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List building is essential to any online marketing venture, whether you have your own products to sell or you are promoting as an affiliate.

Having a targeted list will allow you to capture the names and email address of interested visitors, this will enable you to build credibility with them and continue to market to them. You must have your own list no matter what your niche.

List building is a fundamental part of any internet marketers arsenal, as it is the result of using this strategy that sales occur. People don’t usually buy right away, it takes several contacts before people will buy.

Without a list, you probably won’t make much money. If you’ve just started out online, what are the chances you’ll be able to compete with the established marketers. You need to grab peoples attention  to get them on your list.

You’ve no doubt heard the saying ‘the money’s in the list’, but actually the real money is in your follow-up. To automate your follow up you will need an autoresponder such as Aweber or GetResponse, this will provide your form code to put on your webpage.

You need to load your autoresponder with 5 – 7 initial messages, your first message should be a welcome message with the download link to any product you have offered as an enticement to opt-in to your list.

Offer great content to your subscribers. Use the ratio of around 3 messages of useful content to 1 where you promote your paid product. Include the link to your paid product in your P.S. at the end of your content messages, just make sure your content is relevant to your product. Your ultimate aim is a happy list, this leads to a more responsive list, and gives you the best chance of keeping your subscribers on the list.

A really great way to attract new subscribers is with video.

For example you create a video promoting a product you are an affiliate of and post it to video hosting sites like YouTube. The result, it brings traffic to your opt-in page and it makes you money on autopilot for a one off creation.

Now you may be saying to yourself that creating a video is too hard and costs too much.

Not any longer, the internet has made video creation a cinch.

There are some free tools out there that can help you, CamStudio, Windows movie maker and Open Office.

You can use Open Office to make your slides, and record your presentation with CamStudio. You can then edit it in Windows movie maker.

Now you know how easy it is what is stopping you from creating your first video that will bring you  additional traffic and income right now.

Too many marketers who use traffic exchanges give up before giving it a chance to produce results. It is not the fastest way but most traffic exchanges are free to join. The secret is to build your downlines in these programs, this will build your credits from other peoples work (surfing).

If you are using traffic exchanges you need to use a fast loading squeeze page with your opt-in form in a prominant position, a catchy headline, may be a graphic and 4 -6 bullet points stating the benefits of the program you are promoting.

Remember your page will only be viewed for a short period of time on a traffic exchange, as most surfers who are also members of traffic exchanges are looking for more traffic!

They will mostly be using a tabbed browser, surfing to gain credits to advertise their own pages. So you should be using at least 50% of your traffic exchange promotion promoting other traffic programs, this will build your downlines in your other TE programs and you will earn credits from refering people to a program as well as off of their surfing. Initially you will need to spend time surfing in the exchanges to gain credits.

The majority of these programs are free to join and allow you to email your downline, this is where you can promote your own product, affiliate products or other opportunities and exchanges. Always make sure you maximise the downline builder in any TE you join by filling in your affiliate details for all the exchanges you are a member of, and consider joining any you are not currently a member of so as you build your downlines these members are signing up at other exchanges in the downline builder through your links.

Other ways to build your traffic exchange downlines can include emailing to your own list, write and submit some articles, or write a post on your blog reviewing a Traffic Exchange you wish to promote. The larger you build your downlines, the more credits you will earn, this will allow you to divert your time to work on your next traffic building strategy.

Traffic exchanges are a great place to get free traffic and start building your own list, and should be used as part of your overall Traffic Strategy.

When putting together a website it is important for long term growth and sustainability that you include Search Engine Optimization in your plans.

Search engines provide a place where people go when they are looking to search for information. Google has around an 80% market share of search engine traffic, and if you can get your page to show high up on their pages you can get masses of traffic visiting your website.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is very important if you want to attract organic traffic to your website from the likes of Google, Yahoo and MSN.

Do you want some of that traffic?

Then here are a few things you need to do to optimize your site to give you the best chance of gaining visibility in the search engines.

On page SEO
Page title appears in the top bar of the browser window and informs the search engines what the topic of your website is all about.
Appears as the title on search engines result pages.

Headings h1, h2, h3… tags
By using these tags they are seen as more important than other text on your website by the search engine spiders.

Description
Appears in search engines so keep it short, about 160 characters and targeted.
Each page should have its own description

Keywords
The keyword related to your page, this can be different for each page of your website

ALT tags
Tag your images with a relevant title as the search engine spiders cannot read images.

While it is said that meta-tags do not hold the same ranking power they once did, it still remains a good idea to include them for SEO purposes. Title tags and description tags in particular are important as they will show up in the search engines, keyword tags are of lesser value, but still sometimes relevant.

It never hurts to cover as many bases as possible as far as SEO is concerned. Make sure your on page SEO is relevant to your site. If you don’t know html then learn it, it’s not difficult, I knew nothing about html when I started. There are plenty of sites with relevant information just do a search in google for html tags.

Blog

Starting a blog will enhance your ranking in the search engines. Make sure your content is unique. A blog can create quite a stir with just one article whether it is an article full of great information or a controversial article.

Each article can be set on its own page so optimization is directed only towards that one article each time and not the whole site, this allows for more targeted use of longtail keyword phrases.

People are much more likely to link to a blog with good articles than a sales page.

Opt-in form

Put lead capture forms on all your pages, Keep your forms short, name and email is all you require. Link to your privacy policy or put a statement under your opt-in form.

Measuring your stats

Some of the stats you need to analyze:

Number of visitors – how many people visited your site, how many were unique visitors and how many were returning visitors

Sign ups – how many visitors signed up to your list

Sales – how many sales did you make

Length of time spent on your site – how long did they stay at your site

Number of pages viewed – how many pages did your visitors view

Exit page – the page they exited from, if more people leave from one particular page then you need to look at it. Does it need improving or re-writing, is it relevant!

Optimizing your onpage  SEO takes very little time and is easily achievable, use your stats to analyze where you can improve your website once you are getting some traffic to your pages.

Resources:

Here are some useful resources that will help you:

Website Grader

Google Analytics

Blogging is very effective in attracting large volumes of traffic. However, if you really want to drive huge volumes of traffic to your blog, you will need to do more than just blogging.
If you are using a one page website to collect opt-in subscribers it is unlikely your site is going to appear on the first page of the search engines. Adding a wordpress blog is a great way of adding content to your site, keeping your subscribers informed and getting them to return to your site over and over again, and increasing your search engine page rank.
Here we will outline the top six secrets for driving traffic to your blog.

1.    Create high quality posts that are rich with your keywords and phrases. This brings two main benefits. First, high quality and useful content will keep your website’s visitors interested and they will return and visit your blog on a regular basis and will purchase the products you sell on your website. Second, fresh content with your key words will increase your search engine ranking which brings targeted traffic to your blog and website.

2.    Optimizing your titles for search engines is also a very effectual way to drive traffic to your website. You will need to optimize your blog post titles and use all the keywords or phrases which people use while searching for information on the internet. This will make your website visible on search engines, and your website will also rank high for all your keywords, driving traffic to your blog or website. Install the All in one SEO plugin for improved search engine optimization.

3.    Use email marketing with your blog. This is an effective way of bringing readers back to your blog as well as to create an opt-in list. Building your own opt-in list is important because you can sell your products and services to your list. By using an autoresponder, you can send emails to your list about updates to your blog, hence driving repeat traffic to your blog.

4.    Social book marking is yet another powerful way to drive traffic to your blog. If you don’t know how to use them then most of them have good video tutorials to show you how to use their programs. If you rank high on some of the most popular social book marking sites, you can drive large volumes of traffic to your website.

5.    RSS feed for blog traffic. RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication. An RSS feed is another way you can use to keep people coming back to your blog because after people subscribe to read your RSS feed, they will recieve updates whenever you update your blog. This way you can attract readers back to your blog every time you make a new blog post. Use the Feedburner plugin to reach a larger audience.

6.    You can use some of your blog posts and covert them into articles. All you have to do is to add more content to your blog posts if necessary, add a catchy keyword optimized article title, add your resource box and convert it into an article. Writing and submitting articles is one of the most fantastic and long term strategies for traffic generation.

Irrespective of the size of your budget you can significantly increase the volume of traffic using these six strategies to drive traffic to your blog or website.

The internet is the information highway, people using the internet are generally using it to search for information. Whether for music, gaming, business, sporting results or anything else the internet has provided us with data that has proven to be very beneficial.

Over recent years a lot of people have tamed the mysteries of Search Engine Optimization. More and more sites have benefitted from the effects articles have done for the traffic of their sites. Some even have dedicated sites dedicated completely to providing articles that can be read by their website visitors and contain links that lead to many other sites that are related to the topics and subjects of the articles.

For example, the sites may feature many articles about a whole range of topics. As a visitor reads the articles they have searched for, they will find at the end of the article a resource box that contains a link which can be clicked on to take them to the site that has submitted the article. Of course the article would be in relation to the site. Lets say if the article is about maintaining bicycles, the resource box may lead to a link to a site that sells cycles or cycle accessories.

A resource box can normally be found at the end of an article. They will incorporate some or all of the following attributes, the name of the author, a brief description of the author, a brief description of the sponsoring site and a link. If a reader enjoys what they read, they will often tend to find out more details about where the article came from and to read more information. The resource box will be their link to the source of the article and this will lure them to go to the site and do some additional reading or research for the subject or topic they have an interested in.

But just like the article itself, the resource box also needs be eye-catching to attract the attention and interest of the viewer. While the resource box covers only a small space, providing the correct keywords and content for your resource box will provide a nudge for the reader to followthe link to your site.

What are the benefits of having a good resource box? Primarily its driving traffic to your site. Many sites allow articles to be placed on their sites because they can make use of the articles content to fill their pages. They also get affiliation with other sites that can bring additional benefits for them too. For the sponsoring site, when you get readers to click on your resource box, you get traffic to your website that  you can be count as potential customers.

So what would be a good content for your resource box? Using keywords is key, learning about the proper keywords that people are usingwhen searching for information on your products. There are many tools you can find on the internet that can assist you in ascertaining what keywords you should be using. Where possible always set your link as anchor text using your keywords.

You can also make use of all your creativity in your resource boxes.  You only get a small space for your resource box so you need to make the most of it. Attempt to catch the attention of your reader with resource box content that make them give a second look. Unlike TV ads, you don’t have visual aids to drive your point home. But you do have the power to catch the imagination of a reader. With the right content, you can draw them with intrigued to your website.

Another tip is to use keywords that should be related to your site. Do not mislead your potential website visitors. Build your credibility so that more people would get tempted to visit your site and browse what you have to offer. Make the people click your resource box by providing resource box content that makes a lasting impression. You only get one chance to wow them and hundreds of chances to repulse them.

Never underestimate the power of the resource box. Resource boxes are used on many sites these days not just on articles, but social media sites too, such as Twitter, Facebook and Viral Networks. It may be small in size but they will provide a significant aid in driving traffic to your site. Be fun and creative but at the same time show that you have a great deal to offer. There are many tips and guides that can help you in doing this, the first step is realizing how important a resource box can be in enticing people to click your link and head to your site.