I hope you answered yes to that question, because without traffic we can’t have a successful online business. If you’re a regular reader then you’ll know that I’m in the middle of a traffic generation challenge at the moment, and I’m testing out lots of different free traffic generating techniques. My homework this week was to compile a list of resources to help other people who are trying to increase the number of visitors they receive at their websites.

So here it is – 25 great resources from blogs across the Interweb to help you get more traffic:

1. Generate Website Traffic – 65 tips
2. 10 Ways to Generate Website Traffic for Beginners
3. Increase Website Traffic through MySpace
4. 10 Way to Increase traffic by Changing Your Code
5. 5 Sneaky Ways to Get Traffic to Your Blog
6. Secret Ways to Increase Traffic
7. LinkedIn has New Ways to Drive Traffic
8. 29 Ways to Increase Traffic to a Micro Niche Blog
9. 4 Ways to Increase Traffic to Your Blog
10. Top 10 Ways to Drive Traffic with LinkedIn
11. 16 Ways to Increase Website Traffic
12. 50 Ways to increase Website Traffic
13. 74 Ways to Increase your Blog Traffic
14. The Best Methods to Increase Traffic
15. Blog Traffic Secrets
16. 30 Traffic Generation Tips
17. Using Facebook Fan Pages to Drive Traffic
18. 5 Little Known Times to Grow Your Blog
19. How to Boost Blog and Website Traffic with Article Marketing
20. Website Traffic – Get it Naturally
21. How to Increase Blog Traffic – Fast!
22. Writing Fast Content for Free Traffic
23. 7 Ways Article Submission Can Get you More Visitors
24. 7 Ways to Get More Traffic This Weekend
25. 10 Remarkably Effective Strategies for Increasing Traffic

If you found this list useful I’d be grateful if you could spread the word using the Bookmark & Share button below.

Thanks!

You have been reading Increase Website Traffic – Mega Resource List from our site Seven Somewhere, it would be great if you would stop by and let us know what you thought :)

The stupid thing is that traffic generation isn’t even difficult!

Of course it takes time, and you need to have a plan to follow to make sure that you take action each and every day. So I decided to write a short report (well it turned out to be 23 pages long!) which gives you a different traffic generating activity to do each day for seven days.

If you, like me, are guilty of forgetting to prime the traffic pump then you should download it and put it into action today – it is free after all so you have nothing to lose

Just pop your name and email address in the box below and I’ll send you your copy right away!

You have been reading P.R.O.M.O.T.E. Your Website – Learn How to Drive Hungry Visitors to Your Website – Free Report from our site Seven Somewhere, it would be great if you would stop by and let us know what you thought :)

I’ve been meaning to put pen to paper – or rather fingers to keyboard – about this one for the past week or so but I’ve been busy taking action! When the doors opened on the Super Affiliate Challenge I was slightly overwhelmed by the amount of work we had to do. All kinds of content creation from article writing to videos and bookmarking and forum posting and Digging. The Master Plan laid it all out for us though some of the detail was fuzzy (the brothers are now making amends to clear things up) I was about to throw in the towel when someone on a forum mentioned George Brown’s Traffic Ultimatum. I’ve already laid down quite a few unplanned dollars on courses and challenges this year so I was a bit reticent to even go and take a look but I’m very glad that I did.

The course is made up of three books; the first one (41 pages) is all about niche research, the second (140 pages) is all about free traffic generation and the third one (97 pages) is all about paid traffic generation. The books are pure content too, not a single word of fluff or waffle! Oh and there are 20 over-the-shoulder step-by-step videos that show you how to put it all into action.

The free traffic part of the course includes all of the activities that we have to complete for the Super Affiliate Challenge so I’m going to use Traffic Ultimatum to support the materials that we receive from the Rhodes Brothers. George includes some great traffic tips and other gold nuggets too that I’m going to use to supplement by SAC activities. Just an extra 10 minutes or half hour here or there should help me ramp up the traffic a bit more.

I’ve read the free traffic book from cover to cover twice already and watched half of the videos. I have to say that this is the best paid product I’ve ever come across; it’s professionally done, there’s no waffle and the instructions are clear and easy to follow. I think using this as the instruction book with the SAC Master Plan to determine which order to complete the activities in and when could help me win that iPad lol.

A change in SAC direction

I’m so excited and impressed by Traffic Ultimatum that I’m actually switching tack in the SAC and I’m going to promote this instead. My first product can go on the backburner until the challenge is over and then I’ll switch back to it. To be honest I was struggling to keep up the momentum on the first product but I’ve already got ideas for articles, and free reports to help me promote Traffic Ultimatum.

So I’m going to use the product to help me promote the product!

If you’re interested in learning more about TU then you can head here: http://ultimatetrafficmaster.com/

I’m off to redo the Week 1 SAC activities all over again with TU

You have been reading Traffic Ultimatum may just help with the Super Affiliate Challenge from our site Seven Somewhere, it would be great if you would stop by and let us know what you thought :)

One week we’d be given 13 hours to write and spin 15 articles, the next we’d be given half as much time for twice as many articles! A friend and I worked out the total number of ‘activities’ and comparing that to the time allowed each day meant we’d have to do each one in about 4 minutes. ie write an article in 4 minutes, spin it and submit it to a directory in 4 minutes, create a video in 4 minutes. You get the picture? Unrealistic!

A few disillusioned posts on the SAC blog later (not just by me) and John and Matt decided to redo some of the timings and reissue week one and two of the plan. Now it feels a little more achievable…

Article spinning

One of the tasks is to spin the articles so that they are considered more unique by the other directories. I started out with a 5 day trial of the Magic Article Rewriter and I was instantly impressed. It really was so easy to spin the content and not have it come out looking like garbage.

Then I tested out the Free Article Spinner – if you’re a mac user then it’s perfect as it’s online. You simply paste in your article and add some {} around the words you want to spin. Then it takes you to the next screen where it lists them all out and all you do is type replacement words or sentences into boxes. The final article can be saved as a spun version for use with an article submitter or you can just generate unique versions within the site. Absolutely brilliant – easy to use – and FREE!

Article submitting

Next up is submitting the articles which I find so dull as it’s such a repetitive task. I tried the Magic Article Spinner which was a nightmare to install thanks to a corrupt version of the Microsoft Net Framework on my laptop. When I finally got it to work it registered me with 800 directories – and then ended up submitting my article to 6 of them They’re not really high profile article directories either. If you’re going to invest in the Article Writer then you might as well take the Spinner for $20 – but I wouldn’t buy it on it’s own.

So then I tried SENuke: this software is pretty impressive as it includes a spinner, an article submitter, it submits to Web 2.0 sites, and it bookmarks your links and it submits RSS feeds and video phew! It pretty much is a traffic promotion kit all in one little piece of software.

It’s easy to use – though if you’re not careful I think it’s also very easy to become a spammer. You definitely need to take time out to plan a strategy of how you will use each of the tools. I loved the way it saved the URLs from all the Web 2.0 properties and automatically carried them forward so you can bookmark and ping them. The only downside? The price tag. $127 a month! I think if you use it properly (and there are lots of people posting their strategies on the forum that you can learn from) then it would pay for itself. But right now I don’t have the time to learn how to use it so I’ll not be sticking around past the 7 day free trial.

So then I landed on Submit YOUR article – I’ve heard of this one before, I think Willie Crawford recommended it (or he might even own it??). Essentially you sign up to a number of quality and popular directories (including EZA) and input your log in details. Then you upload an article. It then walks you through rewriting the title, some sentences from the article and the bio box – to help make some unique versions. Then you hit submit and they go off and submit if for you – you can even choose to drip feed the article submissions over a number of days! Brilliant. Easy to use and it’s online too so it’s great for me and my mac

I’m going to stick with this one ($47 a month) for the duration of the challenge and will report back how successful it was. I think $47 is a fair trade for the five to six hours a month it would take me to spin and submit these article variations myself.

Product review

Aside from getting stuck into forum posting and knocking out a further 10 articles (plus spins) Week 2′s activities also include writing a product review. Now the brothers made us a template to use, but by complete coincidence Tiffany Dow posted a guest blog over at Andrew Hanson’s blog – about how to write an product review!

So I used her guidelines and came up with this review for PING! I opted to post in on my own book review blog as going forward we’ll start to build backlinks to it and I’d rather keep the link juice than point backlinks to a blogger blog.

So there you go, some article spinner and submitters tried and tested and a top tip for how to write a product review. Now I’m off to do some more spinning/submitting with Submit YOUR Article!

Oh quickly before I go the Adsense 101 Bootcamp – I’m still hanging in there – this week Steve was teaching us how to spin articles

RESULTS

PING! – 88 Hops – no sales

Did you discover any gems this week? I’d love to hear more about them.

You have been reading Super Affiliate Challenge – half way through week 2 from our site Seven Somewhere, it would be great if you would stop by and let us know what you thought :)

I ummed and ahhed about whether to use an affiliate product or drive all the traffic to my own ebook/membership course. I decided to stick with the programme and go with the affiliate product. As John Rhodes pointed out we need to be focusing on building traffic not optimising sales pages and dealing with customer service issues.

A good friend of mine has just released a product on Clickbank so it made perfect sense for me to promote it. The product is a high quality audio course with supporting ebook and he is putting a lot of time and effort into optimising the squeeze and sales pages. Each sale is worth $36.82 so I only need to sell 47 copies to hit my $1700 target – yikes that’s a lot of sales!

That done I then was supposed to spend 10 hours writing 15 300 word articles to promote the product. I discovered a cool new tool over at Ezine Articles that suggests articles for you based on the keyword you tell it. With the articles already written it was much easier to write an article off the back of it and I managed to knock out all 15 articles in just under four hours! The majority of them are 450-500 words too.

Next up we’re to spend three hours spinning those articles so we have five sets of fifteen to submit to five different article sites. I’m a fan of EZA so I decided to submit the original 15 there which I did yesterday. I had high hopes that they would be published ahead of the weekend since the previous three batches were all published within the day, but alas they were not.

I need them live before I submit the spun copies to the other five because I know how particular EZA are with having unique submissions.

Now the spinning I have yet to do. We’re supposed to do it manually – just swap out the title, the first and last par and tweak a couple of sentences. But I don’t think I can face it so I’m in the market for a decent article spinner. I think I’m going to give the Magic Article Writer and Submitter software a try – after all this way I can submit to even more article directories than the five we’ve been given. I have until Tuesday to get this task done so I should mange it ok.

I have spent an hour or two today trying to think of a smart way to keep track of all of the links – partly because we have to submit them as homework (I think if we reach the end and don’t meet the target they’ll check our homework to make sure we followed all steps before giving us our refunds) but also because we’ll need a record of all of the article links so that we can bookmark and ping them in later weeks.

I was going to do an excel spreadsheet but that requires lots of cutting and pasting. So I thought – why not use bookmarks? One click and the URL is captured and saved in my browser. Here’s my solution:

1. Create a new folder in myBrowser bookmark facility each week
2. Bookmark every page Icreate (ie article, forum post etc)to the folder
3. Once a week export the bookmarks folder to HTML
4. Open the HTML in a text editor and delete all of the links but those for the relevant week
5. I now have an HTML document with the article names and URLs
6. Extract the URLs and paste into an email to submit as my homework
7. Save as a text file so that I have them to hand for bookmarking

I thought it would be better to use a public bookmarking service to give some link juice but I couldn’t find one that exported bookmarks sorted by tag (both Safari and Firefox export sorted by Folder). Also many of them want extra detail like a description etc and are quite slow to load so it’s just too time consuming.

For the URL extractor I discovered a few windows software options but the only mac app I found was $50! Instead I’m going to export the bookmarks as HTML to my desktop and then upload the file via FTP to a private folder on my website. From there I just copy the URL into this site: http://www.webmaster-toolkit.com/link-extractor.shtml and voila I have a list of plain URLs.

Hope that made some sort of sense! I’ll see how it goes when my articles are published and I can start testing it out capturing the URLs. Having an online folder also means that when we have to screen capture some stuff I can just upload the pngs there and link to them in the email rather than attaching lots of images.

How do you keep track of all the articles and Web 2.0 properties you create?

You have been reading Super Affiliate Challenge – Week 1 – half way update from our site Seven Somewhere, it would be great if you would stop by and let us know what you thought :)

There are a couple of videos to watch and I’ve just downloaded the Master Plan that we are going to follow over the next 11 weeks.

I’ve just skimmed it and to be honest I didn’t see anything new in there – but there is a lot of stuff to get through and I think this is all about being dedicated and following through.

We have to work through the steps each week and then submit ‘homework’ with the links to prove that we have done the work.

Want to know the bit that scares me silly? We have to find ourselves a Virtual Assistant. Outsourcing has always been the bit of IM that I haven’t been keen to get into. A – it costs money. B – you have to find someone who’ll do a good job and won’t rip you off. C – I’m a perfectionist and I have to trust someone to do things for me.

But when hiring a VA stands in between me and that iPad (and of course a profitable business) I suppose now is a good time to overcome that fear! I’m relying on you all for some support and guidance when I reach that point

You have been reading Super Affiliate Challenge – First Impressions from our site Seven Somewhere, it would be great if you would stop by and let us know what you thought :)

As an aside if you haven’t bought any of his products he is retiring a lot of them – I’ve set up a blog at http://www.jimmydbrownproducts.net to keep track of his ‘retiring special offers’.

The Easiest Way To Outsell Other Affiliates

If you’re an affiliate marketer, then you’re always looking over your shoulder to see if the competition – your fellow affiliates – are catching up to you. Or, worse than that, you’re looking up ahead trying to catch up with them!

At times any market can be crowded, so selling the same thing to the same group of people means you’re lucky to get just a small share of the market. Imagine having thirty-five Wal-Mart stores in one small town, all competing with each other to get the local business. You get the idea.

But it doesn’t have to be that way. The easiest way to outsell other affiliates is this…

Turn your AFFILIATE offer into a UNIQUE offer!

You see, most affiliates try to sell the product as is. If your prospects are shopping around, they’re going to skip all the “buy from me” offers.

Instead, they’re going to focus on those offers that give them an incentive to buy. And that means you can outsell the other affiliates simply by offering a bonus product to anyone who buys through your affiliate link.

I’ve been teaching this concept since 2001 and, all things being equal, those affiliates who put this into practice will outsell those who don’t virtually 100% of the time.

It’s a very simple strategy. Let’s break it down into three steps…

Step 1: CHOOSE Your Incentive

Your goal is to make your offer stand out from the crowd by offering an incentive to buy from your link, thereby boosting your conversion rate. And that means you need to offer a bonus that enhances or otherwise complements the affiliate product.

Did you catch that? Your bonus should “enhance” or “complement” the product you are promoting as an affiliate. That’s what makes for the best incentive.

————- Case Study ———–

Let me give you a “real” case study (not made up … actually done by one of my customers).

A customer – who is also one of my affiliates – recently purchased my Multiple Streams Theme wordpress blog theme. He loaded it to his site. Then, he invested a little time writing a small report that teaches how to customize and tweak the theme. He offered this small report, filled with insider shortcuts and tips for enhancing the theme, as an incentive to anyone who ordered the Multiple Streams Theme through his affiliate link.

Brilliant.

I’m just guessing, but I bet the report didn’t take him half an hour to write. He just logged his own personal experiences. And yet it has high value to anyone who has plans to order the theme.

That’s how you outsell other affiliates. You turn your AFFILIATE offer into a UNIQUE OFFER.

————- Case Study ———–

One way to do this is by reading the sales letter for the product and choosing one particularly enticing bullet point.

Example #1: If the sales letter tells prospects they can learn how to get traffic from social media sites, then you can create a report called “27 Ways to Use Social Media to Drive Traffic to Any Website!”

Example #2: If the sales page for a diet book promises a month of low calorie recipes to customers, you can create a supplementary low calorie recipe book and give it away to those who buy from your link.

Example #3: If you’re promoting a dog training book and you see a bullet point about eliminating bad behaviors such as jumping, incessant barking, digging in the gardening, etc. You can create a report or even a video called, “The Secrets of Training the Perfect Dog: How to Keep Your Dog’s Paws Off Your Guests, Off Your Counters and Out of Your Garden!”

The point is, your freebie should be directly related to the affiliate offer. You want your prospects to buy through your link just because the incentive is so enticing.

What kind of incentive? You can do videos, software, coaching, advertising, installations, services, etc.

But, “pound for pound”, the best and easiest incentive to create is a small report.

Step 2: CREATE Your Incentive

Once you decide on the topic, your next step is to create the bonus product. If you’re creating a short report or video, you can probably finish it in one day. Otherwise, you can hire a trusted freelancer to do it, which frees your time to focus on marketing the offer!

Tip: You find ghostwriters on sites like WarriorForum.com, Elance.com, and GetAFreelancer.com. You can also ask for recommendations from your colleagues via your social networks or on business forums.

Step 3: CIRCULATE Your Incentive.

Finally, your last step is to promote your offer by letting prospects know that anyone who buys the affiliate product using your link will get the bonus product.

Let your list know. Tell your blog readers. Tweet about it. Purchase advertising. Distribute free marketing materials such as ezine articles. Mention it in sig files at forums. You know the drill.

Now, there are a few ways to deliver the product:

1. On the download page. If you’ve developed a relationship with the product vendor, he may agree to set up a special sales page that promotes the bonus plus a special download page so that customers can download it instantly after purchasing.

2. Manually. You can have customers forward their receipts and then you send them the link to the bonus.

3. Automatically. You can also set up a special email address with an autoresponder, so that anyone who sends you a receipt gets the download link automatically. (Naturally, some people will try to “cheat” this system.)

And there you have it – the simple three-step strategy you can use to outsell your competitors and put more money in your pocket.

It’s so easy you could be making more money by tomorrow… if you get started today!

Speaking of “making more money”. If you have a blog, how would you like to have ten “built-in” ways to increase your affiliate commissions from your blog? Visit http://www.jimmydbrownproducts.net/multiple-streams-theme to learn more.

NOTE: The offer mentioned at the website will no longer be available after Friday, March 19, 2010 at 10PM. Jimmy is “retiring” it then and discontinuing all sales.

——————

I’m gong to keep this in mind as I head into the Super Affiliate Challenge – if it ever get’s started that is!

How do you encourage your visitors to click on your affiliate link and not someone else’s?

You have been reading Affiliate Marketing – some wise words from Jimmy D Brown from our site Seven Somewhere, it would be great if you would stop by and let us know what you thought :)

I’m blaming my good friend Isobel for this one as she was the one who brought it to my attention. Have you heard of the Rhodes Brothers? They’re a bit of a force in the IM world and they are kicking off a Supper Affiliate Challenge on March 17 to help people go from 0 to $1700 a month in just 77 days. Sounds good right. And the kicker is that if you reach the goal they’ll give you an Apple iPad as well as some other goodies. Now me being an Apple geek that one really caught my eye. If that weren’t enough if you don’t reach the goal then they’ll refund your investment three times over.

I headed straight over to the Warrior Forum to check this one out – options were $77 down in one lump sum or to sign up for their membership site over at the Simple Cash Blog. The latter option costs $27 a month and you’ll need to be a member for at least four months to take the challenge so it works out slightly more expensive in the long run – but then you also get access to all the membership content so it seems like a better deal to me.

They say that you need to be prepared to spend at least two hours a day working on the challenge – which I think I can just about manage.

I’ll be posting my progress here so be sure to check back weekly after March 17 to cheer me on – of course if you want to join in the challenge yourself then that would be even better! Here’s the link to the sign up page for the Simple Cash Blog – once you’re in you can register for the challenge by clicking the link in the right navigation.

If you want to read more about it or take the $77 option then head to the original WF thread - but be quick as there aren’t many of those one shot payment places left.

Is it March 17 yet???

You have been reading Want to generate $1700 in 77 days and win an iPad? from our site Seven Somewhere, it would be great if you would stop by and let us know what you thought :)