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Build traffic with articles

Sorry about the slightly late post everyone, I’ve had a bit of a hectic day as I’m preparing for going away on my easter holiday (don’t worry, I will still post thoughts and tidbits here ).

If you have a site where your content is mainly written things, like a blog, then using article directories to drive traffic to your site might be something to consider. Article marketing works for any kind of site though but with blogs and similar, you have the opportunity to give the readers a ”sample” of your real site. And giving people a taste before they get the main dish is always good, in my humble opinion.

An article directory is a site that let people submit their own articles to be listed on the directory. Other people are then allowed to use these articles to reprint on their site or in their e-zines as long as the articles are kept intact along with the authors bio-box.

If you are a blogger and you do write your own content (which you should), with just a few changes to each of your posts you could turn them into actual articles and get them listed on some article directories. You should change the articles so that they are not exactly like your post on the blog or site since search engines try to avoid duplicate content to some extent.

The reason you want to submit your content on article directories is because a lot of them are quite big and the articles listed there will get good Google listings. Most of the article directories lets the author include a bio box at the bottom where you will link back to your own site.

This link back will give you visitors from the article directories, it will give you backlinks to your site, so that the search engines see that your site is more popular. It might also result in e-zines and other sites re-printing your article which leads to more traffic back and more backlinks.

For me this is a logical thing to do since the changes you have to make to the content you have already written will not be too big and you will get your content read by a lot more people. If the people like what you write, they will most likely visit your site and bookmark or subscribe to it.

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Internet marketing mindset

I guess this post shouldn’t be named internet marketing mindset specifically, since the attitude and mindset I mention here goes for everything you do. Anyone who start their own business need to learn how to be able to motivate and ”speak” to themselves in a positive way.

Something you should always remember is that a positive attitude goes a very long way, even if that phrase feels a bit over used.

Working with internet marketing is a fun and challenging occupation. Because of these challenges we face, it can also be a frustrating job at times. That´s the reason you need to be in the right mindset all the time.

I´m no guru or motivational speaker of any sort, but I know that having a positive attitude is important in everything you do. Sometimes, it´s easy to forget that when you are working like this.

While you are working online you will have days when you feel like you are getting nowhere and you will be ready to throw in the towel. These are the days when you log in to your affiliate account (or what for of income stream you use) and for the X number of days in a row, you still just see $0 in the money made.

What you need to remember when you are working online is that you are building a company, most likely from scratch. All companies have slow periods, especially in the start-up period. What you need to do is keep a positive attitude to what you are doing even when things are not going so well.

It´s been said over and over, but it´s still true, the mind is a powerful thing and if you keep telling yourself you will fail then most likely you will indeed fail. But this goes both ways, keep being positive about what you do and keep your spirit high about the work and things will eventually pick up.

I am still learning the internet marketing ”game” and my philosophy is to try to learn at least one new thing every day. This have gotten me to a point where I’ve read countless pages, reports and e-books about this business. Some of these things are good, some are… less good. But if I’m able to just learn that one thing every day, I have accomplished my goal. And I most often do.

My point with this is, break things up and don’t expect everything to ”explode” at once. It´s like they say, the first sale is the hardest one to make. Until you get that first sale, you are still learning how to speak to your customers. Sure, some people go into this business and make a massive income in a very short amount of time, it happens. People also win the lottery.

Most of us will struggle when we start a company, it takes time and effort and we will have bad days. The important thing is to not get stuck in those bad days and look forward, because the in the end, this struggle will be worth it.

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Free Website Promotion

Once you have your website up and running you need to get some visitors to it. Without visitors we can´t make any money, right. When we are starting up a business we would prefer if the traffic we can build up is free or at least very cheap. In this article I will list some ways that are completely free to build a good base of traffic for your site.

Search Engines
There are a lot of ways to get your website ”out there” and many of the good ways are free. The most obvious to start with will of course be search engines.

Search engines can still bring in a load of traffic to your site and this traffic will be targeted and most often of ”good quality”. With the amount of websites on the internet today, it´s not as easy to get good listings on the search engines as it once was, but you should still submit your site to as many as you can. A lot of the search engines work on different formulas how the rank the pages and you might get lucky with some search engine to get a good ranking.

Even if the engines you submit to are smaller it will help getting your site noticed, and one visitor here and there is better than zero visitors at all. When finding search engines to submit to, you could head over to Wikipedia, they have quite an extensive list to get you started.

Social Bookmarks
For those that are not familiar with social bookmarking, this is, simply put a way of saving your bookmarks online with the ability to share them with your friends and people who are interested in similar things. It´s like a community of bookmarkers.

Using social bookmarking sites can drive anywhere from almost no traffic to quite a big heap of traffic to your website. It all depends on how fast word spreads about the content your site is providing. Even if you get almost no traffic from the social bookmark sites, it´s a free source of traffic that will build up over time. The more people who visit your site from the social bookmarks, the more chance there is of the word spreading. And as with the search engines, even if you just get one hit here and there, it´s better than getting no traffic at all.

Today, there are a bundle of social bookmarking sites on the web and a lot of them work differently from each other. I will not go into any of the sites in detail here but just mention them as a source of free traffic that you should not overlook. Luckily, Wikipedia have a list on quite a lot of the social bookmarking sites out there so you can get started.

Article Marketing
Article marketing is when you write an article about a specific topic (preferably related and targeted to your sites content) and you submit the article to the article directories online. Most of the article directories will allow you to put a bio box at the end of your article that can contain a link back to your site. Using article marketing can greatly improve your traffic and search engine exposure, also it will bring you good target traffic that are already interested in visiting your site because they have already had ”contact” with your work.

To find some article directories to get you started, you could simply make a search on Google. The list you get back there should be enough to get you started.

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Mistakes with PPC

When people are starting up with PPC marketing there are a few mistakes that are commonly made.

One of the very common mistake is to not turn off the content network ads. The content network are all the pages that use Google´s AdSense and the quality of this traffic is usually not very good. To forget to turn off, or just not knowing about the content network ads being enabled by default can cost you quite a bit of money with very little or no return.

Apart from the low quality of the traffic, you will also get a massive amount of impressions on your ads. This will usually cause your Click Through Rate (CTR for short) to go way down. With a very low CTR, Google will think that your ads are not relevant to the search terms you have specified and will penalize you. This will result in a higher cost per click. All this is quite simplified but the important thing is that a low CTR leads to higher price for the same click. And a good CTR means a lower price for the same click.

The next common mistake is bidding too high initially. Start out with smaller cost per click, especially when you are learning how PPC works. Bidding high will give you top positions and a lot of exposure, but that will not help you if you are a novice at creating landing pages. Even if you get a bundle of hits to your page, it will be worth nothing if you can’t convert it into a sale.

So, start small and learn both how to get an appealing ad that pulls in a good CTR and polish your landing pages so that you have a high conversion ratio.

Both these things are done best by split testing two versions against each other. Run two ads for the same landing page at the same time, see which one gets the highest CTR. Remove the one with lower CTR and try to improve the one you have by making yet another ad, split test these against each other. Always try to improve your landing pages as well, but remember to keep the previous versions in case the new one is worse!

This brings us to a third common mistake that new PPC marketers make. Not using landing pages. You need to send the traffic from the PPC searches to a well prepared and very targeted landing page. If you run a big campaign, you might even need to have several landing pages for different niches within your topic.

It´s never a good thing to be ”general” when you are working with PPC. If you are selling a specific part for a specific model of cars, for instance, do not bid on just ”car” as search word. Be as specific as you can. It will generate less traffic to your site but the traffic will be better quality.

Working with PPC marketing is about always improving what you currently have in, my opinion. Test and test again what works and what doesn’t. It will pay off in the end.

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Landing pages and PPC

Pay-Per-Click is a good way that can make your internet business take of fast and ”easy” if it´s done correctly. However, if you do it wrong, it can leave you with an empty wallet wondering what went wrong.

When I started out with PPC marketing I think I managed to make all and every thing you shouldn’t do, including the things I will tell you about in this article. Hopefully, I can save you some money and help you to a better start than I had.

In this post I will just cover some basic things to avoid when you start out with PPC marketing. There´s a bunch of information you can find on the internet about how to master the search engines that use PPC. One of the better resources to learn a lot about Google Adwords is Perry Marshall´s Definitive Guide to Google Adwords.

Something that is quite common for people who start out with PPC marketing is to not narrow the traffic for the campaigns down enough. If you are promoting kitchen knives you want to make a campaign for kitchen knives and not just knives. However, that´s way to wide in itself, but you get the point.

Another very common mistake that people make is to send the traffic to the main site without considering what term was used in the search.

In one of my previous articles I used an example of someone running a site about poodles, and I will use that here too. So we say that you are running a site about poodles and you are getting traffic targeted for that from the PPC campaign, but it´s targeted only to everything related to poodles.

What you want to do is to narrow it down even further. Let us assume that your poodle site have at least one page related to grooming. We can also assume that poodle grooming is a popular search term for people interested in poodles. Since this is a popular term, you are bidding on it and getting a fair amount of hits from your poodle grooming bids, but you send the visitors to your main site that lists everything related to poodles. This is not the best way to do it. In fact, it´s quite a bad way to do it.

You want to send the people who are searching for poodle grooming to the pages on your site that is related to this specific topic. Considering how easy it is to find information on the web, surfers have become increasingly lazy. If you can’t provide the information they are looking for right away, there is a good chance they will just press the back button and find a site that can. All that will do for you is to cost you the click through. Always assume that your surfers doesn’t want to search for the things they want. Smack it in their face.

People who are good at PPC and make money from it usually send their PPC visitors to something referred to as a landing page. These landing pages are pages designed specifically to turn the PPC surfer into a customer or get them to opt-in to an e-mailing list, or both. To build a good landing page that convert the PPC traffic into customers or such is a science in itself and I will not go into that here.

If you send your traffic to landing pages designed for each of the search terms you will have a greater chance of making money from them. Give them a lazy way to find what they want and they will be happy with finding your site.

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