TRAFFIC IS THE GRAVITY OF EVERY WEBSITE So you know that you need lots of traffic to have a successful website, and I'm not talking about the four wheeled kind that rumbles around outside… You probably also know that not all traffic is equal. You can have a million visitors to your site, but if they are not targeted visitors then it's unlikely that many will do what you want them to do – opt-in to your mailing list, or buy your products. Targeted traffic is the life blood of every website and every online business. You cannot survive without it, but if you CAN find the people who are just aching to get hold of what you’re offering and then find a way of getting them onto your website – you’re going to make a lot of money! It sounds simple enough, but traffic generation is something that a lot of internet marketers seem to struggle with, which is where this book comes in. Some of the methods and strategies we’re going to cover you’ll probably have come across before, whilst others will most likely be new to you. Look -creating targeted traffic isn’t difficult, but in my opinion it’s probably THE most essential skill in the arsenal of any internet marketer. Once you know how to do it, you’ll never look back. Use the methods in this report consistently and you WILL generate a lot of traffic – whenever you need it, and in many cases on autopilot. When I first started out online I took a pretty half hearted approach to traffic generation. I almost expected the visitors to come to me, rather than me having to go out looking for them. Of course they WILL come to you, but you’ll have to put some work in first. It’s all covered right here in this book, the methods and strategies that form the backbone of my own online business and which you too can begin using in yours. The traffic you need is out there, you just need to be shown how to get it in front of your website… Enjoy the report.  TRADITIONAL METHODS OF TRAFFIC GENERATION THAT I LOVE Some of the best ways I know of generating traffic have been around for years. They’re not particularly sexy or glamorous BUT they do work. Generate Traffic From Blogging Blogs are a wonderful way of getting traffic and building relationships – either with your own blog or through other peoples. Blog Commenting This is one of my personal favorites and it works extremely well. Visit other blogs in your niche and then add comments to posts which you feel you can contribute to (this can be a question, challenge, feedback, or an addition to the post). The secret is to make your comments engaging and thoughtful, and then include a link in the box provided back to your website. The chances are you’ll already know some popular blogs in your niche, but if you don’t then they’re easy to find using Google. Here’s a good example: After a while, if you regularly comment on a particular blog you can also begin to build a relationship with the blog owner, which could lead to backlinks, interviews or the chance to appear as a guest blogger. Another benefit of posting regularly is that many blogs have a „Frequent Commentators’ box or similar – giving you extra exposure.  It’s always good if you’re the first person to leave a comment on a particular post because that means you’ll be at the top and more likely to get read. If you sign up to a blog's RSS feed, you will be automatically updated when a new blog post is published, so this is easy as long as you’re quick. Another good strategy is to find posts which appear to be popular (posts which already have a lot of comments) and add an additional one. The reason for this is that people keep coming back to these posts and you can find yourself getting traffic back to your sites YEARS after the original post was made. The best piece of advice I can give with blog commenting is to simply join in the conversation. Add your own personal thoughts to the original post and try to make your comments interesting and worth reading. Don’t just post one liners (e.g “great post”) as this is boring and people will see through the fact that you’re only doing it to advertise your website and get your link on there. Post an intelligent response to the original post and people will start to think “this person is worth checking out” and they will Guest Blogging Becoming a guest blogger on a popular blog can get you tons of exposure. After a little while of posting valuable comments, send an email to the blog owner letting them know how much you enjoy their blog and after a couple of email exchanges ask if you can do a guest post on their blog. The worst they can say is 'no', but in my experience more often than not the answer will be an unequivocal 'yes' – it’s free content for them (many marketers are extremely busy and don’t post to their blogs as often as they would like, so you’re really doing them a favor.) Make it a condition that you can include a link in the article back to your website and you’ll generate a lot of highly targeted visitors, whilst boosting your credibility because you’ll become associated with the other marketer or blog and thus making you an authority source. Start Your Own Blog Having your own blog is pretty essential for an internet marketer and they are GREAT for generating traffic. You can link directly to your sites from your blog pages, whilst mentioning your products, services (or including affiliate links) in your blog posts. A good blog can give you a centre point in your business. It builds a community around you and your websites, and the search engines LOVE them. Your posts will get indexed pretty quickly, and you’ll get lots of traffic from the links you have in there. Submit RSS Feeds Once you have a blog, submit the RSS feed of your blog to as many sites as you can. The more sites that you can include on your RSS feed the  better, as there will be more opportunities for people to find and click through to your blog. A list of good RSS feed sites can be found here: http://www.rss-specifications.com/rss-submission.htm Get Pinging Always ping every blog post that you create to help spread the news of your new blog post far and wide over the internet. Try http://www.pingomatic.com Using a Facebook Page to Promote Your Blog A Facebook fan page is an ideal way to promote your blog. We’ll be covering this later on in the book. How to Get Traffic From Forums Forum marketing is an excellent way to generate traffic for free, whilst once again boosting your reputation and making you seem like an expert in your field. Get it wrong however and you may find yourself being banned from the forums quite easily, but get it right and in my experience you’ll see some pretty good results. Forum marketing is a great traffic generation method. Not only can you get good backlinks from your keyword rich signature, you will also get lots of curious people clicking through your signature link, and it opens up many opportunities to network with people. First, you need to determine your niche and find appropriate forums to join. You want to find ones where posts are made on a regular basis, so don't bother with any that haven’t had any new posts in the last week. Be sure to read the forum rules, as most have their own specific policies and they can vary greatly from forum to forum. If no signatures are allowed, then I would probably avoid the forum, unless it was very busy and could be used for networking purposes. Create an interesting signature that uses your main keywords and your unique selling proposition to direct people to your website. Always check the forum rules, as it may be that you are not allowed to have a signature until you have x number of posts. It is good to put some thought into what you want to convey in your signature. If you can make it attention grabbing but not sound like a salesperson then you should get plenty of clicks. An important piece of forum marketing etiquette is that if you can't say something nice, then tie your hands behind your back, so as not to  jeopardize your forum marketing efforts! You want to have a good standing and build positive relationships with other forum members. Avoid getting into an argument – it’s all too easy to do this and create lots of negativity around your business. -Before you even think about posting, take in the forum's ambience and atmosphere, so that you can fit right in. -Next, look for topics where you can reply with quality answers. When you have done this a few times people will start to regard you as an expert, respect your opinions and be more tempted to click through the link on your signature. You will become known as someone who can offer solutions. -Start interesting threads on the latest hot topics in your niche. If a hot topic is a problem, then create a thread that offers a solution in a step by step format. Try to turn heads with your knowledge, so that you build your reputation within the forum. You want to be perceived as an expert -someone who people can turn to for friendly advice. You never want to look like a salesman. -Be sure to acknowledge and appreciate any forum member that has provided information or that has helped you in some way. This builds goodwill and strengthens relationships and is another way to contribute to the forum. -Over time, you will build strong relationships with other members on the forum. These friendships can develop into potential joint venture partners, which is another exciting traffic generation method. -Lastly, you can use forums to learn more about your niche and the typical problems that your target market faces. This information can be used to create more targeted products and increase your knowledge. I have used forum marketing for years and I particularly recommend the Warrior forum (see the section on WSOs – which in my opinion are pure gold!) but remember that there are many popular forums in pretty much ANY niche that you can use to generate traffic to your sites, whilst building strong relationships and coming across good business development and networking opportunities. Article Marketing With a Twist Ask any internet marketer how they generate their traffic and there’s a pretty good chance that article marketing will be somewhere on the list. It’s the old classic – yet these days a lot of people know that article marketing is not as effective as it used to be. So, putting your articles on a site like  EzineArticles.com is not really using them to their full potential. It’s still worth doing this, but I have found you get better results through something called Content Syndication Article Marketing. What is this? Quite simply, you submit your articles to popular websites and blogs in your niche that accept articles. So, if you are looking to get more traffic to a site on finance, submit your articles to one of the top websites in that field. If you have a blog about something, then find the top site or blog about the same subject and submit your articles to that. It is quite easy to find these niche sites. All you need to do is go to Google and type in “submit article and your niche.” For example, “submit article wresting”: comes up with several wrestling sites, where articles can be submitted. Another type of website that you should consider submitting your websites to is Web 2.0 sites, like http://www.squidoo.com and http://www.wetpaint.com These get indexed by the search engines very quickly and they have high page ranks associated with them. It makes no difference what market you're in, find someone who has a better page ranking and has a good status within that niche and submit articles to them. Getting More Views on EzineArticles.com Lots of people still view and use sites like EzineArticles – it’s excellent for traffic. Here are a couple of ways to get even more traffic from these sites… We have all seen (at the bottom of each article) “Most Viewed” and “Most Published” and probably thought “how come I can never get on those bits.” Well here is how! The easier of the two to get into (with a little trick) is the Most Published section. You will need the EzinePublisher URL from your article, which you will find at the top right hand side of the page (after you have already submitted it, obviously). At the top of your article, there is a list of icons, and below the printer icon is a link that says “EzinePublisher”. Click this and get the URL to this link.  What you need is for people to click onto this EzinePublisher link and that is how you get into the “Most Published” section. So now you have it, you need to promote this EzinePublisher URL to as many of the different social bookmarking sites as you can -Mixx, Reddit, Digg, Propeller etc. This can be done semi-automatically at Onlywire.com. Be sure to read the section on “Social Bookmarking – The True Secrets to Success”, as this will give you even more ways to use social bookmarking sites to get your articles into the Most Published section. You can also send this URL link to all of your contacts on sites like Twitter and once lots of people have clicked on it, then you will be raised to the heady heights of the “Most Published” section. Once here, it will be on the “Most Published” section of every article in that category. Now for the “Most Viewed” section. Basically you do exactly the same thing, but you use the article URL instead. Once you have done this your article has great exposure and this also means more link power. The great thing is that Google takes notice of the internal linking structure of EzineArticles, so by getting onto Most Viewed and Most Published you are increasing the amount of internal links pointing to your article. This makes a difference as to how Google ranks your article and how far up the search engines you appear. Write Some Tutorials Something that is possibly not used as much as it should be for getting traffic is tutorials. You can write tutorials for almost anything, so if you have a website that relates to web development, SEO, marketing or internet marketing, graphic design, wordpress or programming etc then use tutorials to get swarms of traffic to your site. Write some good, detailed, useful tutorials and submit them to the following sites: http://www.instructables.com http://www.tutorialized.com/ http://www.webdesignbooth.com/ http://tutorial-index.com/ http://www.tutorialsgarden.com/ Write Articles in Parts This is such a simple idea I don't know why more people don't do it! Quite simply you write an article with a part one, two and even three, then submit part one to the article directory of your choice and in the byline include a link to the next part of the article. Place part 2 on your main website, and then if you have made the first part of your article interesting enough they will click the link to finish the rest of the article – and whammmm you have them on your site! You can even get them onto your auto-responder by getting them to give you their email address as verification to read the rest. You can also put an ad in the byline on the next part of the article which will lead them nicely to your sales page or product. If you keep submitting these part articles week by week, your traffic will surely grow. Fast and Furious Backlinks and Traffic From Press Releases Press releases are great for getting numerous backlinks and traffic to your website fast. It’s a technique I have used numerous times to great effect – yet not many people in the internet marketing world are doing it! Just be sure to pick a good keyword for your press release, using the keyword research method described later on in this report, and make sure that your press release is actually NEWSWORTHY – which in my opinion is the most important thing. Ask yourself why somebody would be interested in your press release. If it’s all about your product or your company then chances are that people won’t be. The advice offered here can help you get onto the first page of Google News with ease, but first, let's look at the benefits of getting onto Google News: -A press release on Google News will send you a lot of traffic, and there is also the potential that a journalist could pick up your news story and help you spread it internet wide. -Your press release will be indexed all over the place. This is not only Google, but Yahoo, Ask and a whole selection of other search engine bots. -Google News has a Page Rank of 9, so you'll get great link juice from submitting your press release to them. There are also lots of websites that syndicate Google News, so the potential for great backlinks and traffic is huge. To get the best results from your press release bear the following in mind:  -Make sure your story is interesting and newsworthy If you want your press release to spread around the internet then make sure your story is something people will be interested in – don’t make it a blatant advertising ploy. -Include the key information in the opening paragraph If you don’t grab the reader’s attention in the opening paragraph then the chances are they won’t bother reading any further. Include as much information about the story – who, what, when, where, why – in the opening paragraph. -Only use one keyword per press release This will mean that your press release is focused and targeted to a specific keyword that people will type in to search and find out about you. If you want to target a number of keywords, then write one press release for each keyword. -Your keyword must appear in the title This rule must always be followed as it is a vital part of SEO. If your keyword does not appear in the title then it will be difficult for people to find your release. When your keyword appears in the title, it stands a good chance of getting ranked on other search engines as well. -Put your keyword in the first and last paragraphs This is another SEO tip, as search engines put a lot of weight on a keyword if it's mentioned in the extract, introduction and last paragraph. Also try to make sure that there is a keyword density of about 3 to 5%. You can use the free software found at http://www.dupefreepro.com to check your density. -Always have a call to action in your press release Make sure that you have a call to action in your press release, as this is part of the dual purpose of a press release – to get backlinks and just as importantly visitors. The following are some press release submission sites which should get you indexed fast and onto Google News within 24 hours: http://prlog.org http://free-press-release.com http://www.prfire.co.uk http://www.fgnpr.com http://www.pitchengine.com Video and Podcasting Traffic Video Traffic Videos are great for traffic – and they are becoming ever more effective by the day. Why not turn your articles into videos? When you think about it, quite a few people either don’t like reading or they just prefer to watch and listen to a video. So turning your articles into video form gives you access to these people. The easiest way to do this is by doing a Powerpoint presentation and recording it with software such as Camtasia (which is available on a free trial.) All you have to do is pop on your headset and read your article aloud (it helps if you can somehow make it sound like you’re not reading from the page – quite easy with a bit of practice.) If you’re camera shy then don’t worry because you don’t even need to show your face, or alternatively you could get someone else to do it. If it helps you can put in screenshots to aid and visually enhance what you’re saying. This is especially useful if it's something technical where it helps to show images or diagrams to get the message across clearly. Once you have created your video you should submit it to as many video sites and video directories as you can. Try the usual suspects first -YouTube.com or Tubemogul -where you can submit your video to various different sites for free (and obviously these sites get TONS of traffic – the potential is absolutely huge!) Doing this alone will create traffic for you, but with certain sites, you can dramatically up the amount of views the video gets by adding video responses to other peoples videos which you come across and find useful. YouTube is one such site, so let's go through what you do to add video responses on YouTube. Firstly submit your video, then find another video that relates to yours and has lots of views to it. Once you've found a related video you like, look below it for a section called “Video Responses” and on the right hand side of this will be a link that says “Post a Video Response”. Click this link and you will go to a page where you can post your response. In the middle of this page is a link that reads “Choose a Video.” From here choose the video and click on “Respond With This Video”. Now you can return to the related video you chose and you will see that your  video is listed in the Video Responses section. That's it really – it’s not only simple but this can get you thousands more views to your video, which will in turn create amazing amounts of traffic. Please however make sure you choose a video that is related to the topic of yours (and is of good quality), otherwise you probably won’t get the results you’re looking for. Podcasting Traffic Another way to make use of one article is to read it out and create a podcast. More ideas for audios are included in the “How to Get Traffic on Autopilot” section. I personally use a piece of software called Audacity. You can convert this file into an MP3, so that your visitors can listen to the audio on the move. Submit your podcasts to places like http://www.BlogTalkRadio.com. You can also find a list of places to submit podcasts to here: http://www.podcasting-tools.com/submit-podcasts.htm This is an area that I believe will become ever more popular in the future, and it offers great traffic generation potential. Success with Adwords Means Fast Traffic Adwords is a great traffic generation tool for webmasters to get the hang of as it can generate targeted traffic and sales from day one. There are a lot of nightmare stories about how people overspend and end up with outrageous bills on their Adwords account, but this shouldn’t happen to you if you manage your Adwords campaigns well. Before you start it would be wise to read through all the free information provided when you join Adwords. Make sure you understand the workings of Pay Per Click before you attempt to even try it. 8 Step Guide to a Successful Adwords Campaign Your first Adwords campaign can be very daunting, and all too often it is the nightmare stories that have put many people off from even trying. This systematic 8 step approach will give you the confidence to proceed with an Adwords campaign, even if you have been burnt before. It can be used to create successful campaigns time after time. 1. Research your Market: Really this step should be completed before you create a product to sell, or choose an affiliate product to promote. By going to affiliate program sites like PayDotCom, Commission Junction or Clickbank, we can discover what the most popular types of products  are. 2. What Keywords Would You Use?: When you have chosen your market, think about what search terms you would enter into a search engine, to find products in that market. Write down four or five. 3. Find More Keywords From Your Root Keywords: Enter the four or five keywords created in the previous step into the Google Ads External Keyword Tool – https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal. Now take the list this site creates and paste them into notepad. You have a keyword list, which you will next use in step 6. 4. Decide What Product You are Going to Promote: If you plan to promote an affiliate program, this is what you need to do. Using the root keywords created in step 2, type them into http://www.spyfu.com and study the existing Adwords promotions for those keywords to determine what affiliate programs to promote. If you are promoting (or creating) your own product, you'll need to do the same research to see what is most popular and click through the links to complete step 5. 5. Decide What Kind of Adwords Campaign to Run: Take a look at how the advertisers are promoting their links. Do the links go through to a blog, a landing page, a review page or is it a direct link through to a sales page? The idea of doing this research is to differentiate yourself from other marketers. You will have to make sure that your website has a good landing page, with good information, so that visitors stay on your page. Also to make the most of the Adwords campaign, have an incentive for these visitors to join your mailing list, so that you can email them with more offers at a later date. 6. Placing the Keywords in Your Adwords Account: Now, using your keywords from step 3, enter them into your Adwords Account. Break them down into groups of 5 – 15 related keywords, so that they are easy to manage. Make sure that you add the word 'buy' to some of the relevant keywords and delete the word free, to help ensure that the right people click through to your ads. 7. Set an Amount Per Day That You are Happy to Spend: Set your amount and stick to it. The key to working out this amount is to work out the lifetime value of a visitor to your site and how much you can afford to acquire them. Take this information to determine your budget and stick to it. 8. Make the Most of the Google Adwords Search Query Report: Google have a really rather useful tool called the Google Adwords Search Query Report. After about a week, use this tool and it will show you exactly what people have typed in to Google for your ad to appear to them. This review of your keywords will also enable you to keep the profitable keywords and ditch the unprofitable ones.  HOW TO GET TRAFFIC ON AUTOPILOT This section of the report will involve you creating a mailing list (something that is ESSENTIAL for any online business.) Your list will be instrumental in your search for targeted traffic, as you'll no longer have to search for it, but instead send out a message to have traffic on tap. How to start building your list You only need 3 things: -Sign up for a $1 trial account with Aweber.com to manage your list -A good quality opt-in or “squeeze page” -Some sort of juicy incentive to get people to subscribe (such as a good free report.) The second point is crucial. Please don’t skimp on your freebie – you need to offer people something of high value if you want to persuade them to opt-in to your list. You also need to make sure your offering has a catchy title and copy that tells your potential subscribers about all the content you will be sharing with them. Make sure your freebie sounds sexy and exciting, because that’s ultimately what will get you the opt-ins. Offering good free content that is targeted around the type of products you sell is a great way to make people trust you. You will be giving them good value and knowledge for free, so this should make them interested in the products and services which you have to offer. This, in turn, will lead to the law of reciprocity. You give your subscribers good value and they will start to tell other people about you, especially if you offer them content they can give away and recommend to their friends, acquaintances, business contacts and clients. This is where viral marketing comes in and creates your avalanche of traffic. Remember you can also add affiliate links and other advertisements to monetize your freebies. There’s more about this later. Another good idea is to translate your offerings into different languages, as this way you widen your target market. Traffic to Your Squeeze Page You can build the most fantastic squeeze page in the world and be giving away a genuinely wonderful freebie, but if no-one knows about it, the traffic and subscribers won’t come! You can get people to your squeeze page by creating related articles, press releases, blog posts, blog comments, videos and podcasts, as discussed  elsewhere in this report, but there are also other options available to you.  If you decide to create an eZine, you can submit your eZine to the various free eZine directories and eZine announcement lists to attract people to sign up to your list. With an eZine, or e-course, you can easily get other webmasters to help you get traffic by promoting their product offers in exchange for 50% commission or by including one of their articles in your creation. This works especially well if you make your E-course or eZine in PDF format, as you can use extra visuals and pictures. It is also possible to work out a deal with these webmasters to use their content in each edition of your eZine. If you make an offer that the webmaster cannot refuse and provide them with a squeeze page or form, it is likely they will recommend your eZine or e- course to their own list, thus helping you create new traffic streams and plenty of new subscribers. It will benefit them to do this, as the more subscribers you get, the more sales they will get. Traffic on autopilot. The stuff dreams are made of eh? Well, it’s perfectly possible, although there is of course some work involved in the initial stages, but that snowball of work will soon start rolling into a great big boulder of traffic hitting your website every day, week and month. Trust me when I say that the work is well worth it. Viral Marketing with Free Reports and Audios It’s pretty easy to create a good quality free report. A viral report I created YEARS ago is still floating around the internet and I still get traffic from them to my sites because of the links I have inside the reports. You can do some research and create an ebook (or audio) about a particular subject in your niche or get someone else to create it, or select some of your best articles and make them into a special ebook or audio. You can scatter a handful of affiliate links or links to your websites and products throughout the ebook or report. This is great for traffic. Now to help an ebook go viral, it is a good idea to allow your subscribers to brand the ebook, with their name, company name, URL and an ad on the first page, as this will encourage them to share the ebook with their lists and you'll benefit from the traffic generated through the links in the inside of the book. To help an audio go viral, offer other webmasters a free ad in the audio, in exchange for them giving away the audio to their list. This strategy would also work for the ebook as well.  The potential traffic these viral methods can generate is staggering. Imagine if you got 20 webmasters, with lists of over 1,000 people, to give away your audio or ebook, then 20,000 would have had the opportunity to see your ads. Now, if you came out with a new audio or ebook every month and more and more webmasters distribute them, they could be seen by hundreds of thousands of people. Can you see the avalanche of traffic coming your way? Also make sure that you submit the free ebook to free ebook directories and the audio to podcasting directories to kick off the traffic flow. Offer Free, Live Online Classes Another type of free gift that spreads like wildfire and offers wonderful traffic generation opportunities is to offer free weekly or monthly live online classes in a chat room, video stream, conference line or webcast. Here you would create a short class about a subject in your niche, every week or month. Of course, in the early days you might only have a handful of people come and listen in and ask questions, but once word gets out the attendance rates will increase and give more opportunities to direct traffic to your own or affiliate offerings. Once attendance rates start to increase, you can invite other experts to contribute and further fuel traffic generation, by getting them to promote the online classes as well. You can help spread the word by letting your subscribers know each time you’ve got a class or „webinar’ coming up, as well as by notifying your followers on Twitter, and including a signature link in your forum marketing. If you have a blog then you’ll definitely want to post a link to your event there too. You can also record the classes and offer a series of them as a paid product to create a new income stream. There – an instant product you can sell or use to build your list! Using Contests to Expand Your List and Drive Traffic Very few people use the contest technique, even though it’s great for traffic generation… You will need to have a few people on your list for this to work effectively, or a good number of followers or fans on Twitter or Facebook Pages (please see the  social networking section of this report for more on Twitter and Facebook). The contest will allow you to leverage your list, friends or fans to potentially get thousands more subscribers. There are some essential keys to creating a successful contest: . You need a really good incentive for new people to sign up and decent prizes for your existing subscribers in order to encourage them to get more people to sign up. These can be your own products, other people's products, money, electrical items or a coaching session. . . . The contest can be entered by your existing subscribers or followers spreading the word about your free offer. You can encourage them to do this via Twitter, video, blog posts or a promo email to their list, and then ask them to post what they have done in the comments on your blog. . . . You will need to offer prizes for these actions. You can offer a main prize to the most imaginative way of spreading of the word, or this and a smaller prize to everyone who spreads the word about your free gift. Offering a prize to everyone will get you more traffic and exposure, but could get expensive. It really depends on your imagination and what you offer as your prizes. . This is a very exciting way of generating traffic and if you do a big main prize for the most imaginative way of spreading the word about your free gift, you might even learn some new inventive traffic generation methods too.  WEB 2.0 TRAFFIC METHODS: ESSENTIAL SITES TO HELP GENERATE TRAFFIC VIRALLY Web 2.0 has allowed us to generate traffic more easily, as essentially all social networking sites are user generated and contain hubs of traffic which is just waiting to come across your website. Basically whatever content you create and every web page you make, it can be shared on social networking sites to attract new hoards of traffic to your paid or free offerings. My favorite social networking sites are Facebook and Twitter. Facebook Pages and Facebook Applications Social networking is rife with opportunities to drive traffic, particularly to kick start a viral marketing campaign. Facebook has two specific tools which can assist greatly with this – Facebook pages and Facebook applications. The most important thing to remember when creating Facebook Pages and Applications is to give people a good reason to join. It could be a free report, money off a product or even 1 cent to everyone who joins. Facebook Pages Facebook fan pages can be set up on practically anything. It could be a product, brand or service, but my favorite type are off the wall ones, like “ Sleeping with One Leg Out the Cover” and “ Flipping the Pillow to Get to the Cold Side”. Can you see the viral potential of a quirky Facebook page? One wacky idea can lead to a huge viral following, and lots of traffic. If you sold bedding products, the above examples would be very clever. According to Facebook, there are already 1.4 million fan pages, which collect more than 1 million new fans everyday. That is powerful stuff, particularly as the traffic for these pages are ready and waiting on Facebook. Once you create a Facebook page (via http://www.facebook.com/pages/create.php) you can get instant traffic to the websites you put onto your Facebook page by clicking the 'suggest to friends' link. Next invite people to join your new Facebook page, as when they join their status will show that “[Joe Bloggs] became a fan of [Facebook page name]” and even more people will see this and join, thus viral marketing is unleashed.  I think that the best approaches that you can take to create viral Facebook pages are the wacky idea, something „human’ such as “I like driving in the dark”, or a Facebook page dedicated to things that people are passionate about, like tattoos or piercing. If you need ideas, then looking at places like Yahoo Answers can give you lots of inspiration. Remember, Facebook users love fun and wacky stuff. Facebook Applications Please do not skip this option and assume that this method of marketing is far too technical to even consider – it isn’t. In fact it’s very easy to create a Facebook Application by using the application tool found here: http://apps.facebook.com/appstudio/wizards.php You can create any of the following applications: Games are very popular, and so are quizzes. This tool enables you to create your own application without you needing to know any sort of programming. You can put links to your own websites within the application to get the traffic  to go to your websites. Facebook applications are very popular and many people love adding applications to their profile, hence the reason that they are so viral. Once again, any application downloaded will show up on the Facebook status bar, which aids viral marketing. So get your thinking caps on and get creating applications that go Facebook wide. This is one of the best kept secrets in internet marketing. Using Twitter to Generate Traffic Twitter is a wonderful tool which can help you drive traffic to your various websites. Let’s look at how to do it… You may or may not have a Twitter account already, but for the purposes of this report, we'll start at the very beginning. It's very easy and free to sign up at http://www.Twitter.com. The one thing you really need to concentrate on is your profile and your one line bio. You have to make yourself sound exciting in 160 characters, as this is what many people will read in making their decision on whether to follow you or not. You might also want to consider creating a background in order to differentiate yourself and offset yourself from other Twitter users. Some people create backgrounds that have all their contact details on so that their followers know how to get in contact in other ways than just using Twitter. Now you are ready to tweet. Before you start looking for followers, make sure you have at least a few tweets to your name as an empty page is a turn off when asking people to follow you. Tips on Tweeting A quick warning here! Do not send out too many promotional tweets. A good ratio to have is 9 informational tweets to 1 promotional tweet. This way you will not lose too many followers and keep attracting new ones. To establish yourself on Twitter, you will want to post lots of good content on your Tweets. You can send your followers links to other articles, press releases, blog posts etc to get even more visitors to your websites. Try to keep your posts interesting and personal as this will let people find out more about you and your business. People do business with people they know and trust -and Twitter helps us achieve this.  Ensure that you regularly post tweets, as the more you tweet the more traffic you can send to your websites. Followers are more likely to stick with people who twitter regularly, so set up some kind of tweeting schedule. A good way to convert followers into customers is to send tweets about free seminars, or video training that they can attend, with a small sales pitch at the end. Re-tweeting is a good habit to get into as well, as this will help you get followers. Re-tweeting is where you tweet about another tweet that somebody else made. By re-tweeting what you find interesting it provides value to your followers, and if they like what you refer them to they will begin to trust you. You will also start to build good relationships with the original tweeter, who may very well return the favor and re-tweet your interesting tweets. Finding Followers Next, we need to find followers. Over the long term, the best way to do this is to post great content. If your tweets are interesting enough, people will follow you without you having to do too much work. But in the early days how DO you get people to follow you? A good strategy is to look at the other people who are operating in your niche. Find them on Twitter and then look at who their followers are and follow them. You should find that quite a few people will return the favor and follow you back. Once you’ve got a few followers, you become more credible to other Twitter users. Post good content and make your Tweets interesting and you can easily start to build a loyal following. Twitter Tools to Help In an ideal world, we could easily spend hours on Twitter, but this is not always possible and there are tools available to help us make the most of Twitter. Some people send tweets every day, and although this is a good idea we don't always have the time. A tool called Future Tweets (found at http://futuretweets.com) means we can automatically post prepared tweets at predetermined times. There are so many tools available for Twitter – way too many to mention here, so do a Google search for 'Twitter WordPress plug-in" and "Twitter tools business" to open your eyes to the amazing variety of what is available.  Twitter Checklist Here is a little Twitter checklist that you can keep next to your computer to help you make the most of Twitter as a traffic generating tool: -Shout to the world that you’re on Twitter -Send informational tweets regularly. (Remember our ratio -9 informational: 1 promotional) -Re-tweet any good tweets you come across -Reply to the tweets addressed to you, as this builds relationships -Pay attention to the kind of tweets you’re sending (make them personal and sometimes talk about every day stuff. People love gossip.) -Listen to what people are tweeting -can you help? -Build relationships  SECRET TRAFFIC GENERATION RESOURCES The traffic generation techniques I'm going to talk about in this section are underutilized. Social Bookmarking – The True Secrets to Success Yes, before you say anything, I know that everyone has heard of social bookmarking sites like http://www.onlywire.com and http://www.socailposter.com People bookmark their content, so that it is indexed on Google and other people get the opportunity to rate the content. But how many people strive to get onto the first page of Digg, Mixx, StumpleUpon etc? In my opinion this is where the real traffic can be generated. It is easy to get on the front page and get more views if you know the secret sites to help you do just this. There are four that I'm going to tell you about right now: SocialElves, StumbleUpon Ads, Mechanical Turk and Short Task. SocialElves SocialElves is a social media marketing agency dedicated to helping you get onto the front page of Digg. Not only do they add plenty of Diggs to up the rating of your story, but they offer help in constructing a good story to post on Digg, to get it to the front page and make it stick. If you want to get on the front of Digg, within the next 48 hours, then I recommend that you try http://www.socialelves.com. This is a paid service, but very effective. StumbleUpon Advertising StumbeUpon advertising is a little like Adwords in that you pay 5 cents per view of your website. They will direct targeted visitors to your website, and it is a very useful and cheap way to get relevant traffic to your free gifts, paid products and contests. You can get more details here: http://www.stumbleupon.com/ads/ Mechanical Turk & Short Task I expect that many of you have heard of Amazon Mechanical Turk ( https://www.mturk.com/mturk/welcome), but Short Task ( http://www.shorttask.com/) is a little less well known and does the same job.  The downfall of Mechanical Turk, at the present time, is that you can only post jobs if you are a US resident. Short Task is open to people all over the world. Many people do not realize the marketing power of these sites, as you can get people on these sites to do almost every simple task you can think of for mere cents. If you want people to Digg your content, you can ask them to do this and get enough Diggs to appear on the front page. If you want people to vote for a video or leave comments on YouTube, you can set up a HIT on Mechanical Turk, or a task on Short Task, very easily. You just need to have a little look at what other people are doing and charging for a similar task to yours, then follow the online instructions to set up your own HITS or Tasks. These are indeed exciting finds, which can be utilized for very cheap traffic generation, with little work on your part. Basically, they are really cheap outsourcing sites. The Benefits of a Free WSO The Warrior forum is a great Internet Marketing forum where marketers from all over the world come together to talk and share ideas about online business. You can find it at http://www.warriorforum.com For those of you who don't know, WSO stands for Warrior Special Offers, which is a special section of the Warrior forum where members can post special offers to other forum members. There is a great mix of newbies and experts on the forum, which makes it a great place to generate traffic to a squeeze page to build your list. Let me show you a strategy which can easily result in hundreds of new subscribers by simply posting a free WSO on the Warrior Forum. Now before I go into details, there are costs involved with this traffic generation method. You will need to be a member of the Warrior War Room, which costs a one-time $37, before you can post a WSO. Every WSO you post (and each „bump’ up to the top of the forum) will cost $20 a go. This is money REALLY well spent however. Now, the norm is to post paid products in the Warrior Special Offer Forum, but it can be far more profitable to post a WSO offer for a free product, in return for an email address. An email address can be far more profitable than a sale in the long term!  Create a WSO and direct people to a squeeze page offering a good free product. “But what about that $20 I just spent placing the ad”, I hear you cry! Well, you are getting valuable subscribers that should make you far more than the $20 you paid out, however the secret to this strategy is to monetize the free offer. Don't make the mistake of having a blank thank you page, after your squeeze page. Here is the prime place to put a One Time Offer (OTO). When people sign up for your free gift, there will always be some people who want to buy something from you, so by making a OTO you are simply fulfilling someone's needs. If you don't have a OTO, then that is money well and truly wasted. The OTO doesn't even have to be one of your own products. The WSO does though, as that is the rules of the forum. Now, to add an extra boost to your traffic, when the WSO falls to page three, bump it back to the first page (this will cost another $20), so that new sets of fresh eyes can see your free offer. This means you will get more sign ups and people seeing the OTO. There is nothing stopping you having several WSOs on the go at the same time, as if you have three going at once, you can make sure that you are on the first page at all times and bump up the others when they fall to page 3. The Free WSO Method is an absolute gem. Last time I did this I added HUNDREDS of people to my mailing list in a matter of days and sent a torrent of traffic to my websites. Join in with NING This is surely one of the internet’s best kept secrets. Go to http://www.ning.com and do a search to find a community in your niche. When you find one with over 1000 members, come right back here, so I can tell you how to utilize this fantastic traffic source. Ning is a social networking site of sorts, so you will need to get involved, add some friends and create a profile, but it is so much more than your average Facebook (although Facebook is also a good place to generate traffic, as we discussed earlier in the report.) What makes Ning special is that it is a community of targeted people in your niche and every time you post articles, blog posts or videos it will be displayed on the front page of that community for all to see. This means there are going to be a whole lot of eye balls looking at your content. This is powerful stuff and best of all it’s free.  Create some good content and post it to Ning. Have a look at the communities and get a feel for the kind of things people offer in your niche. Check out what is popular and post some content.  SEO AND TRAFFIC GENERATION One popular way of getting traffic is to get onto the first page of Google by targeting keywords, which we know that people are typing in, to find products and services like ours. This is search engine optimization. It can be a lot of hard work, but it can be worth it in terms of traffic. Also there are a lot of tools that help automate submitting your blogs, press releases, classified ads, articles, videos and podcasts to save your time and get multiple backlinks, which propel you up the search engine rankings. For those of you that may be unsure of the keyword research process, here is a system for finding profitable keywords, which you can scatter into the content you create in order to stand a good chance of being high up on the search engines. Keyword Research The tool I use for finding good keywords is the Google Adwords External Keywords Tool, found here: https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal -I first conduct a general search to see what suggestions the tool comes up with. For example, if I wanted to promote this ebook, I might search for traffic generation terms like: -I will also tick the use synonyms box, so that the tool will make more suggestions. -This is the list of results that I have:  -Next pick out terms which have a decent global monthly search and search for them in inverted commas in Google to see how many competing websites use that search term: You are ideally looking for a competition of less than about 50,000, because it will be easier to rank on the search engines for terms with this number of competing sites. So “Generate web traffic” is a good keyword to target. -To find more related keywords, go through the Google results and pick out some of the URLs, which you can enter into the Keyword Tool. To demonstrate this, I have selected http://www.trafficswarm.com out of the results. -In the keyword tool, I select the website content option and enter in this URL: -When I press “Get Keyword Ideas”, I get a whole list of other potential keywords. Here is just a small selection of these findings:  -I'd explore some of those keywords using the earlier steps and repeat the whole process until I had the number of keywords I wanted, before creating lots of search engine optimized content.  EMERGENCY 24 HOUR GENERATION TRAFFIC SYSTEM When you want traffic in a hurry, this is a great fast system to start the traffic flow to your website. . Choose a competitive keyword and set up a page on your website or blog with the selected phrase scattered over the page or post. . . . Submit the web page or blog post to a number of social bookmarking sites through http://www.onlywire.com or http://www.socialposter.com. If this is your first time to these sites, you will need to spend some time signing up to each of the individual social bookmarking sites. This is the only time you'll need to do this, as the logins will be recorded permanently on these sites, to use as often as you need. . . . Ping your website with http://www.pingomatic.com . . . Create a blog at http://www.blogger.com, with your keyword used in the blog name, and create a short post with the chosen keyword, linking to your website or blog post. . . . Ping your blogger post with http://www.pingomatic.com . . . Submit the RSS feed of the blogger post to RSS feed directories You can find a list of places to submit your RSS feeds here: http://www.rssspecifications. com/rss-submission.htm . . . Write a press release about your new website page or blog post (using selected keyword) and submit to http://prlog.org, http://free-press-release.com, http://www.prfire.co.uk, http://www.fgnpr.com and http://www.pitchengine.com . . . Now bookmark the press release when it's published, on one of the sites with OnlyWire or SocialPoster and ping it with http://www.pingomatic.com . . . Write a keyword optimized article about your new web page or blog post and submit to some Web 2.0 sites like http://www.squidoo.com and http://www.wetpaint.com. You can find a list of web 2.0 sites at http://www.go2web20.net/ and pick out a couple more places to submit your article if you like. You need to submit your article to Web 2.0 sites, rather than article directories, as they are published almost instantly, whereas article directories usually take a few days to publish an article. . . . Take your article, press release, or both, and use them to create a short video with a voice-over and slides with the key points. . . . Submit the video(s) to http://www.youtube.com and http://www.realpeoplerealstuff.com.You can also use the free video .  submission tool at http://tubemogul.com/ to submit to more video sites. . Submit a classified ad with your chosen keyword to http://www.oodle.com, http://www.craigslist.org and http://www.usfreeads.com . . . Join a forum in your niche, which has a lot of forum members and make a few posts with your signature advertising your web page or blog post, using your keyword.