KILLER TRAFFIC (part-4)

 CHAPTER 7: 
LEVERAGING ON ONLINE MEDIAS
1 Using Paid E-zine Advertising to Generate Targeted Traffic

Using paid E-zine advertising to generate targeted traffic is a waste of time, isn't it?

With email response rates at absurdly low percentages and with the average quality of E-zine, it can't possibly be worth it to advertise your product or service in an E-zine, can it? It can...

But here's the problem: adverse selection. Advertisers – you fall into this group – want to purchase advertising in good E-zines. Good E-zine owners want to maintain the quality of their E-zines.

If they allow too much advertising, the quality will dip significantly and list members will either stop paying attention or leave the list altogether.

So what ends up happening? Owners who allow a considerable amount of advertising end up with list members who simply do not buy – and a growing attrition rate.

And list owners who don't allow advertisers to send out mailings – or who limit them – end up with higher response rates, but this doesn't help you, since they wont let you send out an advertisement.

So what does this mean?

It means that using paid E-zine advertising to generate targeted traffic the traditional way will not work.

You might still have some success purchasing advertising in an E-zine or exchanging advertising with list owners, but the best lists – the ones you really want to advertise on – will be really hard to access.

Let me suggest an alternate path for advertising in E-zines. Rather than “purchasing an advertisement” through a PayPal link, instead join lists that actually provide reasonable content to users.

Read them for a while – and then contact the list owner. Tell him/her that you are a list member and that you are interested in advertising in his/her newsletter.

Now, you can pitch this in one of two ways.

You can simply explain that your product is excellent and that you are willing to pay a considerable amount to advertise; or you could offer to broker some type of affiliate or joint venture deal.

Either method is fine. Just remember to approach them personally.

2 Maximum Traffic Exposure with Press Releases

According to many experts, press releases are an absolutely essential part of any traffic generation campaign.

Additionally, they often interface perfectly with a traffic generation campaign; as such campaigns are usually used after a site or product launch – or to kick off a contest.

While there are several different press release services available over the Internet, PR Web, which you can find at http://www.prweb.com is considered to be the current industry leader.

They provide clients with wide-distribution press releases, which range in price from free to well over $500.

Of course, the quality of the distribution is directly related to the price.

A free submission may yield several hundred to several thousand views; whereas a $500 submission will be sent to radio stations, newspapers, publishers, tens of thousands of webmasters, and all other press release services.

This could end up yielding tens of thousands of visitors.

Now, when writing a press release, there are two important things to take into consideration.

The first thing you must consider is the submission guidelines of the press release service you choose.

Some services will require character-per-line formatting. Additionally, they may ask you to include certain elements, such as your telephone number, address, and byline.

The second thing you must take into consideration is the construction of the press release.

This is something that writers often bungle, even when they are talented.

This is because a press release isn't written as an article would be written; although several elements are the same.

When writing the actual press release, you will want to start with a compelling title that will intrigue the largest possible crowd while still remaining at least somewhat related to your topic.

Avoid using your business's name or your own name in the title. Instead, keep it powerful, but vague. Make readers click to find out what it's all about.

Now, when you get to the body of your press release, it is important to take one of two approaches: the “story” approach or the “newspaper” approach.

If you take the newspaper approach, put all of the pertinent details in the first paragraph and then slowly scale down the story.

If you take the story approach, don't give any specific details until the end. The latter often works best for generating traffic to your site.

And there you have it: a short recipe for effective press releases.

CHAPTER 8: 
BUYING AD SPACE ON OTHER HIGH TRAFFICKED WEBSITES
1 Buying Ad Space – Does it Still Work?

Does buying ad space still work? Most experts will tell you no. They will also tell you that it hasn't worked since the 1990s, which was probably the last time they ran a successful campaign by using ad space.

While common wisdom about Internet marketing is often true, in this specific case, it isn't at all.

In fact, you can run a profitable business that receives 100% of its traffic through advertisements placed on other sites.

All you have to do is actually find good sites to purchase links from or exchange links with – and then actually do it.

What are some good ways in which you can buy ad space and actually have it work for you?

The first way is to purchase skyscraper banners on massive sites related to your niche.

If possible, you will want to purchase click through, rather than impressions, which are somewhat meaningless.

For instance, you could purchase 100,000 impressions, but if the click through rate is .001%, then the actual amount of traffic you receive will be no where near that amount.

If you do decide to go with banner advertisements sold by impressions, spend the time to ask where your banner will be positioned and what the average click through rate is.

The next way in which you can generate traffic for your site by purchasing ad space is to look for authority sites that sell front page text links.

This is quite common, even though AdSense advertisements have replaced many of the text links that were once sold for authority sites.

The last way in which you can generate traffic for your sites through ad space is by exchanging banners or links with other sites.

For some reason, people see this is as a lose-lose situation, but that's simply untrue. As long as you pick the right partners, it can be a win-win situation.

People can find both your site useful and your partner's site useful at the same time – without restricting themselves to just one or the other.

2 Decision Factors in Buying an Ad Space on Websites

There are a number of things you should consider when purchasing ad space on websites.

Above all, two are most important – and that is the traffic rating and the page rank. These two hard numbers will determine how much you benefit from the purchase.

Checking the page rank of a site is usually simple enough. You can download the Google toolbar at the following URL: http://toolbar.google.com/T4/.

This will allow you to check page rank while you surf potential sites to place ads on; however, before making the actual purchase, you will want to check the site again with the following URL: http://www.iwebtool.com/pagerank_prediction.

Some site owners will use tricky methods to make “visual page rank” -- or the page rank that shows up on the toolbar – appear much higher than it actually is.

This tool will show you the real value.

In addition to these two tools, you will want to check the Alexa rankings of each site, which you can find at the following URL: http://www.alexa.com. The lower the ranking is, the more traffic the site is receiving.

In addition to considering the page rank and the Alexa rating of the site, you will also want to consider the price and positioning of the ad space.

Is the ad in a place where it is likely to generate revenue? If so, how have previous ad space buyers done? What was the approximate click through rate?

The last thing you will want to consider is the price. Even if the site has a low Alexa rates, high PR, and good ad positioning, if the price tag is too high, you're better off going somewhere else.

Keep in mind that you are paying for both a high page rank link and some direct traffic.

In addition to simple text link ads, you will want to also check the rates and positions of skyscraper advertisements and picture advertisements on the top and body of the page. If the ads being offered are in places that probably won’t receive traffic, do not bother buying them.

3 How to Strategically Architect your Ad for Maximum Exposure

If you've ever read a guide on using Google AdWords, you know that the way in which you create your advertisements will have a powerful effect on how well they actually perform in pulling traffic.

Even tweaking a single word can change your click through rate by a factor of 3 or 4 (although this is not usually the case).

What you may not know is that this is also true for ads you put on other sites, such as graphic ads, image ads, text ads, banners, and vertical skyscrapers.

So what's important to keep in mind when creating advertisements?

The first thing to keep in mind is the regulations of the site to which you are submitting your advertisement.

If you're creating a text ad, find out how many characters they allow and how many lines they allow. And if you're creating graphic ads, find out if they accept them in any format, including flash.

When creating text link advertisements, you will want to employ strategies similar to those you might use for Google AdWords'.

You will want to use a powerful headline and then follow it up with a compelling, scalable pitch, which is accompanied by a call to action (click here!).

Now, if you're creating a banner or a skyscraper, you may want to consider using flash, as it will allow you to produce interactive banners, which have been shown to pull more visitors with the same amount of impressions.

With a banner, you will want to have some movement.

(Lately, many authority sites have experimented with flash games on banners; however, the results have been mixed. You may want to consider at least trying this.)

Last, if you're creating a tiny image ad or a button, you will want to carefully construct it to let potential visitors know what your site is all about. You may want to simply include your logo and 3-4 words that describe your site on the image.

CHAPTER 9: IN CLOSING
1 Questionable Traffic Generation Methods You Must Not Use!

There are a number of questionable traffic generation methods you should avoid if possible.

While they may work some time if you get extremely lucky, 99.99% of the time, they will produce no results at all.

The two most common questionable traffic generation methods people fail with are buying “targeted traffic” and using classified ads.

Let's start with targeted traffic campaigns.

For marketing reasons, the people who sell these traffic campaigns call it “targeted traffic,” when, in reality, it is the absolute lowest, scummiest form of traffic.

This traffic is usually generated through spam, untargeted pop-ups, and domain squatting.

The entire business is a racquet – and they're delivering all of their angry customers directly to your site.

Not only is this simply not going to generate revenue, but it also has the potential to get you reported to your host, as many of these visitors wont be happy that they ended up at your site.

Avoid these bogus traffic generation campaigns at all costs. Almost all people waste money on them sooner or later. Don't be one of the herd; avoid the mistake.

Using classified advertisements is usually disasterous, too.

To begin with, most people simply cannot create a classified ad that will generate traffic even if it does receive hundreds of views.

But what makes classified ads worse is that they're tiny boxes on a page of scores of advertisements.

The chances of someone actually finding your ad in a classified section are pretty slim, even with a high circulation paper.

Things are even worse at online classified sites.

Many of these sites exist only to host classifed ads to generate revenue.

In reality, people are only going there to post ads – not to look at them.

So avoid these two types of advertising.

They're a waste of your time; and you'll only be disappointed and short on cash after you're done experimenting.

2 The One Secret to Getting Non Stop Traffic

Do you know the one secret to getting non stop traffic? If you don't, you're probably not getting it, are you?

interestingly enough, it's really simple – and yet so complex that most people who want to make money on the Internet miss it entirely.

The secret to getting non stop traffic is giving your visitors a compelling reason to continue to come back to your site.

Put yourself in this situation. Pretend that you have a site that receives 10,000 visitors a month from natural search engine traffic.

Let's also say that this site has no mechanism for recycling traffic. Could you make money off of that traffic? Of course, you could.

Now, let's say you have some recycling mechanism, such as a forum or an automatic “favorites” pop-up. And let's say that you are able to effectively recycle 70% of your traffic.

Assuming your natural search engine rankings don't improve, you will receive 10,000 unique visitors the first month.

The second month, you will receive 17,000. The third, you will receive 24,000. The fourth, you will receive 31,000 – and so on.

Do you see the power of this technique? All you have to do is give visitors a reason to keep coming back; and you can do that in a number of different ways.

One way is to offer some service that they can't get in many other places. Perhaps you could offer free image hosting.

Another way is to setup a community forum, which will keep traffic returning again and again.

Additionally, you could offer a free URL cloaking service or dynamic content that is updated on a daily basis.

Whatever you do, provide excellent content and tools for your visitors and they will return again and again, increasing your traffic each month, rather than leaving it stagnant, as it was in the first model.

3 5 Tips on Getting Continuous Traffic to Your Websites

Rather than giving you a single way to drive traffic to your websites, I'm going to give you a rundown of several of the easiest and most important tips for generating traffic – and allow you to try them all out yourself to determine what will work best with your given setup.

• Traffic Generation Tip #1: Pick the Low Hanging Fruit Using SEO

Building natural search engine traffic for “low hanging fruit” is akin to building an asset.

You are simply creating pages that have little competition, which upon being indexed, will immediately take the first, second, or third slot for their given keyword.

• Traffic Generation Tip #2: Use Viral Promotion

At least once every two months, creating some type of viral product to generate more traffic for your site. This can be a piece of software, a PDF, an audio recording, a video, or an E-Book.

Whatever you select, make sure you make people want to distribute it for free – and make sure it has built in ways to bring people back to your site.

• Traffic Generation Tip #3: Consider Legitimate Link Exchanges

Link exchanges only work if you do them with sites that get a lot of traffic and have high PR – and if you exchange them in places where people might actually click.

Keep in mind that the traffic leaving your site probably would have left, anyway, but the traffic you gained wouldn't have arrived any other way.

• Traffic Generation Tip #4: Use Joint Ventures and Affiliate Programs

A joint venture partner or super affiliate can generate a veritable avalanche of traffic faster than any pay per click campaign, natural search engine traffic, or link exchange.

So spend the time to find the right partners at the right times – and engage them personally.

• Traffic Generation Tip #5: Always Recycle Traffic

Recycling traffic ensures that your traffic increases each month, even if your natural search traffic remains the same – or even decreases slightly.

Find ways to recycle your traffic into regular visitors and you will increase your revenue each month.

And there you have it: five simple tips you can use to generate traffic to your site without too much additional work.