• TheSellerDoor
  •    Richard Bach – “Sooner or later, those who win are those who think they can.”
 
  • 11 Dec 2008
  • Posted by eyeofatear

Traffic Traffic Traffic is the internet’s equilivent to Location Location Location, and is the name of the game, and without it, you have nothing. It doesn’t matter what you are promoting…Make Money, Memberships, your MySpace, your ebay, whatever…if you don’t have traffic, you won’t be successful. You will not even be able to give FREE stuff away without traffic.

Bookmark this page and refer back to it frequently.

How to get Traffic?
You Have Many Options!

That’s a lot to choose from, so which one(s) should you use, which methods get better results? Well, they all work, and it is true that some work better than others. Until you get regular, automatic traffic…you should be using all of them. Using all of them is quite time consuming, but there are ways to be efficient.

IMPORTANT NOTE: Most internet traffic starts with
KEYWORDS!  Keep that in mind...keywords are to
traffic traffic traffic as signs are to location
location location.

Your Website

Starting with your website, if you don’t have one…get one. All of your efforts should be centralized around branding your business name(your .com name). That means having your own site(eg. thesellerdoor.com).

Setup your email addresses at that site and use them(mine is ricky@thesellerdoor.com).

Select a good hosting site that will allow you to easily modify your website. We are using Lunarpages for TheSellerDoor.com, and it has been working well for us.

Since we first regestired the site a month or so ago, I have been able to add a few useful things:
a wordpress blog, an auto-responder, a SafeList at dormouse.thesellerdoor.com (That is making use of a subdomain. I did that to associate it instantly with thesellerdoor.com. That way users of our SafeList would automatically know of thesellerdoor.com).

The point here is I didn’t have any problems with the hosting service, and building out the website was pretty easy.

Having a website that changes regularly is a really good thing to the search engines. A frequently changing site does better than one that rarely ever changes. So keep updating your website, keep putting new stuff on it. Add a list of something useful; for some reason people seem to bookmark lists more than other parts of a website.

Here is a list you should bookmark. We are updating this list almost daily.
TheSellerDoor Resource Lists

Your website is your main attraction, so make it good, and keep it good. People will bookmark your site and come back.

See: Getting Traffic and Keeping It
and
See: Web Designing 9 Helpful Tips
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Email Advertising

Email Advertising is one of the best ways to bring in new customers or site visitors. Follow the code of conduct for advertising by email, and it will be a tremendous benefit to you for as long as you want. See: Email Advertising – The Good, The Bad, The Ugly …and Don’t Spam! USE SAFELISTS. You will save yourself a big headach.

Here is a List of FREE SafeLists

Just because you can send to a given list many times a day, does not mean you should…use some discretion. You don’t want your readers to be turned off by the fact that they have 10 messages in a row all from you. Send only one email message a day, or at most two, to any given list.

And remember to write good ads! See: 10 Steps to Writing Traffic Generating Ads

Your final ads don’t have to be as long, just try to cover all the steps.
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Pay Per Click

Pay Per Click Advertising

Pay Per Click (PPC) Advertising is where you create a simple 1-3 line ad and then you pay a click fee everytime someone clicks on your ad. The amount you have to pay varies.

What you do is bid on keywords, and if your bid is a winner you get an ad placement. Lots of different things effect the final bid amount you will pay. For example, if you create an ad that has the keyword ‘free advertising’ and you set the bid on that keyword to 35 cents, if a lot of others are bidding 1 dollar for that keyword, your ad will not be placed. If it is placed, it is ranked 2-3 pages out. In other words, your ad will go towards the bottom with the other low bidders.

If there is not a lot of competition for the keywords you choose, then your ad will get top placement at a lower click cost.

It’s all about keywords, which ones cost and which ones are cheaper. Which ones are competitive and which ones have not been exploited. If the cost is of no concern…you can use this to instantly get thousands of visitors to your site – literally in a few hours.


One of the greatest things about this type of advertising is that once you set up your campaigns, they run 24 and 7…unlike email advertising that requires a little more interaction on your part.

PPC ads are one of the best ways to guarantee you will get traffic…it will just be a matter of how much it will cost you. I have a few tips here to help you reduce the cost.

See: Pay Per Click – Tips to Keeping Costs Low
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Traffic Exchanges

Traffic Exchanges are sites where you get credits for viewing other websites. You can then use your credits to get views to your website. This is a very time consuming way to get traffic. You literally have to spend hours to gain enough credits to even make a dent. The goal here is to only surf about 1 hour a day, and surf 5-10, no more, no less. Less than 5 and you will be waiting for the timers to expire. More than 10 and your efforts will be spread too thin.

Use a tabbed browser like FireFox and set it up so that all your Traffic Exchanges come up in tabs. Then you can use the ctrl+tab to go from one tab to the next, and then click on the image required. Do this for about an hour a day.

Try to promote your traffic exchange’s referral links so that you will acquire a downline. Having a downline in these traffic exchange programs is great, because others will be surfing and you will get credits for their surfing efforts. You then would not have to surf nearly as much.

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Free Classifieds

Have you seen this ad…

I’m answering the ad you posted the other day. If you’d like to speak with me about this reply, I can be contacted at the number below. I am really looking forward to our chat.

I know you’re very busy, but there is something you need to know about your ad and it’s very important. See, I used to post these same ads a while ago myself. I did it for 14 hours a day, 7 days a week. I did it for 5 months straight. Believe it or not, I didn’t make one DIME from those ads. Trust me, you won’t either. Nobody sees them.

I have received that ad so many times, and every time I see it I think…don’t they ever get tired of using that same ad? I do get tired of seeing it, and have learned to quickly identify it and hit delete.

They use that tactic to imply that free classified ads don’t work. My suggestion to this form of advertising is…use free classifieds, but don’t just use free classifieds. If it is your only way of advertising, then you probably won’t go very far very fast. That said, I have received sales, and signups by using free classifieds…so they do work just not as good as email marketing or PPC.

I have a list of 11 that I submit to about once a week, and it takes about 20-30 minutes. So for the small amount of time it takes…it is worth it.
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Free For Alls (FFAs)

FFAs have been around for quite a while and are still in abundance. That alone tells me that people still use them, and still want them. I think that they may be loosing their significance to social bookmarking sites(which to me is FFA with a twist).

The term FFA is somewhat an illusion or mixed up with other concepts in internet marketing. Concepts like safelists, banner exchanges, link exchanges, etc…

What I mean is that sometimes a safelist site is calling itself an FFA. That is OK since Free For All can be applied to any site that offers it’s services for free, or has, at least, a set of free services intermingled with a set of paid services.

For this writing the term FFA will apply to mostly link exchanges, since that is how they started out.

When you are first starting out, I recommend that you pick out a few of these sites, and put your link out there. Let’s face it, until your site naturally gets top Google ranking, you will need all the linking to your site you can get. If you only get a few hits from this, that is OK. You’re just beginning and the more the merrier.

This approach to advertising is not much different than the classified ads approach. Again, just don’t spend your entire day doing this. If it only takes a short while…do it.

One last thing to say about this form of online advertising. If it is within your power to create one of these FFA sites, then, by all means, do it. There are tons of free FFA resources out there, and many are very easy to set up. You can easily register a new domain and setup the website, then install the FFA script(which really isn’t much), and you are on your way to selling the shovel. I can help you set that up if you like…for a fee of course!

FFA’s are really the greatest benefit to it’s owner. The owner gets to send ads to all members of the FFA.

See: FFAs, Useful or Waste of Time?

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Blogs

The wave of the future…or is it the wave of the now. Now I think! Write a blog or three. Keep them updated regularly(daily if you can). For every blog that you write…put your name at the bottom and your company URL below it. People will click over to check out your business. Be careful to abide by the rules of the blog site. An Example…WordPress.com will not allow you to advertise on their .com site, but they do provide a wordpress component that you can install on your website. Then you can advertise all you want!

IMPORTANT NOTE: Don't get discouraged.  You will find
that when working with companies other than your own
that they have rules.  Most of us don't read the rules
until we get in trouble for breaking one of them.

When we do...we are quick to start dogging the
company.  Wordpress will take down your blog if you
advertise your business, and that is their right and
their rule.  There are ways around it, so don't stress
on it.  Don't give them the power to upset you.  The
less you have to rely on other companies to market
your business, the better off you will be.  And you
can do much more with your own website, and your
efforts will be focused on your domain name not
theirs.

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Articles

Article advertising is a lot like blogging with a few subtle differences. Blog is short for web log, and a log is a cronoligical set of events. An article on the other hand is an attempt to relay specific information on a single topic, or to solve a problem of some kind.

Using Articles as a means for advertising is a great way to establish your business. You can write many helpful articles about your business and related topics, and you will generate continuous traffic that you won’t have to spend any further time on. It is simply there living on the internet, and that is a goldmine. Like the blogs, at the bottom of your article put your link to your business, and your name. The more informative information you write, the more you brand yourself and your business as an authority in that area.

TIP: After you write your article, submit to 50-100
article posting sites.  There is a tool called Article
Submitter that greatly reduces the amount of time to
do this by eliminating 90% of the cut and paste effort
and steps you through 100+ article sites.  I only
submit to about 50, but you can choose more.  It's up
to you.

Here is a link to the Article Submitter!

The more Articles you publish, the more residual, self-sustaining, traffic you create.
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E-Zines (Solo-Ads)

E-Zines are good for sending solo-ads. Use them but only send to the E-Zines with the largest subscriber base. The cost of sending varies greatly depending on popularity, subscriber base, and how many times they will run your ad.

The click through rate is better with solo ads in e-zines than it is with regular email because the subscribers asked specifically for information from the e-zine. It automatically makes anything coming from that company more important to the subscriber.

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Search Engines

Search Engine Advertising is best described as Search Engine Optimization (SEO). I’m sure you have at least seen SEO or heard about it. The short of it is this, search engines have a very specific way of looking at your site, and grading it. What you have to do is to make your site search engine friendly, and if you do, you get better rankings when people search for the terms you supply. Better rankings means more clicks. The goal is to get #1 on Google or Yahoo. If you get to that you are doing really good. That will generate tons of traffic for your business.

There is a lot to cover where SEO is concerned. There is also a ton of information on the internet about SEO. Make it a point to read up on it as much as possible to fully understand what you have to do to your website in order to climb the rank ladder to the #1 position. Even if you don’t get to #1 right away, try to get on page 1 or 2. That is pretty good and will be just as rewarding…at least where traffic is concerned.

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Social Bookmarking

Social bookmarking is roughly the equilivent to link-exchanges. They differ in that you don’t have to put their link on your site, so it becomes a one way link to your website, and that is good according to the search engines. Some of them also want you to enter your thoughts about the link you are submitting, so as to, describe what you have found.

Every time you write a new article or create a new webpage with content…submit that link to the social bookmarking sites. Your search engine rankings will soar, literally within hours.

The search engines seem to favor these sites at least a couple that I know of for sure…such as Digg and Propeller. They get favored by Google I think.

See: Bookmark Generator Tool

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Thanks for reading my article, and please leave comments!

***Check out all our resources at TheSellerDoor.com! ***

Rick Brown
TheSellerDoor.com

  • 25 Oct 2008
  • Posted by eyeofatear

Getting traffic and keeping traffic are two very different things. Getting traffic is fairly easy, keeping it not so easy. What I mean by keeping traffic is…simply getting them to come back. That means they must have a reason to return to your site. This idea of returning visitors is one of the top advertising objectives, and you should be thinking about it.

Having a product that requires replenishable items is good, and having a service that people come back to in order to use it is good too.  Having regular, returning customers is an essential part of any business.

Examples of this: a car needs fuel, toys need batteries, air-fresheners need refills. Get the idea? A reason to return to the store for something.


The internet is a little different, but not much. If you provide a service that people will frequently need you will have return customers. If your membership requires members to login at least once a week for some reason, you will have returning customers. If your site has a useful resource, people will bookmark it and return.

In the internet world, the best way to ensure that users will come back is to require membership. Paid memberships are even better but not necessary. If you have to pay for membership, you will want to get your money’s worth, right? The idea is that you have to come in (login) to see what’s going on inside, and in that case, you are a returning customer. Logging in is the equivalent to using your membership card at a video store.

Memberships are a more reliable form of getting people to return, but another way is to simply have good content that people will want to bookmark.


Useful content on your website could be anything from an informative article to a list of items. Or perhaps a tool that is useful to some daily activity. The idea is to provide your visitors with something that IS something to them. If you do that, you will have created a returning visitor to your site. If you do not, you will always be marketing to new users, and that simply will not make you successful in the internet business.

Keep your site content useful, and current, and require a login if possible in order to do stuff like post comments, or to view valuable information. Whatever you do, keep this in mind…you MUST have returning visitors to your site if you plan on being successful in the long run.

Thanks for reading my article!

Rick Brown
thesellerdoor.com


  • 15 Oct 2008
  • Posted by maggiemcgill

 Advertising Your website doesn’t have to be expensive – In fact, it can be Free.

Here are just five ways to bring traffic to your site at No cost to you.

1. Articles: Write and submit articles to Ezines Blog spots and other websites that allow article submission.Include your Web Address and business information at the end of each article.

2. Social Bookmarking: After writing a new article, make sure to post the link on a few social bookmarking sites such as Digg, Propeller, Reddit or others. This lets people know that you have posted a new article.

3. Message Boards and Forums: Participate in online message boards and forums. Answer questions-Ask question. Get involved in some discussions. Link your web address to your signature at the end of each post.

4. SafeLists & Opt ins: There are many safelists and opt in lists available to you. Many limit how many messages that a free member can send but there are some that use a credit system. You earn credits and use those credits to send more messages. Safelists are still a very effective way to reach potential customers.

5. Free Classifieds: Post your Ads to free advertising sites, free classified sites and Bulletin boards. Classified Ads bring in more traffic than you might think. Use many free ad sites-after all, the more places you post your link, the better for your traffic flow.

 I’m sure I have overlooked Many other methods of free advertising. So please comment. We are all always looking for good ideas. Thank You.


  • 20 Sep 2008
  • Posted by eyeofatear

One of many ways to advertise on the internet.

by Ricky Brown

FFA AKA ‘Free For All’. What does that mean because I always have to pay for their service. There are some that are free to use and then if you want their really cool stuff you have to become a professional member.

Imagine a group of like minded individuals signing up for a service that will give them the ability to send out email ads to all of the like minded persons who have signed up. Well that is both good and bad. You want to market your product or service to those that will ultimately buy. If the intent, of a person signing up, is to gain knowledge of new products and services (our hopeful prospects) then, it is to our benefit to sign up too. Right? That is usually not the case. The person who signs up for an FFA program is wanting the same thing you want; more traffic to his or her website, or to push out an advert to it’s safe list.

Most FFA have provisions for different types of advertising, of which the two most common are safe lists and banner ads. The safe list is the FFAs primary selling point…Send Your Ad to ‘Some Number Here’ of opt in members. The problem with that is once you send that ad, you have managed to fill your inbox with auto-reply email ads, and your ad is most likely sitting in the junk email
folder of the recipients.

Now, only a small percentage, will be so bold to assume that you wanted to receive a bounced advertisement, but what happens to the rest (those recipients that did not have an auto-reply set up). For those, again, your ad is most likely filtered into a ‘don’t bother with’ folder or automatically deleted. The majority simply does not care about your endeavors to acquire them as a lead. So what’s the point? You will actually get a small percentage (lets assume ten percent of the whole for the sake of this article) of members will actually read your ad; Hmmm, that is just enough to be of some interest. I’ll talk more about that later.
Banner ads are another FFA possibility. You are usually allowed to place a banner ad or two on the FFA site, and the banner ad can be whatever you want. Now, the problem still is that the banner ads are, most likely, only going to be seen by users of the FFA site. The use of banner ads on FFA sites may be more effective than the safe lists.

So, is it useful? Well, sure it is…to a degree. Supposing your ad can reach ten percent of the whole then, that can be useful in a tremendous way. For most people, however, it is never realized because the content of the ad is lacking. In other words, once you get through the masses and have the attention of a potential customer, you instantly turn them off by a poorly written ad, or you shame them with your kindness by offering them the opportunity of a lifetime for your humble fee. LOL Sorry, I’m really trying to stay focused. The point I am trying to make is simple…try a more indirect approach to capture your audience. Get them to want…stop. Think about that! GET THEM TO WANT. Your ads should leave your prospects wanting what you are selling.

For Example (What would you do with this?):

Subject: Earn 10,000 in 3 days.
Body: Irresistible Link Goes Here

Done…that’s it…I have seen so many of these
pointless ads.

Well, what would you do with that? Delete it immediately. But why? The answer to that is simple, this ad only leaves me wanting to delete it. There is nothing useful in the ad at all. Even if I were so naive, there are so many ads like that to choose from, why would I choose this one? I would go eeny meeny miney mo if I were going to try out the absurd.

SO YOU CAN FORGET ABOUT YOUR TEN PERCENT!
You had your chance and muffed it. That’s all. You’re done! And your email
address has likely been placed on a ‘do not disturb’ list.


But, if you took a different approach and actually gave the reader something (e.g. leave them wanting). You have successfully acquired a lead. Once you have acquired your lead, keep in mind that at this point that is all it is, a lead. You have to do some follow through. I will talk about that in another article. For now the question of are FFAs useful, well sure, if your ads are useful.

Another way FFAs can be useful are the banner ads. Like I mentioned above, I think they are more useful than email ads simply because it is not an email that the members can delete without even looking at. It is right there, in their face, when they log in to do their business. Also, it provides a means of back-linking to your site. That process of back-linking is probably more valuable overall than the rest put together. The more links you have TO your site the better your business will do. I emphasized TO because two way link exchanges can hurt more than they help. You’ve been warned. However, one way links are good.

FFAs can be useful when used appropriately. If your goal is to acquire traffic to your site by means of email advertising through safe lists, then it is in your best interest to learn how to generate desire in your potential leads and ultimately convert them into paying customers. So if you decide to use an FFA, remember… Set your back-link banner, generate quality ads, and convert that ten percent into customers. Most FFA provide tools that can be leveraged to dramatically increase your success in writing good ads. If they don’t provide it, the internet does. There are countless books and articles on writing good ads that will leave your lead wanting to know more about what you have to offer. Not to mention that learning the art of writing good ads and articles is required learning if you want to always be able to generate an income with an internet based business.
Thanks for reading my article!

My name is Rick Brown. I have been successful at internet marketing and advertising for more than 5 years now. I’ve tried a lot of programs,and I know what works and what doesn’t. And better, what costs money and what is free. There is money to be made, but it requires effort and initiative on your part.

Currently, me and my partner Maggie McGill are making $200 per sale. If you are interested and want to learn more, We have a signup form at
More Information Signup Form.

Check out MassiveFFA! for 5,000+ leads you can send to daily!

Or, Business World List for 85,000+ leads you can send to every other day.

Good luck!