Traffic Means Sales
Without Sales, You Cannot Generate Income
Web traffic is the major need of an online business owner. A web site will never succeed if traffic is not coming in. When you have a good flow of web traffic, you are guaranteed to attain success and profits.
It's just like having a retail store. It doesn’t matter how good you are as a salesman or if you have the best products, if no one comes into your store, they may never know. Even if you advertise, if your marketing strategies are weak, it could be buried beneath the other marketing schemes of the other stores. This is especially true on the Internet where the competition is fierce.
You will notice that even the finest optimized site, which has the best sales page, will not gain an extra penny without increasing web traffic. There are numerous ways to increase web traffic and most of the webmasters have tried everything to make it to the top.
Although these ways are known to generate traffic and help increase income, most of them will cost you money without a complete guarantee that you will profit from it once you have spent your cash over it.
On the other hand, there are still many ways on how you can be able to generate good web traffic without spending too much. Sometimes, it even comes free when added with perseverance and patience.
Exchanging links with other sites is a good strategy to generate web traffic. If you carefully study the performance of top ranking sites on the different search engines, you will get numerous links. Though you can benefit from exchanging links with any site, if you exchange links with sites of a similar niche (interest) you will generate more tageted traffic for your site.
Another advantage of exchanging links is that your site will have more possibilities of having a higher ranking in the different search engines. This may favorably help in getting traffic from the search engines plus the linking site.
Traffic exchanges are a form of link exchange in which the members of a certain traffic exchange can view each other’s pages by simply surfing within the exchange. Each time you view someone's page, you gain a certain credit so the more pages you view of other sites, the more your site will be viewed in return, thus giving you more credits and higher chances to increase web traffic.
Although traffic from these exchanges is not targeted it can be used to capture names for your subscriber list and to build your affiliate downline by attracting other webmasters to your affiliates, or getting them to affiliate with you; thus using their skills to increase your own sales margin.
Careful! If It's Viral, It Could Be Contagious
Hence, The Purpose Behind Viral Marketing
Viral marketing is just that, a marketing campaign which spreads, and ideally under its own power. Viral marketing can come in many forms including e-mail campains, articles published in directories and on other sites, tell-a-friend scripts, and even from other webmasters helping themselves out by helping you.
The primary focus of viral marketing is to put something in the customer's hands, or in an associate's hands, which is designed to not only bring customers back to you, but to also use the customer's own experience to bring new clientele to you. Known as word of mouth and promotion advertising in the mundane, walk-a-day world, viral marketing takes on new life in the world of the internet, yet, incorporates many of the techniques of old.
6 Ideas for Viral Marketing
Here are six ideas to help you start your viral marketing campaign:
1. Purchase the branding rights to a viral E-book. Allow people to give away your free E-book to their visitors. Then, their visitors will also give it away. This will just continue to spread your ad all over the Internet.
2. If you have the ability to set up a forum or other bulletin board, you really have a great tool. Allow people to use your online discussion board for their own website. Some people don't have one. Just include your banner ad at the top of the board.
3. Do you have a knack for web design? Create some templates, graphics, etc. and upload them to your site. Then, allow people to give away your free web design graphics, fonts, templates, etc. Just include your ad on them or require people to link directly to your web site. Make sure that you include a link back to your site in the copyright notice and require them to keep your copyright notice intact.
4. Write an E-book. Allow people to place an advertisement in your free E-book if, in exchange, they give away the E-book to their web visitors or E-zine subscribers.
5. Write articles that pertain to your product or service. Allow people to reprint your articles on their website, in their E-zine, newsletter, magazine or E-books. Include your resource box and the option for article reprints at the bottom of each article.
6. You can easily find products on the Internet that will sell you a license allowing you to distribute the product free of charge to other people. Look for those products that provide "branding rights". That is where you can include your own name, website, and contact information.
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Principles of Viral Marketing
Viral marketing has definitely gained its popularity over the global network. More and more businesses are adopting this marketing strategy to gain their fair share in the market. The approach developed by Hotmail in increasing its number of subscribers is one classic example of viral marketing.
How Hotmail Did It
Hotmail is one of the first web-based email provider that gives away email addresses for free. Their marketing approach starts by giving free web-based email addresses and additional services. Each of the messages sent with a Hotmail address has an advertisement at the bottom that goes: “Get your private, free email at http://www.hotmail.com.”
Then, of course, Hotmail subscribers will use the service to send messages to their friends and colleagues. These friends and colleagues will get the message and read it, and then clicks on the link at the bottom. They will also sign up and be a subscriber like what the sender did. Then these new subscribers will also email their own set of friends. The cycle goes on and on.
This is why viral marketing has the power of reaching thousands, even millions, of people in such a short time and with little effort from the one who initiates it.
Free Search Engine Submission and Promotion
Obviously the key to getting traffic from the internet in the first place is to have your link in places which are easy to find. Chief among these resources are search engines and directories; since this is how people search for what they are trying to find.
But why have a link anywhere but Google? Aren't they the primary supplier of traffic to websites?
Well, yes they are, but they have a ranking system by which they return results on searches; and the more links you have on other search engines, in directories, and on other sites, the higher you are likely to be ranked and, as a result, have your site returned earler in the search results.
In order to help you to accomplish that, you will find a handy search engine submitter that will submit your site to several search engines for you. Just enter the details and submit away for free; for as many sites as you would like.
Don't forget to check out Directory Critic which offers a listing of over 800 directories to which you can submit your site for free.
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Elements of Viral Marketing
Dr. Ralph Wilson, an e-commerce consultant, named six elements or basic principles of viral marketing. A viral marketing technique need not have all of these, but the more principles it follows, the more powerful the strategy will be.
1. Give away products or services. This is the first and most basic principle of viral marketing. When a person hears the word “free,” it elicits the interest in him and will avail of that free product or service, for sure. Having cheap or inexpensive products may also do the trick, but “free” will give much faster results.
Patience is important in viral marketing. Giving away products for free may not earn profit today but if the business gets to develop customer base by giving something for free, it will soon generate income for them.
2. Easy transfer to others. The medium used to carry the marketing message to other people should relatively be easy. Viral marketing has been powerful over the internet because of the ease of communication the technology offers. Email, web sites, software downloads are just some examples that can be used in viral marketing.
Also, it is better that the message be short for easy copying and transmission. Simple and short but straight to the point is best, just like Hotmail’s advertisement at the bottom of each email sent out.
3. Scalability from small to very large. When viral marketing is used as a marketing style, it is best that the business is prepared for rapid growth. In cases of increasing web traffic thru viral advertising, the web owner should make sure that the host server is prepared enough to handle the expected increase in traffic within a short period of time.
This should not be taken for granted; else, it will defeat the purpose of doing viral marketing. Once people notice that the site takes a long time to load, they will just leave and forget about it. That means an automatic loss of potential customers.
4. Exploit motivation and behaviors. A marketing strategy that builds on motivation and behaviors of people for its transmission is a definite plus. People love to be popular. This motivation will drive them to communicate to more and more people to be known.
5. Utilize existing networks. According to social scientists, an average person has about 8 to 12 members in their close network of family, friends and colleagues. Moreover, internet gives way to creating a bigger network circle. Learning to use these existing networks in viral marketing will yield better results.
6. Take advantage of other’s resources. Viral marketing need not consume all your resources away. Using other web sites in posting your articles, for example, will get them read by a large number of people without the need of creating your own web page.
It is best to learn these basic elements or principles of viral marketing first before actually doing it. Being to aggressive without doing your homework may just lead to damage instead of success. Try to adopt those that may be applicable to your product. Use all of the principles, if possible, for a more successful output.
Grab Your Free Marketing eBook
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TOP Traffic Building Strategies That Can Put Your Web Site On The High Traffics Of The Internet Highway! To fully complete the success equation you need traffic. Traffic is to a web site what blood is to the body. |
Other than ensuring that you have a great product to sell, you need to focus on generating TARGETED 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 it is time to own a copy of Traffic Overdrive.
In Traffic Overdrive, you will discover a variety of free and low-cost traffic building methods that are not only time-tested but proven as well.
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Free Traffic Club!
The Subservient Chicken
Created for Miami Advertising Agency Crispin Porter and Bogusky by The Barbarian Group, the Subservient Chicken is a viral marketing promotion of Burger King’s line of chicken sandwiches.
The campaign is based on a web site that features a person in a chicken costume. The actor performs a wide range of actions based on a user’s input, showing pre-recorded footage and appearing like an interactive webcam. The takes literally the advertising slogan “Get chicken just the way you like it”.
There are more than a hundred commands the chicken will respond to, including:
- Michael Jackson dance moves such as moonwalk
- River dance
- The elephant
- Lay an egg
- Walk like an Egyptian
- Yoga
- Rage
- Spank
- Taco Bell
- Fight
When told to do anything the Subservient Chicken thinks is offensive, like perform sex acts or take off his mask, the chicken walks up to the camera and shakes a scolding chicken finger in disappointment. If he is told to east food from rival fast food places like McDonald’s he approaches the camera and places his finger down his throat but when told to eat Burger King he has a more positive response. The chicken responds to the command “smoke crack” by smoking but when told to “smoke a bong” he waggles his finger scoldingly.
Burger King’s Chicken Fights campaign was recently introduced. The two cockfighting chicken characters are modeled off this chicken.
There seems to be no end to the variations on the theme from Burger King. There has also been a lot of criticism leveled at the chain about the Subservient Chicken but for now it looks like Burger Kind is crying all the way to the bank.
A successful viral campaign isn’t always in good taste maybe that’s what makes them so tasty. It's up to you to decide which side of ethics you want to take. Too often big business puts profit ahead of ethics.
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Free MiniSite Generator
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Vend-O-Matic! Automatically Build Profit Generating Web Vending Pages
Vend-O-Matic is the absolutely foolproof way to create stunning, ready-to-run 'web vending pages' for any product. In less than a minute, you can create professional looking pages like this one.
Quickly create stunning web sales pages with order forms for your products. No coding involved, just fill out the Vend-O-Matic form and click 'create'. Vend-O-Matic instantly creates your web vending pages for you.
No coding involved! Just click 'create' and Vend-O-Matic creates your Sales page, your Thank You page, even your instant product delivery system.
Highly recommended! |  |
Forget about hand coding your web vending pages . . . Vend-O-Matic does it for you, and it does it right, without HTML errors.
With Vend-O-Matic, you can begin creating your own custom web vending pages immediately. No need to learn HTML or debug someone else's coding.
With Vend-O-Matic you can:
- Instantly and effortlessly create great looking web vending pages.
- Instantly and effortlessly create the ClickBank order links so customers can immediately order products from your site.
- Instantly and effortlessly create the 'Thank You' page customers see when they place an order with you.
- Instantly and effortlessly create an 'Instant Product Delivery System' - so customers can get their products automatically as soon as their order is processed.
- Instantly and effortlessly create web pages that are fully optimized for highest search engine ranking. Yes! Vend-O-Matic is designed to automatically include 'search engine friendly' meta tags for your pages.
Vend-O-Matic does all this and more. |
Download
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Click Here for your Free Traffic!
Free Webmaster Toolbox: 6 Tools in 1
 | 6 Webmaster Tools in 1
To take advantage of most utilities, you generally need to access individual programs or web pages for each task you're hoping to accomplish. But not any more... Thanks to Web Toolbox you can now easily and conveniently handle six different basic and important webmaster tasks by simply opening this one single program! |
Create advanced meta tags, custom popup windows, optimized search engine doorway pages, space-saving drop-down menus, standard mini site pages, and encrypt HTML documents... all with the click of a button!
Simply navigate to each of the tools and fill out the associated form to create whatever you need. Generate the code and then copy and paste it into your HTML document. That's all there is to it!
Download
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Free Google Adsense Sites
We've seen them before in various packages and configurations; article rich (and keyword rich) sites in which you can insert your Google Adsense code, upload, and have complete sites on various topics that easily. That is, of course, if you don't mind paying for them.
Hold the boat! (or whatever that expression is) I have these same sites. Now why would I want to charge you for them? (that was a rhetorical question, smart alec) No, I'll give them to you for free; well, ten of them anyway.
I have picked out ten hot topics for the internet, which should provide you with plenty of keyword rich content for a new site or, better yet, add them as sub-domains to your present site and build your keyword density and backlinks by promoting each of your sub-domains.
The topics included in this package are: affiliate programs and marketing; article writing and promotion; blog, blogs and blogging essentials (uh-huh, had to get all keywords in there; I feel like doing it again: blog, blogs and blogging); casino, poker, and gambling articles; digital photography and digital camera essentials; eBay selling and auction advice; HDTV, LCD, Plasma, home entertainment and cellphone information (oh, I'm so bad); self-employment, home business, and job seeking help; search engine optimization (seo) articles; and virus and computer security overview.
All that you have to do (after downloading it first, silly) is go through the hundreds of pages and replace the included Adsense code with your own. (why are you looking so depressed?) Oh! Well, what if I throw in a program which will search through the files and replace the adsense code for you? (uh, no, that wasn't a lie) You can also download the Adsense Search program for free which will do just that.
Both of these downloads are free just for you stopping by the site and, as usual, no email is required; just download it and enjoy.
Download Adsense Sites
Download Adsense Search
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Updates
Being that I need a place to update visitors about changes to the site, and that the forum software is having problems, I decided to place an update box on the page itself. Here you will find updates primarily about affiliates, link exchanges, and links which have been removed; and precisely why they have been removed.
The 1x3 banner exchange has been removed from this site; and they are far from recommended. It seems as though, after sign-up, they like to delete accounts (without any notice) and just ride sites for the free advertising. I guess that they did not expect that someone would bother to check that out; but I did, and they will no longer be allowed to advertise on this site and this warning will forever stay on the site.
The ProgramHoppers banner has been removed and will not return. I might expect an occasional e-mail from a service I sign-up for, but dear God, not that damn many e-mails. Even though a service like this, like many others, has an agreement up front that you are signing up to receive e-mails from them in addition to the service, they just take too much advantage of this. There is an op-out for their e-mails, but I really feel that I sould not have had to use it that soon.
Please note that although the Aesthetic Rotation button exchange has been removed from this site, it was due to the domain expiring and nothing which the button exchange did.
Unfortunately the registrar for the domain was using the button exchange link to send popunders through the sites linked to the exchange. This practice is a violation of someone's webspace, and an inconvenience to any visitor to a site. I will get the registar's name and duly post it for everyone to see for the underhanded tactics they practice.
I would suggest to those webmasters who have not even bothered to visit their own pages, and have the Aesthetic Rotation link on their site, that you remove it for the sake of your visitors, or they may well (and rightfully) leave. I do apologize for any inconvenience the popunders caused during the two days that the link was still on the site.
The following topsite lists have had their links removed for failure to reciprocate with a link back to TrafficClose, or just for plain incompetence in running a topsites list:
WebmasterPit.com; Dutch's Software Top 100; Top100-Websites.com; Zulu Topsites; Webmaster Topliste/Megahitz.de.
These sites have been riding me for free advertising. Whether intentional or not, they have failed to provide a simple link and are subsequently a worthless resource; as no webmaster needs to waste their time advertising someone who has no intention of reciprocating.
I do not, nor does any webmaster, like to be taken advantage of for free advertising. If I place a link to a site on my site, I fully expect a link to be placed back to me. Any such sites which do not compensate with a link back, will not get away with it.
Perhaps this may seem a little harsh to some, but the purpose of TrafficClose is to provide information and sources which can prove beneficial to webmasters in both promoting their sites and getting traffic to their sites. Obviously, any such source that does not deliver on what it promises is simply not a good source and a waste of your precious time and effort. Any such false promises which are discovered (and I check it regularly) will not only be removed, but will be publicly admonished so everyone will know to avoid them.
Please stay tuned as I will be adding even more resources, and a few eBooks (after I thoroughly check them out myself).
A new webmaster forum is on the horizon providing a place for the serious discussion of webmaster subjects including for coders to delve into PHP, MySQL, Javascript, HTML, CSS and more.
Graphic designers and webmasters can discuss using JPEG, GIF, and PNG files, as well any Photoshop techniques, plugins, or any other graphic editors.
Get or give advice on open source scripts or your own scripts for blogs, forums, content management systems (CMS); even provide input for the more popular scripts like Wordpress, Joomla, PHPNuke, SMF, MyBB and others.
No webmaster forum would be complete without delving into SEO and search engines. You will find not only coverage of that, but a forum for making money online as well.
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Link To Us
Hey, if you like the site and would like to share it with your visitors, I would very much appreciate a link. Choose from the banner, button, or simply a text link would be great. Just download the banner or button and host them on your server.
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TrafficClose - Free Traffic Resources
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