Here are 3 different articles. Be aware that one of them is a review of a specific product - so there will be affiliate links there (not mine!). But it’s still pretty informative which is why I included it here.

Is There A Difference Between Manual Traffic Exchange, And Auto …

There are many websites that tells you to join hundreds of traffic exchanges, to get the joining bonus. Yes it sounds great, but big mistake! If you just joined to get the joining bonus that the traffic exchange offers you probably will …

This is the one that’s a review of a specific exchange:

Ts25 - Traffic boost - does it work?

Although it is possible to join TS25 traffic exchange free you will really benefit more from upgrading your membership to either gold or platinum. As a silver member you need to work very hard to get into the syndicate and earn …

Blogging Traffic - Confidential Tips to Generate an Avalanche of …

The traffic exchange programs through blogs are more effective to generate visitors to a blog, than the earlier methods. But, you will have to be joining several of these programs to reap real benefits, even if your blog enjoys a great …

Please ‘Share This’ through the link below and leave us a comment!

This gives you more opportunities to promote your blog to a large and targetted audience than many of the social sites do.

Well - the folks at MyBlogLog have just released a plugin that makes a powerful traffic magnet even more powerful. Read about it here:

MyBlogLog’s Just For You Wordpress Plugin

However…

In order for this plugin to work your hosting provider needs to support the json extension for php - which mine doesn’t 

If you think this info may be helpful to others please ‘Share This’ through the link below.

Bummarketing is all about getting traffic to your website for free and, since I’m doing this series on promoting your website for free, I thought that pointing you to other articles on-line about bummarketing would be helpful. But I can’t, since there’s not much out there that’s current and valuable.

No matter! I’ve found some other articles that look at different aspects of getting traffic to your site without you needing to spend any money.

I’ve already talked about a lot of what these articles cover, but it’s always good to see similar information written in a different way - so read on and see what others are saying:

A Massive Boost to Your Web Site Traffic Today

Traffic will grow the more you do it. Forum posting - most subjects or niches on the web now have their very own forum related to it and you can join them mostly for free. Make good posts that people are interested in amongst the …

Discover how to make your Home-Based Business work

SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, is the process of increasing the volume and quality of website traffic from search engine results for targeted keywords. Using these same keywords throughout the body of your pages’ content will help …

How To Generate Massive Free Website Traffic

Today, I’ll share with you how to create and maintain an endless stream of highly-targeted website visitors for free. The secret to generating all of the free website traffic that you can handle [...]

Free Website Traffic Without Spending A Fortune

If you are trying to meet your goals of getting traffic to your website you may be tempted to check out some programs that promise free website traffic. You need to do your homework because usually if something sounds too good to be …

If you think this information may be useful to others please ‘Share This’ through the link below. And leave us a comment with your thoughts on getting free traffic.

The answer, of course, is why not do both?

As far as promoting a product through a blog goes there are some things to keep in mind:

• Blogs, by their nature, are not as tightly focused as a sales page. There are generally other links that people can click on, enabling them to leave your blog without making a purchase
• If you do manage to keep your blog tightly focused this may make it difficult to keep producing good articles over time. And that’s essential if you’re going to attract readers.
• The focus on a blog is generally more on the articles, where as the focus on a sales page is generally on the product and its benefits.

However – a blog tends to attract more search engine traffic than a sales page. This means that your cost of sale is likely to be lower.

So if you’re promoting a product do both: run an out and out marketing campaign and promote it through your blog.

Here are some ways to improve the ability of your blog to attract search engine traffic, encourage people to subscribe and help to spread your content among the social sites:

• Set up a Wordpress self hosted blog on your own domain
• Install and activate SEO related plugins. There are others, but here are some starters:
  • All-in-one-SEO pack
  • Google Site map generator
  • What Would Seth Godin do
  • Share This
• Join some social bookmarking and social networking sites. Be sure to actively participate in the communities and don’t only post your own articles! This is very important – if you only post your own articles people will start to give you a wide berth and on some sites you risk getting banned.

Use the social sites to disseminate your content. You can do this efficiently on those sites that allow you to set up your RSS feed – but do so with care! Remember to post articles that provide value to people.

The links from the social sites have no value because they all use re-directs. But links from people who see your articles, like them and link to them DO have value.

And probably the best resource for helping you to get traffic to your blog is…

Jack Humphrey’s Authority Black Book.

It’s free to download and contains 67 pages of tools, techniques and ways to increase traffic to your blog.

Check it out here. (It really is free!)

This first article covers the basics of web search technology and it illustrates another great way of creating links to your site:

Aggregating the author… and The Google

Remember every hit counts at moving you up in the search engine results. So whenever you’re in a public blog, forum, or you’re mentioned on someone else’s web page, always ask to have a link to your website included. …

And here’s another article on the importance of good quality content in getting noticed by the search engines:

Magic vs. Quality

You go to search engines to search for something you may know little about. The quicker you find quality results for that ambiguous query, the more likely you will return again. Google and Yahoo compete on the quality of their results. …

And, finally, another article that talks about the writer’s experience of combining a properly structured site (as I discussed here) with good content:

A designer’s perspective on SEO

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is definitely one of of the more notorious online disciplines, often badged as a ‘black art’ due to the uncertainty linked with achieving a good ranking in natural search listings. …

Have a read of those - they’re great articles and then come back and leave a comment letting us know your reactions. And if you think this info may be interesting to others please ‘Share This’ through the link below.

So, as promised at the end of that article, here’s the second part of the answer to the question about whether SEO or good content is better for generating good search engine visibility: content and its impact on off-page SEO.

Off-page SEO is more effective than on-page SEO at getting your site to rank well in the search engines. So what is it, and how do we improve it?

Off-page SEO drives the search engines’ perception of what the Internet generally thinks of your site.

These are some of the factors the Search Engines use in coming to their view:

• How many sites link to your site?
• What is the quality of the sites linking to your site?
• Are the sites linking to you in the same niche as you?
• Are the links one-way or reciprocal?
• Is your site easily ‘discoverable’?

Links. That’s what you really need. And lots of them. High quality, one-way links.

So how do you get those?

With good quality content.

Content that informs, amuses or entertains. Content that people find so useful, or grabs them in such a way, that they not only link to your site so they can return, they pass on your site to others. Who also link to you.

Forget link farms and link exchanges. Forget trading links. The search engines can spot those activities and they discounted them ages ago.

Forget the social networks (for linking purposes) – they all use re-directs and, even if they don’t, the Search Engines discount links from them too.

You want a steadily growing number of real people linking (one way) to your site because they like what they find there.

You can buy one-way links, but you’ll usually only get them for a pre-determined period of time – a month or some other period you agree with the link seller. These do have the effect of creating one-way links in the eyes of the search engines, but you’ll lose them again once your agreed period is up.

Producing lots of good content that people want to link to is the surest foundation for getting your site to rank well in the search engines.

But it takes a long time – is there any way to speed up the process?

Sure – you need to develop a link building strategy.

But never forget - a link building strategy is not a substitute for good content.

Without good content a link building strategy won’t work. Or at least not a link building strategy that involves quality links.

So what would be a typical link building strategy?

You can search out blogs or other sites that are in your niche. Use a tool such as SEO Elite, or the SEOBook plugin for Firefox, to find the good quality ones. Sites with lots of incoming links and a high Google page rank.

Then you can link to them. If they’re blogs the blogmasters will receive a notification that someone’s created an incoming link. On my blog it will ask me to approve the link request – which means that I’ll have to visit the site that’s linking in.

If I like it I’ll approve the link. If I like it enough I’ll link back. Yes, yes – I know that’s a reciprocal link…

But the point is – once you’re on someone else’s blogroll other visitors to that blog may come visiting your blog. And if they like your site they’ll link to you. These are the links you want.

What else..? Use the social networking sites to get your content in front of as many people as possible - but don’t spam! Many of the social sites and micro-blogging sites give you the option to link back to your site and pull in your RSS feed. That’s fine, but don’t openly try to push people towards your site.

Links from the social sites themselves have no benefits. But if people see your content, visit your site and like it, they’ll link to you. And those links DO count.

But for all this to work effectively – you have to have good content.

So my answer to the original question would be:

Focus on content – it’s the foundation of good search engine ranking. Develop lots of it – high quality, valuable content.

Then use the techniques I’ve touched on in these two articles to generate good on-page and off-page SEO to help the search engines find and crawl your site. And, finally, disseminate your content via RSS and through the social networking sites to get it infront of as many people as possible.

But, at all costs, do not spam!

Remember – the search engines are changing their algorithms on a regular basis. This means that if you place your emphasis on SEO you’ll constantly be trying to keep up with them. The one thing that remains effective, whatever changes the Search Engines make, is good content

When you get it in front of enough people, and enough people like it, you’ll get the incoming links and your site will start to rise in the search results.

Leave us a comment with your experiences of link building, and if you think this may be useful to others please ‘Share This’ through the link below.

For the best search engine visibility you need a combination of both - good, current content and a well-optimised site.

In this post I’ll deal with some simple, on-page SEO.  In the next post I’ll address content and its impact on off-page SEO.

Before I go any further, let me state very clearly that I stay well clear of anything approaching ‘black hat’.  It simply is not worth trying to fool the search engines.

Firstly they’re constantly changing their algorithms precisely in order to weed out the black hatters.

This means that you’ll find yourself in an endless game of cat and mouse with the likes of Google, Yahoo and the rest – and that will become your focus, rather than developing and growing a sustainable business model.

Secondly – once they’ve got your number you’re marked for life.  You then have to keep changing IP identities in order not to be completely ignored by the search engines.

Again – no way to develop a sustainable business.

So – back to the question:  SEO or good content?

Again – my answer is that you need both.

But here I’ll deal with basic, on-page SEO.

Optimising your site for the Search Engines is not difficult – it just takes a bit of discipline.

Firstly, you need to get your META data set up properly and accurately.

This means defining:

• Your keywords
• Your page descriptions
• Your page titles
• The page category (is it suitable for general viewing, adult viewing etc)
• Telling the robots whether or not to follow links
• Telling the robots how often they should crawl
• Identifying the author and designer.

All of this data is important.  Some will tell you that META keywords are no longer important.  And it’s true that Google appears to be placing less emphasis on them currently.

But Yahoo does currently appear to use them.  So does MSN.

And no one (except possibly Matt Cutts) knows what algorithm changes any of the Search Engines have planned for the future.  Meaning that even if Google doesn’t use Keywords now that doesn’t mean to say they won’t be using them next month.  Or next year.

The META data fields are there – so use them.

If you use all your META data fields properly, all the time, the impact of future changes to Search Engine Algorithms on the way your site figures in search results is likely to be reduced.

Note:  I did NOT say eliminated!  Sites (especially relatively new sites) tend to bounce up and down in the search results, certainly initially as Google tries to assess the public reaction to your page.

There are three META data fields to pay particular attention to:  the Title, Description and Keyword fields.

Currently page titles are very important to Google.  The page titles are what appear as the headlines in the search results and, currently, they carry a lot of weight when Google is comparing what the searcher typed in with pages it can offer up.

The page META description is what usually appears as a summary of the content of the page, immediately under the headline in the search results.  This is important, because you want this to act as a hook to bring searchers into your site.

If you don’t use this field Google will pick up a snippet of text from your page that it thinks is relevant and place that there instead.  And what Google thinks should be there may not be particularly compelling.

Usually the Search Engines only display up to 160 characters in the summary area under the result headline – so make the first 160 characters of your description extremely compelling!

And don’t waste too much time creating a description longer than 160 characters because most times it won’t be read.

The keywords you use must be relevant to each page – not the site. (Except for the index (home) page).

Again – keep your keywords focused and don’t use too many.  I’ve seen pages that have used up to 70 keywords – and they’ve not been focused.  This is just a waste of the keyword META field.

Always remember that Google’s focus is on serving searchers.  Not advertisers or webmasters.

As much as we may not like that – that’s the situation.  So if we want to do well in Google search results we need to recognize that and work with it.

Google’s focus on serving the searcher drives them to constantly refine their algorithms in a never-ending drive to present the most relevant results possible to search terms.

To figure well in the results for a specific search term, therefore, your META data and your content must be tightly focused around it.

Using too many keywords, irrelevant titles and un-focused descriptions just dilutes your efforts and will drop you down the search results.

When creating your page titles, however, put yourself in the position of a searcher.  Think about what you would actually type in when doing a search and use that type of wording for your page title.

For example:  if you were searching for ways to pay off your mortgage you wouldn’t type in ‘how to pay of your mortgage’.  You would be more likely to type in ‘how to pay off my mortgage’, or ‘how to pay off a mortgage’.

So use those terms as your page titles, not terms from your perspective as the content provider.

And finally, for this article, make sure that your description, page titles and keywords are totally relevant to your content.

The Google bots do read your content – and if they decide that your content doesn’t match what you’ve put in your META fields, your page will be way down in the list of search results.

So – to summarise:

• Use ALL your META data fields
• Make sure your Title, Description and Keyword fields are tightly focused around a set of relevant keywords.
• Make sure that the content of your page is totally relevant to the keywords you’ve used in your Title, Description and Keyword fields.

In the next article I’ll look at content and its impact on off-page SEO.

Please leave a comment with your own experiences on simple SEO and, if you feel this may be useful to others, please ‘Share This’ through the link below.

Not big numbers compared to some, I know, but look where it’s headed…

The down-pointing arrow shows the date on which I joined Jack Humphrey’s Social Power Linking membership site.

Having known of Jack from last year as a result of picking up a free copy of the Authority Blackbook, (it’s still free) I immediately pricked up my ears when I learned that he was launching Social Power Linking back in January, and I joined a few days later.

So what are my impressions after 2 months of membership..?

Very well worth the monthly fee – and the picture above says why.

What do you get for your fee..?

1. An active and growing forum that has become increasingly busy over the past 2 and a bit months since Social Power Linking was launched. Jack is a regular contributor. He picks up and responds to questions quickly and clearly, but there are an increasing number of experienced social marketers who also chip in with help and advice. This forum has a real buzz about it now.
2. Help and guidance on setting up and running your WordPress blog. Self-hosted WordPress blogs are accepted pretty much universally among the online crowd as being the most search engine friendly, customizable blogging platform around. Social Power Linking is heavily focused on WordPress and you can get answers to pretty much any question at all on setting it up, customizing it and operating it.
3. Help and guidance on Social Network Marketing – from the Social Network Marketing King. Jack Humphrey has been doing Social Network Marketing since before anyone else knew about it. He is accepted as an industry leader on ways to use the social bookmarking, media and networking sites to generate healthy waves of targeted traffic to your sites. Again – refer to the picture above.
4. Regular training calls – hosted by Jack and discussing social networking techniques.
5. Regular new videos, audios and PDF documents discussing new social marketing techniques – new information in one of these formats is usually available about every 10 days or so.
6. A social marketing 60 day jump start plan – taking you step by step through getting yourself set up to become a Social Power Marketer.
7. Social Marketing 101 training – for the complete beginner, explaining what everything means and dealing with some of the common whisperings about social marketing.
8. New software applications to help cut down the time required to do your social marketing activities.

… and the list goes on.

Social Power Linking is a University for Social Network Marketers. And Social Network Marketing is how marketing will be done going forwards.

Anyone who has read any of Seth Godin’s books, or follows his blog, will know that Permission Marketing is quickly replacing ‘Interruption Marketing’ as the most cost-effective way of promoting whatever it is you’re selling.

Social Network Marketing is the implementation of Permission Marketing.

If you need targeted traffic to your site, and long to escape the tyranny and cost of Adwords – you should seriously check out Social Power Linking.

Check it out here

A: Better SEO, total control, more traffic and more sales – although those reasons won’t apply if you’re not blogging for business!

When I started out blogging I opened a blogger.com account. That worked fine for me at the time because I was new to blogging, knew even less than I do now and didn’t even realise that I could host my own.

Even if I had realised that, it’s not something I would have given a moment’s thought to at the time. I was too new to working online, I was (still am) totally non-techie and (in my mind) it would have been too daunting a task.

So I happily blogged away on my blogger account until I logged on one day to find that Google had translated all the admin pages (in fact everything except my actual posts) into Chinese. I live in Hong Kong so Google, thinking they were being smart, used my IP address as the basis on which to make the decision to translate it.

Not being able to find the help link (because I can’t read Chinese) I logged into my Google account (Adwords, Gmail, etc,) to raise a request for them to translate my blog back to English. Luckily they only translated my blogger account, not all the other services I have with them!

After a week nothing had happened. I hadn’t received a reply, I still couldn’t read my admin screens, and I was seriously frustrated that Google should unilaterally decide to translate my blog, so I kissed the big G goodbye and shifted my blog over to Wordpress.com.

By this time I had learned enough about blogging to have heard that Wordpress was the place to be. So with some anticipation of great things to come, I imported all my blogger posts (click of a button in Wordpress) and set about learning the new admin screens.

One thing I noticed immediately was that my posts were suddenly figuring much more quickly in the natural search results, so it looked as though at least some of what I’d heard was correct.

And I happily blogged away until…

…one day I tried to log on to be met with a notice telling me my blog had been suspended for infringing Wordpress’ terms and conditions.

DAMN..!! Twice inside a month I’d been blind-sided by my blogging platform and the second occasion was even more damaging than the first. (It doesn’t give a great message about your professionalism when your visitors are met with a message that you’ve infringed T’s & C’s and had your blog suspended).

So, finally, I was pushed into the realisation that I had no option but to set up my own blog and host it myself.

So off I clicked to Wordpress.org to see what I could find out. And I was pleasantly surprised.

Firstly – the instructions they’ve set out for downloading and installing a WP blog are delightfully clear and easy to follow.

They set out a few minimum requirements, which I passed on to my hosting provider. Once I got the confirmation back that there would be no problems I printed off the instructions and got going.

First step is to set up the database. Easy to do – the instructions are very clear, include screen shots for every step of the way and are written in simple, non-techie language.

I then downloaded and unzipped the blog files, entered my newly created database details into the config file, (just followed the instructions), uploaded the files and accessed the installation screen via my browser (the URL is provided in the instructions). That kicked off the installation script and I was all done.

It was, literally, a 5-minute exercise.

However, the majority of hosting providers now give you an even easier method than that:

One click installation.

I’ve never done a 1-click installation so I can’t confirm whether it really is one click or whether a few more are involved – but it’s definitely very easy and it doesn’t involve any downloading, unzipping and uploading of files.

So what are the benefits of running your own blog on your own server?

You have total control. You can write what you like, you can drive traffic to affiliate programs, no one is going to translate it into Chinese, and no one is going to lose your database.

You can customise it as much as you like. Customisation is done through plug-ins, and there are plug-ins for just about anything you can think of. You decide what you want to do with your blog, then you can either go to the Wordpress plug-in directory or do a Google search for a plug-in for the function you want.

Download the plug-in, unzip it, upload it and activate it through the blog admin screens. It’s that simple. Really.

But of all the sexy things you can do with your self-hosted blog, probably the biggest benefit of all is the SEO tweaks you can make.

This really turns your blog into an incredibly effective way of figuring strongly in the natural search results.

Optimising your blog for the search engines is simply a question of installing and activating the appropriate plug-ins. And you can find probably the best list of SEO related plug-ins in Jack Humphrey’s Authority Blackbook.

If you’ve gone to the trouble of setting up your own, self-hosted blog then you should absolutely download this book and follow the guidelines in there for optimising it properly for the search engines.

Firstly, the Authority Blackbook is free and secondly, if you don’t set up your blog properly then you’re wasting an enormous portion of its SEO potential.

It would be like buying a Ferrari but never taking it out of the city centre.

Since I’ve been working online I’ve always struggled with getting targeted traffic to my site. Traffic – loads of it. But targeted traffic is what pays – and that’s much tougher.

Having spent a lot of money in the past on Adwords and other paid advertising campaigns, with not a lot to show for it, I decided a while ago to change my strategy.

I’m now using my blog as my primary means of drawing in traffic. I haven’t (and will not) spend a single penny on promoting it.

And yet my blog is now attracting a little over 50% of the total traffic I’m getting on a weekly basis – that’s traffic to my blog plus traffic to all my other sites – and that’s almost totally due to the SEO effectiveness of my plugin-rich, self-hosted blog.

Within the next year I’m aiming for that to be well over 80%.

It’s so easy to set up a self-hosted blog – and the benefits are enormous.

Do you host your own blog..? Has it been worthwhile? Have you tried it and run into trouble..? Leave a comment to tell us about your experiences!

How is it delivered?

This 15 module course is delivered by short online videos (2 – 10 minutes in length). You can also download mp3, audio-only versions of each module, a 1-page .pdf document that summarises the entire course (just giving module titles and sub-headings) and a .pdf document version of the entire course.

Who will benefit most from this course?

Newcomers to blogging. Meaning people who have never blogged before or people who are just starting out.

More experienced bloggers probably will find something that’s new to them, but this is primarily aimed at the beginners’ market.

What were the points I liked?

Over the 15 modules Mark Joyner covers the entire spectrum of blogging. This starts with defining what a blog is, through how and where to set one up, the component parts of a blog, copy writing tips, modules on how to attract traffic, how to publicise your blog and the various ways you can earn money from your blog.

The video lessons are described in clear, simple language. They load quickly and, visually, are based around PowerPoint clipart slides, which get the message across quickly and effectively.

For beginners this is a wide ranging, comprehensive introduction to blogging.

What are the negatives?

Although the course is wide ranging, the topics are not covered in depth. In particular a couple of the modules on how to attract traffic to your blog were a bit repetitive, and were heavy on the ‘what’ but light on the ‘how’.

There are other free resources available on attracting traffic to blogs (for example Jack Humphreys’ Authority Blackbook) that go into infinitely greater detail on the ‘how’ and provide some very powerful techniques. It is true, though, that the Blackbook is aimed at people with more experience in blogging than the Simpleology course is aimed at.

Overall Summary:

A comprehensive introduction to all aspects of blogging for newcomers or those who have just started out.

You can still (as of 26 December) get this course for free provided you post about it on your blog.