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The 2 Edition Encyclopedia of Free Online Advertising By Luke W Parker, creator of the Surefire Success System nd Completely updated for Web 2.0! This valuable eBook reviews all of the best tactics and techniques that anyone who markets on the internet needs to be aware of! Branding Rights of this Viral eBook available for readers who act quickly… Click here for your branding kit! This is a free eBook. You are welcome to pass this document along as you please as long as no content is modified. Only those that use the branding kit have permission to change any of the links within this eBook, all others can & will be prosecuted. This document copyright © 2007 Luke W Parker and the Home Biz Factory. All rights reserved worldwide. Introduction A lot has changed on the web since I wrote the first version of this eBook six months ago, but advertising your business effectively on the internet is still the single most important skill to learn for any business to survive online. So why is it so difficult to find the effective advertising sources you need? I probably don’t have to tell you that the internet is full of free advertising. It comes in many forms, from websites that advertise other websites, to text-box ads on the sides of pages, to spyware, spam, blogs, bookmarking tools, & autosurfing… There are almost too many ways to get visitors to your website or blog now, because creative entrepreneurs are figuring out new ways to do it daily. This industry has grown so large in fact that there are even many FREE ways to get traffic to your website. Legitimate traffic for free… And plenty of it, too. This represents an awesome opportunity for new business owners without a huge advertising budget. That’s what this Encyclopedia is all about. I’ve spent years exploring, building, and testing these resources, and I’m going to share them all with you today. I’m even going to review them all for you with quick-glance indicators that reflect each free traffic source’s: Quantity (How many visitors you can get.) Quality (How Targeted the Visitors can be to your niche.) Time to Delivery (How fast all of your traffic can arrive.) They will be rated on a scale of one to five, 5 being the best possible. A Zero rating means that it’s not applicable. It is my goal for this book to be a completely indispensable handbook for all online businesses that advertise. A common misconception that many webmasters have is that all free forms of traffic are very low in quality. Some will even quote the instances that software “bots” will be delivered as a visitor instead of a human. Scams do happen from time to time, there’s no dismissing it. All of the traffic methods reviewed in this encyclopedia however, are genuine methods that are This document copyright © 2007 Luke W Parker and the Home Biz Factory. All Rights reserved Worldwide. 2 usually scam free. A great benefit about using free advertising is that there’s no reason for a scammer to try to target you, since you’re not a paying customer. No credit card number, no scam. A mild case of spyware is the worst you should expect. (So get your anti-Spyware and anti-virus up to date before trying some of these!) The fascinating thing is that research has revealed that these forms of traffic are not usually just cheap, un-targeted surfers. There’s plenty of free Pay-Per-Click traffic out there, just as targeted as Google’s AdWords. In fact, when you get down to the “P” section, I’m showing everyone reading this book exactly where they can pick up their own free 100,983 visitors in paid, WELL-TARGETED traffic! There are also free ways to get incredibly large amounts of traffic, that only require a modest amount of your time working on the front end. SEO, Link Building, and Article Marketing all can make your site the most popular site on the net for your niche market, yet they don’t cost a single penny to do correctly. Furthermore, targeted traffic isn’t the only traffic you’ll ever likely need. I’m sure you would be ok with a couple hundred thousand semi-targeted or Non-targeted visitors on your site tomorrow, building up your Alexa Ranking and showing the world how powerful a draw your website has… Also, with those kinds of numbers, you stand to make more than just a sale or two, no matter how unrelated the referring site is. I’m going to spill the beans on a method to do just that for you under the “Traffic Exchanges” section. The rest of this book is just as useful, in fact, what I’ve mentioned here are not the only juicy bits! However, juicy or not, you must choose a strategy for your marketing efforts and stick to it, because different strategies require different types of advertising. What it all comes down to is which KINDS of traffic you need for your marketing strategy. You’ll be sure to find a few in this eBook to fit your needs. So before we get started, let me reiterate that every technique in this encyclopedia is completely free for you to use to drive some form of traffic to your website with. All techniques listed here have been tested, not just by me, but by other online marketers and even ratings services in some cases. There are no sources of traffic here that require you to use a credit card. (Unless you upgrade to some premium level of service, of course.) With these free services alone, anyone easily build up enough traffic to their site to make you wonder how Google can charge so much for AdWords listings! So why am I giving this knowledge away for free, instead of hoarding all the traffic for myself? I thought you might ask that… I certainly would. This document copyright © 2007 Luke W Parker and the Home Biz Factory. All Rights reserved Worldwide. 3 You’ll find the answer to that question here under the letters “E” and “V” - This is a Viral eBook, which is one of the methods with the highest “Quantity” & “Time to Delivery” out of all free traffic generation types that there is. Yes, I’m getting tons of free traffic from this eBook, because it is so jam-packed with useful information. Keep that in mind as you read any section of this book; no matter which of the methods you use to drive your traffic, it all works out in the end that the only real way to convince anyone online to visit your website is to offer them something valuable. In my case, I’m handing out this book to everyone in hopes that they check out my Surefire Success System. It’s quite likely the only system online that can very easily make you cash in your bank account within 48 hours, and meanwhile, it builds many multiple residual streams of income without duplicating your work. Naturally, it has an affiliate program too, where affiliates make a generous 51%, so if there was ever a product online worth using the methods in this eBook to promote, Surefire Success would be it. Now that my motives are exposed, you should seriously ask yourself what yours are. Are you promoting any products that you can be proud of? Are you just testing these methods to see if anything online actually pays? Or are you just looking for an extra way to increase efficiency so that your current stream of income starts to really take off? I can’t stress enough that used properly many of the methods in this book are very POWERFUL. They may be free, but quite a few entries here are the exact same things that the pros use to gain massive, passive traffic. So don’t waste this knowledge on something that doesn’t make you good money! If you’re not absolutely sure what will make you real, attainable cash this week, then I highly encourage you to swing by Surefire Success and check out all that we have to offer. Anyway, I hope you find this Encyclopedia as useful as many of my past readers have, and that it helps to make your business a huge success, no matter what that business is. I’m rooting for you, and if you ever need any advanced tactics on any aspect of your Home Business, swing by the Home Biz Factory and I’ll be sure to have just the training you’re looking for, all for free. To Your Surefire Success! Luke W Parker The Surefire Success System The Home Biz Factory This document copyright © 2007 Luke W Parker and the Home Biz Factory. All Rights reserved Worldwide. 4 Table of Contents THE 2ND EDITION ENCYCLOPEDIA..................................................................................................... 1 INTRODUCTION ......................................................................................................................................... 2 TABLE OF CONTENTS ............................................................................................................................. 5 A ..................................................................................................................................................................... 7 AFFILIATE PROGRAMS .............................................................................................................................. 7 ARTICLE MARKETING (A SUBSET OF LINK BUILDING).............................................................................. 8 B ................................................................................................................................................................... 11 BLASTING - (SCAM ALERT!) .................................................................................................................... 11 BLOGS (A SUBSET OF LINK BUILDING) ................................................................................................... 11 BLOG COMMENTS - (A SUBSET OF LINK BUILDING) ............................................................................... 13 BANNER AD EXCHANGES ....................................................................................................................... 13 C ................................................................................................................................................................... 15 CLASSIFIED ADS - (A DIRECTORY OF NOTHING BUT SPAM).................................................................... 15 CRAIGSLIST - (A SUBSET OF LINK BUILDING)......................................................................................... 15 D ................................................................................................................................................................... 17 DOORWAY SITES - (A SUBSET OF LINK BUILDING) ................................................................................. 17 DIRECTORY SUBMISSIONS - (LINK BUILDING)......................................................................................... 18 DESKTOP DIRECT MESSAGING - (LIST BUILDING) .................................................................................. 19 DIGG – ..................................................................................................................................................... 19 E ................................................................................................................................................................... 20 EBAY (A SUBSET OF LIST BUILDING) ...................................................................................................... EBOOKS - (A SUBSET OF LIST BUILDING) ............................................................................................... EZINES - (YOUR OWN NEWSLETTER, OR YOUR “LIST”) .......................................................................... EZINES YOU CAN ADVERTISE IN FREE..................................................................................................... 20 21 23 24 F ................................................................................................................................................................... 26 FFAS OR “FREE FOR ALL” LISTINGS..................................................................................................... 26 FORUM MARKETING - (A SUBSET OF LINK BUILDING)............................................................................ 26 G................................................................................................................................................................... 28 GOOGLE ADWORDS - (USUALLY REALLY EXPENSIVE)........................................................................... 28 J.................................................................................................................................................................... 29 JOINT VENTURES..................................................................................................................................... 29 K ................................................................................................................................................................... 31 KEYWORD PLACEMENT – SEE “SEO” ................................................................................................... 31 KEYWORD SELECTION – SEE “SEO”..................................................................................................... 31 L ................................................................................................................................................................... 31 LINK SWAPPING - (A SUBSET OF LINK BUILDING).................................................................................. 31 LIST BUILDING SERVICES ....................................................................................................................... 33 M .................................................................................................................................................................. 34 MSN ADCENTER - (ALSO USUALLY NOT FREE)...................................................................................... 34 MYSPACE ................................................................................................................................................ 34 This document copyright © 2007 Luke W Parker and the Home Biz Factory. All Rights reserved Worldwide. 5 N ................................................................................................................................................................... 36 NEWSLETTERS – SEE “EZINES”............................................................................................................. 36 O................................................................................................................................................................... 36 OPT & OPL - OTHER PEOPLE’S TRAFFIC & OTHER PEOPLE’S LISTS. ................................................. 36 OPT-IN - AS IN OPTING INTO A SUBSCRIBER’S LIST. ............................................................................... 36 P ................................................................................................................................................................... 37 PAY PER CLICK FREEBIES...................................................................................................................... 37 The HBF PPC Freebie Database: ............................................................................................... 37 PODCASTING........................................................................................................................................... 39 PRESS RELEASES – (A SUBSET OF LINK BUILDING) .............................................................................. 40 R ................................................................................................................................................................... 43 RSS – (SYNDICATED CONTENT) ............................................................................................................ 43 S ................................................................................................................................................................... 44 SAFELISTS ............................................................................................................................................... 44 SEO - (SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION)................................................................................................ 45 Keyword Selection......................................................................................................................... 46 Keyword Density ............................................................................................................................ 46 META Tags....................................................................................................................................... 47 Site Flow........................................................................................................................................... 47 SiteMaps........................................................................................................................................... 48 SOCIAL BOOKMARKING .......................................................................................................................... 49 SOLO ADS – ............................................................................................................................................ 52 SQUIDOO LENSES ................................................................................................................................... 52 T ................................................................................................................................................................... 54 TESTIMONIALS - (A SUBSET OF LINK BUILDING) .................................................................................... 54 TRAFFICBARS (BUILT INTO YOUR BROWSER) ........................................................................................ 55 TRAFFIC EXCHANGES – MANUAL ........................................................................................................... 56 TRAFFIC EXCHANGES – AUTOMATIC...................................................................................................... 57 V ................................................................................................................................................................... 59 VIDEO MARKETING - (INCLUDING YOUTUBE.COM)................................................................................. 59 VIRAL MARKETING .................................................................................................................................. 61 W .................................................................................................................................................................. 64 WEB 2.0 - (AN OVERVIEW) ..................................................................................................................... 64 Y!.................................................................................................................................................................. 65 YAHOO! ANSWERS.................................................................................................................................. 65 YAHOO! GROUPS .................................................................................................................................... 65 YAHOO! SEARCH MARKETING ................................................................................................................ 66 THE LIST-BUILDER TRAFFIC STRATEGY ........................................................................................ 68 *LUKE’S FREE RECIPE FOR COMPOUNDING TRAFFIC* ............................................................ 68 SO, WHICH METHODS ARE BEST FOR ME? .............................................................................................. 76 CONCLUSION ........................................................................................................................................... 77 Final thought ..................................................................................................................................... 78 This document copyright © 2007 Luke W Parker and the Home Biz Factory. All Rights reserved Worldwide. 6 A Affiliate Programs If you have a website that sells a product online, and you’ve built in a fair amount of room into your price for it, then you have an opportunity here to use a GREAT free traffic source. In fact, running your own Affiliate Program helps you in more ways than one. By signing up affiliates to go out and sell your product for you, you’ll not only build a huge salesforce, (assuming you make your offer tempting for them) but you will also be building hordes of one-way, targeted links back to your website as they advertise in the various places. Drawbacks? You must be very persuasive to get an interested following to do serious selling for your product. To overcome this issue, simply build more room into your price so that the monetary gain for your affiliates is too tempting for them to refuse. 50% commissions are quite standard these days on informational products, with some products go all the way up to 100% commission structure, so that the seller can build up a newsletter list. I would have to say that, especially when dealing with Clickbank (the #1 infoproduct marketplace for affiliates) 75% commissions to your affiliates is the way to go. That’s just because there are so many products out there competing for an affiliate’s attention… So since 75% is the maximum that clickbank allows, you’ll soon learn that affiliates will swarm to these products first and you’ll build up a sales force (and incoming links) quickly. –And you can always turn down the commission later. Naturally, if your product is not available for online delivery (i.e. software only) then the ability to attract affiliates will be much more difficult for you… Not impossible though, because some affiliates understand the importance of offering their readers a full range of products built around a central niche theme. Having an affiliate program that offers multiple tiers helps as well. There isn’t an affiliate marketer alive who wouldn’t like to earn residual income from the work of others. There are two different ways to get started with your own affiliate program. Both can be free, and of course you pay your affiliates out of sales afterwards. 7 This document copyright © 2007 Luke W Parker and the Home Biz Factory. All Rights reserved Worldwide. The most common form of affiliate program is when a webmaster loads software, usually some form of PHP or Perl script onto the server, integrating it with the website. These have been sold for years to webmasters and lately have even been offered for free. The second type is a service run off-site, through providers such as ClickBank.com, Commission Junction, or PayDotCom. (There are many other, non-free ones too.) They do the added work for you of helping your products get found by more affiliates, and they even feature your product in an online marketplace of theirs. Naturally, they want their cut of the product’s sale too, usually in the range of 4% to 8%. (Some let you even split that fee with your affiliates.) These services may be more effective in the long run for the average infoproduct seller, but quite often they do not offer the flexibility that many webmasters need to best promote their own product line. In those cases, using server-side software scripts is the only way to go. Finding a free copy of your own Affiliate program software to load onto your web server is quite painless, as there are now several different scripts to choose from. To find your own script, simply google the phrases “free affiliate program software” or “free affiliate management software.” They should both return helpful results for you. Naturally, you’ll have to investigate each one in depth to see if it runs on your particular server in your software environment. No matter which way you go, there will be plenty of research involved; this is not something you can start up in the next 20 minutes. (More like 2-7 days.) Once it starts though, assuming you make your offer attractive enough, this could really bring in hordes of traffic immediately. Article Marketing (A Subset of Link Building) Writing articles about your topic of interest and sending them out to article directories, other websites, and eZines to publish is an almost ideal way to gain free advertising. I really can’t recommend it enough for long-term link building campaigns. All you need is time & writing skills for this self-compounding method to make your website one of the most respected and authoritative sites on the net. I realize that this method has been out in the open and even done to death over the last couple of years, especially with the popular trend called “Bum Marketing,” This document copyright © 2007 Luke W Parker and the Home Biz Factory. All Rights reserved Worldwide. 8 however I find that a lot of people who have tried Article Marketing quickly give it up before seeing any success. It seems that everyone sets out writing articles, no matter if they do it themselves or pay someone to do it for them, by submitting one or two articles to the main article directories found in the more popular article submission software suites, such as Brad Callen’s great, free Article Submitter software. Some sort of article submission software is pretty much necessary because it can take a long time to submit an article to even a handful of websites… The automation that all of these softwares offer are not just ‘set-it and forget it,’ and you Don’t want them to be! The way that the Article directories are set up, you will most definitely still have to go to each site and make sure it populates all the right fields properly. (But the software makes that much faster.) The main problem that people have with any article submission software is that when most people first try them, (I am certainly guilty of this myself) they want to ‘test the waters’ to see if the technique works or not before they commit to it fully. With most purchases you make in your life, this is a fair strategy - but not when it comes to an article submission campaign. The real benefit in sending out your articles is by doing it in bulk, over time. What proponents of Article Marketing have so far failed to tell me (but I learned for myself the hard way) is that one or two articles out there pointing back to my website, no matter how many directories I send it to, is only going to help an itsybitsy, teeny weenie bit, and then slowly fizzle away. More than likely it won’t even send a single visitor to my site… It will only help my PageRank a bit, for a while. This of course assumes that I haven’t gotten it published by an eZine owner who has a really big list… Since there is no way to be sure that you can get it published by an eZine owner with lots of influence, we won’t depend on it for this example. Think of that as a surprise bonus you can sometime get with this system, if it happens at all. The way to surely succeed with articles is to have an article submitted to all the directories EVERY WEEK, all linking back to the same website. This of course takes time and patience, which is the only reason that so many people fail at this strategy. I don’t feel it’s worth my time every single week to write and submit an article, I’ve got more important things to do with my life. Worse yet, I’ve so far made a living from informational AdSense publishing (VRE) sites, so running an article campaign for each of these 250+ small websites is simply impossible. This document copyright © 2007 Luke W Parker and the Home Biz Factory. All Rights reserved Worldwide. 9 However, over the last year I’ve tested 10 different campaigns of article submission for 10 of those sites, and the one result they all had in common was that bulk, regular submissions are the key. I hired someone on rent-a-coder to submit my articles for me once a week for 3 months, and right now (4 months later) a few of those sites are #1 in Google with no other promotion except for link directory submissions. It’s a prime example of the tortoise and the hair… But in the first and second months of the campaign, I was sure my turtle was asleep! For more advanced instruction on Article Marketing specifics, I even made a film walking you through the process. You can check that out here: How to Generate Serious Website Traffic with Article Marketing Enjoy! AutoSurfing – A great method to bring in tons of completely uninterested traffic. See “Traffic Exchanges” This document copyright © 2007 Luke W Parker and the Home Biz Factory. All Rights reserved Worldwide. 10 B Blasting - (Scam Alert!) This generic term is sometimes used loosely for sending out large amounts of (assumed non-spam) email, such as to multiple eZines or Safelists. See “eZines.” However, there is a lesser-understood ‘technique’ called Blasting that scammers commonly use to sell software. Beware any Software that claims to “Blast” your website out to large numbers of directories, other websites, classified Ads, FFAs, or even “free” eZine publishers. If they are charging money for this software or service, you won’t ever hear from them again. If they aren’t charging money for it, then they’re harvesting your email address and you’ll be the next “blastee.” Blogs (A subset of Link Building) These great tools act as duplicate websites that are extremely easy and free to set up, and can generate traffic very quickly. All you need is some content, not even very good content, and you’ve got a great “Second site” for the search engine to follow your links to and from. Ever since Google bought Blogger.com, Googlebot has paid a lot of attention to what’s happening in “the Blogosphere.” Search engines still love to spider Blog content more often than other types of websites, since blogs were invented to be easy for SE Spiders to traverse in the first place. A unique feature of even the free blogs like Wordpress & blogger is that you can set them up to automatically “ping” certain Search Engines or even social bookmarking sites to request that the spider comes out for another visit every time new content is added. However, the hype about blogs has mostly died down now. (Thank goodness!) At first it was well justified, and then a method of website marketing called “Blog and Ping” was overused in early 2006 by most of the Internet Marketers of the time. 11 This document copyright © 2007 Luke W Parker and the Home Biz Factory. All Rights reserved Worldwide. It involved making tons of blogs with almost no content in them except a link to their website, and then setting them all to ping immediately… This caused Google to hold an emergency war council and now the Ping feature is only marginally better than not at all. –It is still an advantage over normal websites though! The other great thing about a Blog is that you can get attention to it, not just by pinging but with any of the thousands of social bookmarking tools, per POST, not per website, which is a powerful thing. There are many marketers who are using Wordpress blogs installed on their own servers to generate 4,000 unique visitors every day right now! –Not peaks, but Constant traffic… Although they do have to come up with good content daily for that to stay at that level. You can read a lot more about Web 2.0 and Social bookmarking in later chapters, including how they relate to blogs, but the thing to decide at this point is if you want to build a huge, high-tech blog yourself, or if you just want to use other’s blogs for some easy traffic. Check out this service by none other than Mike Filsaime: The Free Advertising Blog. It’s an interesting example of a blog turned into a free-for all ad posting site. He’s basically just allowed anyone to sign up for free and start posting their ads, even in full HTML. –With a few hundred or thousand blog postings a day, I get the idea that no one’s ever going to read these things… But since it’s a Blog, you know Googlebot will! A BLOG with thousands of posts a day?? Let’s just say that the jury is still out on how long this will last. –But you might as well sign up and get your free one-way link to your sites with it while they’re still valuable. The reason I mentioned Free Ad Blog wasn’t just to build downlines, but I wanted to demonstrate a point; it’s easy to find blogs that are watched by search engine spider constantly, so you can submit one-way links back to your site. This is by no means the only blog online that will let you post for free. So, a big bloggin’ operation or simply small blog hit n’ run jobs; It’s up to you how to use weblogs. They are extremely flexible & powerful when coupled with social bookmarking tools, and the Blogosphere is growing exponentially, daily. But no matter which you choose, I recommend you start somewhere, because we’re all going to be blogging eventually if we still have a need for any traffic. This document copyright © 2007 Luke W Parker and the Home Biz Factory. All Rights reserved Worldwide. 12 Blog Comments - (A subset of Link Building) Much like Forum Marketing, commenting on other people’s Blogs is a great way to build incoming links and also network in your niche. Finding blogs that are on your niche topic is as easy as going to Blogger’s search at: http://search.blogger.com, to a great tech head’s site called Technorati: http://technorati.com, or directly to Google’s whole web Blog Search at: http://blogsearch.google.com. Once you’ve found a blog that is on your topic, I recommend bookmarking it and the others you find into the same folder so you can watch them from time to time. What’ you’re looking for is a question that you can answer. If you simply make a posting that sounds like an advertisement, they you’ll be spamming the blog, and surely the blog’s owner will delete it, and may even ban your IP address. The trick is to answer a question someone else asks with your business being part of the solution. You want to show off your expertise without sounding too arrogant, and of course you want to get a link in. Always offer help and advice, and only market yourself when it’s part of a solution to someone else’s question. The real benefits of this method are long term, as you want to be found by both SE Spiders and humans alike, talking authoritatively on your niche subject. No one blog posting will bring in tons of visitors, however, and you aren’t going to find the ‘ripe’ questions out there every day. Banner Ad Exchanges Most people will agree publicly that they never click on banner ads. Then they go home and click on them without even knowing it. Banner ads today are all about creative placement which can work well when done right. It’s true that they’ve lost their effectiveness significantly… In 1994, webmasters could EXPECT 5% or more clickthru rates for semi-targeted banner ads! We were in the infancy of marketing on the internet and back in those days we all thought that Advertising wouldn’t go very far online! How naive we all were… This document copyright © 2007 Luke W Parker and the Home Biz Factory. All Rights reserved Worldwide. 13 But in 2000, Harvard University did an in-depth experiment on web surfing with the conclusion that we had trained ourselves to avoid looking at banner ads. Specifically, the strip across the top 10% of the screen was virtually invisible to us already. Clickthru rates plummeted from 5% way down to 0.0005%, and I have no idea where they are today. The same old banner ads simply won’t ever work again. So, why did I rate them 3 out of 5 for quantity? Advertisers have figured out how to make banner ads somewhat effective again. They simply move them around on the page, make them into different shapes, turn them vertical, or whatever else to vary them from one page to the next. They look different, and generally webmasters know to only place very targeted ads on their sites, because the more targeted the ads are to their content, the better the clickthru rate will be. The method that allows you to get access to this form of advertising for free is called a Banner Exchange. Like a traffic exchange, these work by you exchanging impressions with other webmasters. All you have to make is a single banner, (obviously the more, the better) and place it along with your website profile into one of the many Banner Exchange services. The drawback is that you have to find a site to display other people’s banners on your site… A catch that most sales websites can’t afford to live with. If you can find room on your website for such a banner, these do move some traffic around pretty well now that they’ve divided up all members sites into categories… That way you’ll only show ads on your site from other websites in your own general niche. And the more times you show that banner, the more times yours will be seen. Overall, it’s an average traffic generation method, nothing too powerful. Perhaps you’ll have a use for this kind of traffic, but in most cases I’d say that you could do much better. If you’re interested, you can easily find a good exchange by googling: "Best Banner Exchange." Often you’ll see Banner ad exchanges built into other services mentioned here such as traffic bars and surf exchanges. This document copyright © 2007 Luke W Parker and the Home Biz Factory. All Rights reserved Worldwide. 14 C Classified Ads - (A directory of nothing but spam) Much like a newspaper Classified Ad section, there are hundreds if not thousands of places online you can submit a “website promotional” classified Ad to promote your business. Unfortunately, the format of these things simply invites severe spamming as a few hundred webmasters out there will continuously spam each single Ad millions of times, sometimes daily, to the same directory! You may have never seen one of these things because they are hidden away where human eyes would not likely go. They are most usually stumbled upon from the other side, when some scam artist sells a newbie an “Ad Blasting” or some similar ploy guaranteeing that the poor guy’s listing will be posted in thousands of different places. On the bright side, such a listing is placed in a category so that any resulting traffic would be semi-targeted. Also, Ads are instantly posted to these automatic boards, so any traffic would be instant as well. But that’s where my enthusiasm ends. Since there are so many Ads coming in, yours will only stay on the top page for a few seconds, if that long. To my knowledge, no one has ever read one of those horrible, spammy ads and no one in their right mind ever will. Search Engines avoid these locations like the plague and being found in them can actually HURT your Search Engine rankings! Quite likely, these listings will likely do more harm for your site than good. I highly recommend keeping your distance. Craigslist - (A Subset of Link Building) Craigslist is a hugely popular classified Ad site (a true exception to the other classified ads on the web) that started out as a simple bulletin board to be shared between a few friends in San Francisco. It has grown so large and so varied that it reached #24 in Alexa last year! (Currently # 46) 15 This document copyright © 2007 Luke W Parker and the Home Biz Factory. All Rights reserved Worldwide. It achieved this by offering a no-frills simple classified-ad listing that was Specific to your Metropolitan area. If you go and visit Craigslist.org right now, you’ll get to choose your nearest big city… Naturally a lot of advertisers feel that it’s not worth their time to place ads to one city at a time, so it really helps promote a spam-free atmosphere. Placing your classified ads on Craigslist actually works pretty well, all things considered. You may have to place your ads in the top 5 or ten largest cities, all by hand, one at a time, but it clearly had brought a steady albeit skimpy stream of traffic that sticks around for weeks. If you’re curious, go to the main page and click under the: “Your City Craigslist” > “small biz ads” –This is the only clearly marked area that you’re allowed to post Ads in, although you see them often in other areas as well. Below is a list of the January 2007 top 20 most-trafficked subdomains at Craigslist, according to Alexa.com. • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • sfbay.craigslist.org - 14% newyork.craigslist.org - 10% losangeles.craigslist.org - 9% seattle.craigslist.org - 4% boston.craigslist.org - 3% sandiego.craigslist.org - 3% vancouver.craigslist.org - 3% orangecounty.craigslist.org - 3% chicago.craigslist.org - 3% portland.craigslist.org - 2% denver.craigslist.org - 2% washingtondc.craigslist.org - 2% phoenix.craigslist.org - 2% atlanta.craigslist.org - 2% lasvegas.craigslist.org - 2% toronto.craigslist.org - 2% minneapolis.craigslist.org - 2% dallas.craigslist.org - 2% sacramento.craigslist.org - 2% • austin.craigslist.org - 1% This document copyright © 2007 Luke W Parker and the Home Biz Factory. All Rights reserved Worldwide. 16 D Doorway Sites - (A subset of Link Building) Old timers will remember this phrase with very negative connotations. Around the year 2000, a “Doorway Site” meant a “fake” site that looked just like the site you were going to, which existed just to fool the Search Engines into thinking that they are multiple sites with different keywords, yet humans wouldn’t know that they were separate at all. (They could cover more keywords that way.) That trick is so obvious to every Search Engine now that no one even attempts it anymore. They’d get their IP address banned for sure. Nowadays, a lot of Internet Marketers are reviving the phrase to mean a slightly different, much more SE-friendly strategy of link building. These new ‘Doorway Sites’ are usually just blogs or informational websites such as an “AdSense Farm” site. However, its main purpose, whether it displays Ads on it or not, is just to exist as an on-topic link to the owner’s primary website! The fact is that websites are so cheap and easy to spit out these days, even with well placed keywords and content, that it’s actually worth the time of a dedicated webmaster trying to build lots of relevant, one-way links to make these websites just for the linking value alone. Obviously this is a long-term strategy that won’t be getting you any clicks or even rank improvement this week. To do it right you’ll need to make this doorway site with well-placed keywords, semi-fresh content, and submit it to all the link directories before linking it to your primary website. Still, if you’re in it for the long-haul, imagine what 50 or more of these pointing to one site will do for it’s ranking, all targeting a different primary keyword on topic. One serious concern is that Googlebot checks IP addresses. A few of these websites sharing the same IP address at your server host is fine… But there is an upper limit and Google isn’t telling us exactly what that limit is. If you get serious about this technique, you may find yourself spending a lot of money on hosting in order to purchase IP addresses on separate “class C blocks,” which will fool any Search Engine into thinking that the separate sites aren’t owned by the same person. 17 This document copyright © 2007 Luke W Parker and the Home Biz Factory. All Rights reserved Worldwide. Another approach is to make your websites in lots of different free blogging or free website platforms, like Blogger, Wordpress, Freewebs, etc… Naturally this is much more time consuming because of the variation. Keeping it a small operation, perhaps 10-50 or so sites pointing to one primary website shouldn’t be a real concern at any rate. Just a lot of work. Directory Submissions - (Link Building) There is probably no better first marketing step for any website at all than submitting it to the top 400 or so Link Directories. As you can see from my rating, it’s not even close to being your best method of traffic generation. However, if you care about incoming links to your website, this is THE FOUNDATION that all other links will build on, because Search Engines start in these places and find your website through the links you place in them. I’ve built over 300 different websites for all kinds of different purposes in my career, but I have submitted all of them to the legitimate link directories without fail. It’s a no-brainer that really should be thought of as necessary, despite the piddling amount of traffic it brings. There are probably more link directories out there than anyone could ever submit to, but luckily it is only important to submit to the ones that have some PageRank. Even still, the number of submissions you could wind up making for each site will be between 400 and 500, so this is not a quick task to do. Without software to keep up with all of them, and of course to help you paste your content into all of those forms, you’d take way too long to finish a single site’s posting. It used to cost a lot for software that would submit to all the best directories, (As I know well, I have paid out the nose!) But luckily for you there is now a completely Free software that will submit to all the best Directories. (It can be upgraded to do them all, but the free selection is SO much better than doing it by hand.) It’s simply called Directory Submitter, and it’s made by the same guy who did SEO Elite, so you know it’s quality stuff. Download it ASAP and make it part of your marketing regimen for every website or blog you start for the rest of your life. This document copyright © 2007 Luke W Parker and the Home Biz Factory. All Rights reserved Worldwide. 18 Desktop Direct Messaging - (List building) A little like a Trafficbar, Desktop Messaging is a way to send ads via an email-sized communication directly to the desktop of people you’ve talked into loading the software program. Although this sounds like an impossible way to build traffic, it does have the very handy side-effect of being completely free of spam filters, so when using this as a way to send newsletters to your list or downline, you get 100% delivery, instantly. It’s more like a messenger service than an email program though, and convincing a downline to sign up to hear your thoughts each week, at the cost of them hearing 13 other’s thoughts as well, sounds like an impossible task. (You only receive 1 message a week from each of the 14 people in your upline.) The only popular choice is Desktop Lightning, none others have built up a following large enough to consider. It’s interesting, at any rate, so if you can use other tactics like safelists or traffic exchanges to build up your Desktop Lightning downline, then perhaps you’ll find a way for it to be useful. Naturally, the only people to install this on their desktops will be other internet marketers, so don’t even bother trying if you are marketing to any other niche at all. Digg – Digg.com is a Social Bookmarking tool with extraordinary power. (The best of all social bookmarkers.) It’s completely free to use this to generate some of the fastest and most serious traffic of all online, although your content needs to be interesting. See “Social Bookmarking” for more about this highly recommended Web 2.0 application. This document copyright © 2007 Luke W Parker and the Home Biz Factory. All Rights reserved Worldwide. 19 E eBay (A subset of List Building) eBay? Free Advertising? Ok, so technically an auction listings cost 35 cents… But one sale can easily make you a profit, and you’re allowed to sell nine of the same product in one auction at that price… So this is one exception I’m going to keep in this book because it’s really BETTER than free, all things considered. So where does the Advertising part come in? Simply place an information package of some kind, even if it’s just an article on your niche, and sell that infoproduct in an extremely cheap auction listing. Most people sell these things for 1 penny, although the difference between 1 cent and 35 cents really isn’t that much of a difference to the buyers looking for this information. Naturally there are no other costs like shipping or insurance, because delivery is a simple digital download. Further advertising is up to you, and it is always a matter of just giving eBay some additional fees to make your listing stand out more. If your listing is profiting, try starting the next listing as a “Gallery item” for another 35 cents, and go up from there until you’ve reached a point of maximum returns. Here’s the great part about this tactic: The winner of the listing’s email address is automatically sent to you via email, through eBay itself. Sell a bunch of those info packets, and you’ve built yourself one of your industry’s most targeted lists! Don’t feel too left out if you haven’t mentally joined these two concepts together before now. Not too many people have, unless they bought the secret from someone on eBay themselves. The fact is that eBay already has the lion’s share of traffic, and more importantly, of people in the purchasing mindset. Compare this to Google’s Traffic, which is composed of people in the “researching” mindset. It’s not hard to imagine why serious marketers prefer eBay’s traffic to Google’s Traffic! Advertising on eBay is as simple as being there in the first place, using a few well-searched keywords. Finding those keywords isn’t too difficult either; all you really have to do is search for expired listings and sort by the price. This way you’ll easily see which auctions recently got the most money in your niche, and This document copyright © 2007 Luke W Parker and the Home Biz Factory. All Rights reserved Worldwide. 20 then all you have to do is model your campaign like theirs, listing your product under the same category! Drawbacks? Although the Delivery Time and the Quality of the traffic is world class, the Quantity is not infinite… It depends on your niche, of course, but the competition on eBay can be fierce as new auctions will be placed above older ones all the time. Still, with people happy to search keywords you’ve still got a good chance of being found even between the first day or the last few minutes of the auction. Effectiveness in drawing a large amount of traffic all depends on how good your auction’s sales copy is. Luckily, you can model your auction off others that have done well in the past. Make no mistake about it; selling infoproducts on eBay is a world-class listbuilding strategy. That’s about all there is to it, but most people overlook this very powerful way of building your list because it seems too awkward, or they don’t want to take the time to put an info-packet together. If you sell a product online, then you’ve got to face the fact eventually that this is some of the most targeted, “buyer-frenzied” traffic that exists. If you’re not using this tactic, then you’ll not only be depriving your business of a constant stream of better-than-free advertising, but you’ll also be missing out on a large source of clients that you aren’t likely to be able to reach otherwise. The fact is that everybody eBays nowadays. That’s why I can use eBay as a verb! In fact I’ve seen a statistic recently that showed $14 of every $100 spent online, worldwide, is spent through eBay now, and this number is still growing! It is clearly the single biggest mover of money on the planet. People from ALL walks of life can be found there, right when they have their credit cards in hand looking to spend… I don’t even know of another source of traffic that comes close! When used correctly, you can build up a niche market list on any topic with this technique, and reach an unprecedented 50% or more of that market over time. eBooks - (A subset of List Building) So, you wondered why I didn’t try to sell all the valuable information in this eBook, did you? The fact is that eBooks almost can’t be sold anymore, because every marketer and their uncle has penned at least one eBook lately and given it away! This document copyright © 2007 Luke W Parker and the Home Biz Factory. All Rights reserved Worldwide. 21 Why would we do this? Well, it’s the same principle as Article Marketing, except that it builds more brand recognition and is much more dynamic. For instance, you’ve probably noticed an affiliate link or two throughout this PDF document. Some authors write these eBook just as a way to spread their Affiliate links alone. Some even pay a team of ghost-writers to crank out a bunch of eBooks for them to do just that, on a larger scale! The most common use of eBooks nowadays and one that still works wonderfully for most niches outside of Internet Marketers is offering a free eBook in exchange for your visitor’s eMail address. Like eBay, it’s a great source of targeted traffic. That’s it - you basically just bribe people to get on your list. There’s nothing wrong with this tactic, it works. It’s not like you’re misleading anyone, either. Most of them came to your site to find more information, and probably would have signed up for your newsletter anyway just to find what they were looking for. The third and lesser-known, but more effective method of using eBooks, comes from combining them with Viral Marketing… Such as the product you are reading right now. Unless you got an advanced copy of this eBook, many of the Affiliate links you saw here weren’t my own. My primary objective when writing this eBook was to get visitors to my website and build up brand recognition for Surefire Success… Keeping control of all the affiliate links in it would have been a nice stream of income for me, but the book would not likely have gotten into your hands, as I wouldn’t be offering an incentive to other marketers to pass this around. I explain this tactic more in depth under “Viral Marketing.” An obvious drawback is that it can be slow to get going. However, it doesn’t have to be. If your book is really good and offers a great incentive, (like I hope this one does) then more and more affiliates will send it out, and technically you could build up a huge list in no time that way. Using JV Partners (see “Joint Ventures”) is a great way to launch your eBook for that purpose. If you can offer it to a bunch of big-list owners to send out to their lists, their main incentive will be the revenue from your affiliate links in the document they send. Also, don’t be discouraged at all from making an ebook because it seems hard to write or compile one. I understand that most people don’t have a PDF writer software, so they think that making an eBook will cost them money or even be something difficult to learn. –Nothing could be further from the truth though! PDFs are so well integrated into the business world now, that there are dozens of ways to make your MS-Word document into a PDF document, and it will look and This document copyright © 2007 Luke W Parker and the Home Biz Factory. All Rights reserved Worldwide. 22 work just as good as it would if you composed it with expensive Adobe software. I even made a film showing you just how to do it: How to Convert an MS Word Doc Into a PDF for Free I hope that helps… Now all you have to do is start writing. eZines - (Your own Newsletter, or your “List”) If you’ve been marketing online more than a minute, I’m sure you’ve been bombarded with the phrase “the Money’s in the List.” Well it’s 90% true. It doesn’t end there; you still have to work at it. Keep giving to your list once you sign them up, much like a one-sided relationship. If you ask any of the subscribers to my own list, I hope that they tell you I’ve been doing just that. So far, I haven’t had any more than one single unsubscribe, and I believe it is because my newsletter offers something for everyone, not just a new Advertisement each week. Anyone can send out a bunch of solo Ads from JV Partners and the affiliate programs that they’re pitching, but I wouldn’t recommend it if you’re interested in building a solid, trusting relationship with your subscriber base. There are hundreds of places online that harvest email addresses, usually by some sort of co-registration, (where a person doesn’t even know he’s signing up for the second newsletter simultaneously) and will be glad to sell me a whole Solo Ad mailing allotment to that list of 200,000 or more for something like $50. Sure, it sounds like a great deal, but what would it really get me? About 200,000 eMail boxes filled only with Ads that are no longer opened anymore. Why should these people read such eMail? Would you watch a TV channel that ONLY showed Ads? The only way to make your own list profitable is to offer the same valuable content that you would in a product or informational website. If you are just looking for a quick product launch of one event, I don’t recommend an eZine for you at all. Owning any eZine list that is worth its weight in kilobytes is a long term process that requires plenty of upkeep. In that case, you should Joint Venture with lots of other eZine owners This document copyright © 2007 Luke W Parker and the Home Biz Factory. All Rights reserved Worldwide. 23 The rewards are astounding, however. This is the only traffic method in this whole eBook that receives a perfect score. And yes, it is free to build and eMail your list regularly; there are many software email utilities and even autoresponders floating around for free. A good percentage of web host control panels now have them built into your hosting controls. Naturally the hard part is the time it takes to build up the list. I give it a 5 out of 5 for delivery speed however because once you send out your email to the whole list, you can have thousands or even tens of thousands of people on your website in minutes. Nothing else in the whole IM arena can claim to do that. eZines you can advertise in Free Easily confused with Safelists, there are many eZine services that sell Solo Ad mailings to their big, loosely harvested lists, and sometimes they’ll even offer a free emailing just to get your business. Of course they want to sell you a much bigger eMailing down the road. It is common to see an ad from a company that looks like a legitimate eZine “collector” company, offering a free Solo Ad submission to a list around the size of 5,000 – 50,000 recipients. I haven’t tested too many of these because of the hoops they make you jump through and the long lines you have to stand in. In my experience, these companies have the power to collect and sort such a list out of their main, untargeted list and use it as described above in a sort of “bait & switch” routine. I can’t verify if they all do business this way, but I have seen it happen more than once. The free mailing will go fine but you’ve got to buy a second mailing… So you choose a package, pay $67 or more for the mailing, and a month later when it’s your time to be featured, the much larger list doesn’t convert nearly as well as the little one did! Let’s not overlook that you really have no way of knowing how many recipients got the email, or if they were safelist boxes, completely untargeted, etc… So any time you see the words “eMail your ad to 2,000,000 people for only $X,” just remember that there are many more than 2 million safelist email boxes online! The only way to take advantage of this technique is to keep using the “little lists,” by jumping from service to service, never paying for a bigger mailing. However, there is usually a few weeks or more of waiting in line to get through each time, and from time to time an outright scam can occur. 24 This document copyright © 2007 Luke W Parker and the Home Biz Factory. All Rights reserved Worldwide. One of the few times I attempted this I used PayPal to send the company $1 to “hold my place in line.” They said I’d even get the dollar back so I said ok, not even caring about the buck. Three weeks later the 5,000 subscriber mailing went out, and I got a paltry 115 people to show up on my very closely targeted website. Naturally I wasn’t going to sign up for a bigger package, so I didn’t contact them again, not caring about the fate of my $1. I won’t make that mistake again! Apparently their fine print said that the $1 was a “down payment” for the bigger solo ad later, and if I took no action within 30 days, my default package was the $89 Solo Ad to their 150,000 general subscriber list! My PayPal account was charged $88 a month later and I had no clue what it was for! Getting out of these kinds of situations, especially when dealing with companies that don’t have a phone number, is just not worth anyone’s time. Making this technique work requires a lot of searching and a thick skin against hassles. If you want to try your luck, however, simply google the phrases “Free eZine mailing” or “Free eZine Ad Blast.” You’ve been warned though. It’s a tough road. If you are determined to use eZines for advertising (there are many advantages, such as proven, targeted spenders) then I suggest paying for it. At least we now have a very helpful service called Amigo that lets you pay per clickthrough, so your ad budget is never wasted and can be monitored closely. See “Safelists” and “Blasting” for more on this subject. This document copyright © 2007 Luke W Parker and the Home Biz Factory. All Rights reserved Worldwide. 25 F FFAs or “Free For All” listings Almost always a complete waste of time, FFAs simply let you post your Ad in either a classified format or as a link in a link directory. Search Engines avoid these locations like the plague and being found in them can actually HURT your Search Engine rankings! Almost always, these listings do more harm than good. Beware! Also see “Classified Ads.” Forum Marketing - (A Subset of Link Building) There are countless Forums online these days for all possible niches. (And if you can’t find one in your niche, Eureka! You’ve hit the jackpot! Start the first forum there and it’s like inheriting an oil well.) Identifying all the popular forums on your market or niche is a very important thing that all marketers should do for any online marketing campaign. For the really big, active forums with over 500,000 posts, simply go search for them by your keywords at http://www.big-boards.com. Finding smaller forums is a little trickier. Since there are many different software packages that forums are based on, there is no one good search command to find them all, except for adding the word “forum” to your search query. Try googling each of your top five keyword phrases, in quotes, with the word forum slapped on the end, outside of the quotes. Once you’ve found them, the big question becomes how you market to them without becoming a “spammer.” You will rarely find a forum, unless it’s strictly a “marketers’ forum” that allows you to post a blatant ad inside of them without it being deleted. What you’ve got to do is network a little. Answer any questions you have the answer to first to build up a presence for yourself. This document copyright © 2007 Luke W Parker and the Home Biz Factory. All Rights reserved Worldwide. 26 However, what you are really looking for on a forum is a question that someone else asks that leaves room for you to answer, with your business being part of the solution. So if you sell sprockets, and you find a great engineering forum, starting a new thread about your great sprockets or even offering information about how a great new sprocket line could solve many of their engineering problems will quickly be deleted, and it might even get your whole account booted! On the other hand, if you take a somewhat passive role on ALL the Engineering forums, and wait for someone to ask about a sprocket-related issue, you’ll be the hero, not a spammer, for offering your educated advice. The moral of this story is to only market on forums when it’s part of a solution to someone else’s question. In those situations, you can market as much as you want, and the outcome is a lasting link to your website tied to both name recognition & expertise. This document copyright © 2007 Luke W Parker and the Home Biz Factory. All Rights reserved Worldwide. 27 G Google AdWords - (Usually really expensive) I felt it necessary to mention the Adwords program because the quality of their Pay-Per-Click traffic is the benchmark for Internet Marketers to measure targeted traffic with. Almost nothing else can compete with AdWords as far as targeting, because they not only serve the AdWord advertisement boxes on relevant, keyword-targeted pages across the web, but in the Search Engine Result Pages as well. eBay’s traffic is the notable competition. Although eBay is not as precisely targeted as AdWords, nor can it bring as many visitors as quickly, eBay triumphs in delivering visitors in a buying state of mind… And you can get those visitors for free through eBay. Expect to pay a very minimum of five cents per visitor through AdWords, but usually more likely around $1 with more competitive keywords costing over $20! The one bit of good news here on the freebie front is that there are a lot of coupons floating around the net offering $50-$250 in AdWords clicks to new signups… But those are rare nowadays as Google knows it’s got the market cornered. You never know, though. Run a search on “AdWords Coupon” from time to time to see if they’ve released a new batch. (Perhaps you’ll want to search with Yahoo! in this case…) This document copyright © 2007 Luke W Parker and the Home Biz Factory. All Rights reserved Worldwide. 28 J Joint Ventures Pulling off a successful Joint Venture can be the very next best thing to having your own highly-targeted eZine list. Of course for it to be free, you’ve got to offer your JV partner some sort of commission, like the full size of your cut or better, for them to send out an Ad to their coveted list. This is sometimes called “OPL” (Other People’s Lists) or “OPT” (Other People’s Traffic.) In fact, this is the most common form of JV structure, a simple commission split in return for a list “Solo Ad” or a recommendation. There really is no set definition for the term Joint Venture, it simply means that two or more marketers form a temporary collaboration to benefit them both. Creativity can mold modern JVs into almost any shape or appearance. Still, there are a few very well-known strategies for JVs. I already mentioned the most popular one, list sharing, above. The simplest action that could be called a JV is simply a swapping of links between two websites. Other JV types could involve putting together your products as a package to sell, and any profits and/or Opt-ins generated could be shared between the two. However, probably the greatest JV strategy that has put a lot of super-affiliates in the limelight is a Review-Affiliate-Testimonial JV, also known as a “RAT.” RATs are great for up-and-coming marketers to get their foot in the affiliate door while building up their name, brand, &/or face recognition. It also offers them the benefit of securing a one-way link back to their main website. To find a RAT opportunity, all one needs to find is a JV Launch where a marketer is working up to a product launch, drumming up affiliate interest and talking to JVs. If he or she is still working on the Ad Copy for the Sales page, they’ll very likely need Testimonials from others in the field, just like you. (Assuming you have your own industry-related website to link to.) At this point, the Marketer will send you a ‘tester’ copy for review, assuming that you’ll quickly get back to him or her with a glowing testimonial, including your headshot, quote, and URL to link back to in the testimonial. This document copyright © 2007 Luke W Parker and the Home Biz Factory. All Rights reserved Worldwide. 29 Number one ‘Super’ Affiliate Ewen Chia has probably done the most RATs of any online marketer, as evidenced by his face appearing on such a large number of sales pages across the web. He seems to be doing pretty well, (he’s arguably the world’s most successful & sought-after super-affiliate) so I suspect that there is quite a lot to be gained by “RATTing.” It is also important to note that you’ll likely have some competition while approaching the marketer for a RAT, so in such situations, he or she will either want to treat you all as equal affiliates, or just go with the one or two affiliates who have the biggest list. So, where do you find Joint Venture partners? Well, there’s a whole bunch of products dedicated to that problem, but there are also some free website forums just for this purpose. Try these sites to get your feet wet, and from inside them you can easily find the rest: JV Notify Pro, one of the better free communities: http://www.jvnotifypro.com Joint Venture Alert - Free membership with instant notification toolbar, and it offers very helpful tools as well. A great deal! Joint Venture Network: http://www.jointventurenetwork.net/community/ The Warrior’s Forum’s JV section: http://www.warriorforum.com/forum/default.asp?CAT_ID=2 Direct Matches, A powerful, up-and-coming Marketers networking platform: http://www.directmatches.com This document copyright © 2007 Luke W Parker and the Home Biz Factory. All Rights reserved Worldwide. 30 K Keyword placement – See “SEO” Keyword selection – See “SEO” L Link Building The most time sonsuming form of work to do in order to get your site ranked well by the Search Engines. Comes in many forms, but all take time to do right. See “Articles,” “Blogs,” “Blog Comments,” “Doorway sites,” “Classified Ads,” “Craigslist,” “Directory Submissions,” “Forums,” “Testimonials,” “Social Bookmarking,” “Press Releases,” and “Link Swapping.” Link Swapping - (A Subset of Link Building) Link swapping used to be a simple concept that just meant two webmasters could scratch each other’s back by placing a link on their websites, pointing to each other’s site, for mutual benefit in the search engine’s eyes. This definition became inadequate when Google decided that this kind of swapping, although not actually bad enough to deserve punishment, was only done in fact to influence their rankings, and so they made some algorithm changes that complicated things for us. This document copyright © 2007 Luke W Parker and the Home Biz Factory. All Rights reserved Worldwide. 31 The premise is simple, mainly because Google and the other big Search Engines see all incoming links to a website as a “vote” for that site’s popularity. (The PageRank method.) Webmasters quickly adapted and put up a link directory on each of their websites to automate the link-swapping of that site with other webmasters. This method has largely lost its’ effectiveness, however. Google has proclaimed that one-way links were MUCH more important, and only then if they were for sites in the same niche or a closely-related topic. If your website is about Penguins, then having some rude spammer come and post his Viagra or Online Degree Program (or any other non-animal topics at all, really) links in your directory will bring down the wrath of Googlebot on your site in no time… Certainly before you get a chance to intervene and weed out the offending links. Overnight, millions of link directories became useless or even hurtful to their web ranking because while trying to build them up as large as possible, webmasters simply allowed links from other websites on topics other than their own to swap links with them. This doesn’t mean that you can’t use an automated link directory anymore, but if you do, you’ll want to manually verify each posting to ensure every linkswap is on topic. If you’re still manually trading links with a few choice websites, especially the most authoritative sites in your niche, or at least the ones with the highest PageRank in your niche, and not using an automated link directory, you’ll be in good shape. Here’s a great, free link directory script that you can install to your own website, however you really should be careful to limit your linkswapping to other sites in you immediate market niche: http://www.homebizfactory.com/Link_Trader_Pro.html This method has its critics, however, and some webmasters won’t even use a directory anymore because its obvious structure should be a real giveaway to Googlebot about what its purpose is. These are usually the same people who would say that you must link 3 or more sites in a circle, instead of just two. However there has been no evidence that this works any better, as Googlebot can just as easily follow three sites linked as it can two sites. This document copyright © 2007 Luke W Parker and the Home Biz Factory. All Rights reserved Worldwide. 32 List Building Services Online programs referred to as “list builders” are a modified form of Safelists where you must build a downline and at the same time only get emails from your own upline. They are usually free to join but have 2 or three upgrade packages where the more you’re paying for your monthly membership, the more emails you can send out. One great thing about these services is that they are much more read than a safelist. Anyone who signs up for a safelist is told from the start that they will get “A lot” of mail daily, and must supply 2 email address, because they know that you won’t often be looking inside one of them. List builders are all about who’s in your upline and downline, so the email volume is much smaller, say 5-10 emails a day from the worst ones. And, they don’t ask for a second email address. If you take the time to build up a downline (usually by referring 10 or so people personally) you’ll be rewarded with a large supply of daily or weekly emailing allotments for the rest of your life. The main benefit to keep in mind is that all these list builders offer you increased mailings (traffic in this case) for the more sign-ups you get underneath you. So, the more you spread it around, the more mail-outs you get for life, and eventually you'll have access to so many mail-outs that you’ll be able to plaster the planet in your ads. If you are a full-time internet marketer, this is something that I encourage you to check into. I’ve had 1,500 member mailings where 50 people would clickthru quite often. (That’s a 3.33% conversion, which is pretty normal, and compared to Safelists with their 0.0001% conversion, it’s phenomenal.) Of course if you don’t get any referrals, nor upgrade your account from the free version, your mailing list will be hard to make large enough to be worth your time. I’ve even gone so far as to figure out a very easy and powerful strategy to use your list builders together in a series to obtain the ultimate traffic flow. You can find it near the end of this book just before the conclusion, titled: “The List Builder Traffic Strategy.” The best three List builders are: List Joe, List dot com, & List lotto. Unfortunately, the older ones like these don’t get as much publicity anymore like the new ones, including the latest one, List Bandit… But after testing these new ones out I find that they are completely rigged against you and waste more time than not. Steer clear of List Bandit and many of the newer ones completely. 33 This document copyright © 2007 Luke W Parker and the Home Biz Factory. All Rights reserved Worldwide. M MSN AdCenter - (Also usually not free) I once again hesitate to mention a big-name PPC Engine because this is supposed to be a free resource report. However I’ll make an exception because I think you’ll want to pay the $5 they need for you to open up a new account with when I spill the beans on AdCenter… First of all, MSN launched AdCenter in 2006 and they’ve still got a long way to go in order to catch up with AdWords… Or even Yahoo’s Search Marketing program. MSN’s per-click prices are pretty low right now because of this, and it’s common to get #1 or #2 for a keyword at or under $0.30 per click. Even in a tough IM2IM niche like ‘Home Business,’ I’m still able to pull a few daily visitors with just the minimum bid of 10 cents. Of course that price may change at any time. Secondly, and even more temptingly, (is that a word? It did not set my spell checker off – oh well...) AdCenter has had coupons out since the beginning, and these coupons have been getting BIGGER in size! They have recently been handing out $200 coupons to new sign-ups which would be a shame for you to miss out on. I went so far as to attempt to secure some for everyone here, but they just won’t hand out very many at a time. The next best thing I can do is tell you how to find your own: Just Google “MSN AdCenter Coupons” and you’ll be sure to find plenty of leads! (Hint: the $50 & $100 ones are all likely to be used up… Search for the bigger ones!) MySpace Marketing on the web’s #1 Social networking site is a lot like how you remember High School; the rules are different, it’s all about competing in a Popularity contest! In fact, you may notice that it seems the majority of MySpace members are pretty young… So why does everyone obsess about using MySpace to market with these days? Simply because they’ve already got the traffic there. 34 This document copyright © 2007 Luke W Parker and the Home Biz Factory. All Rights reserved Worldwide. MySpace.com is at this moment the world’s 6th most popular website according to Alexa.com. YouTube.com and it had been closely competing for the #5 spot for half a year until Microsoft’s ‘Live’ search got between them. (YouTube, which I review later in this eBook, is even better for marketing purposes than MySpace.) Still, getting a website all about you on the #6 website worldwide is an opportunity you shouldn’t pass up. Getting your own profile there is free, you can make it link to any off-site (no illegal) websites that you’d like, and of course your profile page should include some type of non-spammy-sounding content on your niche subject matter that other people may want to link to. Since it’s easy to linkswap (they call it ‘inviting friends’) with other MySpace members, a full link campaign inside MySpace takes only minutes instead of months. Of course not everyone there will accept the invitation. You can search for link swap opportunities by simply popping your niche keywords into a MySpace search box and you’ll get all the matching member pages as results. From there it’s just about having a nice page yourself that they’ll want to swap links with (accepting the invitation) and if you get enough MySpace ‘friends,’ your MySpace page can have a really impressive stream of traffic… Which of course you’ll want to have linked to your own primary website. Although you won’t get any traffic worth mentioning if you don’t make a nice page and invite every friend in your niche there, one nice thing about it is that many MySpace members surf member pages randomly, so you’re almost sure to get a visit or two daily, even with a blank page. It won’t be very targeted, however, so don’t count on it to bring you much reward. Also, since it’s so much of a popularity contest, it can be difficult to convince individual members into accepting your invitation. Your best bet: Use a Popularity submission tool like Friend Laser. It’s not free, but it can drastically improve your page views because it seeks out just the ‘profitable’ friends to submit add friend requests to… That way you don’t build a list of thousands of friends there just to find that none of them have ever been back to MySpace since the day they signed up. It also make sure you’re only submitting comments on pages that have a lot of views, which is the hardest thing about MySpace marketing. Unfortunately there is no free way to do that part, so the best you can do without any cash on MySpace is just to manually make sure that you submit to only people who appear active, on topic, and have lots & lots of friends. This document copyright © 2007 Luke W Parker and the Home Biz Factory. All Rights reserved Worldwide. 35 N Newsletters – See “eZines” O OPT & OPL - Other People’s Traffic & Other People’s Lists. See “eZines” Opt-In - As in Opting into a subscriber’s list. See “eZines” This document copyright © 2007 Luke W Parker and the Home Biz Factory. All Rights reserved Worldwide. 36 P Pay Per Click Freebies Other than the big-name traffic like Google, MSN, and Yahoo!s text-ad programs, there are endless competitors for pay-per-click venues… More than you could imagine. So many in fact, that yep, you guessed it, there are freebies here too for us to take advantage of. How much? Well, how about $1,040 in PPC money, without even showing a credit card? (With minimum bids as low as $0.005!) These types of “Old School” PPC engines are the dinosaurs of the net. Most of these companies you’re about to see are older than Google, and even older than any kind of Search Engine Ranking! Still, this method of gathering all these free targeted visitors to your website works great. It has been forgotten about and then well hidden by the old-timer PPC fanatics until recently. So, how does it work? Below is a chart of Pay-Per-Click search engines that are currently giving away free sign-up bonuses. They don’t even want to see your credit card, just sign up and the money will be waiting for you inside the account. I have personally verified each and every one of these by hand in making this report. To my knowledge there has never been a listing of them all in one place like this before, at least not with the amounts listed. Keep in mind that each of these services will only allow one sign-up bonus per person, so make sure you are promoting the right program or combination of programs before you make all of your bids active. So here are your 100,983 Clickthrus, sorted by traffic they send, most to least: The HBF PPC Freebie Database: Company Name $ Bonus $ $ $ $ $ 550.00 100.00 75.00 50.00 25.00 Min Bid $0.01 $0.01 $0.01 $0.01 $0.01 Clickthrus 55000 10000 7500 5000 2500 Search Post End Find Surf The Web LinkAThon Meteor Surf This document copyright © 2007 Luke W Parker and the Home Biz Factory. All Rights reserved Worldwide. 37 Search Mega Seek Hawk Seekster Sci Seek E Search Zone Free Explore Jiffy Seek Kwick Search Link Assist Search Raider Spider Jump The Best Find Harry Knows Meg Peg Search it Fast Alternative Search Engine Leap Surf MegaCrawl Find Big The Dallas Explorer DWI Page Inc. Mammoth Search Search Pros $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ 25.00 25.00 25.00 24.00 10.00 10.00 10.00 10.00 10.00 10.00 10.00 10.00 25.00 5.00 5.00 10.00 5.00 2.00 2.00 10.00 1.00 10.00 1.00 $0.01 $0.01 $0.01 $0.01 $0.01 $0.01 $0.01 $0.01 $0.01 $0.01 $0.01 $0.01 $0.05 $0.01 $0.01 $0.03 $0.02 $0.01 $0.01 $0.05 $0.005 $0.10 $0.01 2500 2500 2500 2400 1000 1000 1000 1000 1000 1000 1000 1000 500 500 500 333 250 200 200 200 200 100 100 $ 1,040.00 100,983 As you can see there are quite a few of these dinos still running... For every one giving away a freebie like this, there are easily 2 others that don’t! I doubt that some of those very generous listings at the top, such as SearchPost’s $550, will last forever, so at least sign up for your account and grab your bonuses before they change their policies. It should go without saying that the faster you want your traffic to arrive, (accomplished with higher bidding) the fewer of those 100,983 visitors you will ever see. That’s just how PPC works. But don’t worry about having to pay too much for your highly competitive keywords, these guys don’t seem to compete on the same market with Google and Yahoo at all, so getting a couple of targeted clicks a day from this list should be expected even at the minimum bid! (Well, perhaps not for gambling, porn, viagra, or life insurance niches…) The numbers in this chart were compiled by hand by on New Years Eve 2006, and updated again in June 2007, but since this is a free-floating document, I have no control over when you receive this file or when these search engines This document copyright © 2007 Luke W Parker and the Home Biz Factory. All Rights reserved Worldwide. 38 change their policies. Any updates to this chart will have to be made on the referring page of my website. Drawbacks? Well, you will have to put in a lot of keywords to get any steady traffic out of it. My home business niche has the very most heavily competed set of keywords there, so I opted to spend 1 cent across the board for each of 80 keywords related to Home Business. My results have been a steady trickle, as I usually come up in any search result as #2 to #4… So my website will ultimately receive 10-50 visitors a day from this source. But that’s not using very many keywords for my niche; I just haven’t had time to go find them all. Once I do I should be able to get 10 times than many daily visitors from these free sources. PodCasting There are free places online for people to actually download MP3s on any subject. Naturally, you can also upload them for free. Many people are audio-centric and prefer to learn by listening on their iPods, usually so they can multitask or not be bored during a commute. Giving them free content is an excellent way for your name and relation to their favorite subject matter to be presented. Much like how an article works, effective PodCasting depends on your content being interesting enough for them to want to download it, but at the same time, you must include your sales message and of course end it with a “Call to Action” that motivates the listener into following up in some way such as visiting your website. It’s true that this rarely results in many links back to your site, and if your content is interesting enough, the best you can hope for is for fans to pass them around to each other by word of mouth… Certainly no benefit for link-building. Still, there is a lot to be said for Brand Recognition. If you are marketing solely by advertising through PPC and SEO, then the fact of the matter is that you won’t be reaching a good portion of people out there that respond solely or much better to another form of contact. This document copyright © 2007 Luke W Parker and the Home Biz Factory. All Rights reserved Worldwide. 39 Whereas you might not have ever reached the “Generation Y” crowd using traditional methods at all, something like PodCasting or YouTubing would get your foot in the door, and your Brand Name would be in a new niche. From there, the Gen Y individuals would look for the rest of your work by themselves if you’ve done your job right. To get started in PodCasting, all you need is a Microphone on your computer (sometimes you can even use headphones plugged into the “Mic” input) and some free software that allows you to save & convert your voice into MP3 format. From what I’ve heard from many pros on this matter, there is nothing better than a free software called Audacity. It even comes in Mac and Linux flavors, too. Simply take an article or some interesting copy you’ve written and read it into your computer’s mic while running this software. Practice your speech first, work the bugs out. Once finished, you simply need to name the file with some good keywords that are likely to get searched in your niche, and upload it to all the best free download sites. There are literally hundreds of Podcast Directories out there now, with the most popular one being http://www.podcast.net. Don’t forget to offer your cast from your website, Squidoo lens, blog, or MySpace pages as well. Perhaps as a bonus for signing up to your newsletter or even just as a simple link on your home page. Multiple media formats containing your wisdom build professionalism. This is a great way to develop your diverse brand on your website. Press Releases – (A subset of Link Building) Much like Article Marketing, writing and submitting press releases can be an incredibly effective way to get attention to your website or cause. However, not just any informative article will do for a press release; these are meant to go to the News agencies of the world… So your submission has to be at least a little newsworthy & timesensitive. Many businesses apply this tactic by hyping up their product launches, writing a press release about the release of their upcoming product that is factual but implies that the launch is quite a newsworthy event where they are located. The more newsworthy your ‘news’ is, obviously, the more news agencies will pick it up. The more of that pick it up and run your story, the more attention and name This document copyright © 2007 Luke W Parker and the Home Biz Factory. All Rights reserved Worldwide. 40 recognition you’ll get. All news outlets have websites these days, so any published story should deliver a high PageRank link back to your site. Ideally, you want a story that will get picked up by ABC & CNN, so you’ll get millions of backlinks and receive 10,000 visitors every hour for weeks… Of course I’ve never met a marketer who’s pulled off that trick yet, so back in the real world what you’re shooting for is mention in the local papers and at least one big-city newspaper. That’s enough to bring some great exposure to your site. Instead of submitting your release to Article Directories, you’ll be submitting it to press services like PRweb.com, which is the biggest and best of the bunch. They don’t make you pay for their distribution, but if you’re trying to get your message out overseas or for the most massive distribution pushes, there are fees that they charge. (I’ve honestly never had to investigate that option.) You can also make a “Contribution” at PRWeb that highlights your release in a special section above the other listings, just like an eBay featured item… This just gets your release read more by those who browse manually… The official press looks at everything anyway. The biggest turn-off that discourages marketers from writing a press release is that it seems too difficult to make your story sound newsworthy… Especially when your news is nothing more than a product launch. Before you let that thought defeat yo, go to PRWeb.com and read some of the stories there that have been pushed lately. Most of these stories are all just hyped-up everyday happenings. Let me give you a great example out of today’s headlines I just quickly found there: “Google killed SEO with their filters, now the SEO Industry responds with undetectable links. (PRWEB) January 21, 2007 -- The search engine optimization industry has been hit hard by Google's increasingly complex algorithmic filters, which can often times determine whether a link is a paid one or not. Now with the launch of V7N Contextual (http://contextual.v7n.com), the SEO industry is responding with undetectable paid links. V7N Contextual is a new service launched by John Scott of the V7 Network, which aims to give the SEO industry an edge over the Google filters and other tactics recently employed to devalue and detect paid links, and thwart the efforts of those trying to increase traffic to their website. V7N Contextual provides you with the perfect link - one that is highly relevant, well-placed, permanent, affordable, and completely undetectable as a paid link by both humans and algorithmic filtering.” This document copyright © 2007 Luke W Parker and the Home Biz Factory. All Rights reserved Worldwide. 41 In case you missed it, all that’s really going on here is that a company called V7N has just ‘launched’ a service that provides a link-source cloaking of some kind… Hardly CNN headline news, but they’ve phrased it to sound Earth-shattering, and the end result will be that relevant SEO news websites and newsletters will all consider this story to run in their next edition. It will likely get out nationwide, but the nature of the news business is that it will have to compete with the other news in that industry at the time. If it’s a slow enough news day, this story could be really effective! This document copyright © 2007 Luke W Parker and the Home Biz Factory. All Rights reserved Worldwide. 42 R RSS – (Syndicated Content) There are actually many great uses for RSS, which stands for “Really Simple Syndication.” Website Publishers & especially Blog owners should use RSS feeds in their pages to give fresh, on-topic content to their readers each day without having to lift a finger. Alternatively, they can offer their own RSS feed to other webmasters so that those other sites can publish their site content elsewhere (with a link back to their site, naturally.) Your visitors will like having the fresh industry news there at a glance. I know that I certainly appreciate my Yahoo! news start page portal, which is nothing but 50 RSS Feeds all crammed together. For a few years now we’ve been able to show RSS feeds from our own sites, plugging in various RSS Feeds to our web pages to constantly update themselves, so our websites are always new and up-to-date looking for our visitors. Here are two great resources to start learning how to do so: How to Make & Display syndicated content Wikipedia’s guide to RSS usage (in depth) Alternatively, any webmaster or Blog runner that puts out a fair amount of content (weekly posts or more frequently) can ‘syndicate’ it with RSS by simply creating an XML feed file and posting it on one of the many varies RSS directories. (http://www.syndic8.com is one of the largest, but again there are hundreds of these directories, and many are themed.) It’s important to note that there is no point building an entire site out of RSS Feeds, because there would be no original content on your site. With no original content, Search Engines like Google won’t see anything on your site worth pointing to. RSS Feeds technically don’t belong to your site; they only belong to the originator of the feed. All the rest of the people who display that feed are using scraps of duplicate content, which Google doesn’t count towards your page’s worth. But don’t worry, there is a big upside to RSS publishing; these feeds still have keywords in them to match to contextual-matching programs like AdSense, so RSS Feeds can help bring up your AdSense click value if used properly. This means that feeds are great tools for AdSense Publishers, as long as they don’t try to make the feeds into the majority of that site’s content. This document copyright © 2007 Luke W Parker and the Home Biz Factory. All Rights reserved Worldwide. 43 S Safelists An often dismissed way of advertising online is by using a Safelist. It’s named that because you have to agree not to report the flood of emails you get as spam… So the emails you’re agreeing to use is therefore “Safe” from spam accusations, no matter how many come in each day. I normally get a few hundred emails daily just from the three accounts I mention below… Way more than I or anyone else is planning to read through. Safelist’s major problem, which everyone agrees is substantial, is that no one really reads these emails. Conversion rates (people actually clicking a link in one of the emails) are down in the toilet around 0.0001%. So why do we still use these things? Sheer bulk. If you can write (or borrow) a catchy headline that could get your email opened by someone who just skims headlines alone, then even new free members can send out their solo ad to a massive enough list to get some form of response. It’s very much like having your own list, although it would be the equivalent of having a list that people didn’t have to opt-in to, because so few will read it. Like Traffic Bars and Exchanges, this tactic excels in the IM2IM niche because everyone else who subscribes to a safelist is an Internet Marketer too. The three biggest & best Safelists I’ve found for general use are: Mad Vlad AdTactics Easy List They are more responsive than most large lists, and also let you build credits by clicking on links inside certain emails. However, if you really want to get serious about this and investigate Safelists in depth, check out Traffic Hoopla’s directory of safelists. Since so many people are afraid of the tech curve involved with safelists, I took the liberty of making a very detailed film to show you just how to set up and use safelists effectively, while keeping it all free: How to Advertise for Free with Safelists This document copyright © 2007 Luke W Parker and the Home Biz Factory. All Rights reserved Worldwide. 44 SEO - (Search Engine Optimization) Search Engine Optimization is big business. The number of companies out there providing SEO services is quite staggering, and it’s growing every day. Does that mean it’s too difficult to do all by yourself? Not at all. It’s very involved, and it will take a little time and ongoing effort, but it’s not rocket science, and you can even do everything you need to organically Rank #1 in all major search engines by yourself, all for free. When I opened my SEO Services business in 2004 I only had experience working with my own websites before that point, and I learned VERY quickly one last, very important thing about SEO… It’s personal. If you pay a big company to optimize your website for you, as opposed to you learning how and doing the optimization yourself, then you’ll never be able to rank as highly. Another company cannot have the very discreet knowledge of your businesses’ keywords and market that you had to learn the hard way. You can’t just write some keywords down on a list and give it to them, either. You have to be the one continually choosing your website’s keywords and putting them in your site where you see fit. Any other method will either make your site be someone else’s work, not matching your industry, or simply ineffective. (Usually all three.) The good news is that you taking on the role of SEOer of your own site means that you won’t have to pay a penny for SEO services at all. As my ratings suggest, it’s not a very quick way to bring in traffic, but scoring very highly for your keywords in the Google, Yahoo!, and MSN search engine ranking pages (SERPs) is an incredibly effective way of bringing in traffic. Possibly the best of all ways, because it is the highest possible quality, and if you can dominate enough keywords for your niche, the highest possible quantity as well! On- site Search Engine Optimization breaks down into 5 categories. We won’t be including link building in with these five, but it is a very important ongoing method you must follow up with... There are many entries throughout this Encyclopedia on that subject. People who don’t understand SEO just aren’t aware that it’s all about the Keywords. Choose the right ones, and all of the ones, for your niche, and then use them everywhere you can on your site. That’s really all there is to SEO, but there are infinite variations to the process. Let’s hit the major areas by category. This document copyright © 2007 Luke W Parker and the Home Biz Factory. All Rights reserved Worldwide. 45 Keyword Selection Choosing the Right keywords to target your intended audience with is more than vital, it’s the whole ball game. The best way to do this is by using a large-scale keyword generation software & services such as Wordtracker or Keyword Elite. However, if you take the time to do it right, you can find all the same keywords yourself, albeit more slowly, by using an excellent free web-based tool offered by Digital Point Solutions, simply called the Free Keyword Suggestion Tool. It actually queries both Yahoo’s (Overture) data as well as Google’s AdWords keyword data, for each and every keyword search you run. Better yet, it let’s you drill down to be as specific as you want. The only thing this doesn’t tell you is how much people are willing to pay for each term in PPC engines like AdWords and Y!SM. This is valuable data I suggest you use for in-depth campaigns, especially for AdSense Publishers, however at this point it’s not necessary. SEOing your website is strictly the art of choosing the MOST RELEVANT keywords to your desired audience. All else needs to be forgotten at this stage. Build up as big a list as possible, keeping all keywords on your list relevant. I suggest using a spreadsheet like MS-Excel to store them, so you can sort them by demand as well. The way you get lots of people to your site is by choosing the highest-demand keywords on that list and using them in your site often. After you’ve built your whole list, sort by demand, and use those with the biggest numbers the most across your website. It’s actually a bit more complicated than that, but you can easily see the pattern here. For those perfectionists out there, I’ve perfected the process instructions on my old SEO website: http://www.internetoptimization.net/keyword_services.html Keyword Density This term refers to the number of times you use your keywords throughout a page or a site. If you had a 200 word page that you’re trying to optimize for the word “peanut butter,” but only said this phrase once throughout the whole page, you’re not letting Googlebot and it’s spider pals know what you’re talking about at all… Alternatively, if 50 of those 200 words (25%) are the keywords themselves, then you’re really going to be spamming the search engines, as Googlebot will see right through what you’re trying to do and penalize you for it. Even worse, people This document copyright © 2007 Luke W Parker and the Home Biz Factory. All Rights reserved Worldwide. 46 reading such copy would think that you’re not even a native speaker of your language, and leave the page immediately! The best course of action would be to aim between 0.5% and 5% of the content on a page. Any more would sound artificial; any less would be too vague. The trick is to never let it influence your copy’s effectiveness. This doesn’t take into account the other places you can put your keywords, such as the name of the page, the title, in HTML comment tags, as names for the photos it links to, and of course in the Meta Tags in your HTML code. They’re all wide-open for you to shove your keywords into as well, and SE Spiders like Googlebot read them too. META Tags The most important place on a web page to put your keywords, beside the Title on the page, is in your page’s META tags. In your html page codes’ heading section, they look like this: There are many other META tags as well, but these are pretty universal, and really only the top two here, Description & Keywords are vital. A major mistake most web authors do is to make their META tag block once, and then just post the same block on every page of their site. Each page on your site should be targeted individually, and contain the keywords from the meta tags in the body copy as well. To put it another way, your page on Peanut Butter Cookies must have that keyword phrase on it, in the Meta Tag as well as the content, and not the same 5 keywords on your main Peanut Butter web site home page… Remember, Google and the other big SEs judge each page one by one for for their results, not whole websites. Site Flow The Flow of a website in SEO terms refers to the order in which a Search Engine Spider like Googlebot will read a site and even page while indexing. (In sales websites, there is another “Flow” process, which is totally separate from this one.) 47 This document copyright © 2007 Luke W Parker and the Home Biz Factory. All Rights reserved Worldwide. To optimize your website for the search engines, you have to try to read the website code in the same order that a spider does, not just how it appears to humans. There are many variables to this, including instructions for the spiders in your Robots.txt file, inside the META “Index” tag, the order of which your links appear on a web page, the order of all links in your sitemap file, and even the order that the content occurs within the html code. Collectively, we call all of these “Spider guiders.” What this mini-science comes down to is the fact that you must show the search engines exactly what you want to be highly ranked for, and hide as much else as possible from them. The most important tool in this arsenal is a Sitemap file… SiteMaps Both Google and Yahoo! let you write a “map” of your website and submit it to them, so their spiders will know in advance exactly what to go index and how often. This has nothing to do with your website’s “Sitemap” page, those are for a human being’s eyes, although technically those make it a little easier on the spiders as well. Google’s spider map is commonly a file named “sitemap.xml” that must be placed on the main web directory of your server host. Google demands that it be written in the XML language, which looks a lot like HTML except for a few other commands. Don’t worry, you won’t have to write a single line of code for this. There’s an excellent free tool coming up in a minute to write these for you. Once you’ve got your file written, you’ve got to tell Google that it’s there, so you can get Googlebot to come out and spider your website as soon as possible. Without doing this, you have no control at all when your website will be first indexed. Where do you do this? Simply log into your Google account, (the same account for Gmail, Analytics, AdWords, AdSense, or any other of Google’s services) and click on “My Account,” then “Webmaster Tools.” From that page you’ll be able to add websites and watch their progress. Yahoo!’s Sitemap is different. It’s just a Text file (.TXT) that is nothing but a list of URLs on your domain. If you list an URL there, it will index that page. If not, it won’t. I love the simplicity of their method. They call it a “Feed” however, and you have to submit that too. Simply go to the main page of Yahoo.com, click at the bottom where it says “Suggest a Site.” Choose the top option of “Suggest a Site for free,” and the page will then take you to an account login screen if you’re not already logged in. Do so, and then the next screen will be a website URL suggestion form. The account “Feed” it is looking for is the Urllist.txt file that you have to make. It can be added This document copyright © 2007 Luke W Parker and the Home Biz Factory. All Rights reserved Worldwide. 48 there at the end of the URL to your website in their form, and Yahoo! will start spidering your site immediately as well. So where do you get your Sitemap.xml and Urllist.txt files made? There are hundreds of places online that offer the service of writing these files for you. Until recently, all the free versions were very limited, only allowing 50 to100 links on your site, or not allowing certain time variables. Lately there’s been an addition that has no such limits, making all the rest of these obsolete: http://www.auditmypc.com/free-sitemap-generator.asp Click on the ‘webmaster tool’ box on this page and it will open up a Java application. (Yes, you need free Sun Java installed first.) Play with this app until you feel like you’ve included everything on your site that you want Google and Yahoo! to see, and hidden away everything else. It can then output the sitemap.xml and urllist.txt files for you, all for free. Upload those to the main folder of your server host and tell Big G and Y! where they are as fast as you can. All the rest of SEOing your website has to do with link building, but there are some other details that can help as well. I also recommend a great program called WebCEO that helps automate all of this work from one suite of tools, and they even have a free version as well. It even gives you reports of work left to do and campaign effectiveness. Social Bookmarking Digg, Technorati, Reddit, Del.icio.us, Fark, Furl, even Netscape. Web 2.0’s largest trend has created over 1,000 of this new breed of “Tagged News sites.” On them we mere humans share our online bookmarks with each other, and on the latest incarnations, we vote them up and down against each others to point out which ones are the most interesting or useful. These tools are great, and their power is staggering at times… But all they do is essentially just use humans to duplicate Google’s work to the same end! Why would we go through such trouble? Because computer algorithms still just don’t “know” their resources the way humans do. Having another person select a website and “tag” it as relevant to your keyword is much more intuitive for us to find resources with. It has its problems too, mainly when combining keywords, 49 This document copyright © 2007 Luke W Parker and the Home Biz Factory. All Rights reserved Worldwide. but overall it’s becoming an extremely popular way for people to find other websites. This of course means that you, too, need to be Tagging your website in many Social Bookmarking tools for others to find. Essentially the way these things work is that you set up an account with each of the ones you want to use and “Tag” any website or blog entry instead of bookmarking it the traditional way. Those tags could be kept just for personal use (Who in their right mind would want to do that…?) but as a default they are shared on that bookmarking website for others who search for the term you tagged it with. With most Social Bookmarking tools, such as Del.icio.us, (we call this group the “Taggers”) the websites that have been tagged the most for a certain keyword come up the highest on the list when that keyword is searched. It’s actually a very simple & elegant system. The newer breed of SB tools, such as Digg.com, uses an additional Voting capacity for people simply viewing the index page to vote up or down any news items they want to. (Naturally, these are referred to as the “Voters.”) From a marketing standpoint, however, this can all be chaotic! First of all there are simply too many of these sites… Submitting to Google and Yahoo! is one thing, but could you imagine opening an account in all 1000 of these things and hitting the “tag” button for all of them? How about providing a review in each of them? Second, people still go to google.com to search unless you make it easier for them to search a Tag elsewhere. It’s still not quite worth our time. Finally, the problem it has with multiple keywords (Search engines handle keyword phrases as a single query… Bookmarking sites handle each word as a query and add them together) leaves a lot up to interpretation. The end result is that you need to be supplying even MORE keywords to a bookmarking site than you would to a search engine. One thing you’ve got working for you is that you really don’t need to submit to them all. (Whew!) Once you choose some good keywords for your article (Remember, we use bookmarking tools per article or blog posting, not per whole website) you simply need to post it in the best bookmarking tool sites for your niche topic. For example, in the Internet Marketing world, the best one is PlugIM (www.plugim.com) which will only accept internet marketing-related posts. That isn’t to say that I should be submitting my articles to Digg.com too, because Digg This document copyright © 2007 Luke W Parker and the Home Biz Factory. All Rights reserved Worldwide. 50 has a marketing subsection… But I’d never submit it to a social bookmarking site like Newsvine, for instance, because they are only interested in the most newsworthy news stories, like what President Bush is doing to make a fool of himself this week. So, once you start exploring the SB tools for your niche market, you’ll quickly learn the best ones for you and use the same ones over and over again forever. Surely, you ask, someone has tried to automate the process… Perhaps another submission software? But of course! You didn’t think I’d forget to tell you the shortcut on this one, did you? Well you’re in luck, because there are THREE shortcuts for Social Bookmark Marketing, and two of them are free! The first is not a submitter at all, but it helps webmasters (and of course blog owners) get their content submitted by others much easier. It’s called the Socializer, and it’s basically just a page that is updated for you with all of the most well-known SB tools on it. It even passes the title and URL information through for you… But it’s not something you can use to do mass submissions with yourself. The second tool is quite frankly awesome for a free product. I can think of no reason everyone shouldn’t be using this tool daily. (Even those who pay for the third tool!) It is a service called OnlyWire that keeps your account information and passes your submission to NINETEEN different SB tools with one single submission. That’s 19 links to your site or blog for every time you use it, all for free. (Quite possibly the best free marketing tool online!) OnlyWire’s only downfall is that it doesn’t appear to work with Voter sites, discluding Digg, Reddit, and many of my favorites… But it does have a few big names on it such as Del.icio.us. Perhaps in the future they’ll find a way to add a lot more sites and then shoehorn the Voters in too. Also, keep an eye on OnlyWire in the future; I expect great things from it. Think of the power it would have if it manages to talk all social bookmarking tools into cooperating… I guess only time will tell. So how about for the really aggressive Social Bookmark submitters out there? You didn’t think I’d leave you out, did you? Web2Submitter was designed just for you. In very much the same fashion that you use Article Submitter and Directory submitter, Web2Submitter lets you submit your posting to all of the Social Bookmark tools out there as automated as can be. For the small price you This document copyright © 2007 Luke W Parker and the Home Biz Factory. All Rights reserved Worldwide. 51 have to pay for it, this is easily one of the few tools out there that has a cost to performance ratio in the top 1% of anything you can do online! There is a great film walking you through the whole usage of Web2Submitter on that page, so go check it out if for no other reason than just to learn what a wellexecuted Social Bookmarking Marketing campaign looks like. Quite seriously, just using this tool for an hour on one blog posting can result in many dozens or even a hundred new quality incoming links to your blog and a 35 day increase of traffic that you couldn’t afford to pay for otherwise… Even if you took out a new mortgage on your house! So in summation, Social Bookmarking is quite possibly the very best thing you can be doing to market your website online. Certainly there will be exceptions, and it works much better for Blogs that have frequent postings than it could for a static website. Even still, it’s a free source of traffic that has been known on many occasions to send blog & website owners even more traffic than Google ever could on its’ best day… So the bottom line is that Social Bookmarking should be one of the top sources, if not the primary source of traffic you use for your free advertising campaign. Solo Ads – Refers to the sending out full-page Ads to eZine list subscribers other than those on your own list. See “eZines” Squidoo Lenses Any Internet Marketers not Squidooing right now simply haven’t tried it yet! This exciting Web 2.0 application is truly a Business Marketer’s dream come true. You can think of it as MySpace, but for serious professionals. It’s a lot like being given editorship of your own topic at About.com, but with even more functionality! A lens is a web page on their domain that “brings into focus” your niche topic in a new and dynamic way. It’s a place for you to show off everything you know about your topic, as dynamically as possible. This document copyright © 2007 Luke W Parker and the Home Biz Factory. All Rights reserved Worldwide. 52 Started in the Fall of 2005, within one year flat Squidoo had already gotten itself into the top 1000 sites according to Alexa, and it’s been pretty steady ever since, slowly growing. (It’s #601 today, still steadily growing.) I believe a lot more Internet Marketers would use this service if they only knew about it. I’ve even witnessed many Squidoo pages pop up in the #1 spot at Google for that lensmasters’ keywords! They’ve now got about 180,000+ lenses, although considerably fewer members… A few people have cranked out many lenses on all of their favorite topics, so there’s no reason you can crank out one for each of your business ventures or marketing ideas. To attempt to get your lens featured, simply use good Tags on your page, and then email their review team once it’s done and they’ll consider making it the “lens of the day.” These get some serious traffic, but of course they won’t select a lens that appears to be blatant advertising or boring. One other great feature to note is they share all advertising revenue with you for advertising on your page! Some people are making lenses to use as Virtual Real Estate style publishing sites… Theoretically, you could make a few hundred great lenses and live comfortably off the income forever. Many are trying to do just that. For our purposes, however, the benefit of using lenses for marketing our other websites is clearly the main reason to get involved. The branding you create and the nearly automatic stream of traffic will be well worth the time. And did I mention that they are a cinch to put together? You could literally start and finish one in 10 minutes. Of course, the more work you put into them the better they’ll perform, just like everything else in life. So how do you get involved with Squidoo the fastest? Here’s a free download from Bob the Teacher called “How do you do, Squidoo?” that will show you all the best ways to use Squidoo for marketing. It’s a very valuable resource if you’re even thinking about creating a lens, and it’s totally free with no opt-in required. Joel Comm once let Bob the Teacher tweak his brand new Squidoo lens with no page rank and within two days it went from around #168,000 (dead last at the time) all the way up inside the top 100 in all categories! Bob’s personally had the #1 ranked Lens himself, and has also taught many “LensMasters” to achieve that great honor too… The man knows his lenses. And you should too if you could use some free, quality advertising. This document copyright © 2007 Luke W Parker and the Home Biz Factory. All Rights reserved Worldwide. 53 T Testimonials - (A Subset of Link Building) There are endless products sold online that the owner of would be more than happy to publish a testimonial about. Most info-product sellers have a whole page set aside on their website just to display testimonials, and they actively have to go out and drum up the first batch of them before they can properly launch their product! It doesn’t really matter if you find them before their product launch or years afterwards, you can still get great, targeted links to your website from these short blurbs. The nature of testimonials is that the more you provide proof that you exist, the more the business owner will be compelled to display your link, closest to the top. Give it some thought. If you just send in a testimony that says: “Your product rocks! -Bob Jones” Then the site owner might not even publish it because it’s not a ‘credible’ testimonial that proves that you exist and he didn’t make that entry up. Not to mention, how does that help your website? The way to properly use testimonials is to write a favorable but not over-the-top review for products that you really are familiar with, and then give as much evidence of your existence as possible… Your URL should be the absolute minimum you supply. Try this format, for example, and imagine your Headshot to the left of it: “Wow! This program knocked my socks off. From the moment I turned it on, I could see how powerful it was and it helped me churn through my pages in less than half the time that my old, bloated program did… And the results are terrific! Thank you for a high-quality product. Sincerely, Bob Jones, Creator of the Peanut Butter Sprocket This document copyright © 2007 Luke W Parker and the Home Biz Factory. All Rights reserved Worldwide. 54 http://www.peanutbuttersprocket.com“ If the product has already been launched, then the owner won’t usually take the time to post a photo, although some do. Photos add credibility too. Even without finding the owner before the product launch, these links are valuable because you’ve made them targeted. You did that simply by making your product known up front, just before your link. Googlebot will see the relevan