Blog Traffic Voodoo and YOU (Blogging To Your Central Demographic Model) is a post from: Breakthrough Marketing with Loren Woirhaye

Reading time: 9 – 15 minutes

I’ll assume to start that like most people, you’re way, way more interested in yourself than what I’m doing.

Don’t feel bad – we’re all like that; largely interested in our own ends, our own stories.

But I’d like to tell you a little bit about my experiences with blogging and affiliate marketing on the internet.  I don’t expect you’ll care about my experiences, but there are some lessons you’ll learn (if you’re open to learning).

These lessons in my little story will will help YOU:

Get More Traffic!

By Blogging!

PLUS!!!

It’s Easy For YOU To DO!

Now do I have your attention?

I came around to blogging slowly.  At heart I’m a believer in proven direct response marketing methods and my early experiences marketing online validated those beliefs.

But the marketplace changed and the web became, well, more social.  The same shtick that worked for content marketing when I started out doesn’t work today.  That’s because the internet as a marketing environment has matured and the competition for “mindshare” is hotter than ever.

For years I focused almost entirely on list-building and then ]]> Blog Traffic Voodoo and YOU (Blogging To Your Central Demographic Model) is a post from: Breakthrough Marketing with Loren Woirhaye

Reading time: 9 – 15 minutes

I’ll assume to start that like most people, you’re way, way more interested in yourself than what I’m doing.

Don’t feel bad – we’re all like that; largely interested in our own ends, our own stories.

But I’d like to tell you a little bit about my experiences with blogging and affiliate marketing on the internet.  I don’t expect you’ll care about my experiences, but there are some lessons you’ll learn (if you’re open to learning).

These lessons in my little story will will help YOU:

Get More Traffic!

By Blogging!

PLUS!!!

It’s Easy For YOU To DO!

Now do I have your attention?

I came around to blogging slowly.  At heart I’m a believer in proven direct response marketing methods and my early experiences marketing online validated those beliefs.

But the marketplace changed and the web became, well, more social.  The same shtick that worked for content marketing when I started out doesn’t work today.  That’s because the internet as a marketing environment has matured and the competition for “mindshare” is hotter than ever.

For years I focused almost entirely on list-building and then I would email newsletters and promotions to the list. I did do blogging, but the blog content was not my focus much at all.  My emphasis as a free-content provider was to shower my lists with good stuff – but subscribers only got that content on the inside.  It wasn’t out there for everybody to read on the blogs.

I still do list-building and it’s still valid.  As far as my newsletters and content however, I’ve shifted into a more transparent mode of putting it out there in the blogosphere for anybody to read.    I notify my email lists when I update the blog and I’ve shifted more into the mode of working to get RSS subscribers to the blog and get my writing syndicated and published widely.

This may seem pretty obvious to you, but you have to understand that when I started marketing online blogs were fairly primitive and not many people knew what RSS was.  Many still don’t.  I’ve had to let go of my old opinions about what good internet marketing was and adopt new methods to grow my income and influence.

If I were starting out today, I’d start as a blogger and work hard to be a darned good one.  I would still market in other ways, but I would always try to put my best foot forward in my public blog and grow readership for the blog as a primary goal in my traffic strategy.

The lucky thing is, getting blog traffic isn’t hard at all.

That’s because blogs, by their nature, attract the search engines.   Those search engines, including specialized blog-search engines like Technorati, are on the lookout for fresh content—and they know blogs provide it so they give blogs “love”.

Blogging for traffic

Blogging is a relatively easy way to get traffic.  Some of the traffic you’ll get is better than others, but the way blogs are indexed pretty much guarantees you’ll get some traffic every time you blog.

To my way of thinking here are two or more ways to go about blogging:

• 1.  The sloppy way.  This is where you don’t have much care for quality blogging, but you can get traffic and build your list anyway.  The problem with being a sloppy blogger is you’ll never establish a reputation and a genuine following and you’ll undermine an important part of the second half of my system, which is monetizing and leveraging your list to get more traffic.
• 2.  The “Pro” way. The second approach is blogging as if you want to establish yourself as a preeminent expert in your field.  If you use my system exactly as I teach, this will be related to internet marketing and making money online.  but Within that range you could write about personal development, entrepreneurialism, hot marketing trends, affiliate marketing – there is really a very big range but trying to make a blog about raising chickens work to build an internet marketing would be an unrealistic stretch.

Step 1.  Who Is Your Reader ?

Recently I gave some advice to a startup entrepreneur who had $50,000 to invest in promoting his website.  He was wondering what sort of advertising would be a good investment.  When I asked who his target users were his reply was:

“Anybody who uses Facebook, Ebay, or Craigslist.  Our site is a cross between  all three.”

Basically, he was saying his site was designed to appeal to everybody.  Big mistake.  You cannot please everybody in marketing anything.  Some businesses get lucky after they have a base level of support from a specific group of targeted people.  Facebook, for example, started as a college thing and attained core  support only from a relatively small, but loyal, user group of students and alums from Ivy League schools.    Ebay started as a site for auctioning off collectible  PEZ containers and Craigslist just caught on in the San Francisco area for some reason and grew from there.

Your Central Demographic Model

Anyway, the smart way to launch a project to get traffic these days is to decide who your ideal target market is on a fairly detailed level.  One name for this is a “central demographic model”.   This is like a voodoo doll of your target customer.  Your model might be represented by a picture but behind the image the important thing is your understanding of the values of the person who looks that way.

For example: If you were to make a blog about video games  you’d want to create a model of your reader in your mind:  chances are he’s male and between 12 and 30 years of age.  That’s still pretty vague, but it’s more specific (and more useful) than saying “my site is for anyone who plays video games”.

So you make a mental list, or write it down, of what your reader likes and doesn’t like.  You try to imagine what his or her average day is like.   The more defined your mental image of the person is, the more you’ll be able to reach the emotions of people within the demographic sweet spot you want to reach and the more easily the traffic will come.

Traffic Comes When You Blog About The Right Stuff For Your Market

It’s almost like magic how blogs attract traffic.  It’s not at all, but as I said above, the search engines and specialized blog engines have a way of getting you traffic when you blog relevantly.  How much traffic you get is a result of two factors primarily:

1.  How much your blog is linked to by you (through self-promotion) and by other sites linking to you blog as a recommendation.

2.  How effectively the titles and content of your blog posts enters into “the conversation” within the average head of the average person who fits your central demographic model.

Keyword Research

I dislike keyword research and I hate writing around keywords, but if you can do it without descending into idiot-level writing, more power to you.   The search engines are getting better at sorting out what’s really relevant, so stuffing your blog posts with blatant “spider food” in the form of high-density use of keywords isn’t as necessary as it once was to get search engine rankings and traffic.  The reason is the search engines now use a fancy-schmancy technology called LSI or “latent semantic indexing” which allows them to look at not only the specific keywords and phrases you use, but also use complex algorithms to rank your blog for the actual topic based on synonyms and context.  You might actually rank rather well for keyphrases you don’t even use because the search engines discovered you’ve written relevantly about the topic with a different vocabulary.

If this seems all over your head, don’t worry.   The upshot of LSI technology is that it allows you and me to just focus on creating good blog content.   That said, some keyword research will be helpful to you.  I don’t like doing it so I use Market Samurai as my tool of choice to help me save time doing the tedious business of researching keywords.

Starting Your Blog

I recommend you use WordPress and you self-host, which means you’ll have to spend five or ten bucks a month to run your blog.  Self-hosting gives you freedom to write about whatever you please with no worries about having your blog arbitrarily deleted, which is known to happen to marketers who use free blogs like Blogger or free WordPress.org blogs.  Free blogs have their uses, but I believe your main blog should be totally controlled by you.

Pinging

Pinging your blog every time you update it gets you traffic.   When you post and ping frequently, the traffic comes.  How much depends on your subject matter, your market niche, and how well established your blog is.  But the traffic will come if you blog and ping and in fact a few years back some “gurus” were selling “how to make money online” products based on the same  simple premise I’m showing you for free.

In your WordPress blog control panel there’s something called a “ping list”.  Depending on how you have it set up, your blog will auto-ping one or several ping services.  I like to install a plugin called “cbnet Ping optimizer“ which prevents your blog from auto-pinging too often.  By default WordPress pings every time you make the slightest change to your blog content, which can run to a lot of pings and get your blog banned as a ping spammer.   So I recommend you use the plugin.  By default WordPress doesn’t ping many services (just one in fact I think).  There are some ping lists that run over 100 ping services but I feel that’s overkill, so I’ve narrowed it down to about a dozen.

http://api.moreover.com/RPC2

http://bblog.com/ping.php

http://blogsearch.google.com/ping/RPC2

http://ping.weblogalot.com/rpc.php

http://ping.feedburner.com

http://ping.syndic8.com/xmlrpc.php

http://ping.bloggers.jp/rpc/

http://rpc.pingomatic.com/

http://rpc.weblogs.com/RPC2

http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping

http://topicexchange.com/RPC2

http://www.blogpeople.net/servlet/weblogUpdates

http://xping.pubsub.com/ping

I set the ping optimizer to ping at most once every 60 minutes.  Often when I publish a blog post I read the post afterwards and I want to correct some dumb grammar error or add something.  With the ping set to 60 minutes,  I have an hour to make the post the way I want it without double-pinging being a problem.

I am not claiming, by the way, that getting traffic as a blogger is not work.  All success takes work.  Blogging well and blogging often will get you traffic and build you a following, but with that comes a commitment of your time.  The most important thing is just to get started and then keep going.

P.S.  you’ll also want to sign-up for an account with Technorati.  When you do you create a profile and claim your blog.  Then Technorati gives you some love as a registered member.  All you do is embed a code in one of your blog posts (looks like: JMUMM7FSB8X5 ) and then Technorati helps you get some more traffic.  Technorati isn’t  the only free service that does this sort of thing, but it’s probably the most influential one.

Blogging to the Bank

The post author, Loren Woirhaye writes sales copy and creates marketing systems for business clients who want to slash customer acquisition costs and position their businesses For 20%-30% sales growth in the next 12-18 months. He writes regularly about marketing and life at his Entrepreneur Blog.

3 Easy Ways To Get More Free Traffic and More Free Leads From Your Articles and Blog Posts is a post from: Breakthrough Marketing with Loren Woirhaye

Reading time: 4 – 6 minutes

In the next few minutes I’ll share with you the 3 “secret” ways I’ve used to get more traffic and leads from articles and blog posts. Using these three methods you’ll easily double, triple or even quadruple the effectiveness or your articles, sending your list-building into overdrive. At the end I’ll tell you how to get a free guide that teaches you an automated traffic method you can use to get free web traffic with push-button ease.

Picture this common list-building scenario…

You’re putting up squeeze pages and writing articles. You’re getting some traffic, but that traffic isn’t converting to email leads very well. Sure, you’re getting an opt-in here and there, but you’re looking for the secret that will explode your opt-ins.

Right Under Your Nose…

I’ve been testing different copywriting approaches for years and isolated key elements that cause articles to succeed and get traffic. The answer to your problem is right in front of your nose. The reason you don’t see the answer is because ]]> 3 Easy Ways To Get More Free Traffic and More Free Leads From Your Articles and Blog Posts is a post from: Breakthrough Marketing with Loren Woirhaye

Reading time: 4 – 6 minutes

In the next few minutes I’ll share with you the 3 “secret” ways I’ve used to get more traffic and leads from articles and blog posts. Using these three methods you’ll easily double, triple or even quadruple the effectiveness or your articles, sending your list-building into overdrive. At the end I’ll tell you how to get a free guide that teaches you an automated traffic method you can use to get free web traffic with push-button ease.

Picture this common list-building scenario…

You’re putting up squeeze pages and writing articles. You’re getting some traffic, but that traffic isn’t converting to email leads very well. Sure, you’re getting an opt-in here and there, but you’re looking for the secret that will explode your opt-ins.

Right Under Your Nose…

I’ve been testing different copywriting approaches for years and isolated key elements that cause articles to succeed and get traffic. The answer to your problem is right in front of your nose. The reason you don’t see the answer is because there’s so much confusing information out there.

You need to get clear why people don’t opt-in or why your traffic results aren’t what you want them to be.

3 Reasons Articles Aren’t Drawing More Subscribers

1. Not enough people are searching for keywords you are using to draw traffic
2. You aren’t making a really attractive free offer to build your list
3. Your writing is confusing to readers and they lose interest

You might be aware that many people are short of time. Therefore it’s important you tell people what they are going to get and assure them that to get it won’t take much time or effort. The real thing you are competing for as a markter is not readers’s time, it’s their attention.

Three “Structural Persuasion” Secrets

Secret #1: The best way to get and retain attention in your articles is to make a promise at the start of the article. I like to quantify the time investment too. I did it at the start of this article and if you got this far, it worked on you. If it worked on you, it will work on other people too. Telling readers how long it’s going to take them to get the information they want may see a little goofy, but it works, so start doing it.

Secret #2: The easiest formula is “3 easy ways” formula. Title your article with a promise of 3 easy ways to make something they are doing better or easier. This may seem like a slow-pitch promise, like you’re writing for dummies. But guess what? It works so use it. You can mix things up and use “5 simple ways” or whatever, but always a straightforward promise to deliver your information in bite-sized chunks. The number of points you are promising your reader doesn’t matter as much as the fact that you’re promising to divide the information up into easy bullet points. People crave and respond to well-structured communication and this titling method is an easy way to start doing that.

Secret #3: The offer at the end. Article traffic is all about getting readers to click on your link at the end. To get a lot of click you need to offer a very attractive free goodie. Make an effort to imply that the goodie is an almost magical solution to all the reader’s problems. While it may not be in reality, you need to whip that reader into a feverish excitement to get him to click. If you’ve built some momentum into your article and offer at the end, many readers will just click through and opt-in to your free offer, which takes some of the pressure off your squeeze page.

When you use these 3 secrets in your articles, you’ll be writing the way real copywriters do. Copywriters know that every step of the persuasion process has to be easy-peasy for the reader. When it is, lookout! because your results will be much better.

Start looking for ways to use these 3 secrets in every article you write. They don’t always all fit with all article types. I don’t always use them myself (because I get lazy sometimes) but when I do I get clickthrough rates as high as 40% of readers checking out my offer. There are other ways to write a good article, but if you’re after opt-ins for your email list, the formula I just shared with you works great.

Now you know the basics of writing killer articles using structural persuasion principles.

You can expand what you’ve learned here.

How about a system for getting unlimited free, automated traffic to your website?

Well, I’ve got such a system and I wrote a guidebook about how it works. You can have the guidebook for free.

Your Free Traffic Guide awaits.

If you want an internet money machine, you’ll want to learn more about how to use software to get traffic. Just grab the Free Traffic Formula for free and find out how.

The post author, Loren Woirhaye writes sales copy and creates marketing systems for business clients who want to slash customer acquisition costs and position their businesses For 20%-30% sales growth in the next 12-18 months. He writes regularly about marketing and life at his Entrepreneur Blog.

The Quick and Easy How To Get Your Website Online and Begin Making Money is a post from: Breakthrough Marketing with Loren Woirhaye

Reading time: 8 – 12 minutes

If you’re new to online marketing and you are getting ready to launch your first real website, you need to know the following, very timely information about “web hosting” In the next few minutes you’ll learn :

My first website was really lame and I had no clue what I was doing.  I  blundered through the process, wasting a lot of time but learning a bit in the process.  Over the last few years I’ve learned a lot about webmastering.   For me, web hosting and webmastering is a means to an end, not a career.  Knowing how to manage my own web-hosting empowers me to try new things as a marketer and adapt rapidly to changes in the marketplace.  ]]> The Quick and Easy How To Get Your Website Online and Begin Making Money is a post from: Breakthrough Marketing with Loren Woirhaye

Reading time: 8 – 12 minutes

If you’re new to online marketing and you are getting ready to launch your first real website, you need to know the following, very timely information about “web hosting”

In the next few minutes you’ll learn :

• how to choose a sensible web-hosting plan and what to avoid
• how to host multiple sites on one account
• how to know the right time to upgrade to so-called reseller hosting
• the best hosting control panel for internet marketers (in my opinion)
• why a blogging platform may be your best way to get started and which platform to use

My first website was really lame and I had no clue what I was doing.  I  blundered through the process, wasting a lot of time but learning a bit in the process.  Over the last few years I’ve learned a lot about webmastering.   For me, web hosting and webmastering is a means to an end, not a career.  Knowing how to manage my own web-hosting empowers me to try new things as a marketer and adapt rapidly to changes in the marketplace.  I also save lots of  money because I don’t have to pay someone to work on any of my sites.  I am the one in control, and so will you when you  manage your own websites.

These days it’s a lot easier to be your own “webmaster” than it was only a few years ago.  The whole process of setting up and managing websites is much more user friendly today.  With a little patience you can learn to put up eye-popping websites in record time.   You’ll have the ability to get an idea for a new site and have it up and getting traffic within one hour.  No kidding.

Control Panels Matter (especially if you’re a beginner)

One of the things that baffled me most of all was web-hosting.  I was on a Plesk host when I first started. To this day I want nothing to do with Plesk. I found it dreadfully confusing.

When I discovered C-Panel hosting things got a LOT easier.  C-panel has improved since I started using it too.  Now it has tutorials embedded inside it that help you as you go along.  I’ll recommend a reliable C-Panel host (the one I rely on) at the end of this lesson.  You can save a few bucks by using non-c-panel hosts, but I don’t recommend cutting corners.  When you choose a C-panel host you’re choosing a standard that has earned a preferred position of preeminence among internet marketers.

Basic Hosting

“Starting a Website” means different things to different people.  If you work for a billion dollar company, your budget may be in the millions and there will be a small army of developers, writers, strategists and coders involved in the project (plus some management types there to take credit/shift blame and basically pee on the projcet to mark  their territory).

But if you’re like “Joe Average who wants to make some money on the internet”,  you can launch a website for less that the price of a night out -  $20 or so.

To start your internet empire with just one website or blog (which is fine) you don’t need to invest much in hosting. Less than $10 per month gets a nice plan for one website.

Dedicated Hosting is probably more than you need.  If you’re starting a site with heavy bandwidth requirements, dedicated hosting may be necessary, but often shared hosting, which is very cheap, is adequate and works fine.   As your needs grow you might go from basic hosting to reseller hosting to dedicated hosting.  If you think you need dedicated hosting or a private server for your websites,  you’ll want to get some specific education that goes way beyond the scope of this article

Multi-Site Hosting

You can usually run more than one site on any hosting plan, but there’s an awkwardness to running more than one site on a basic hosting account.  Basically, you would have to set up each site as a sub-domain.  Thus you would have http://site1.yourdomain.com and “site2″  and so forth.  You can also do it like this:  http://yourdomain.com/site1, which is making your site a subfolder of your top-level domain.

I use domain sub-folders all the time, creating a sub-folder for each product I sell on a site, for example.  It’s not a bad practice at all but things can get out confusing to manage once you have more than a few sites running as sub-domains or sub–folders.

As your  empire-building progresses you’ll acquire numerous URLs, which are registered domain names you own.  They generally cost about $10 a year so you can afford to have a few and owning more than one has  advantages I’ll explain later.

When To Choose Reseller Hosting

The next step above basic hosting is to get a so-called “reseller” account.  It’s called that because you can resell hosting space to anybody you like and set them up with their own control panel.  Doing this is a cool way to make some money or cover your hosting costs, but unless you really want to get into the webmaster and support business (which isn’t a bad thing but could suck your energy away from a business you’d prefer) be selective about who you sell hosting space to.

If you do sell hosting space on a small-time basis you’ll want clients with minimal support needs who just need a site that’s reliable – this way you get paid every month and don’t have to do much to earn it.  You could also sell the hosting/support plan for top dollar with the value to the customer being in the support.

If you’re doing web-design or some sort of web-consulting work you might want to include hosting in the packages you offer to clients.  Doing so may help clients put-off discontinuing your services because if they do they’ll have to cope with moving their hosting, which is no big deal but your clients won’t know that.  Little “hooks” like this is good business strategy because they help you keep your customers in a buying cycle with you.

The Best Reason To Choose Reseller Hosting

Many website owners use reseller hosting for their own websites but don’t resell space at all.

When you choose reseller hosting you benefit because it simplifies the running of more than a couple of websites enormously.   Because with reseller hosting you can create a new control panel for as many hosting accounts as you want, you’ll be able to put every domain you own on a separate account.

The first benefit is this makes site-management a cleaner process with fewer files on each hosting account, which saves time.

You’ve probably already know your time is your most precious resource in building an internet business.  There are time-thieves everywhere trying to suck it away from you.  Even if you are disciplined about not doing obvious time-wasters like watching a lot of YouTube videos of stupid pet tricks, your own working methods can be time-inefficient and when they are your progress will be slower.

The main reason I recommend using reseller hosting for a serious internet business is the separation of sites into invidual control panels… mostly because it saves lots of time.

If you’ve ever spent an hour combing your hard drive looking for a misplaced file, you know how frustrating it can be.  Just as being organized with the files on your hard drive saves you time, using separate control panels for each domain you own does as well.

Other benefits become more obvious as you learn a little more about webmastering.  Some php “scripts”, which are programs that run on a hosting account, can conflict with each other if they are on the same account but if put on separate control panels they don’t.

A Blog May Be Your Best Choice For Website #1  (and why it’s also the easiest)

When I got started I didn’t even know what a blog was.  My first websites were very ugly things coded in plain HTML.  Real ugly — and labor-intensive as well.

These days WordPress is perhaps the best platform to start most websites with for the serious beginner.  In relation to it’s power and flexibility, WordPress is easy to learn.

With most C-panel hosting you get a feature called Fantastico which can be used to create a WordPress site in about two minutes.   Fantastico won’t install the very latest version of WordPress, but since WordPress has an auto-upgrade feature you can install it from your C-panel using Fantastico and then login to your WordPress site as an administrator and just click the upgrade link to upgrade to the latest version. As of today the latest version of WordPress is 3.0.1  – version 3.0 was a watershed upgrade to WordPress that marked it’s real maturity and that’s part of why I’ve gone from being  skeptical of WordPress to recommending it wholeheartedly.

WordPress is robust, flexible, and easy-to-learn.   It isn’t the right system for every website,  but it’s a powerful, widely used,  amply supported tool that can grow with you.

Enhancing Your Site’s Core Functions

The WordPress core script is a blogging program.  By adding other features, called “plugins”, you can modify it to do a huge variety of tricks.  I am currently running about 20 plugins on the WordPress site I experiment with the most, and I’ve tried probably 40 or 60 and researched dozens more.   In subsequent articles I’ll tell you about every single plugin I recommend and why, so stay tuned.

In the meantime, if you’re ready to get  started with WordPress, you’ll need to get a hosting account and a domain name.  Domains registrars are all pretty similar (I use Godaddy mostly), but the hosting service I recommend you use is Hostgator.  I’ve used them for years and the features are excellent,  support is stellar and the value you get is superb.

SAVE on HOSTING: If you want to save some money on hosting you can use this coupon code to get a discount: JUSTINTIME

(of course I’ll be compensated if you sign up today through the link above)

The post author, Loren Woirhaye writes sales copy and creates marketing systems for business clients who want to slash customer acquisition costs and position their businesses For 20%-30% sales growth in the next 12-18 months. He writes regularly about marketing and life at his Entrepreneur Blog.

3 Easy Free Ways You Should Be Getting Traffic (From People With Money) To Your Blog is a post from: Breakthrough Marketing with Loren Woirhaye

Reading time: 4 – 6 minutes

In the next few minutes you’ll discover:

First some bad news: in today’s web marketplace just having a blog won’t get you any real traffic at all.  In fact, the market is savagely competitive and crowded, so if you aren’t super-focused you probably won’t get far in marketing your site.

The good news: people are super busy these days and what they need and want when they look for information online is clarity.  When you create focused information that is easy for people to understand and explore, you win.

Some of the best, most friendly traffic is free.  Friendly traffic is the kind of visitors who want information and come searching for it.  I call this traffic friendly because they are asking questions and want solutions to their problems.  They aren’t really expecting to be sold anything, so their guard ]]> 3 Easy Free Ways You Should Be Getting Traffic (From People With Money) To Your Blog is a post from: Breakthrough Marketing with Loren Woirhaye

Reading time: 4 – 6 minutes

In the next few minutes you’ll discover:

• 3 easy ways to start attracting the right kind of visitors to your blog
• How to start growing your email list immediately
• The secret ingredient (that skyrockets sales) you must deliver in all your content

First some bad news: in today’s web marketplace just having a blog won’t get you any real traffic at all.  In fact, the market is savagely competitive and crowded, so if you aren’t super-focused you probably won’t get far in marketing your site.

The good news: people are super busy these days and what they need and want when they look for information online is clarity.  When you create focused information that is easy for people to understand and explore, you win.

Some of the best, most friendly traffic is free.  Friendly traffic is the kind of visitors who want information and come searching for it.  I call this traffic friendly because they are asking questions and want solutions to their problems.  They aren’t really expecting to be sold anything, so their guard tends to be down.  The “friendly factor” is part of what makes blog traffic so high quality.

Of course some of your traffic will usually come from phrases people type into search engines.  You’ll get this sort of traffic naturally over time,  but getting lots of it is a technical process I won’t try to teach in a short article.

The cornerstone of the best free traffic is human engagement. That means giving information as from one person to another.  Imagine a person asked you a question and you knew the answer.  You would probably share the answer, right?

Sharing answers to questions is the easy way to get free traffic.  Of course sharing answers means putting words together.  There are many opportunities online to share answers to questions, but the easiest to learn to use are:

• forums
• article sites
• press releases

Online forums are easy to figure out.  You’ll want to explore whether the forum allows you to put a signature link at the bottom of your posts.  If it doesn’t allow links, it’s probably not a good forum for getting traffic.  There are hundreds of great forums where people ask questions.  One easy way to find forums is using Google Alerts, which is a service that emails you whenever somebody uses keywords, anywhere on the internet.  For example, if you had a blog about alternative energy, you could have Google Alerts email you whenever new content turned up with phases like “home solar power” turned up.

It can take awhile to build up forum traffic, because with most forums the more you post, the more people on the forum will trust you because they can see your “post count”.  People naturally assume the more you’ve posted, the better your advice.  Thus, a good strategy is to stake out a half-dozen or so forums and promote your expertise on them consistently.  This strategy takes awhile to generate a lot of traffic, but in time the traffic can get to be quite substantial.

Article sites  are another good way to get traffic. The most important thing is to learn how to title your articles so people will be curious to read them.  Arguably your title is more important than the content of the article in getting people to read the article.  Article marketing can be frustrating if you aren’t writing about subjects lots of people are desperate to learn more about.  A smart approach is to test different approaches until you figure out what kind of article topics and titles get you the most traffic, then write more of that type of article.

Press releases are like articles but you can get away with a lot of self-promotion in them.  Articles tend to do well when they are informative on their own.  Try to make your releases more newsy and tease the reader to go to your site to get the really hot information.  Not many marketers use press releases effectively, but the traffic is often substantial.

How to start growing your email list immediately (plus a secret)

All anybody online searching for information thinks about is “what’s in it for me?  What do I get and how do I get it?”. Web searchers are about as self-centered as 2-year olds.  The best way to build your email list is offer instant gratification in terms of bait.  Free reports or training videos are common subscriber baits because they work.  The secret missing ingredient you must offer in the bait, if you want a lot if subscribers, is the implication that if the person gets your free goodie, all their problems will go away effortlessly.  I cannot emphasize this enough – you have to write to the “Chimpanzee brain”, the 2-year old who wants only easy, instant gratification.  A nice box shot or graphical presentation of the free prize your subscriber will get can skyrocket your email list to.  That’s because people want what’s new.  Make your free prize “goodie” appear as new and exciting and effortless as possible and you’ll get much better results in building your list.

The post author, Loren Woirhaye writes sales copy and creates marketing systems for business clients who want to slash customer acquisition costs and position their businesses For 20%-30% sales growth in the next 12-18 months. He writes regularly about marketing and life at his Entrepreneur Blog.