Getting traffic to a new blog can be a serious challenge for a brand new blogger.

You can have the coolest looking blog in the world, with the best content… but ultimately the question you will have to ask yourself is “Am I going to make money with this?”

And it all comes down to one thing…

Traffic.

There are many ways to get traffic to your blog, from guest posts on popular blogs and online publications to other published content in more traditional venues (think magazines, journals etc.) to paid traffic sources to social media….

But, did you know that there’s a “trick” that most seasoned SEO (search engine optimization) pros use to drive traffic to blogs WITHOUT creating brand new content all the time?

The method is called “Content Multiplication”, and is in some ways similar to “syndication”, with a twist.

The definition of “Syndication” according to Dictionary.com is:

“to publish simultaneously, or supply for simultaneous publication, in a number of newspapers or other periodicals in different places”

…and the idea here is for you to do something quite similar online, BUT by using different modalities.

In other words, instead of publishing the same blog post on a host of other ‘blogs’, which is more like traditional syndication (which can be penalized by the search engines for what they call the “duplicate content penalty”)… you would turn your original blog post into slightly different types of content by:

• re-formatting the content slightly into an article for publication in an online article directory like: EzineArticles.com. EzineArticles.com is arguably the largest and most popular article directory on the internet with an Alexa.com rank of 228 (note: Alexa.com ranks sites based on traffic volume).
• re-formatting the blog post into simple power point slides or photo slide show, and submit to video submissions sites such as YouTube.com. Youtube, in case you’re wondering, is ranked the #3 site in the world according to Alexa (just after Google and Facebook). You can also use services such as Tubemogul.com which allows you to submit your video to several video submission sites from one dashboard.
• re-writing the content into a press release format and submit it to some free (or paid) press release services such as PR.com or PRWeb.com (paid).
• and finally, if you are motivated, you can also turn your blog post into an audio by either recording yourself (or someone else) reading the post OR by using a service such as Odiogo.com, which will turn your blog posts from text into speech automatically (not quite ‘human’ sounding but still ok). Once it’s been converted, you can submit your audio to podcasting directories (even iTunes) for even more exposure.

Each of these steps allows your new pieces of content to be viewed (heard) and potentially syndicated to hundreds if not thousands of additional sites, which in turn will create buzz, links and ultimately more visitors back to your blog.

The really cool thing is that you don’t have to stop there.

You can now take each piece of this re-formatted content and truly syndicate the information using the power of “social media”, in other words, platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr and the like.

Once you’ve signed up for each of the services, you can simplify your life by using a social dashboard such as Hellotxt.com or Ping.fm to post each piece of your “new” content to various web 2.0 properties.

Yes, it takes a bit of work to set up the accounts.

And yes, it takes a little extra elbow grease to convert the original blog post into an article, video, audio and a press release.

But the benefits outweigh the little bit of extra time that this process takes. Once you have done this a handful of times you will find that the conversion process will take much less time and it becomes routine.

And eventually you could outsource these tasks relatively easily to a virtual assistant or on Fiverr.com.

Ask yourself this question, if you’ve already spent hours crafting your blog post, why not spend the 30 – 60 minutes to re-purpose the content using content multiplication in order to get more visibility and potential “celebrity status” in your niche…

Post from: Affiliate Internet Marketing

4 Simple Steps To More Traffic

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In this series we will be focusing on video marketing… actually optimizing videos in particular (more specifically for YouTube since they are the king of video sharing sites), since this is an area that generally gets forgotten by most marketers.

In this series, I will be using both video and/or articles for these tutorials, and my hope is that some of it may help you in getting more exposure and ultimately traffic to your videos.

—

Note: Some of the material written for this and subsequent tutorials on video marketing are taken from one of my reports, that were until now, only available through a paid subscription.

—

We focus first and foremost on YouTube because Google emphasizes their videos in the universal search engine as a thumbnail, which means you get better visibility and potentially higher click through rates. This means that if you play your cards right you may get some decent rankings in the search engines and potentially drive some decent traffic to your site.

The great thing about using video as part of your marketing strategy is that you can often start receiving traffic within minutes of submitting your video to YouTube (provided you did the appropriate amount of research before creating and publishing your video).

One of the more frequent questions (and complaints) I’ve gotten from people wanting to market using video is:

“I don’t have any money or equipment… so, how do I make a video”.

I know you’re probably asking yourself: “How the hell am I going to create the content?” or better yet, “I don’t have any money, how am I going to produce it?”

Well, first off, you’re not going to need any professional equipment… all you need is either a way to create videos using screen shots or pictures (using something like Windows Movie Maker or iMovie on the mac); OR create some ghetto videos using your digital camcorder that’s capable of capturing video (which most digital cameras do these days) OR a camcorder… or better yet, if you have some cash – invest in a Flip Video thingamajig (it’s a tiny video camera that captures up to 60 minutes of video… and has a built-in USB connector so you can plug it into your computer). By the way, you absolutely DO NOT have to use a camera or be in front of the camera if you don’t want to…

If you want to create screen capture videos (actually showing people how to do something on your computer screen), you can use CamStudio (which is free) or Camtasia for the PC (they have a 30-day free trial of their software so I recommend you actually download and use it); or iShowU or ScreenFlow (which is a new software) for the Mac.

Post from: Affiliate Internet Marketing

YouTube Marketing: Optimize It For More Traffic Part 1

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Many people misunderstand the purpose of social bookmarking (from a niche marketing perspective) and think you get A TON of traffic by bookmarking all their pages…

In my opinion it’s a myth.

However, it does serve a very important purpose. Getting backlinks to your sites. Unfortunately Google does not count all backlinks because of the "no follow" rule. So, if you want your link to "count" (in Google) you want to spend your time setting up bookmarks with the sites that actually give you some "link love".

So, here’s a list of the Top 23 "Do Follow" Social Bookmarking Sites (by PageRank) that I came across that you can use for Social Linking purposes:

1. Furl – PR7
2. Backflip – PR6
3. Bibsonomy – PR6
4. LinkaGoGo – PR6
5. Mister-Wong – PR6
6. Raw Sugar – PR6
7. Spurl – PR6
8. Buddy Marks – PR5
9. Jumptags – PR5
10. MyJeeves / Ask – PR5
11. MyLinkVault – PR5
12. Xilnus – PR5
13. A1 Webmarks – PR4
14. Bookmark Tracker – PR4
15. Connectedy – PR4
16. Diigo – PR4
17. OYAX – PR4
18. MyVmarks – PR4
19. TeDigo – PR4
20. ez4u – PR3
21. MyPIP – PR3
22. SyncOne – PR3
23. Yattle – PR2

If I’m missing any or am mistaken, please let me know in the comment section below!

Thanks,

[tags]social bookmarking, social media traffic, social media marketing, web 2.0[/tags]

Post from: Affiliate Internet Marketing

Top 23 “Do Follow” Social Bookmarking Sites

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With the advent of Stompernet’s SMARTS program, Howie Schwartz’s Conversation Domination and Jack Humphrey’s Authority Black Book, leveraging the power of Web 2.0 / Social Media has "officially" gone mainstream.

As you know, I’ve used Web 2.0 for quite some time and a while back I created a "flow chart" to explain how I actually use Web 2.0 (in the ‘one’ forum I participate in on a regular basis). So I thought I’d share it with you as well.

Hopefully, you’re already familiar with Social Media sites on some level… from free Blogging platforms such as Blogger.com and WordPress.com (which started this "revolution"); to Social Networking Sites like MySpace and FaceBook; to Content Sharing Sites, like EzineArticles, Squidoo and HubPages, and Social Bookmarking sites like Del.icio.us, Reddit, Digg, Propeller, Stumbleupon etc. (some would argue that Digg, Propeller, Stumbleupon and similar sites are Social Voting sites).

So, what’s the big deal about social media?

I personally think that the main benefit to these properties is that they contribute to "organic" traffic that is not dependent on Search Engine Results. In addition, you also get to take advantage of the sites’ authority, which means more search engine traffic and more backlinks to your site (depending on whether they use "dofollow" or not). In other words, there are two parts to the Social Media equation: Social Media Traffic Generation and Social Media Linking.

So, you might be wondering, what’s the advantage of using sites like Blogger, Hubpages, Squidoo and WordPress.com?

All of these are considered authority sites and can rank very well in the search engines provided you build them "properly" and more importantly add some new content to them on a "regular" basis.

In terms of Blogger, they have a lot of pull with Google Blog Search as well as organic search engines and if you create the "right" type of content, you can rank on the first page of Google almost immediately (depending on competition of course). It is also very user friendly in terms of setup, ad integration (particularly Adsense), and is quite easy to "tweak". The downside of building blogs with Blogger is that Blogger controls your site… and they are often very "delete" happy (I’ve had a couple of dozen blogs deleted by them…).

As for WordPress.com… they are similar to Blogger in that you host your blog with them (except they don’t in my experience have the habit of deleting blogs like Blogger). Their interface is easy to use and ranks well in the search engines. The upside of WordPress is that they have an active user community that likes to read other people’s blogs… and you can get quite a bit of free traffic just from using "tags" in your posts. However, they are not very user friendly with Ad integration and if you’re not careful, you could be in breach of their TOS.

Which one do I start with, and is one better than another?

Squidoo and Hubpages can both drive quite a bit of traffic and they both use "do follow" in their links, which means you can leverage these sites to drive traffic to your "money site(s)" much in the same way you would use EzineArticles (or other article directories). The pages you build on these properties are also better suited for a more narrow niche (or product), rather than broad niches.

Blogger and WordPress.com are "traditional" blogs and is a great resource for posting either snippets of articles from your money sites, or independent articles with anchor text links embedded in the article pointing to a particular page on your money site.

I generally use all of these properties to support my main money site, whether it’s an opt-in page, sales page, content site…

There are obviously no "rules" as to how you use leverage Web 2.0. I personally use them to build a "mini net" of properties to "dominate" a niche term… and funnel traffic and link power to my money sites. So, you could potentially set up something like this:

NOTE: This is just an illustration of how you can setup one type of a mini net and the sites listed are just some of the sites I may use.

As you can see, the chart flows from the "less" important web 2.0 properties down to Blogger / WordPress.

The most important thing to know is that you should not get stuck in a pattern. In other words, you can for instance switch the positions of Blogger / WordPress with Squidoo / Hubpages or other "authority sites" and gain similar (or better results). 

Let’s talk about some of the biggest mistakes people make when creating these networks:

1. Try to focus on too many keyword phrases at once
2. Give up after creating one blog /lens / hub for one topic
3. Not bookmarking ALL content (be sure to use different bookmarking sites for different sites)
4. Trying to use just ONE account for bookmarking / blog creation (I would personally recommend that you open multiple accounts, ten or preferably more, with each service to avoid footprints and patterns).
5. Using reciprocal links between different properties

One of the biggest "secrets" to success with this tactics, is to actually create multiple pages spread across you network for just ONE long-tail keyword phrase. In other words, the whole network above should be for ONE phrase. Then you rinse and repeat for the next keyword phrase.

Also, learn to use and publish your RSS feeds. This will save you A LOT of time when updating your web 2.0 properties.

I’d love to hear your thoughts and experiences on the topic…

To your success,

[tags]conversation domination, authority black book, stompernet smarts, stompernet, jack humphrey, web 2.0 traffic, social media traffic[/tags]

Post from: Affiliate Internet Marketing

Dominating the Search Engines with Social Media Networks

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During my Trend Blogging case study I ended up tracking some statistics regarding the "effectiveness" of Web 2.0 sites, and to what extent they were contributing traffic to my blog.

Even though I will be writing a separate blog post on the actual methods I used to drive the traffic to the blog, I wanted to share with you guys my findings…1. because I found it interesting and thought you might want to know some of these numbers, and 2. because you should know which web 2.0 sites you should be spending more time on.  By the way, I will be writing a separate blog post on the actual methods and reasons why I received a significant amount of traffic on this blog in the next week or two.

Ok, so let’s start with the Web 2.0 properties I used during my Trend Blogging case study:

• Digg (www.digg.com)
• Plime (www.plime.com)
• Propeller (Netscape) (www.propeller.com)
• Reddit (www.Reddit.com)
• Shoutwire (www.Shoutwire.com)
• Sk-rt

As you can see, I did not actually use some other popular Web 2.0 services such as: StumbleUpon, Del.icio.us, Furl, nor did I use Onlywire or spend the time building pages in the various Web 2.0 communities (such as: Squidoo, Hubpages etc.)… for no other reason than that I was being lazy. 

By the way, in case some of you did not check out my case study on Trend Blogging, you should know that the blog was centered around the Entertainment niche.

So, how did it all play out? Check out the stats taken from Google Analytics below. The results are based on approximately 20,000 visitors visiting the blog over a 3 week period of time. And notice that the majority of my traffic came from organic search results (Google Search), not Web 2.0. I have highlighted the Web 20 properties with a red box.

As you can see:

1. Digg is the "winner"! It drove in the most traffic by far and served 6.34% of overall visitors to my site (out of approximately 20,000 visitors).
2. Propeller was the runner up, driving in about 2.5% of the overall traffic. You’ll notice that the propeller.com url show 2.35%, however there were sub-categories not displayed that served some visitors as well.
3. Shoutwire served 1.73% of the visitors, which was surprising.
4. Sk-rt drove in about 0.2%
5. Plime and Reddit served an insignificant amount of traffic (only a handful of referrals each). The low amount of referrals from Reddit was surprising as it’s often considered a "decent" web 2.0 property for referral traffic.

A caveat, these numbers were a bit skewed as I did not start using Shoutwire, Sk-rt, Plime and Reddit for the first couple of days of this case study, and believe Shoutwire would have probably matched or eclipsed Propeller in the amount of traffic served if I had started using them from the beginning (in other words, USE Shoutwire!)

In conclusion, you can see that the few social bookmarking / social news (or social voting) sites I did use served about 2500 visitors in three weeks. This is direct referral traffic that you would not have received from the search engines. So, if you have a brand new site or have not used web 2.0 before it is certainly worthwhile considering it gave me 12.5% more traffic for 2 minutes of extra work per post (on a brand new blog).

Will you receive the same amount of traffic? It’s hard to say as it will depend a lot on posting frequency and whether your posts are "buzz worthy". There are software out there that can automate a lot of this process, and make the process very painless.

One that I use frequently when bookmarking Blogger or static sites is Social Bookmarking Demon.

Post from: Affiliate Internet Marketing

Is Web 2.0 Working For You?

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