In the world of Internet Marketing traffic is the life blood. The more traffic you get exponentially increases your ability to make sales. Achieving this is not always so easy, so here are three methods for getting free traffic to your site.

The first thing you can do is add a signature to your forum posts as well as in your emails. In forums, there is often the ability to add a link to your site through the your signature. Each forum software typically has its own code which will allow you to create a hyper link to your own site. Something to avoid however is creating a crazy wild signature full of colors and large fonts. You will have the forum administrator all over you in no time. The most successul approach is to create a simple signature with a catchy title or a call to action and your link.

Be sure to find the most popular forum sites in your niche. Once you become a member, make up to fifteen posts and then add your signature with a link back to your site. It is important to have your link connect to an offer of a free report in order to bring some value to those who choose to subscribe to your newsletter.

Another great tip for creating free traffic is through social networking sites(called web 2.0)which have become massively popular. Many ask, what is web 2.0. My brief explanation is that it is user driven content rather than content created by businesses. What is important about these sites is they rank well with the search engines. Currently, the three hottest sites are Squidoo, Hub Pages and Twitter.

It is important to ensure you place valuable, content rich pages on each of these sites. Be sure to include keywords which will enhance your search engine results. This does not mean you want to stuff your content with illogically placed words. Search engines will actually penalize you for keyword stuffing. So when you create your content write logically and place the keywords appropriately throghout your information.

The last, but perhaps the most important aspect to your free traffic strategy is the use of video. Whether it’s home made, a Camtasia screen cast or some other type of video, they get views. Video has emerged as the most important medium on the internet and it is vital that you include it in any traffic generation strategy. Certainly it goes without saying the most popular video site online remains to be YouTube, so familiarize yourself with the process of adding videos.

I have tried to outline three basic strategies for generating free traffic to your site. Use signatures for posts and emails, get on to social networking sites and create some amazing YouTube Videos. You will be amazed at the results and the increase in your income.

www.edgelineinfo.com

Article Source: http://bb-articles.com

The good news is that this blog’s Alexa ranking has jumped again from 729,497 last week to 674,459 today. Alexa ranking is a loose indication of traffic, but not a total picture.

I’ve heard it said that the figures come from those who have an Alexa toolbar in their browser as I have in my Firefox browser.  I can see at a glance what any site’s Alexa ranking is and those who are more likely to have the Alexa toolbar in their browsers are Internet marketers who are more interested in traffic.

That would explain the huge discrepancies I see with my niche site’s traffic and Alexa rankings. For instance my highest traffic site is a Yorkshire pudding blog with an alexa ranking of 691,569 and my second highest traffic site with about 50 less visitors a day is my main article directory with an Alexa ranking of 95,576 this week, though it was as high as 82,000 last week. Clearly if the Alexa rankings were a total picture the Yorkshire pudding blog would rank higher, but the traffic is highly targeted to those interested in Yorkshire pudding recipes and cooking in general not Internet marketers with an Alexa toolbar in their browser.

However, as this blog is about Internet marketing the traffic I want to target is Internet marketers so Alexa gives me some indication of how things are doing.

My cpanel awstats tell me that from April 1st – 9th there have been 195 unique visitors and 733 visits (3.75 per visitor on average) and 4311 page views. That’s pretty good to me because it says that people are not just looking and going away, they are finding enough of interest to come back again.

On 2 of those days there were 123 visitors and 129 on another. That’s real progress when you think that during the whole of March there was only one day with over 100 visitors.

This week I did something that I should have done when I first set up this blog and that is give the pages, articles and categories search engine friendly URLs instead of the ugly numbers and question mark default URLs.

To set up title URLs you need to go into the settings area of your WP Dashboard and click on Permalinks. You will see a list of permalink settings and at the bottom is Custom Structure. In the space there you put /%category%/%postname%/ for category and title or /%postname%/ for just title.

Because I forgot to do that when I set up this blog I didn’t want to change things because the search engines had already indexed a lot of the pages and to change the page titles would have meant page not founds the next time they spidered the blog and the altered URLs would have meant that the pages would have needed indexing again. Traffic and previous bookmarks would be lost.

Then I found a Permalinks Migration plugin for Wordpress. The plug in allows you to change your permalinks to SEO friendly URLs without affecting your blog’s traffic. It tells the search engines and browsers that the page has moved and that the old URL should be replaced by a new one. This is called a 301 or permament redirect. Hopefully this plug in works and the SEO friendly URLs will help with getting more traffic.

I will only know how this plug in is working by monitoring statistics and seeing if there is a significant jump in page not founds during the next week or two. If there isn’t then the plug in is fine and I will be able to see more easily which pages and subjects are attracting the most traffic and views.

The best so far this month are articles about SEO, Squidoo and website hosting, suggesting that those are the articles visitors are the most interested in. But the most searched for keyphrases are information about offline printing so the good mix of articles is helping to draw traffic.

My article marketing campaign has been limited so far due to lack of time. As I know that article marketing will help me to get more targeted traffic to the blog I’ve decided to outsource the writing of some articles to a lady who has previously written some good articles for me, so hopefully my article marketing campaign will really kick off soon.

Yes I know that I am supposed to be doing this challenge with only free tools and resources but I’m not actually paying for the articles to market this blog. I had already commissioned some to promote my travel sites and the copywriter was offering 2 free for every 5 written, so I’m getting some freebies.

My target for next week is to hit the 150 mark on at least one day. That will take me half way towards my traffic challenge of 300 visitors a day within 6 months.

Unlike some blogs, where information is passed from the webmaster to the visitor, Squidoo is more interactive, encouraging the public or community members to provide the content or primary information for the site. Squidoo was established to help foster knowledge rich communities on the Web and to give everyone some clout on line. Best of all it’s a free service that actually pays you to participate.

Squidoo was launched in 2005 as a way for to allow individual users to create single web pages on even rants they are passionate about, interested in or have expert knowledge about. Of course, some really savvy marketers saw a great opportunity to make money with minimal work on their part.

Squidoo wants to be known as  “The World’s Most Popular Site” not just because of the number of users it has but because it allows average people interested in building pages to reflect their passions, interests, books, videos or any other material for that matter, without much censorship. As long as the content is clean and not overtly offensive, illegal, or hateful, just about anything goes.

Many Squidoo publishers use their pages to promote their organization, their charity, their favorite book, a book they wrote, promote a social cause and more. At the same time many others use Squidoo as a corporate marketing vehicle to drive targeted visitors to their website or offers. They call these pages, “Lenses,” which are single page sites on a topic a user is interested in promoting.

All you need to do is post a simple promotional paragraph highlighting some passion or product and include a link to your web address for people to get more information. read more about it. This is where the Squidoo traffic generation magic really pays off.

Another great use for Squidoo is to get to know other people interested in the same subject as you. One of the primary reasons for the advent of Web 2.0 is to allow users who have a common interest to form online communities rather than just creating static web sites controlled by single webmasters where information is fed to viewers and there is no interaction. Squidoo allows that missing interaction.

Yet another great use of Squidoo is for increasing your web visibility, and to gain credibility as go to person on a certain subject or information.

We all know that it has become increasingly expensive to promote our website on the Web. For those reasons, more and more smart marketers are turning to new forums and platforms, such as Squidoo, to boost traffic and gain credibility and sales.

To help boost traffic to their home pages or offers, marketers are building literaly hundreds of Squidoo pages each pointing to the users other web pages or blogs. You see, you can build as many Squidoo lenses as you like. There is no known limit. Plus, most of the pages on Squidoo.com are easily indexed by Google and other top search engines, so Squidoo provides an excellent method for driving targeted traffic.

A very nice bonus is making autopilot money. A lens publisher can earn commissions for their company or favorite charity because Squidoo offers a built-in system allowing shared compensation paid directly to owners of lens pages or to charities designated by lens owners. One can even designate a percentage to charity with the balance going into the user’s bank account. Nice, eh?

There is no cost to set up a page with Squidoo.com which is one of the main reasons this new technology is so popular.

Here are just 9 reasons you should start using Squidoo, today!

1. If you have a product offer, you can use your Squidoo “Lens” to attract visitors to your lens and in turn send some of those visitors to your website and increase your PageRank in Google. Increasing Google PageRank is one of the most challenging aspects of website promotion. Squidoo helps many people overcome this barrier. And, as Squidoo becomes more popular, so too will your site.

2. You can use Squidoo to highlight your favorite blog posts, accepting comments on them, and providing more information about services or other information you offer on your blog.

3. You can use your Squidoo lens to help promote or earn money for your favorite charity or other nonprofit group.

4. For audio lovers, Squidoo allows users to post details about their upcoming podcasts and point links to transcripts of podcasts the user has available online.

5. For those people who are avid “fans” of writing about people, places, or things, Squidoo provides an ideal platform for sharing personal insights on your personal likes and dislikes.

6. New authors can use Squidoo to promote their works, providing links to all of their works for sale on Amazon.com, for example.

7. Entrepreneurs can earn affiliate income by promoting products or by building MLM downlines.

8. You can easily research other people’s passions and interests to get an idea of what is “hot” on the Web and what to write about or sell on line.

9. As a social medium, Squidoo allows users to share many different positions, often on the same subject, so you have the opportunity to get a diverse view by collecting, gathering and sorting the information provided from other users.

As you can see, Squidoo is an excellent platform for just about anyone interested in promoting their passions and interests. Now that you know a little bit more about what Squidoo is, don’t you think it’s time to learn more about “how” the site works, and how you go about creating your own dynamic lens pages?

Jim DeSantis is an Internet Reporter and former TV News Editor who provides a free ebook that walks you through Squidoo basics, step-by-step, with screenshots. Get Squidoo Basics Free – here! No email or signup are required to get it. It’s ideal for folks who want to learn an easy way to start creating a presence on line.

Article Source: http://bb-articles.com

Ten years ago or so, launching a web site for your organization was a newsworthy event. You were surely on the cutting edge, maybe even the bleeding edge, when you took the dramatic step of opening your organization up to those relatively few consumers who looked to the Internet as a commerce alternative.

Today, you’re a Luddite if you don’t have a web site and a dinosaur if all your web site does is showcase your products or services and provide an online ordering mechanism.

Building a web site is no longer a newsworthy event. But having one, even a tricked out one with all the bells and whistles, may be a non-event if you aren’t working hard to raise your site’s visibility in a crowded marketplace.

The Top 3 Things Web Sites Are ‘About’ These Days

1. Visibility
2. Visibility
3. Visibility

It’s not enough to have a web site loaded with all the must-have features if no one knows it’s there.

The Advertising World has Changed

A friend of mine relayed a story to me that should send a chill up the spine of any organization that isn’t fully invested in raising its website’s visibility.

My friend’s father-in-law was in the hospital. A nurse made a terrible error and hooked up the wrong medicine to his IV tube. It nearly killed him. After the doctors pulled him back from the brink of death, the hospital’s Risk Manager came to the room with a waiver offering the patient some relatively small amount of money in return for releasing the hospital from all claims over the “unfortunate incident.”

My friend’s mother-in-law, a 69 year-old woman who doesn’t even have an email address, turned to my friend and said “Go on the Internet and find one of those medical malpractice lawyers and make an appointment for me and you to visit him.”
That’s what she said; but it’s what she didn’t say that is so chilling.

She didn’t say “Go to the Yellow Pages and find a lawyer.”

She didn’t say “What’s the name of that big law firm that advertises on TV every day.”

She instinctively knew that the Internet was the preferred source for solving her immediate problem.

My friend used Google to search on the term “medical malpractice” and the name of the city the hospital was in. He took the results and googled each firm’s name to find more information not only from the firm, but from people who had used the firm and had written about their experiences in blogs and other social media sites.

What if you had a law firm serving that market? Would your firm’s name have come up in the top 10 Google results? Would you have had satisfied clients writing about you or your firm on social media sites?

You don’t have to be a lawyer to see that the world around you is changing.

If you don’t have top search engine placement and a strong social media network working on your behalf, you are invisible.

The good news is: It’s never too late to start.

The bad news is: Nothing will happen until you make it happen.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is part science and part magic. Blend both parts together and you instantly raise your chances of survival in an increasingly hostile market where SEO-savvy competitors are all too willing to use the Internet against you.

At Idea Design Websites in the Tampa area, we keep informed about the current market and technologies. We prepare your on line presence to be more than passive for your visitors. We offer SEO, Social media, copywriting and submission services.

Article Source: http://bb-articles.com

Blimey it’s week 9 already and I’ve been really bad at missing the weekly reports. Reasons, excuses – simply very busy in my business, my life and my day job. However I’ve found time today and there are some interesting things to report but it aint all good.

Alexa Ranking has jumped up to the current 729,497 during the last 4 weeks from 1,074,10. That’s a good increase and mostly due to the work that I put in during the first month. Results aren’t always immediate and if you lay good groundwork you continue to see improvements as long as you spend some regular time on your promotions and content adding.

My Cpanels awstats aren’t as positive. In February there were 651 unique visitors and in March it dropped down to 507, but the number of visits increased and I did hit my target of getting over 100 visits in a day on the 5th of March.

My neglect has done some damage in the traffic challenge progress, but nothing that I can’t rectify with some work. Part of my neglect was due to one of my other blogs starting to make money unexpectedly. Sales were coming in from Clickbank, some ebooks I had on sale and Adsense revenue. The blog was put up for fun and when I saw what was happening I concentrated my traffic gaining efforts on that blog and who could blame me. Maybe I should have made my challenge about that blog!

On the good side the company which I use to get my articles out has finally approved them after several weeks of waiting so the effects of the article marketing should start to kick in soon. Maybe I should change companies, but despite the wait I’ve always had good results from them and I can’t argue with that.

During March I started to add the RSS feed to a list of feed directories, that I shall continue to do, but it’s very time consuming as I decided to add the feeds from all of my sites and blogs while I was on each directory rather than having to keep going back.

I continued to add fairly regular content and used this link in my signature on a handful of forums which has helped to get some targeted traffic, but not a lot because I haven’t been posting much.

During April I aim to get the Alexa ranking below 500,000 by doing more of what I’ve already been doing. Because I now have 2 months worth of statistics I also have 2 lists of search strings which will be useful in determining whether or not I should change the meta keywords for this blog.

I’ll also be reviewing some more of the free resources that I use in April and some of them are pretty darned good. I’ve also found some more WP widgets that I will be testing out on this and my other blogs.