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Many Ways To Get Traffic

by Glenn Canady

I've tried many traffic generation techniques and listed those which I've had success with in my course. Here are just some these techniques I present in this article.

Viral Marketing

What do I mean when I say Viral Marketing? Viral marketing describes ANY strategy that encourages people to pass on your marketing message to others. This strategy can result in exponential growth in the message's exposure. Like a single cell organism splitting into 2 and then 4, and then 8 etc, a carefully designed viral marketing strategy grows extremely rapidly.

The three basic elements that make up most viral marketing campaigns are:

1) Give away valuable products or services.
2) Provide a method for transferring your marketing message to others.
3) Take advantage of others' resources to multiply your efforts

Let's examine each of these elements briefly.

1. Gives away valuable products or services

Giving something away "free" is the most powerful weapon in a marketer's arsenal. Most successful viral marketing programs give away some product or service with a high perceived value to attract attention. Examples of things you can give away free are free reports, free e-books, free articles, free "graphics", free programs, free e-mail accounts, etc.

While giving away "free" things will not make you rich by itself, it will get your site a lot of visitors because everything you give away will mention your website. Once you get the visitors, you will eventually get the sales since you'll be collecting the names and email addresses of your visitors and eventually selling everybody that comes to get your "freebie".

2. Provides a method of transfering your marketing message to others

Viral marketing works so well because word travels instantly on the Internet. I'm sure you've gotten an electronic greeting card from somebody. At the bottom of every one of those little greeting cards is a message that advertises the website where you can send your own electronic greeting to others. This is a form of viral marketing. Every single electronic greeting card that goes out carries a little advertisement for the company.

3. Takes advantage of others' resources to multiply your efforts

Using other people's resources to spread your marketing message is a smart way to grow your business. Link partners and affiliate programs are great examples of viral marketing because they use other people's websites to spread the word about your website. If you write a "free" report or article and encourage other websites to publish it, you're using their resources to spread the word about your offerings. Of course any report or article you write will contain information about your website and instruct others that that they may publish it freely as long as they keep your information in the article.

There are many viral marketing tools out on the Internet, but so far here's the one that I've had the most success with: TrafficSwarm. It's easy to setup and will slowly grow each week to provide you with more traffic. They key to using TrafficSwarm is to have a really exciting Headline for your ad and to post the popunder code on all your high traffic pages.

E-zines

The term "E-zine" is short for "electronic magazine" and usually takes the form of a website & newsletter combination that is modeled after a print magazine. Some e-zines are simply electronic versions of existing print magazines, whereas others exist only in their digital format. Most e-zines contain collections of articles about specific subjects and are advertiser-supported but a few charge a subscription.

There are thousands of E-zines on the Internet about just about everything you can imagine. When I talk about E-zines for website marking, I'm talking more about the email newsletters that are sent out to their members. These E-zine newsletters are viral marketing at its best. You see, most e-zines are constantly searching for more information to create their newsletters. Most of them publish weekly so there's always a struggle to get the next issue filled. Many of these E-zines will include your short article for FREE or at least will mention your offerings in the newsletter if it offers something useful for their membership.

You can find tons of e-zines on the Internet with just a few simple searches. A good starting point would be a directory of e-zines such as http://www.freezineweb.com.

Many e-zines charge for their ads, but if you write a really good article that just has your website information at the bottom, you can find lots of e-zines to place it for free.

Partnerships

Partnerships are a great way to increase your sales and they can take several different forms. When you use Zeus, you are creating lots of link partnerships with similarly themed websites. Best of all, these sites are sending you traffic for free! Affiliate partnerships are another way of working with other websites. You'll pay these partners on every sale that come through their links.

Press Releases

If you have a product or service that might be considered newsworthy, you should seriously consider doing a Press Release. I recently tried this for the first time and did pretty well. I wrote a press release for 5 Star Shine, went to http://www.press-release-writing.com and paid to have them release it. My press release got picked up in the Gary Indiana Tribune as well as lots of Internet sites. I got tons of calls and orders from that one newspaper article. I also noticed a big pickup in web traffic when my release was posted to the Internet websites. All in all, my orders more than paid for the press release so it was a great deal. I'm going to experiment with Press Releases some more and I'll keep you posted on any other tricks I pick up.

Newsgroups

A really good way to access the newsgroups is now through Google. Google bought out Deja News and now pretty much has the complete newsgroup archive. This is the Google Newsgroup.

Newsgroups can give you some additional sales but you have to be careful to do it in the right way. You can't just jump onto a newsgroup and tell everybody to come to your wonderful website or you will get yourself FLAMED big time! Being flamed is a newsgroup slang term that basically means that you will be ridiculed without mercy. You see, newsgroups are where all the advanced Internet users hang out. They don't like to see any commercial messages in their little newsgroups.

There are some newsgroups that are exclusively for commercial ventures and you can post anything you want in those areas. Every newsgroup has their own set of rules and you must read them before you even try to post to that group. If you really enjoy reading a particular newsgroup that is related to what you sell, you can contribute to the group from time to time and include your signature in your postings. Your signature would have your website in it so that's a good way to get newsgroup members to find out about your site without throwing it in their face. This subtle form of advertising your website is accepted as long as you make useful contributions to the newsgroup.

You can also find individual customers through the newsgroups that you could contact directly through their e-mail address. Let me give you an example of this. Go to Google Newsgroup and put in the words "car wax" into the Search Groups search box. This will perform a search that will look for all newsgroup postings that contain the words "car wax" in them. Here's an example of one I found:

brooke@alumni.xxxx.xxx (Brooke P. Anderson) writes:
Anyone have any recommendations for car wax or other paint treatments?
There are several treatments out these days that say they last and protect up to a year. Is this stuff really better than plain old car wax?
-- Brooke (brooke@alumni.xxxx.xxx)

So if you sold a type of car wax, this person would be a great person to at least tell about your product. You have to be sure to look at the date of the posting and make sure it's not too old though. If it's been 3 years since the article was posted, then this person probably has already changed email address. I usually try to stick within 6 months or so as a general rule.

Glenn Canady is the author of Gorilla Website Marketing which is chock-full of new and exciting ways to get to the top of the search engines and increasing your site traffic.

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