The Helpful Pointer

Many people will tell you that traffic exchanges are not effective. For some this may be true depending on the service or product you offer. I, however, have had several customers that found my services through my advertising on traffic exchanges. So I am gonna tell you the 3 ways to make this an effective advertising option for you.

First: You need to be sure your home page is effective at explaining what service or product you are offering. Traffic exchanges have a timer so the person viewing your site has the option to leave within a matter of seconds. So your main goal is to give them a reason to stay!!

Second: Only choose traffic exchanges that offer manual surfing. Most people do not even watch the window when an autosurf is running. If it is a manual surf exchange they have to physically watch the pages in order to go to the next site. This gives you the best opportunity for them to actually see your site and be drawn in by your content.

Third: Be prepared to work. In order to earn credits for people to view your site, you have to view other people’s sites. That is why it is called a “Traffic Exchange”. The more you view other sites, the more your site is viewed.

With these 3 steps you can use traffic exchanges as an effective advertising strategy. It takes planning and work to get results, but doesn’t every advertising plan? I urge everyone new to advertising to do alot of research to find the plan that is best for you and your business.

Stacy Hensley designs websites, makes graphics, and also runs a Banner Exchange.
http://www.jakscreations.net

Have you noticed the many internet marketing books using the word “secret” in their title, headline or copy?

Why do they do this?

Is their actually one or two online marketing methods or strategies that are going to bring to your site an ever growing consistent stream of willing to buy targeted clients?

The simple answer is NO.

Unfortunately many website owners think this is not the case and continue to accumulate book after book and software package after software package looking for “the ultimate web traffic method”.

The fact is that there is no one single marketing method that will make your online business successful, period. Only continual application of the right methods will see your business grow and expand.

The main reasons why most people think there is one main method is because of the following four elements:

- If you wanted to be a “plumber”, you would do your apprenticeship and then work for someone or then start your own business. If you wanted to own a “milk bar” you get a business loan, buy the “milk bar” and start running the business. Why do we know this and why are there no so called “secrets” regarding being a plumber or running a milk bar? Because these businesses have been around for a long time, to start them is “common knowledge”.

- Therefore because the internet is new and evolving, how to start an internet business has yet to become “common knowledge” and there is still many unknown aspects regarding the subject unlike traditional business. Unfortunately, many now capitalize on this “unknown aspect” by selling so called “secret information” type products thus only increasing the myth regarding internet business.

- Even if starting an internet business was “common knowledge”, there is simply too much information to decipher. Unlike going to the local library, finding the business section and picking one or two of the five books on “starting your own business”; you are now on the internet. You have a world library, the business section is as big as a football stadium and books on “starting your own business online” are in the thousands (including many misleading ones).

- This final point is the most important one. People want to believe there is an easy way to get a lot of web traffic and make a fortune without any work; they just have to find it! This is just human nature.

So now you know that you must use more than one internet marketing method to make your online business successful.

Stick with the main tried and true methods -

SEO
Content
Linking
Articles
Sales Copy
List Building
Joint Ventures

and your traffic will continue to increase rapidly.

Chris Taylor - helping web based business achieve unique distinction & maximum growth by building “life-time, client based relationships”. Visit one of my online resources and I will show you how to increase your business profits and clients quickly and easily starting today - www.thewebtrafficco.com/adb/
Copyright 2005 © CATDynamics

I finally got my web site to the top of MSN for a very competitive keyword - “free paid surveys”.

I knew that if you want your website to rank high with the major search engines you must get other web sites link to yours.

I was also aware that there are several free ways to get links to your web site:

1. You can write and distribute articles.
2. You can write testimonials.
3. You can do reciprocal linking.

I had been using all of the above linking strategies, but my site just couldn’t make it to the top page of the search engines.

Things improved dramatically after I started posting informative blog comments related to the subject of my web sites.

Let me explain how to do that…

Simply, go to Google, or any other search engine, and type - “yourkeyword blog”. Visit any of the blog sites found by Google and look for “Comments” or “Feedback” links.

Click on the comment links and you will see other people posting their comments to the blogs.

Here’s how you too can benefit from it…

You can include your website’s link in the blog comments! Don’t forget to include your targeted keyword in the title of the comment.

Visit as many blogs related to your web site as possible and keep posting comments. Try to post informative comments, otherwise the blog owner may delete them.

Note that search engines love the content from blogs. If you keep posting comments to blogs, you will soon notice how quickly your website’s search engine ranking increases.

One of the best ways to check how many blogs with your site’s links have already been indexed by search engines is by going to MSN and typing - “link:yourdomain.com”

So, improve search engine rankings of your web site today by posting informative comments to blogs related to the subject of your site.

Learn all about one-way links to your website with free report “Easy Website Links By Writing Blog Comments” by Gerardas Norkus:
http://www.webmastertools4u.com/blog-links
Publishers can reproduce this article and change the URL to point to their own rebranded version.

Do you know how many people are actually linking to your website? Like a lot of people, you probably have gone to Google, typed in link:yourdomain.com and had a peek at how many links there were. Even a lot of software will use the same method - looking for exactly that hyperlink within webpages. The problem is that this is very innacurate and gives you only a small glimpse into a much bigger picture.

How can that be?

Hyperlinking is far more advanced these days. It is common for many sites to have their links coded for statistical purposes or simply because the software they run on their server creates coded links so that sites can be easily edited or removed from the database. They may look something like this:

“www.somedomain.com/links.asp?url=http://yourwebsite.com”
or “www.somedomain.com/links.php?link=345″

There may be other reasons and variations of urls too, however the point is that because these links are coded, a simple backlink check just won’t work. So while it may appear that only 100 sites are linking to you, it could actually be 1000’s.

Case in Point: One of my websites shows only 74 exact backlinks through a basic check, when in fact there are about 11,800 links. While it is almost impossible to know just how many of those links are active (clickable), cross-referencing my own statistics supported these results.

Try it yourself. Type in something like:

“yourdomain.com”

But what about internal links from within your site showing up as backlinks? Wouldn’t that skew the actual backlink count?

You’re right, but you can easily exclude your own domain from the results by simply typing in:

“yourdomain.com” -site:yourdomain.com

Do the non-hyperlinked references really count?

I believe they do qualify as valuable backlinks (though I do prefer to call them references instead). Look at it this way, business cards contain your website url but aren’t clickable. So what makes non-hyperlinks on the web any less valuable? If people want to visit, they can copy and paste the link or type it in themselves. In fact, there is less chance of typos because of this.

The Traffic Time Forgot…

Another useful function of this method is the ability to locate dead spaces where people are linking to pages you no longer have on your website and perhaps have forgotten about. While 404 redirects and messages are fine for catching the traffic, why would you waste the space? These are prime areas to bring life to and can easily be filled with monetized content.

About 6 months ago I did a complete redesign of one of my websites. This meant removing a lot of pages that I was no longer using as I was condensing everything. A few weeks ago, I was doing a backlink check and noticed a large number of links and references (100’s actually) pointing to a page which I had long forgotten about. What was suprising is that the majority of these backlinks were coded, so that they did not show up in a basic link check. Instead of letting the 404 catcher manage it, I decided to recreate it with still relevant content and much to my surprise, it still had a pagerank of 5 immediately after being uploaded.

Imagine That!

Carole Nickerson has been a web developer and internet marketer since 1998. Visit http://www.thenetter.com for more free articles, tips and software.