Copyright (c) 2009 Willie Crawford

Image by Kansir via Flickr

It goes without saying that if you don’t have website traffic, the other components of your web business can’t work very effectively. Without eyeballs on your sales letter, you won’t make any sales!

There are many ways to generate fast free website traffic, but many of them aren’t readily available to the average, lesser-known marketer.

Joint ventures are an excellent way to get tons of others to send you there traffic. However, joint ventures hinge upon relationships/connections, and many of the people with the most traffic have tons of their own products to promote. Those who own large lists are also approached about joint ventures so often that they may have commitments that extend out past six months.

If you do have a large list, getting immediate traffic to your website can be as simple as sending a compelling email. However, it takes time to build a quality list. It also takes time to build strong relationships and trust with your list members.

Another one of my favorite ways to generate lots of free traffic is by creating an inexpensive product and then allowing others to selling it and keep 100% of the profit. However, that does require a product on a really hot topic, and you still have to recruit affiliates.

You are also giving away 100% of the money on the sale (sacrificing early profits), and your goal there is not so much traffic but to build a list. I do often do this, using a script called Rapid Action Profits, which deposits proceed from the sale directly into my affiliates Paypal accounts while adding the new subscriber to my list automatically.

However, for generating traffic that is free, fast, and even long-term, I recommend creating lots of content and putting it in the path of the search engines. In fact, I often do this when I’m launching a new product, or even promoting a new affiliate product. Here are the down and dirty steps that I take:

1) Do your keyword research, striving to identify the "buying keywords" that your target customers are using. One easy way to do that is to use the "Google External Keyword Tool" to research which keywords get the most searches. This tool is free to use, and will also suggest related keywords to you.

What you are looking for is evidence that people are searching on a given phrase, and that those people are spending money. The Google External Keyword Tool will tell you this.

You can also enter a keyword phrase that you plan to target into the regular Google search box, and look at how many Google AdWords ads display on the right side of the page. These are people paying for each click from people who search on that term, and then click through to their sites. Presumably, they wouldn’t pay for those clicks unless these customers were spending money.

2) Use your target keywords to craft titles for 20 articles. In addition to the keywords make sure that your title also promises some benefit. The article title is what’s going to get you the most traction in the search engines.

3) Actually write those 20 articles. They can be as short as 400 words. If you have trouble writing, go to several of the bigger article directories and read what others have written on the topic. Also Google the keyword and look at what experts have had to say on the topic. Then write the articles.

If you are still stumped, simply plug your mike into your computer and then talk about the topic. Most of us are certainly good at talking. Record your thoughts then go back and organize them and you have an article (or several articles).

Add a resource box to the article that tells the reader to go to your site for more information, or resources (your product) on the topic. When linking back to your site, use your keyword as the anchor text where permitted.

4) Turn each article into a video. The simplest way to do this is probably to put your main points on PowerPoint slides. Then as you read your article, flip through the slides, and record it using Camtasia screen capture software. As easy as that, you have a movie.

5) Turn each article into a podcast (an MP3). Just read the article and record it using software built right into your computer. You can also download free recording software for tons of places on the internet. One of my favorites is Audacity.

6) Write several press releases using the article titles as your topic. Here you need to get a little creative, but as an example, for this article I would use, "Website Traffic Expert Reveals How To Generate Free website Traffic Fast."

These press releases are being written for SEO purposes, so the exact wording is not so critical. You are going to share several point in the press release and then you are going to link to one or two websites that you want to call attention to. Your links will use your keywords as the anchor text.

7) Submit these articles, videos, podcasts, and press releases to article directories, video sharing sites, podcast aggregators, and free press release sites. Since I do this for numerous products and projects, I use an automated submission site. Being a very prolific writer, I have weeks when I may do 20-40 articles (while still running my web business).

8) "Rinse and repeat!" What happens over time is that you’ll soon have so much content in cyberspace that you’ll achieve critical mass. At that point you’ll rank for your most important keywords as well as lots of longtail keywords. At that point, you’ll be amazed at the traffic.

To speed up the process you can also post your articles to an optimized WordPress blog that’s been configured to "ping" RSS aggregators, social networking sites, and bookmarking sites each time that you post. If you don’t know how to do that, it’s beyond the scope of this article, but most webmasters familiar with WordPress can set that up quickly for you. WordPress is very simple, yet very powerful.

There you have it, "How to generate free website traffic fast!" Yes, there is work involved, but when you see the results, you’ll know that it was well worth it.

About The Author:

Willie Crawford has been marketing online for 13 years, and used article marketing most of that time (writing over 1500 articles). His favorite tools for automatically distributing his articles, videos, podcasts, and press releases is the automated submission site: http://EasyPushButtonTraffic.com/

Read more articles written by: Willie Crawford

Article marketing has long been viewed as one of the best strategies for online business. This initiative can help to build reputation, as well as providing hyper-links to your site for the article readers, who may well represent partially qualified leads. The Internet thrives on the presentation of quality information and well written articles can be your organisation’s key contribution. The major search engines value good articles highly, and it’s essential that you compose focused and optimised material for your project.

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

Once you have compiled your comprehensive list of appropriate keywords for your niche, you should prepare articles accordingly. Write very informative pieces which include your keywords and make sure that they are distributed to relevant and powerful article directories and other repositories around the web. Anchor text-based hyper-links within the article resource boxes should point back to the landing pages, as specified, on your website.

You should remember that you need to focus on your website development, as well as your article composition and distribution, as this is equally important within the overall picture. Your website must be adequately optimised to enable you to get the most out of any article marketing campaign, and to ensure this you should concentrate on several areas:

1. Understand that the primary reason why people visit your page is to seek information. You should not spend too much time on fancy presentation, complex graphics and flash animation, if it detracts from the overall message.

2. The layout of your site must be easy to understand and navigate. Visitors must be able to progress from point to point or page to page without any confusion and there should be a logical progression when it comes to presentation of information.

3. Ideally, you should present a separate page for each keyword that you focus on during your article marketing campaign. In this way, the search engines will match the keyword contained in your article’s anchor link with the keyword optimised on each page.

4. Always make sure that most of the content on the web page is directly related to the content of the article. Keep in mind that the reader of the article is being encouraged to check out this site through the actual content of the article itself. He or she should be able to continue this process of discovery, which may be leading them further into your sales funnel!

5. To make sure that the search engines recognize the landing page you have specified as relevant, you should make sure that you:

* Put the exact keywords in the title of your page, as well as in the description.

* Repeat the keywords in the body of the content on the page. It is suggested that you do this to no more than a density of 1%, ie 5 times within 500 words of content, so that it appears natural.

* The H1 tag is very important and the keywords should appear here too.

* Specify the keyword and related keywords (sometimes known as secondary keywords) within your meta-data keywords tag.

6. There is increasing evidence that Google is placing a lot of emphasis on synonism and latent semantic indexing. This means that they will be looking for the existence of certain words and phrases within your content, relating back to their large databases of information, so they can accurately judge whether your content is indeed relevant to your primary keywords.

As you prepare for your article marketing campaign, there’s a great deal to focus your attention on. Make the most of each article that you compose and distribute by ensuring that every element of your campaign is optimised. To ensure that you don’t miss any of these essential steps, give some thought to taking on a Virtual Assistant to make the most of your online business development.

Source: http://www.submityourarticle.com

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Copyright (c) 2006-2009 Bill Platt

Image via CrunchBase

As webmasters, we are all chasing customers. We are looking for human visitors to come to our websites and to buy what we are selling.

To serve our needs for targeted traffic — potential customers — the search companies have begun to offer us a share of their significant traffic through many paid advertising methods.

The most common advertising offer at the search engines is the PPC (Pay-Per-Click) advertising model. There are also other search advertising models such as CPM (Cost Per Thousand Impressions) and Featured Listings.

In this article, we will look at the advantages and disadvantages of each advertising method.

PPC (Pay-Per-Click) Advertising Model

By far, PPC is currently the most popular advertising model. From the buyer’s perspective, it is usually the most expensive type of advertising and the one that generates the most fear of fraud. In fact, many experts suggest that click-fraud might be as high as 20 to 25% of all click-traffic.

Pay-Per-Click is exactly what it sounds like. The advertiser bids on keywords and tells the advertising company that they will pay X number of cents or dollars for every click that they receive to their website through the PPC-provider’s website.

Advertisers compete for position within the search results with the highest bidder getting the best advertising spot at the top of the results. The second highest bidder gets the #2 spot, etc.

Generally, Pay-Per-Click providers serve three listings on the first page of search results. Only when there is strong competition for a particular keyword term and a number of advertisers vying for placement, will the PPC-provider show results with more than three advertisers.

If you bid the minimum five cents per click (the standard for most PPC systems), then it is possible that you might not see your listing on page one or page two of the search results. Let’s face it; PPC providers are interested in making the most money they can from the traffic they send to people. So, if one advertiser is paying a dollar per click and you are only bidding five cents a click, who do you think will receive the best placement? Yep, the one-dollar per click advertiser will get the most attention and the best placement, even if it requires pushing your placement back to page three of the search results.

The top two PPC-providers are:

http://adwords.google.com/
http://www.content.overture.com/d/ – Now owned by Yahoo!

Other not-so-well-known providers of PPC traffic, in alphabetical order, include:

http://www.411web.com/
http://www.7search.com/
http://www.abcsearch.com/
http://www.adbrite.com/
http://www.ask.com/
http://www.brainfox.com/
http://www.enhance.com/
http://www.kanoodle.com/
http://search.looksmart.com/
http://www.lycos.com/
http://www.miva.com/ – Formerly FindWhat.com
http://www.search123.com/
http://www.searchfeed.com/
http://turbo10.com/

The biggest advantage to these systems is that they serve large pools of consumers online, and they let you target specific search keywords.

The disadvantages are numerous. Those most often cited include: the high cost of bids for certain keywords, poor conversion rates on purchased clicks, and click fraud (generally regarded as people clicking your link just so they can get paid for it).

Personally, I have paid as high as a dollar per-click for a service that sells for $35, and $20 in volume. I have spoken to others who operate for-profit websites and have paid as much as $2.50 per click on an average keyword. In some really competitive markets, people pay as much as $30 per click.

If you use the Web-Professor bid tool to check keywords at Overture ( http://web-professor.net/tools/bidstats/ ) and you type in the keyword "mesothelioma", you’ll find 30 bidders vying for that term and a maximum bid of $29.88 per click! If the maximum bidder converts traffic to sales at the national average of 3%, then he or she is paying an average of $900 to get one client! Insane, but true.

CPM (Cost Per Thousand Impressions) Advertising Model

CPM advertising is most often associated with banner advertising, but can now be purchased for text ads as well. This type of advertising is available from many sources, including:

http://adwords.google.com/
http://www.realtechnetwork.com/
http://www.joetec.net/

CPM advertising can be cheaper than PPC, but it fails to address the effectiveness of your advertising copy. Before undertaking a large CPM campaign, you need to be confident your advertising copy will deliver results.

As with any other type of advertising, you need to track click- through and conversion rates to determine the advertising copy that is most effective for your business.

You also need to have a solid understanding of how many impressions it will take to generate a visitor, and how many visitors you will need to generate one sale. And, on the backside, you will need to know what the average earnings from your sales will be. With these stats in hand, you’ll know how much you can afford to pay for CPM advertising or any other type of advertising.

Using Google Adwords, you can buy CPM advertising for as little as $2 per thousand impressions. The one time I went that route, thinking my advertising might be cheaper, I ended up dropping $180 in three days with only one sale to show for my investment – — utilizing the exact same ad that generated a 4% click-through rate (CTR) in Google‘s PPC advertising system.

The major appeal of CPM advertising is its perceived low-cost, with rates ranging between $2 – $3 per thousand impressions.

The major disadvantage to this type of advertising is that you need a good handle on how well your advertising is performing. Your advertising copy can make or break you. Additionally, you need to keep an eye on your advertising budget. From first hand experience, I can tell you that although CPM advertising can appear inexpensive, it can in short order surpass the costs of PPC advertising.

Featured Listing Advertising Model

Featured listings differ from the other two advertising models in that you do not pay for "ad clicks" or "ad impressions". With featured listings, your advertisement appears in the purchased location for 30 days, 90 days, or one year.

Featured listings can be bought on individual websites and even on networks of websites. Below are a few examples of advertising networks that offer featured listings:

Geek Files ( http://www.geekfiles.com/advertising/ )

Geek Files offers various Featured Listing placement options with ad rates ranging from $19 to $179 per month. You get two months free if you buy advertising for a full year.

Aardvark Travel ( http://www.aardvarktravel.net/featured/ )

Aardvark Travel is a travel search engine. Featured listings appear in a colored box between the top five listings and the bottom five listings in the travel-related search results. There is a $50 setup fee for each Featured Listing and a $10 per month recurring charge for as long as you keep your listing active. Aardvark claims featured listings generate 40 times more clicks than any other listings on their pages.

The Independent Search Engine and Directory Network ( http://www.isedn.org/ )

The ISEDN offers a program that allows you to purchase Top Ten exposure for your website(s) across their network of 200 plus member websites.

The network is comprised of specialized search engines, search directories, and article directories. Featured Listing placements for specific keywords are displayed across the entire ISEDN system.

The cost of a keyword term (the word or phrase associated with the listing) is $12 for three months or $36 for 12 months. The price drops for each additional 5 listings you purchase. If you are buying in volume, discounts can be significant. For example, the cost for 16 to 100 listings is $6 per listing for 3 months and $18 per listing for 12 months.

The main drawback to the ISEDN program is that the network, although large, does not yet have the traffic volume of the major engines.

The major benefit, of course, is that you can buy a lot more bang for your advertising dollars. Additionally, you can see your ads appearing on pages in a position that will attract more attention and click-through traffic to your website.

Which Advertising Model Is Right For You?

It really depends on your business model. More so, it depends on your absolute click-through averages and your website conversion rates.

Your advertising needs to cost you no more than what it earns for you. Ideally, your advertising will cost less than it earns for you.

Some businesses trade on the lifetime value of customers and are willing to pay more to get customers than what they earn on their first sale, but not all of us can afford to build a customer base in the same way that Amazon built theirs.

If your advertising budget is small, your goal should be to make every advertising dollar count. Grow your business to the point where you might be able to afford some of the more expensive advertising solutions. But then, if the lower-cost solutions generate sales for you, why would you want to pay more?

About The Author:

Bill Platt has owned and operated http://thePhantomWriters.com/ since 2001. If you would like to learn more about his article distribution service, visit his website. To read 100′s of Bill’s Tweet-sized tips for article marketing, SEO, and more, visit: http://thePhantomWriters.com/tips/index.php Bill is also active on Twitter @contentmanager

Read more articles written by: Bill Platt