Witch Project”?

Many big companies have tried viral marketing and have had many success stories with it. A classic example is Microsoft’s Hotmail. They were the first known big company to utilize the scheme and it has worked wonders for them.

Now it’s your turn to use viral marketing to work wonders for you. Act now and reap the benefits Viral Marketing will provide for you and your sales figures.

To get a person to go to a site than others, it needs to be very visible. Providing ads that could direct potential consumers and costumers to their site would allow them to have an increase in traffic as well as sales. Yahoo provides a service that can put a site or company’s ad in their sites that can be shown when certain keywords are inputted.

Yahoo offers a chance for any company to increase their traffic by using their services. With more people being aware of your site, there would be more traffic and visitors to your site given the chance to view your pages as well as your products. With even a small percentage of successful sales, with a high traffic volume this could still be a substantial figure for your company.

Getting a consistent substantial flow of website visitors is every company’s goal. Many methods are devised and utilized to ensure that there would be more people to boost the sales and to be aware of the existence of such a product or service. Website visitors are potentially the life blood of your internet based business.

Yahoo/Overture utilizes the same principle as Google’s Adwords. In fact, they are very similar to each other that they use keyword and keyword phrase searches and to determine which ads to show per search. When a person types in a keyword or keyword phrase to search for anything, the search engines gives out the results in a page. Then at the right side of the page, you will see selected ads that have paid for their ads to be viewed with certain keywords and keyword phrases searched.

For example, Lets say you run a car parts retail/wholesale site. You choose keywords that can prompt or trigger your ads to be shown in the page when a keyword is searched. When a search engine user types in Honda Accord, your ad may come up if you have designated that as one of your keywords. You don’t need to fully optimize your site with Search Engine Optimization methods and techniques.

While some labor so hard to make their site one of the high ranking sites per keyword search, you get the chance to be on the top of the list or at least in the first page of a search result increasing your chance to be clicked on. With that, you drive traffic and website visitors to your site a lot faster.

You will have to pony up some cash when using this service though. There are different ways Yahoo/Overture will charge you. It may be in the number of Keywords or Keyword phrases your ad uses or in the many times your ad is clicked on. Others offer many other services like having your ad show up not only in the search engine pages but also with some third party sites.

Third party sites support ads that have the same theme or niche as them. With more areas your ad is shown, you increase the chances of people knowing about your site or product. With more website visitors you increase the sales of your site which makes your investment with your ads a wise one.

With so many competitions in the internet based businesses, it is necessary to take a huge leap forward from the pack by advertising. Yahoo/Overture will be a great place to start. Many have utilized their services and have reaped the rewards of this decision. It’s a marketing strategy that will increase your website visitors as well as increase your sales resulting to profit.

It takes money to make money, while there are some methods that are basically low cost or free, using a marketing service such as what Yahoo/Overture offers will provide results faster and on a larger scale. Many businesses have learned this the hard way, don’t be counted with them.

So, we all know that in the core of it all, traffic is the most essential thing to a successful internet based business company. Aside from ensuring that you have a great product to sell, and you have your company’s internal organization well taken core of, it would be time to get to the nitty gritty of things, generating traffic.

If you already have a site and you want think that you’re not getting the traffic that you’re supposed to be getting, then its time to reconsider. If you are contending in these very competitive business, you should always be a step ahead of your competition, increasing your traffic flow should have been done starting yesterday.

Timing is essential, that’s an old adage known to everyone. But with generating traffic, you should always be on your toes and be a day ahead of everyone. Never think of today and tomorrow as a starting point for making your site traffic laden, it should always have been yesterday.

To help you out in generating more traffic for your site, here are some seven surefire ways to increase your traffic starting from yesterday.

1) Invest in good advertising with search engines

Google’s Adwords and Yahoo’s Overture provide great advertising schemes that are very truly popular and assures great traffic. Although with this surefire way to increase your traffic would cost some money. While some would shy away from spending money to increase traffic, it is imperative in this case to do so because Adwords and Overture is the top surefire way to increase your traffic.

You could see for yourself the success this search engine advertising methods have reaped rewards for so many companies. Lots of site feature these advertising system and many have signed on to reap the benefits. Do not be left behind. Every penny is worth it with using Google and Yahoo’s advertising.

2) Exchange or Trade Links with other sites

With exchanging links with other sites, both of you will benefit from the efforts both of you do to enhance your sites traffic. When one site features another sites link, they could provide one another with the traffic one site generates. The efforts are doubly beneficial because it would seem like both of you are working to generate more traffic. The more links traded with more sites the more traffic could be expected.

3) Use Viral Marketing

Viral marketing allows you to spread the word about your company and product without any costs or if ever low costs only. This is a marketing method that can be quite sneaky; you can attach your company’s name, product or link to a certain media such as a funny video, entertaining game, an interesting article or a gossip or buzz. With this method, people get infected with the creativity and entertainment of the medium that they will pass it on to many people.

4) Search and use proper keywords or keyword phrases for your sites content

Search engines look for certain keywords that they would show in their results page. In doing so, having the right keyword and keyword phrase is a high requirement in ranking in high in search engine results. You could write your own content or you could hire someone to do it for you.

5) Write Articles that can lead traffic to your site

Submit articles to sites that would contain the same subject that your site deals in. If you sell car parts write press releases and articles about cars and car parts. Attach your sites description and services at the end of the article as well as the link.

6) Join forums and form online communities

Capture a market and show your expertise and credibility. When you found a good foundation for your site, people will trust you and your site and will pass on to many people their trust. Traffic will certainly increase because they know that you can provide what they need.

7) Lastly, Offer newsletters.

If many people know what you are about and your existence is shared with many others, you will find a loyal traffic that can provide you with more traffic by recommendation. If you arouse the curiosity of your customers they would be pushed to help you with your traffic.

Submissions to blog carnivals are actually pretty easy. If you already have good content on your blog that you want to promote, then it is simply a matter of submitting those posts to the relevant carnivals and waiting for the link back to your blog. Unfortunately, based on my experience so far, blog carnival submissions alone won’t do much. My biggest spike of traffic came when I physically went to each of the blogs that had also submitted their blog posts to the same carnival, read through them and posted comments.

At this juncture, I think I should point out that leaving 10 comments on different blogs or forums is actually a lot more time consuming than it sounds. If the idea of commenting on other blogs is to draw traffic back to your own blog, then one needs to construct a thoughtful reply that would interest others to click the link back to your blog to find out a little more about who you are. Therefore, a simple, “great post!” or “I agree with you!” just won’t cut it, especially if you are commenting on a popular blog that receives lots of comments.

One great thing about writing into blog carnivals is that it helps you find other blogs and more specifically, other blog posts that are relevant to the topics that you write about. So rather than searching aimlessly and commenting blindly on random blogs that may or may not be related to the topics you are interested in, blog carnivals help give you a focus. You don’t waste time looking for relevant blogs or blog posts. Clearly, the more specific the carnival, the better. For instance, a blog carnival about baby humour is clearly more specific than a blog carnival about Family Living which could be about anything and everything under the sun.

I should also add, as I discovered so recently, that leaving “thoughtful” (or perhaps I should write “thought-provoking”) comments can be a double-edged sword. The blogosphere is filled with readers with very strong opinions who may and will easily take offense to what you’ve written, regardless of whether it is intended or purely misconstrued. Then, there are the readers who will pick fault regardless of how amicably your try to put forth your point of view.

It is inevitable, as you grow your readership, that you will encounter plenty of such individuals. Finding a way to handle them appropriately will be a bit of a challenge – one that some of us might shy away from. Being a rather non-confrontational person, I dislike such frays, even though I do enjoy discussions amounting from a difference of opinion. What’s the difference, you may ask. The difference being that the former may amount to name calling and other methods of verbal abuse, whereas the latter is constructive and educational.

This also leads me to a very interesting concept that I remember reading about in a sports book called The Mind Gym. Under a chapter entitled “Permission to Win”, the author aptly describes an inherent problem faced by many of us who seek the spot light but have not yet had the opportunity to really bask in it for all its glory. I will use the example described by the author to illustrate the point.

In a golf tournament, there was a player who was not among the top rated players who had emerged out of the blue as a contender for the trophy. Being a wild card, no one had ever expected him to win. Quite frankly, I’m sure, neither did he. One hole away from the trophy, all that was required of him was a conservative shot – it was an easy win. Instead, he hit a bogey and lost the tournament.

What happened? He hadn’t given himself permission to win. He was so used to being the underdog that he wasn’t prepared for success. While this might be a sports example, I think the philosophy is relevant in all other aspects of our lives. In this particular case, it is going from being a regular blogger to a professional blogger. While we might aspire to become a professional blogger, the mindset of being a professional blogger might not be there. In other words, we might be unintentionally sabotaging our efforts to become a professional blogger through unwitting actions that detract from our blogs because we are secretly unsure of how to deal with blogger fame.

A simplistic blogging example might be what I described earlier. I mentioned my dislike of verbal debates amounting to little more than petty name calling. Although I felt I had posted a carefully drafted comment, another reader had obviously seen fit to make a mockery of my response after misconstruing the true meaning of my comment. The realisation that to become prominent in the blogging world also means to become a target for such individuals might have led me to retreat to the insular world of my own blog, never to venture out again.

It is our fear of the consequences of success that hold us back from performing at our best. Until we can overcome that fear and accept the responsibility of success, we will not have the proper mindset to succeed.

You can get free advertising by giving away free expert content to relevant sites itching for some new, fresh content. Web site owners are always looking for fresh content. Make sure you write a bit about the author and your web site or product. As long as it is not competing with theirs, they will not mind. You can post on these sites:

www.ezinearticles.com
www.freesticky.com
www.ideamarketers.com
www.findsticky.com

You can become an active expert in a newsgroup that is industry related. A newsgroup is an online forum where people share information and common interests. When you post, you are literally talking to your potential customers. These people do not want to be sold something; they want information from gurus, about the topic they are interested in. Make sure you have a sig file, or signature and start establishing relationships and prove your expertise. Stay with newsgroups that do not accept advertisements. This is also a great way to gather feedback from your website, straight from the horses’ mouth. You can reinvent it if you need to and fix it accordingly. When you post informative articles, people will begin to look forward to your posts, and eventually you may want to direct these people to your brand new newsletter.

Reciprocal links alone put them in the Million-a-Month Club. Reciprocal links, good ones, can do much more for you than any search engine ever will.

Wow Jack, that’s a bold statement, got anything to back that up?

How about the server logs of people getting over a million hits per month who did nothing more than seek out link partners and ONLY submitted to each major search engine ONCE? Would that convince you?

Well check it out. Here are two sites that use reciprocal linking almost exclusively with all other forms of advertising bringing in a relatively negligible amount of traffic. When looking at their live server log files, pay attention to the following things:

1.) Qualified traffic from reciprocal links.

Look at the Refers Report and check the section labeled ‘/’. Underneath you will find which links and search engines are sending these websites traffic.) Search engine traffic to the sites’ Link Directory pages.

In the Refers Report, find the headings that start with /links/, with the name of the Link Directory pages directory after. Search engines send lots of traffic to these pages. These pages were never submitted to the search engines!

Example 1: CTEX CD Replication holds the number one keyword placement on Yahoo for “CD replication.” How did they get there? Link popularity! Check out their live server log files at: http://www.ctexinc.com/stats/index.html

Example 2: Toolady.com is a website that has been using reciprocal links for a long time and her web site traffic was generated completely reciprocal links! In four months it became one of the most heavily trafficked bird web sites on the internet. No other form of marketing was done. Check out her server log files here:

http://toolady.com/reports/log_bird.html

So you tell me, are search engines the almighty savior you thought they were a minute ago?

Relevance of Your Links

Relevance has a lot to do with how a search engine robot will treat you nowadays. That’s why I always talk about the importance of building a link list or “theme index” for your site (call it a reciprocal link exchange) that closely resembles the topics or products you deal with in your site. (But not those, of course, in direct competition to you.)

Now the FFA and Link Farm people are going to be mad at me, but this is the truth!

Here’s a test. If I fail it you may publicly scorn me!

Go to any FFA page on the web and look for Yahoo.com. Try Amazon.com, or CocaCola.com… There must be TONS of their links on FFA pages – EVERYBODY knows those guys! Go ahead and check it out, I’ll be here when you get back!

Glad you’re back – how many links did you find? None? Yikes!

Now go to Altavista.com and type link:yahoo.com in the search window. What happened? Well, I just did it and it said: We found 6,670,578 results. (By the way, don’t you love how the search engine will report millions of links just like it reports none? Doesn’t it seem like they would be like “WOW, six million links!!!”)

That’s 6,670,578 links pointing to Yahoo.com!!

And not a single one from a link farm. Now don’t go getting ideas in your head about getting 6 million links. You don’t need that many to flood your site with enough traffic to keep you selling widgets, or informing the public on the effects on the ozone layer from methane gas produced by cattle. (What? hey its late, that was the best example I could come up with! How do I know what you’re into?)

No, you need far fewer links than that to get 1,000,000 hits a month. And, with a million hits a month, how many methane gas-to-oxygen converters do you think you could sell to farmers to mount on the backs of their cows to protect the ozone layer? I’d say at least a whole heap!

There is automation software out there that people are using to drastically optimize their link lists and I highly recommend checking them out. The best and first of its kind can be found at webmastertraffictools.com.

This software has a fully functioning demo that will spider the web, set up your link directory, AND upload it to your server. It also does a mail-merge function to personalize all your link requests to other webmasters and mails for you. All in the DEMO version!

You CAN do all this manually, but it is highly recommended that you at least check out the automation software demo above to see what the best of the best webmasters are using to get those million hits per month.

(Author’s note: It has not yet been proven whether methane produced by cow emissions affects the ozone layer. Example above is fictional.)

————————–
Jack Humphrey is the Author of “Power linking 2: Evolution”
which hit the net this week to rave reviews. Grab your copy
before your competition does at http://power-linking-profits.com

POWER LINKING
The best-kept secrets for getting links, getting customers, getting traffic and getting thousands of hits weekly through Power Linking

-by Jack Humphrey

Today, it’s your turn to unleash the traffic generating fury of Power Linking into your website business and completely overwhelm your website with all of the free, targeted traffic that’s ready to pay you good money for your products or services.

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Most web hosting companies will provide you with basic web traffic information that you then have to interpret and make pertinent use of. However, the data you receive from your host company can be overwhelming if you don’t understand how to apply it to your particular business and website. Let’s start by examining the most basic data – the average visitors to your site on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis.

These figures are the most accurate measure of your website’s activity. It would appear on the surface that the more traffic you see recorded, the better you can assume your website is doing, but this is an inaccurate perception. You must also look at the behavior of your visitors once they come to your website to accurately gauge the effectiveness of your site.

There is often a great misconception about what is commonly known as “hits” and what is really effective, quality traffic to your site. Hits simply means the number of information requests received by the server. If you think about the fact that a hit can simply equate to the number of graphics per page, you will get an idea of how overblown the concept of hits can be. For example, if your homepage has 15 graphics on it, the server records this as 15 hits, when in reality we are talking about a single visitor checking out a single page on your site. As you can see, hits are not useful in analyzing your website traffic.

The more visitors that come to your website, the more accurate your interpretation will become. The greater the traffic is to your website, the more precise your analysis will be of overall trends in visitor behavior. The smaller the number of visitors, the more a few anomalous visitors can distort the analysis.

The aim is to use the web traffic statistics to figure out how well or how poorly your site is working for your visitors. One way to determine this is to find out how long on average your visitors spend on your site. If the time spent is relatively brief, it usually indicates an underlying problem. Then the challenge is to figure out what that problem is.

It could be that your keywords are directing the wrong type of visitors to your website, or that your graphics are confusing or intimidating, causing the visitor to exit rapidly. Use the knowledge of how much time visitors are spending on your site to pinpoint specific problems, and after you fix those problems, continue to use time spent as a gauge of how effective your fix has been.

Additionally, web traffic stats can help you determine effective and ineffective areas of your website. If you have a page that you believe is important, but visitors are exiting it rapidly, that page needs attention. You could, for example, consider improving the link to this page by making the link more noticeable and enticing, or you could improve the look of the page or the ease that your visitors can access the necessary information on that page.

If, on the other hand, you notice that visitors are spending a lot of time on pages that you think are less important, you might consider moving some of your sales copy and marketing focus to that particular page.

As you can see, these statistics will reveal vital information about the effectiveness of individual pages, and visitor habits and motivation. This is essential information to any successful Internet marketing campaign.

Your website undoubtedly has exit pages, such as a final order or contact form. This is a page you can expect your visitor to exit rapidly. However, not every visitor to your site is going to find exactly what he or she is looking for, so statistics may show you a number of different exit pages. This is normal unless you notice a exit trend on a particular page that is not intended as an exit page. In the case that a significant percentage of visitors are exiting your website on a page not designed for that purpose, you must closely examine that particular page to discern what the problem is. Once you pinpoint potential weaknesses on that page, minor modifications in content or graphic may have a significant impact on the keeping visitors moving through your site instead of exiting at the wrong page.

After you have analyzed your visitor statistics, it’s time to turn to your keywords and phrases. Notice if particular keywords are directing a specific type of visitor to your site. The more targeted the visitor – meaning that they find what they are looking for on your site, and even better, fill out your contact form or make a purchase – the more valuable that keyword is.

However, if you find a large number of visitors are being directed – or should I say misdirected – to your site by a particular keyword or phrase, that keyword demands adjustment. Keywords are vital to bringing quality visitors to your site who are ready to do business with you. Close analysis of the keywords your visitors are using to find your site will give you a vital understanding of your visitor’s needs and motivations.

Finally, if you notice that users are finding your website by typing in your company name, break open the champagne! It means you have achieved a significant level of brand recognition, and this is a sure sign of burgeoning success.

Michael Rasmussen is a successful Internet Marketing Consultant and author of many top-selling eBooks. Michael has been marketing online since the early days and he knows what it takes to make money and succeed online. Stop by his Web site and subscribe to his Free monthly newsletter full strategies and techniques for successful web site promotions that can help YOU!

Go to http://www.search-engines-revealed.com

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