First of all, many experts recommend using a platform like WordPress to build your blog or site. There are a couple of ways to do this, but suffice it to say that WordPress is generally well received by Google as it is a blogging platform at heart. You can easily update WordPress and build a large community right on your site using the features that come with it.

You might decide that you want to spend part of your marketing budget using PPC (pay per click) systems such as Google Adwords. You can also use Facebook Ads or even LinkedIn Ads. Keep in mind that PPC takes testing, so prepare to lose some money as you are learning. Or, you could just hire an expert to start with.

Be sure to add your website or blog URL to every signature you have. That means adding it to your email and forum signatures. This gives you constant promotions for your business and site without having to say a word.

Next, make sure you are using the awesome power of press releases. You can write (or have written) press releases about news happening within your business. Then, have those pieces distributed throughout cyberspace.

It is critical that you use social media to increase your site’s marketing power. If you are not using social media correctly, you are missing out on so much potential traffic! There are hundreds of millions of people on some of these social media platforms. Do you think at least some of your customers might be there too? Probably so!

Finally, use your new marketing avenues to sponsor contests and giveaways. People love vying for the chance to win something, so use that excitement to build more buzz about your business.

These six little things can help boost your business at least twofold. The more you do, the more you will see results. There is no question that these time tested methods work…. if you use them!

Six Ways To Boost Website Traffic is a post from: online marketing with smartzville

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First, you need a site map. This is a page on your site that allows people to skip around and find what they need. Think of it as a table of contents for your site. Have a link to it on every page so that people can find the parts of your site that they want to read without having to go through a lot of hassle to do so.

Second, use a lot of pictures on your site that are relevant to your niche. Make them interesting and informative so that people don’t get so bored reading long pieces of written content. While you are at it, use lots of white space, subheadings and bullet points in your copy as well.

Third, write compelling content that keeps people interested in what you have to say. Don’t be boring. Don’t write fluff. Don’t be repetitive. Don’t just say the same things that your competition says. Be unique and develop your site around your own voice, tone and personality.

Fourth, give away some useful information for free. The idea here is to give such quality information for free that readers wonder how much better your paid content must be. If you know this much that you tell them for free, they want to hire you for your other knowledge and services.

Finally, always make sure to ask for feedback from your readers. This feedback will help you to tailor your website and your content to the people who matter most – your paying clients!

Attracting new traffic to your site is important, but keeping your current traffic coming back over and over is critical. You want to make your site “sticky” to improve your bounce rate with Google and your conversion rates with your customers.

Five Ways To Keep People Coming Back To Your Blog is a post from: online marketing with smartzville

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Your brain seems to stall out and you really have no idea what you are going to write about. You may have a general idea but it is the details that are killing you and your drive to complete the article, book, or blog. And yes, blogging is no different than writing an article or a paper. Sometimes you just have no idea what to blog about.

If you are trying to blog for money then you can definitely run into some problems. What types of topics are interesting enough to engage readers and encourage them to mark your page and visit it often to read new blog posts? Well the topics vary according to you. Let’s say you are interested in promoting a book that you have written. Your blogs can contain snippets of the book to interest others. They read the snippets and then are curious about how the story turns out and they buy your book. Cha-Ching! Money in your pocket just from blogging, and you cannot forget that if they like the book they will recommend your blog to other people. That is great word of mouth advertising.

What you choose to write about is completely up to you but there are some things to keep in mind. You want your blog to be informal and easy to relate to. But beware of making it too informal. You want to stay informative yet add a personal touch. People really do not want to hear about what you ate for breakfast unless you are blogging about a new diet. In that case you can blog about your daily food intake to your heart’s content and it is relevant to what you are trying to get out.

A great way to build readers is too often build up a reputation of being an expert or at least have great knowledge in a field. Blogging can do that for you. You do not want to post an erroneous fact that is for certain but you can post tips, hints and suggestions for readers to follow. People begin to trust that you actually know what you are writing about because this is important if you are out to make money blogging.

One thing you should know is that blogging does take time and effort. You have to post comments on other blogs or other websites in general that also include the link to your blog or a specific blog post. Not many people want to devote that kind of time to maintaining their blog on a daily basis.

You know, you can cut down on your work load significantly by using the strategy and tools I use and it doesn’t cost anywhere near as much as you’d imagine for something that helps you with content, backlinking, rank and PR, automation, and website traffic. This is what I use.

Making Money with Blogs is a post from: online marketing with smartzville

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Wondering what the heck Viral Traffic is?

Check out this free training course by the Grandfather of Internet Marketing, Mark Joyner.
Over an hour of free audio.

For many years Mark has been silent about some of his past success, but he has come out into the Internet Marketing spot light once more to show you the answers to questions like:

• “How did Mark Joyner create both the 36th and the 198th most popular sites on the Internet in just 3 months…generating over one million downloads?”
• “What behind the scenes traffic generating, profit-pulling secrets did he use to create the top 2 online viral marketing systems?”
• “How did Mark build another viral marketing system that generates more visitors than ICQ, AOL Instant Messenger and even Harry Potter?”

Get the free viral visitor training here.

There are a pile of online marketers I trust and whose advice I followed to get to where I am today. On this page you’ll be able to subscribe to some excellent free courses on website promotion and marketing…

Free Course on Getting Top Search Engine Placement

The BEST Keyword related, Search Engine Course I’ve Ever Read

I’ve been online creating websites for clients since 1997. I’ve even done some search engine optimization for those clients…but in all those years I hadn’t gleaned as much information as I discovered in this free 6-part course!

This course is, in my books, so instrumental to website success that I practically force my RSS Feed customers to take it and apply it!

Now, you’ve got to pay attention here… When you click this link you’ll end up on a sales letter. In the left column of that page is a free course sign up. The real meat starts on day 2 — stay with it, there’s lots to learn!

Grab this free pdf training on getting top spots in the search engines. Your author won the top spot on google and yahoo for a number of years, for a number of highly competitive search terms, through some simple website tweaks. He’ll show you, step by step, how to do it – all for free. Plus he shares a number of website promotion tips.

These are the same methods I have used to also gain top spots in the search engines on some of my other websites and not one of the suggestions are difficult to perform.

Free Courses on Marketing To, and Building, A Subscriber List

List Profit Secrets – Free Webcast

The free webcast has passed, but you can still listen to the call!

Visit the site, (I know, it’s expensive, think of all the time you’d save fast-tracking to marketing success though – at any rate, follow the instructions below to get the free training).

When you click the window to leave you’ll be invited to sign up for the free e-course – go for it! You’ll get more solid info in that free e-course than you usually get had you paid for someone else’s!

Free Courses on Making Money Online with Niche Marketing

Niche Marketing Course

This is Smartzville’s own free online course – An Introduction to Niche
Marketing.

You’ll learn the concept of niche marketing right through to your first order. Included are tips on idea generation, help on website hosting, how to get people to your site, accepting credit card payments and much, much more!

Article Marketing Course

Although this, in it’s entirety, is not fully fleshed out, the basics to article marketing and how it works to bring you website traffic, branding in your marketplace, and higher search engine ranks, is explained.

Free Work at Home Info from Phil

Phil is one of the most friendly and helpful internet marketers you’d ever want to meet online. He’s helped many kick-start their work at home ventures – simply by following his tips and techniques in his free newsletter.

Imagine what you’d get if you actually bought one of his products…but save that for later…you want to make sure he’s a ‘fit’ for your learning style first.
Sign up here for free work at home training.

Free Courses on The Latest Website Promotion Crazes…

Blogs and RSS Feed Course

Although I swore I’d never try to enter into ‘guru territory’ I just couldn’t help myself when I discovered the power of RSS Feeds to get traffic to a website. My little niche site grew in readership by over 600% in less than 3 weeks just because I added one little .xml file to the marketing mix. I simply had to tell other online marketers about this! So I teamed up with ‘marketing great’ Joe Vitale to create this info product and list of RSS Resources. A mere 10 days after Joe’s acceptance The Stampede Secret was launched!

Free Courses on Copy Writing

Joe Vitale’s Hypnotic Copywriting Secrets

Getting this audio interview from marketing guru Joe Vitale can be a bit of a trick – but it’s worth the two minute wait. Here’s how to get it: Click the link below, read the offer and if you aren’t buying, simply close the window. A pop up window will appear. Answer a quick 3 question survey and an audio interview (plus transcripts) of Joe’s Hypnotic Marketing Formula Interview will be sent to you. Powerful ‘writing to sell’ tips and information – soak it in and put it to use!

And, a free audio series from Joe Vitale here.

Million Dollar Online Advertising Strategies

Interesting in learning more about writing copy that sells?

Then go grab the first 3 chapters of this training manual for free. Even master copywriter Joe Vitale says “…insights are brilliant. They teach you about human motivation, sales copy, and what it takes to make a living with your words….”

What you’ll receive are part of the Robert Collier letters, dissected and analyzed (so you’ll see ‘why’ they worked so well), which you can apply to your own online sales letters.

Free Courses on Promoting A Site with Auto Responder Email Accounts

The Power of Auto-responders for Profit

This is a free course, delivered via email on using auto-responder accounts and services in your marketing. This is one of the way we marketers put our income on autopilot. By following up with our customers and newsletter subscribers via an auto-responder. Click the link above to grab a free auto-responder account, plus a great free course to help you prepare for auto-pilot income! 

Free Courses on Writing and Selling an Ebook

Write An Ebook In Seven Days Mini-Course

This is one of my favorite all time ebooks.

It takes a new info-product marketer by the hand and prepares them to have a product to sell in 7 days. I think the book currently sells for $37 but you can sample the flavor of the ebook before you buy!

Sign up for the free marketing course at the bottom of this page. When you are duly impressed (and you can’t help but be duly impressed), return at any time and grab your copy. Then put the knowledge to use and get selling online!

Free Courses – Internet Marketing and Website Promotion is a post from: online marketing with smartzville

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Allow me to explain…

A blog is a website or part of a website. To learn how to market a website, or part of a website, cannot be accomplished by reading a 1,200 word article. Sorry.

How Blogs Differ From Other Websites

Blog marketing – Using your RSS Feed, WordPress blog plus a little promotion and marketing savvy.

There are some aspects to a blog (and the marketing of it) that differ greatly from other website types.

• They are chronological. Newest content displays at the top of the website page.
• Blogs are often (but not always) more personality laden and opinionated.
• Blogs are created, managed, and maintained through an administration panel that is generated via CMS running on a website server. Now if that doesn’t sound ‘geek’ enough to make you run for the hills, blogs are generally much easier to set up, add content to, and maintain than the more traditional website.
• Blogs, good ones anyway, generate an RSS Feed for the blog proper, every directory within the blog and even on a post-by-post basis (there’s more to this that’s beneficial, but too advanced to go into here).
• Search engines are naturally drawn to blogs for a number of reasons – the skinny amount of code, the organized content delivery, the consistently updating content, and the syndication aspect of a blog’s RSS Feeds.

A Blog’s RSS Feeds and Marketing

This, really, is all I want to discuss on this page. If you’re here because you don’t know how to set up a blog but want one I strongly suggest grabbing a $5 hosting account here: fast self-hosted blog setup. Your account will be cPanel access, you’ll have 24/7 chat and phone support, but you only need to click a few buttons to install a WordPress blog.

As you read above RSS Feeds are the part of blogs that truly make them a marketing dream. After all, getting the word out is a huge part of marketing – both online and off.

While you’re busy with your website (by adding content to your blog), your blog is doing the heavy lifting behind the scenes. A self hosted WordPress blog does this by dynamically generating the RSS feeds that run the blog and notifying update servers on the fly.

These RSS feeds may or may not be used by other webmasters, may be subsribed to by your website visitors, may or may not be picked up by newspapers or journalists.

Many people will tell you that your feeds being using on another person’s site is a terrible thing. This is, after all, your hard-written content! Yet (to the untrained eye) the other websites are getting all the credit for it.

This is most certainly not the case. Your feed, when used by other webmasters, includes a link to your website as the originating source. As your feed is used on multiple websites you are gaining one-way back links to your website, thereby positioning you (in the search engines and in the reader’s eyes) as the authority on the subject.

As with anything there are techniques to protect yourself, techniques to ensure that other website owners aren’t using your content for their credit and not linking back to you, techniques to make a reader want to click over to your site from their site, etc. Those are advanced techniques I’ll save for another article.

Promoting Use of Your Blog’s RSS Feed

The final step to blog marketing, promoting your feed. You want to get the word out to the search engines and other webmasters that you have an RSS feed (or a variety of them). This step will ensure your content is indexed and frequented by the search engines. You can manually visit over 80 top feed submission sites today and add your feed to their lists or purchase a one-time service license and/or software to manage the submissions for you. Even though there are many more than 80 rss submission sites – only 20 deliver the lion’s share of benefit to bloggers like yourself.

Blogs and Online Marketing is a post from: online marketing with smartzville

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Back in September of 2004 Joe Vitale and I wrote a book on using RSS Feeds to drive traffic, increase subscribers and boost search engine positioning…

But due to the intensity of that product (and the fact that customers are gleaning information from one of the top internet marketers of all time), and the fact that we are in constant communication with our subscribers, we have to charge a hefty price tag to make that business and website viable.

The sad part is, not everyone can afford that RSS Info Product!

So, once the dust settled down from that RSS ebook’s success, I have been scouting around for other top notch information for website owners, who:

• want to learn more about marketing with RSS,
• but don’t have a lot of money to spend on info products.

And I know that knowledge is power.

And power gleaned from knowledge creates action.

And action creates success.

So there’s no doubt in my mind that getting this knowledge is your first step to success with RSS Feeds.

As soon as I saw this report I had to tell you about it, certainly because it is much cheaper than you’d pay anywhere else. You’ll also get a bonus piece of software with it that makes promoting your RSS Feed a snap.

Learn more about RSS Feeds and submission software here.

Believe me, you can implement an RSS Feed on your website (if a 40 year old chicken farmer from Ontario did it, so can you!), and you won’t regret the learning curve or time invested for a moment once you see the traffic, sales and search engine position increase!

Sincerely,

Laura Childs

P.S.: I’m so sure that the ebook and software you’ll find over at 123webs.com will answer all your questions about how to use, create and promote an RSS feed that if you don’t love “The A To Z About RSS” package you can simply drop me an email within the next 30 days and I’ll ensure you receive your money back.

RSS Feed Guide is a post from: online marketing with smartzville

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That sounded like a pitch I know, but I can barely contain myself when it comes to the power of RSS feeds to drive traffic to a website, increase search engine positioning, add subscribers to your email lists, and make you more sales.

My RSS Success Story

Nearly three years ago now (2004) I was surfing around trying to figure out how to make more money online and get more traffic to a new website I’d created. As a matter of fact, this is the website I was trying to promote and it’s in a highly competitive marketplace. It seemed I had no hope for gaining even just a small corner of traffic away from the more established marketing sites.

But then I happened upon RSS Feeds.

Being a bit of a chicken and not wanting to take any chances that could get me ‘black-listed’ by the search engines, I experimented with what I’d learned about RSS on another web site I owned, one I’d lost interest in.

“Smart surfers – frustrated with spam mail, frustrated with irrelevant search engine results, frustrated with slow-loading pages – are finding a new way to surf for fast answers, research and product purchases. They’re using RSS Feeds and as more people find out about them more marketers need to know how to use them to their advantage.” Laura Childs, Jul 26, 2004

That site didn’t see much traffic back then, even though it was well aged and indexed in all the search engines. It was a ‘dead dog’, I paid for hosting and it barely broke even. But all that was about to change.

How Fast Did RSS Serve Up the Traffic?

Within two weeks, yes two weeks I started seeing tons more visitors to that old site and sales were pouring in on my lesser ebooks and promotions as well.

To be candidly honest, I was beginning to wonder how I could turn the traffic ‘off’. I had requests for free downloads, custom orders being paid for upfront, newsletter subscribers signing up at my personal email address by the hundreds and absolutely no systems in place to handle it all. This all happened well before I learned about auto-responders and automation of any sort for that matter!

There’s much more to this story but I won’t bore you.

The fact of the matter is that within just a few weeks RSS Feeds were serving up more traffic than I could handle and my search engine listings for some very competitive phrases jumped the charts as well.

I documented some of it (I really didn’t know how to ‘market’ or promote a website or traffic technique back then and I’m still learning), by comparing my Alexa stats to my top two competitors (one in US and the other in UK – I’m in Canada) and when I shared the information with other internet marketers and website owners they were amazed at the results (which is the only way I truly knew that I was ‘onto’ something).

Enough about me, let me ask you now…

Are You Ready for An RSS Feed Traffic Surge on Your Website? 

Listen, I’m not going to keep you with all the drawn out details here. I’ll just give it to you straight. For a number of reasons RSS Feeds are still a viable means to traffic, subscribers and sales – even now in 2007. But you’ve got to do it right to get the maximum return.

Here’s what’s involved in setting up and running an RSS Feed on your site that will give you top results. (How do I know this? (a) first hand experience, and (b) working closely with my loyal clients and customers on
StampedeSecret.com.)

Step by Step to RSS Feed Success (miss any step and your time is wasted):

• Read and understand why RSS works as a promotional tool for websites. 1 hour.
• Do your keyword research. 1 hour.
• Check out your competition. 1 hour.
• Brainstorm your RSS marketing strategy. 30 minutes.
• Create your RSS Feed. 30 minutes.
• Promote your RSS Feed. 15 minutes.
• Update your RSS Feed. 10 minutes per day – 3 times per week.

There you have it.

One hour to learn, just over 3 hours of setup, plus 1/2 an hour per week. The end result is a ‘truckload of traffic’. If you’re interested you can download the pdf of my traffic explosion the first month I used RSS Feeds on that dead dog of a website I owned.

If you don’t have time to implement an RSS Feed on your site the right away, then you’ll likely miss out on all the success I and StampedeSecret’s clients have seen. Of course there are other means to getting traffic to your site – some more involved (such as the recent Web 2.0 traffic push now being explained on Stampede Secret), others more costly and not as effective. RSS and even Web 2.0 traffic strategies involve time, commitment and thoughtful consideration during the strategic development phase.

I’m at a loss to show you any other technique that works anywhere near as well to give your website a huge boost in traffic. You can buy all the links you want, pay for search engine optimization, purchase traffic directly from google and you still won’t see the results in traffic and search engine rank that you can get by running a tiny xml feed on your site.

RSS is Easy – I’ll Show You How

The way I see it, you’ve got 3 choices.

1. Spend hours surfing around for free RSS information and try to make sense of it when applied to website promotion,
2. Grab this extensive report which will show you the ins and outs of RSS and how to apply it to website promotion (plus it includes free software to promote your RSS Feed to over 50 RSS directories), $17, or
3. Join us over at StampedeSecret.com for some easy to follow, find-it-when-you-need-it instruction on RSS feeds.

Either way, I wish you the best of luck using RSS Feeds for website traffic and higher rank in the search engines. I’ve only ever heard of one person saying it wasn’t worth the time and effort (and he had a one page website promoting a ‘get paid to read email’ program).

Create An RSS Feed is a post from: online marketing with smartzville

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