With all the changes in Google AdWords and the increased competition these days, organic SEO looks more and more attractive to most of us.

The key is for your website optimization to out-perform your competition, without over spending with an online marketing consultant (or without taking up too much of your time if you’re going the do-it-yourself route).

Remember, affordable Search Engine Optimization is about increasing quality traffic, then

• converting
• that traffic to a sale or a sales lead.

If you miss these points I describe below, your SEO goals of increased conversions will tank, even if you have a Number 1 Google Ranking.

I often notice these missed areas when I’m Coaching a business owner about their Web site and their need to increase sales and sales leads.

So, here are 3 points for you to review that I hope will help your SEO goals of increased conversions.

What’s Above the Fold Counts Most, so Consider Monitor Resolutions

Living in the world of TV remote controls and browser back buttons, we have to capture our website visitors’ attention ASAP. Our visitors aren’t going to give us much time before making a decision to stay or to leave our website.

As much as this subject is discussed these days, it’s amazing the number of sites I review that have critical information missing from “above the fold”, in that area visible before your visitors scroll down.

This is the area to briefly summarize what people can do on your site and make your best case for your guests staying on your website and not clicking away. This may also be the area to place your contact information.

Keep in mind that what’s above the fold on your monitor will likely be different from what’s above the fold on the monitor for someone visiting your website. Browser resolution is set differently for various computers.

For instance, on my website, I know the top resolution of my visitors is 1280 by 1024 (53%) and the second most popular resolution is 1024 by 768 (37%). I get this information from my site’s analytics script, although not all analytics programs provide this critical information.

Since I make sure my site looks great for these 90% of my visitors and make sure I communicate reasons to stay on my site above the fold (my value proposition), I draw more people into my site, encouraging them to scroll down.

Remember to cross test your site with recent versions of the most popular Web browsers: Firefox, Internet Explorer, Safari and maybe even Google’s new Chrome.

These steps raise my conversion rate and they will raise yours, too. And increasing traffic and conversions is the whole point of affordable search engine optimization, whether using an online marketing consultant or d-i-y, right?

So, don’t miss this important step.

Carefully Select Your Type Size and Font and Remember that White Space is Your Friend

I’m astounded by the improper text choices made by so many website owners today. Is there really any good reason to make people squint at your website, struggling to get the information they need?

Consider reviewing The Easy to Read Standard at Information Architects (you can Google it). I would encourage you to review the size of your text, the white space between your letters and words and between your paragraphs and headings.

Designers often believe whitespace is your enemy; if you want people to understand your message and stay on your website, whitespace is in fact your friend.

Also consider that fonts with serifs are easier to read than fonts without serifs.

If you want to successfully convey your message to as many of your site visitors as possible, then make it as easy for them as you can. When we’re talking about increasing conversions, it’s all about the numbers and appealing to the largest number of people possible.

Use Opt-in Email or Blog Postings to Maximize Your Sales

All website owners would like for people to buy from their website the first time they visit. But is that realistic?

Consider these statics from the National Sales Executive Association:

• 2% of sales are made on the 1st contact;
• 3% of sales are made on the 2nd contact;
• 5% of sales are made on the 3rd contact;
• 10% of sales are made on the 4th contact (and)
• 80% of sales are made on the 5th – 12th contact.

For most businesses, if you don’t offer an opt-in contact, like a regular email newsletter or blog postings, you’re missing out on most of your potential sales!

When setting up an opt-in Internet marketing campaign, you should offer incentives to subscribe. To entice people to opt-in, you can offer:

• special pricing for email list members
• a first look at new products
• ability for customer to select subjects and emails they receive (controlling the frequency of contact by choosing which of your lists to be on)
• promise not to share email or other personal info with other companies

Using opt-in contact allows you to significantly increase conversions by introducing yourself over time to your potential customers, in a soft-sell manner.

Website optimization is important; the goal is increased Internet traffic, sales and sales leads. But whether you’ve hired an online marketing consultant or you’re doing the process yourself, Affordable search engine optimization by itself doesn’t accomplish those last points of increased sales and sales leads.

You’ve got to remember to design your website to alleviate visitors natural apprehensions and make buying from you as easy as possible.

Properly mapping out the above the fold area of your Web pages, using appropriate size text, using adequate whitespace and offering an opt-in process to nurture your buyers will all help you accomplish the real goals you have with SEO and website optimization: increased sales and more sales leads.

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With today’s website tracking software and services you can find out a lot about the people who visit your website. You can learn where they’re from, what kind of browser they’re using, how long they stayed on your site, and a whole lot more. But what all this high tech intelligence won’t tell you is what kind of people they are, and how likely they are to be transformed by your Web presentation from viewers to customers.

Your ability to convert website visitors into clients depends on your ability to find the soft underbelly of their subconscious desire. After all, if someone is happy with what they’ve already got, they don’t need you, but if they were truly one hundred percent happy, they wouldn’t bother coming to your website. Therefore every visitor that comes to your site is a potential client whether they know it or not.

The Setup’s The Thing

Your website presentation has to find that annoying little subconscious scab just under the surface and pick at it until it becomes a full blown irritation that fosters discontent and a desire for change. That discontent is your opening to make your value statement.

We refer to this process as The Setup. Like any good presentation you cannot, or rather should not, just blurt out how great you are, but rather you have to set the scene. Like any good story, the punch line, moral, or payoff only works if it is properly setup. Far too many website presentations suffer from premature pitch climax.

The ability to transform viewers into customers requires patience. Entrepreneurial companies tend to view the setup as a waste of time, and they fear losing viewers before they ever get to the so-called “good-stuff.” But without a proper setup, an audience is just not primed to accept what you have to say.

You can’t sell anybody anything unless they understand they’ve not been getting everything they need and deserve. That understanding creates dissatisfaction with your competition and opens the audience’s minds to what you have to offer. In short, the setup needs to touch a psychological nerve.

The Customer Is Always Right – Not Quite

We’ve all heard the expression, “the customer is always right.” The fact is the customer is not always right, and in many cases they don’t really know what they want or what they should have; and sometimes even when they do, they resist it because of a variety of misinformation, misunderstanding, self-doubt, and preconceived notions of conventional wisdom. It’s your website presentation’s job to set visitors on the right path.

Being The Expert Inspires Confidence

You’re supposed to be the expert in what you do, and if you are, you need to have the ability to dig deeper into what people really want, need, and desire. I am always reminded of friends of mine who hired an interior decorator to furnish their new home. The decorator asked them what kind of furniture they liked. They answered that they were looking for Colonial, to which the decorator answered, “No you aren’t. What you want is Country French.” And after he showed my friends what he was talking about they quickly agreed. The decorator knew his business and understood the clients. Yes the clients liked the idea of the homey Colonial look they’d seen, but not being furniture experts they didn’t understand what the options were, and what kind of furniture best suited their lifestyle and budget, while still providing the homey rustic but comfortable aesthetic they wanted. Customer satisfaction is about providing what the client really wants and not necessarily what they say they want.

Learn How To Communicate So Audiences Get It

Let’s face it; we all like to read about how the digital revolution has opened up the business world to more audience influence, but the fact is people are influenced and manipulated and desires created through marketing and advertising as much as ever. How many website owners actually benefit in any meaningful way from social networking and search optimization, or do they do it because it’s expected and promoted by proponents as the tactic du jour.

If you think a particular song you like is played on a thousand radio stations because it’s good, or even because it has a following then you are living in a fantasy world. If you thing the vast majority of viral videos produced by corporations go viral all by themselves then think again.

Audiences are being manipulated and transformed into customers all the time, not because companies responded to what the public says, but rather to how the public reacts to various communication and marketing stimuli. What’s truly amazing is how bad companies are at doing it. With all of the television industries’ research into viewers, they still fail to deliver consistent quality programming that people want to watch. Every Fall new shows are yanked faster than a Nolan Ryan fastball, but the same crappy commercials live-on for what seems an eternity. Television viewers are a captive audience and if they want to watch their favorite show they have to tolerate the commercials (PVRs aside), but the Web is different. If your website presentation stinks, nobody is going to stick around to absorb the smell.

Web Television Convergence Has Arrived

If you think of your website presentation as nothing more than a digital brochure, you’re already behind the curve. Welcome to the Web on TV.

All you need is a laptop computer or one of the new gaming consoles attached to your big screen TV to access the Web on television. And as network programmers scramble to get their acts together more and more people are opting to spend their television time on the Web. Kind of makes you rethink what kind of website presentation you should be offering. It’s time to start thinking of your website as your own business channel and the content on it as programming. It’s the future and it’s here, now.

Who Visits Your Website?

Before website visitors can be transformed into clients, we have to understand who they are in terms of their mental outlook or frame of mind when they first arrive at your home page.

1. Accidental Tourists

Accidental Tourists are website visitors who find their way to your website by serendipity. Your company’s link may have come up in a search for something mentioned on your website, but not something that’s a core element of your business. But just because these people didn’t really intend to visit a site like yours doesn’t mean they’re a waste of time. Perhaps they never thought of using your product or service, or perhaps they never realized how much they really wanted what you have to offer. If your website presentation is exciting, meaningful, and entertaining you at least have the opportunity to plant the seed of desire for your product or service.

2. Brain Pickers

Brain Pickers show up at your site with little intention to buy anything, in fact they’re there to pick your brain and find out how to do what you do for themselves. But if you’re truly an expert at what you do, you at least have the opportunity to show these people that what you offer is special, and doing it right requires a company with your skills and resources.

3. Penny Pinchers

These guys are looking for a bargain. You are on a list and they are checking out who is offering the cheapest solution to their problem. But not all Penny Pinchers are penny-wise and pound-foolish, some, just need to understand why you’re the best at what you do, and why what you are charging is the real bargain.

4. Tire Kickers

The Tire Kickers love to look but rarely buy. They want what you’ve got but they just can’t make the commitment to buy it. They visit your website a hundred times, each time pressing their noses against the virtual storefront window trying to make a decision that rarely comes.

It’s up to your website presentation to push them over the edge. If they want what you’ve got, you can sell it to them. All you need to do is find that soft under belly of desire that gets them eager to spend their money.

5. Missourians

These guys want what you offer but need the reassurance of some practical input to get them to buy. The desire is there, but it’s frustrated by their mental need to justify the purchase with practical excuses. “But Honey, I know little Johnny is only three, but think of the eye-hand co-ordination he’ll learn playing these video games.” People ultimately buy what they want, and rationalize the purchase with logic and reasoning, but without desire, no amount of statistical evidence will work.

6. The Enemy

If you’re any good, you’ll have plenty of competitors hanging around your website looking for ideas they can use. It’s all part of the game. Better to be out there showing people what you’ve got than hiding, afraid someone might take advantage. Besides if you’re really good, you’ll always be at least one step ahead of the competition anyway. That makes you the leader and them the follower. And everybody wants to do business with the leader.

7. The Needy

The Needy crave what you’ve got but need a lot of reassurance, handholding, and customer support. These guys have the potential to be good customers but your presentation has to make it clear that you’ll be there to answer questions and concerns and not just leave them in the lurch like so many other Web-based businesses do after they’ve got the sale.

In The End

If you’re fed-up with social networking self-gratification, frustrated by ever changing site optimization requirements, and ineffective advertising then it’s time to re-evaluate what your website presentation says and how it says it.

In the final analysis it’s all about communicating your emotional value proposition using your most important venue, your website; delivered in the most engaging, informative, and memorable manner that compels your audience to pay attention to your marketing message, and act upon it.

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Do you drive yourself crazy trying to keep up with the latest SEO trends? If so, Stop! Please. You have enough to worry about already. Quit running yourself ragged or spending a fortune trying to keep up with the latest and greatest SEO tricks and tips. The truth is search engine optimization has not changed nearly as much as experts (trying to sell you something) might want you to think.

To be perfectly honest getting to the top of Google, Yahoo, MSN or any other search engine is largely dependent on the quality of your Web pages. There’s no magic formula you must follow to the letter but there are a number of simple things you can better understand and do to help get you to the top of ANY search engine. It’s a lot easier than most people think.

First and most importantly, remember that search engines only care about your Web pages, NOT the whole site. If you end up with enough high ranking PAGES from a single site on Google, you can become a what it considers to be an “authority site” which can automatically double your top ten rankings. Here’s what I mean…

If you do a search on http://www.Google.com and search for “SEO partner” (without the quotes) you will see that number one looks like a normal return while number two is indented. You have just witnessed an authority site’s usurping of an extra top spot. There is a good chance that the indented one was actually number six or even fifteen. But since it is from an authority site it got to cut the line and push everybody else’s listings down one.

Secondly, the biggest and most important search engines use something called a natural text algorithm. This means they can tell when you are writing text that is intended more for search engine spiders than for actual people, and they will ding you for it. So to keep quality high, simply write your page text as if you were describing your goods or services to a good friend. Let the words flow and don’t get hung up on things like keyword density and ideal placement. We’ve got a great technique for that coming up next.

Keyword density is an outdated concept for the most part. As long as you don’t spam the text by having your keyword blatantly repeated or inserted in areas that don’t make sense, you will be OK. If having a guideline helps, plan to use each keyword about five or six times on each page and no more than twice in a single paragraph.

Keyword proximity is another concept that is a bit outdated but still somewhat valid. What that means is you should be aware of where your keywords go but you do not need to follow a strict formula of placing them in exact locations. Just be strategic. Put them where they make the most sense in context. Don’t force them to fit in one location just because it is the first sentence of the third paragraph or whatever. It helps the reader and the search engine if you can mention your main keyword toward the beginning of the page text and toward the end, but this is not a hard and fast rule. It’s just a suggestion.

As for the number of keywords you optimize a single page for, do what makes sense for the page length. If the page is really long and you have room for several keywords to be featured with good natural ext, go for it. As a rule of thumb I try to limit each page to about three keywords but that’s just because it helps me stay better organized and does not confuse the readers by splitting their focus too much. The other reason is because I really want it featured prominently in the page title.

Speaking of the title, this is one of the few META tags we care about and it’s a pretty big deal. Use the title as your chance to show off your keywords. After all, this is what your visitors searched for. Don’t feel that a page title needs to be clever and captivating like a book title. In fact this is probably the easiest part. Just take your keywords, in order of importance, and separate them with a comma or pipe (the vertical key over the enter key.) That’s it! Just remember most search engine will only count the first 64 letters.

So if you did a page on search engine optimization tips with the following keywords: “SEO, Search Engine Optimization, SEO Tips” your title could be just that. Or you can use my favorite and it would look like this “SEO | Search Engine Optimization | SEO Tips.”

And by the way, when Google sees “SEO Tips” it is counting the word SEO and Tips as individual words so the title text “SEO, SEO Tips” has the word SEO repeated. Just two instances of one keyword so close is not really SPAM but it’s good to be aware of.

I mentioned that the Title tag is one of the few META tags we care about. Another is the Description tag. No magic here. Just be sure to write it naturally and include a couple of your keywords if they fit in well. And you can make this as long as you like but most search engines don’t use more than the first 250 characters. Most importantly, think of the Description as your big chance to get people interested enough to visit your page. This is sales copy first.

Once someone lands on your page they will be looking for a little guidance. Give it to them with Headings (H1, H2, etc.) Think of a heading as an on page title use a similar keyword strategy, just not as cut and dry. Here it is a good idea to have not only your keyword but also some descriptive supporting text. Something like “SEO Tips That Really Work” is a good example. We have our SEO Tips keyword and reinforce it with a statement that the information they are about to read actually works. Too simple? Yes. It really is.

While headings are your first visual cue to the reader, links are the ones that really draw them in. Make sure your on page links stand out and contain relevant anchor text (clickable keywords.)

If you really want to get the most out of your online real estate consider dedicating one page to each major keyword and linking to it from the anchor text on another page. For example, the words SEO Tips would be great anchor text to a page titled “SEO Tips | Search Engine Optimization Strategies.”

The final piece of this SEO puzzle is linking. Quality inbound links will account for most of your success on Goggle and several other top search engines. You need to get the highest quality links possible and build optimal reciprocal linking partnerships. This is HUGE!

The final piece of this SEO puzzle is linking. Quality inbound links will account for most of your success on Google and several other top search engines. You need to get the highest quality links possible and build optimal reciprocal linking partnerships. This is HUGE!

You can do it all manually or use an inexpensive SEO software tool like the one found at http://www.SE0elite.com. I’ve done it both ways and find that good software saves me about 10 to 15 hours each week, per site. But either way, manually or with a tool, focus your efforts on linking as much as possible. While onsite optimization is a one time (or at least limited) thing, linking should be part of your weekly routine.

Good luck!

By Scott Jason

How to make $1000 a month online from scratch – Part 6 of 8

When I was starting out, for a long time in fact, I felt that generating traffic was some kind of secret art form that only a few lucky people held the keys to.

Nowadays, I know that generating traffic isn’t anything mystical at all. It’s actually quite simple when you break it down. It boils down to a few critical and fundamental elements that given enough time and patience, anyone can achieve.

There are really two methodologies when generating traffic. One is generating it free, and the other is paying for it. These days, I’m happy to pay for traffic because I have a good handle on the numbers required to make it work. Of course having a decent budget behind you helps too.

However, we’re not going to look at any paid traffic (except one special kind) for now. Because of the limited budgets of most people starting out, I’m going to look at how to generate lots of traffic on a shoestring.

Free Traffic Fundamentals

There are really three major ways to generate traffic without any upfront costs. They are:

Via Search Engines
Via Direct Links
Via Affiliate Traffic (which isn’t free, but you don’t have to pay for that up front).

As usual, I like to follow the 80/20 rule when working at this stuff. I try to do things so they target at least two of these ways at once. So, for example, I like to target traffic that is going to help in my SEO efforts and generate direct traffic at once, rather than separately.

Now I am going to let you in on a traffic secret. Well, I guess it’s not so much a secret, but more of a revelation that I had about getting lots of traffic. It’s important to read this carefully because it’s easy to miss the gold here.

Getting lots of free traffic is about creating a snowball that keeps getting bigger and bigger as it keeps rolling. It’s about exponential effects when you have the right elements in place. Think about this carefully.

You can generate large, perpetual traffic like this:

Create content that people value
Get links to your content
Rank well in search engines
People find your valuable content and link to you
Rank even better in search engines
Create more valuable content
People find your new valuable content and link to you
Improve search engine and direct linking traffic
Create more valuable content… etc

As you can see, this has a snowballing effect. This growth is started and fueled by the creation of valuable content.

Which is why I keep raving on about it not being about the technology. It’s all about the content. You just need a framework that’s going to support your content being found. Once the snowball starts rolling and you keep kicking it by adding more content your traffic will just continue to grow.

The sooner you can get this drummed into your head, the more free traffic you’re going to get. Perhaps you understand the principle already. But are you doing it?

Keyword Research

The starting point for this whole process is by finding out exactly what people are looking for. Without this, you’re flying blind. You’re simply guessing.

An educated guess is OK, but our time is too precious to not get it right the first time. Especially when the actual results are often counter intuitive.

For example, what do you think would have more volume: “golf putter” or “golf putting”?

Well, I really have no idea. I would have to guess and say they are about the same. Was I right? Not even close.

According to the new keyword volume figures in Google’s keyword research tool, “golf putter” gets twice as much traffic as “golf putting”.

How To Kick Off The Traffic Snowball

Once you’ve found the content to create that is valuable to people via your keyword research, we’ve got to look at using the right methodologies and best practices to leverage this content as much as possible.

Much of this is hinging on search engine traffic and is supplemented by direct traffic. So we want to focus our energies on doing the activities that will work both of these angles in synergy.

Many people will have you think this stuff is incredibly complex. It can be at times with large sites and when you start pushing the optimization envelope into shady territories. However, solid, reliable search engine optimization is pretty simple really.

Just use the following principles.

On Page

If you’re lucky enough to be an SBI! owner, the best practices are recommended to you on the fly. So as you create your pages, it makes recommendations on how you can improve to generate more traffic. This is obviously very helpful for the beginner, and is a strong reason for using SBI as your site platform.

Regardless of your site building platform, ensure for every page you create, the page contains the following based on your keyword research for the topic you’re covering.

Put your keywords in the title tag

This should be no longer than 8 words. You should focus on having a nice blend of enticement and targeted keywords. So when people see the page in the search results it looks like a page that they want to visit while at the same time still being optimized.

Put your keywords in your meta tags

The meta tags are not as important as they used to be, but still shouldn’t be neglected. You should aim to have unique meta tags for every page. The most important is the description meta tag because this is often displayed in the search results.

So you want to have this as enticing as possible so when people see the top 10 results, they believe that your listing is going to be the best to answer their query.

Your site builder should allow you to specify these meta tags when creating a page.

Put your keywords in your page heading tags

In a similar way to your title tag, you should aim to have text based heading tags. This should be a natural and exciting heading, but still containing the keywords that you are targeting.

Put your keywords naturally in your content

Your content should also naturally contain your keywords. You should consider mixing up your keyword usage within your content to try to capture other keyword phrases.

A good guide is to use the same keyword variations as you’ve put in your meta tags. So take your central concept that the page is about, and then think of the keyword variations that people might use to find this kind of content.

Think about grabbing a thesaurus and seeing if there are any other synonyms that you could be using as well.

Put your keywords sparingly on your alt tags

If you’ve got graphics on your page, considering writing a natural piece of unique, keyword rich text to apply to the alternative text (alt tag) on your image.

Put your keywords in your page name

One of the more important components is to include the keyword text within the page file name itself. So if you were targeting the keyword phrase “ping putter review” you’d want to have the file name on the page to look like this.

www.golfputters.com/ping-putter-review.php

If your site building tool can’t generate website addresses like this you should consider changing.

While there are other optimization strategies, if you can do all of these, you are well on your way to creating a traffic magnet page.

On Site

Some people forget about the onsite optimization. It’s an important aspect, and can get pretty advanced if you want it to. In reality, if you can get a few of the basics right, you’re doing enough to not be concerned with the advanced stuff.

The two things I recommend that you always follow:

Keep your site in themes

This is all about how your structure your site. Ensure that you work from broad topic down into more specific sub-topics. This will help the search engines to understand the content themes on your site and may help with your ranking potential.

Link to content within your own site with keyword rich anchor text

Be sure to link to all of your content within your site with text links that contain the keywords that you want the page your linking into to rank well for. So for example, if you had a page on “ping putters” then you should have text links throughout the site with the words “ping putters” linking to that page. The search engines see this as an indication of what the page is about, and doing so will help it rank.

Off Site

So once you’ve got the traffic-producing mechanics right with respect to the site itself, it’s now time to pour your efforts into doing the right things off site that help produce that synergistic mix of direct traffic that improves your search rankings.

The strategies I’ve outlined below aren’t all you can do. However, they do (in my opinion) offer the best bang for buck. You could focus ONLY on these and you should do well. These are all “white hat” or safe strategies that shouldn’t get you into strife with the search engines and with any luck will work for you well into the future.

Article Marketing

Article marketing is a popular way of building links. It’s simply the process of writing a quick, unique article that includes a resource box at the bottom of the article that contains a link to your site. This can’t be a copy of any articles on your site. It has to be unique.

You then submit this article to sites that allow people to take the article and publish it on their site (with your link intact) free. This generates some direct traffic, as well as builds links to your site which in turn helps your site rank.

You can do this manually to the hundreds of article sites. Otherwise, I would recommend using an article submission service. These services do all the grunt work on your behalf and do the submission for you. All for about $1-2 an article. Believe me, it’s well worth it. I recommend iSnare for this.

By the way, a useful tip for pumping these out is to do this: Have a look at an article you’ve already written on your site. Read it through quickly. Put it out of sight and then rewrite it from memory. Don’t try to use the same words, just paraphrase the same content.

This provides unique content (which is essential to make this work), but means you can pump them out quickly.

Press Releases

Press releases are a slight variation on the article submission process, but should have the same effects. For everything new that you add to your site, write a quick press release for it. Writing a press release is a different style which you’ll need to adapt to. Here’s a good guide on writing a press release.

Just remember that the focus of this is to get a link. If your press release is announcing something newsworthy and it gets picked up by other media then fantastic! But don’t bank on it.

Once written, submit your press release via your choice of press release announcement services. You can get them submitted free, or pay more to get greater exposure. Your options will be dictated by your budget. I’ve found that using the free ones most of the time are OK. When you’ve got something really newsworthy, think about using the paid version.

Here are some sites that provide press release announcement services:

PRWeb.com
PR.com
PRBuzz.com
PRLog.org

Guest Blogging

One strategy that is a more powerful spin on article marketing is guest blogging. This provides you with higher quality links and positions yourself as an expert. Consider contacting bloggers and site owners in your niche and asking them if they would consider a trial as a guest blogger.

I would appeal to their ego first and give them some praise on how good their site is. Then tell them you’d love to write some high quality content for their site free if you can use a resource box at the bottom of the article.

Bloggers often appreciate getting a break, which in turns gives you a break. Work hard on making it a good article, and you’ll probably get more opportunities in the future. This is an important tip.

Forum Posting

Find forums on your niche and see if they allow links in their signatures. If they do then sign up and set up your signature with an enticing statement that contains a link to your site. For the hypothetical golf putting site, I would do this at a site like this one.

You’ll then want to post there every couple of days with useful posts that contribute to the community. This opens up opportunities for highly targeted direct traffic, and positive SEO benefits if the site doesn’t tell the search engines to “nofollow” outgoing links.

Blog Posting

In the same way as the forum posting strategy, do the same for a selection of high quality blogs in your niche. Become an active and positive contributor to the blog.

This will give you direct traffic, may help with SEO as well as open up opportunities to become a guest blogger. In the same way as contributing to a community forum, you will hopefully start to establish yourself as an authority, which will help build links naturally from other people’s sites.

Newsletter/Autoresponders

A simple way to keep driving traffic back to your site is to regularly publish a newsletter. I would recommend publishing one once or twice a month. This can simply be a digest of what’s been going on at the site with a personal introduction to connect with your audience.

RSS

With any luck your site building platform should have RSS on new articles. You can leverage this by making sure it pings the RSS aggregators and encouraging people to sign up for your RSS feed.

You can use a service like Feedburner to track the number of subscribers you have, as well as making it easy. The way you set this up for each site building platform is different so you may need to ask for help on this.

Linkbaiting

Linkbaiting is the process where you write content purely focused on getting links to your site. You can do this by writing articles that push people’s buttons (but doesn’t turn off your readers), running competitions, providing top 10 lists or making a simple and useful tool.

This can be a bit hit and miss, but when it hits, it can give you a tremendous boost in traffic.

Problogger gives an excellent 101 on linking baiting here including 20 linkbaiting techniques.

Affiliates

I’m going to expand on this later, but running an affiliate program is a great way of generating links to your site. Your affiliates link to your site, plus it gives you an opportunity to submit your sites to affiliate directories (which are mostly free).

Correct Linking

When linking, ensure that you follow best practices when creating the links. Sometimes, only your URL will be allowed to be linked, but if you have control, you should do the following:

- Create keyword rich text links. So use your keywords in the links themselves.

- Mix these linked keywords up a lot. This makes it look more natural.

- Don’t just link to your home page. Try to get at least 30% of links to internal pages on your site. This makes your link profile look more natural to the search engines.

Timing

Another important point with respect to making your link profile look natural: Don’t send all the links to your site at once. Steadily keep adding links pretty much forever. Don’t just work like crazy for a month on getting links then get no more links for six months. Slowly and steadily grow your link profile.

Build Momentum

Once you’ve done this, keep the cycle going. After the first few months of building momentum, you can shift the main focus from building links, and focus more on the production of top quality content. Remember, this is a slow and steady process that requires dedication. Back in Part 2 I discussed the mindset required to pull this off. Review that when you find yourself getting slack.

Building lots of traffic requires persistence, but with enough dedication it pays dividends.

Think of yourself as a traffic-generating diesel engine that over time creates a snowballing traffic stream that simply cannot be stopped.

Now you’ve got all this traffic, I guess you want to know the best way to turn it into dollars!?

Next week we’ll be digging into this crucial step in Part 7 “The Money”. It’s going to be a big one, so set some time aside. It may just provide many of you the missing information in your quest for making money online. Look out for it.

Article Series
This article is part of a series. Other published articles in this series so far are shown below:

How to make $1000 a month online from scratch
The required mindset for online success
Choosing a niche for your online business
How to plan your online business
How to start your online business

Albert