Internet Marketing Notes » Traffic Generation

Nothing Beats Traffic to a Website!

Jason — Mon, 05 Mar 2007 04:27:06 +0000

You might have a beautiful-looking site complemented by compelling content with AdSense ads at the most strategic places; but seriously, it’s all for nothing if you don’t have any traffic to your website.

No traffic means no dollars. Period!

If you’re new to the traffic generation game, where do you begin?

First steps, get listed on Google and Yahoo. Start swapping links but you’ll have to do it the right way. Get traffic from blogs and forums. Get traffic from articles. Start a mailing list and get traffic from newsletters. Play the arbitrage game. Get traffic from social networking sites like MySpace.

Well, if you’d like to get a detailed explanation on the above, download Joel Comm’s 30-page report and hopefully, you’ll get to implement some of his techniques and enjoy a flood of new traffic to your site.

Click here to download the report!

A Way to Get Quality Backlinks and High PageRank

Jason — Tue, 27 Feb 2007 17:37:58 +0000

I came across an interesting blog post about getting quality backlinks and high PageRank.

Have you ever added a little chunk of HTML/Javascript code (sometimes called a widget) on your website to add a fun or “live” informational element to your site? e.g. a stock ticker, a weather report, or a graphic depicting the stage of pregnancy you’re in?

These third-party codes normally embed a link back to the developer’s site. Imagine if this widget is embedded in blogs and social networking sites — the number of one-way backlinks to the widget homepage could be staggering. Having a good number of one-way backlinks often translates to high PageRank.

So, you could easily leverage on this technique of creating one-way backlinks if you’re a web developer but what if you’re not? Well, you could hire freelancers to do the job of creating the widget for you. Of course, you’ll need to find some way to relate the widget to your site content.

For case studies, check out Open Source Candy’s excellent blog post here.

Can Google Toolbar Cause Pages to Be Indexed?

Jason — Thu, 14 Dec 2006 17:29:34 +0000

So, you created a new web page and visited your new page using a browser installed with Google Toolbar.

You hope that your page will somehow be indexed by the Google search engine…

Well, that’s not going to happen, at least according to Matt Cutts.

In an experiment by Philipp Lenssen (where he had a little bet with Matt Cutts) on the premise that

once you installed the Google Toolbar, every URL youâ€™d visit would slowly be added to the Google web search index… even otherwise unlinked URLs, as long as theyâ€™re public (and not excluded via robots.txt)

Philipp set up a secret page and visited his page via a browser installed with Google Toolbar.

After a few months, Google Toolbar did not index his secret page. Philipp lost the bet of course.

Yet another Google Search myth debunked!

Hosted Business Pages: Advertise Even If You Don’t Have a Website

Jason — Thu, 07 Dec 2006 12:01:49 +0000

Now you can advertise on AdWords even if you don’t have a website. The landing page for the AdWords ads will be hosted by Google.

At the moment, the service is only available in the US. I suppose it’s only a matter time before the service is made available to the rest of the world. The new service is known as the hosted business pages for the AdWords Starter Edition.

So what exactly is this new service?

Hosted business pages are now available for new US advertisers using AdWords Starter Edition. It’s important to note that a hosted business page is not a full-featured website with its own domain name, but rather a single landing page for your AdWords ads. Hosted business pages are free with a new AdWords account, and can be set up with no knowledge of HTML.

I’m wondering if the hosted business pages receive a different landing page quality score treatment. Something to ponder about…

Free Website Traffic Generation Tips

Jason — Thu, 23 Nov 2006 16:53:40 +0000

I’d like to share with you Allan Gardyne’s free report, “77 Ways to Get Traffic“.

This excellent 69-page report is packed with traffic generation tips that you probably wouldn’t have thought of. Most of the traffic generation techniques described in the report can be applied without costing you a single cent.

If this report interests you, I’d like to share more of such reports with you in the future.

All I ask is that you join my free mailing list; you’ll get the above-mentioned free report right after signing up.

Subscribing to the mailing list

Just head on to the right sidebar now and fill out your name and email address and click Subscribe. Your privacy is assured.

Dedicated IP PageRank Advantage Myth Busted!

Jason — Fri, 17 Nov 2006 16:29:12 +0000

I just came across an interesting post by Matt Cutts indicating that there is noÂ difference in Google PageRank treatment between a site hosted on virtual hosting (multiple sites on 1 IP address) versus a site hosted on a dedicated IP address.

The followingÂ is what Director of Technology at Google Craig Silverstein stated in reply to a Slashdot interview questionÂ on virtually hosted sitesÂ having PageRank penalized:

Actually, Google handles virtually hosted domains and their links just the same as domains on unique IP addresses. If your ISP does virtual hosting correctly, youâ€™ll never see a difference between the two cases. We do see a small percentage of ISPs every month that misconfigure their virtual hosting, which might account for this persistent misperceptionâ€“thanks for giving me the chance to dispel a myth!

I’m just wondering what it means by misconfiguration in virtual hosting.Â

Anyway, all my sites are on virtual hosting and the busted myth isÂ a comforting note indeed.

Fancy Placing an Ad on Amazon.com?

Jason — Mon, 13 Nov 2006 11:26:48 +0000

Early this month, Amazon.com’s subsidiary A9.com, launched Clickriver – a new pay-per-click sponsored links program. Clickriver is currently in beta.

The text ads will appear alongside Amazon.com’s product pages and search results.

Well, who can advertise? Here’s what A9.com says:

We welcome services of all types â€” in travel, finance and investment, training and education, entertainment, insurance, news, healthcare and physical fitness centers, IT assistance and consulting, photo printing and more. We also welcome product retailers whose offerings complement the many products on Amazon.com.

Everyone can apply, although unfortunately we will not be able to accept all the applications. If you’re interested, we encourage you to apply to join the Clickriver beta.

It has been noted that the advertised products must be complementary, sold from an external site and not in competition with the products sold on Amazon. So if you’re thinking of advertising your Amazon affiliate link, then forget the idea.

If you happen to have been accepted in the beta, do share your experience here.

AdWords Advertiser? You Better Have a “Quality” Landing Page!

Jason — Thu, 09 Nov 2006 16:26:04 +0000

If you’re an AdWords advertiser, there’s an important update that you need to know:Â

Google will begin incorporating landing page quality into the Quality Score for your contextually-targeted ads.Â

AdWords advertisers providing low quality landing page will see:
1) increase in minimum bids for Google.com and the search network and/or
2) decrease in traffic traffic across content network

Why the update?

This AdWords update is to ensure that advertisers provide the best user experience to users who click on the ads.Â

To know what constitutes a good user experience for a landing page, Google recommends referring to the Google AdWords Landing Page and Site Quality Guidelines.

Takeaway point?

If you’re an AdWords advertiser and you’re guilty of not providing the best user experience in your landing page, or if you’re in the business of arbitraging, it’s time to do something about it as it may eventually affect your ad visibility factor and possibly your bottom line.

I’m an AdSense publisher, so what?

From the AdSense publisher’s perspective, this update will lead to more ads offering more relevant and substantial content showing up on your site.Â There’s even this fascinatingÂ suggestionÂ by Darren McLaughlinÂ that there may be a slight pay raise for AdSense publishers.Â How true this will turn out, we’ll see…

How to Increase Blog Search Engine Traffic by Porting to WordPress

Jason — Tue, 07 Nov 2006 06:34:37 +0000

Here’s a story of how Chris Pearson apparently increased his search engine traffic by 455% in just one month (from September to October).

He made two simple changes:

He ported his blog from MovableType to WordPress
He based his design code on the Cutline framework

Chris built the Cutline framework from scratch with SEO (search engine optimization) in mind.

With some creativity, it just proves how easy it is to implement effective SEO on the WordPress blogging platform. Read Chris’ post for a detailed analysis of the result that he has achieved.

If you’re just getting into WordPress and don’t know where to start, you can download two free chapters of Gobala’s WordPress Adsense System.

You might also be interested to read why WordPress is bettter than other blogging platforms in many ways.

Easily Add Podcast to Your Blog and Drive Traffic!

Jason — Thu, 02 Nov 2006 09:23:42 +0000

Podcasting is getting serious attention nowadays but relative to blogs, the podcast sphere is still relatively small by comparison. In a recent seminar that I attended, internet marketing guru Derek Gehl did point out that now is a good time to capitalize on the podcast space as it’s still pretty much a new frontier.

Recently, someone asked me about how I implemented the podcast feature that I have on this blog. If you have listened to any of my podcast, it’s not me who is in the podcast.

Doing an actual podcast of your own voice recording takes time, energy, and also persistence. What I’ve done in this blog is to have a computer read out my blog posts.

The podcast is generated by a free text-to-speech (TTS) service called Talkr. If you are hearing TTS technology for the first time, it’s not new. Windows XP has it. My first experience with TTS was in the late ’80s! But, the voices then sounded so robotic.

Recently, natural-sounding speech technology has been making tremendous leaps and in my own testing, the quality varies from acceptable to near-natural.

Using natural-sounding TTS technology, Talkr is able to read an RSS feed and convert the text to MP3 audio. The “female” voice in the podcast doesn’t sound that bad either though I wish I could choose from a few other voices.

I’ve also used this service in my other blog which is powered by Blogger. Whether you have a WordPress blog or Blogger blog, you can easily embed a link to download and play the Talkr-generated podcast for a particular post.

Here are some of my tips when creating Talkr podcast for your blog:

If you want your each post to be read aloud in full, make sure your RSS feed does not output only an excerpt of each post but to generate the full text of each post. You can configure the feed settings from the control panel of your blog.
If your emphasis is on best podcast experience for your users, minimize on the use of images in your blog posts. If you are using Feedburner as your feed for Talkr, turn off the Feedburner FeedFlare feature if necessary.
Also, for best listening podcast experience for your users, use short phrases or sentences in your post and minimize on capitalizing each letter in a word like “THIS”.
After creating a podcast in Talkr you can create a chicklet for your podcast feed on your blog plus embed an audio link (like “Listen to this podcast”) for each post entry. If you are using WordPress, there is a plugin for Talkr which allows you to embed the link automatically without having to edit your templates. However, if you know HTML, it’s probably better to add the link manually in the desired templates as you have more control over the appeareance of the link and which template the link should appear.
Once you have your podcast made public, drive additional traffic to your site by registering your podcast feed in various podcast directories and pinging these directories whenever you have a new post. Within Talkr, you can also optimize your podcast for iTunes and other directories by adding additional information about your podcast.

As an aside, I mentioned yesterday that contextual advertising for podcast could be coming soon – another potential source of revenue and advertising opportunity. Cool eh?