Free Traffic Blog

As a full-time internet marketer - use of time can get complicated if you don’t manage yourself.  Since there’s no boss to provide oversight, I have to be my own taskmaster.  One of the ways I keep myself efficient is outsourcing things that take a lot of time to do well that I don’t have to do myself. Here’s my list of the top four things a full-time internet marketer should never have time for.

1. I don’t think a full-time internet marketer should waste time trying to create lots of blogs by hand.  I think you should have 1000 blogs but imagine trying to make all that by hand. I have over 1000 blogs and I can create more and post to all of them with a few clicks of a mouse. The tool for that is Blogger Generator.

2. Writing articles.  I don’t have time to write ten great articles for every website I promote, plus writing fresh ones each month for the same sites.  Content creation is great to outsource because there are fantastic writers in emerging economies that can write them for you.  There are lots of freelancing sites but I prefer to use RentACoder.

3. Submitting articles.  If you paid attention to #2, you’ll recognize that I deal with a crapload of articles constantly. It’s not efficient to spend all week submitting one article to 5,000 directories, which is why I outsource my submissions to the ever popular and totally powerful Article Marketer.

4. Directory submissions.  Directories are still great for building keyword-rich backlinks to your site to rank well on Google.  I outsource lately to a guy who goes by the name of Kulwinder at the Digital Point forum, but there are lots of other sources for this kind of work. I’ve yet to find a program that completely automates submissions. A lot automate the form filling, but if anybody knows of a program that will complete the submissions all by itself let me know.

So I’ve found my Video Epidemic training guide being shared twice on Rapid share now. It’s kind of flattering that people would like your work well enough to share it with others (pirate it).

I’m all for the sharing of information freely. Whoever obtained a copy freely, I hope they benefit from it. I didn’t invent anything I wrote about, I just organized and compiled it. That’s all a digital training guide can be.

Here’s how to proceed on Rapid Share when your stuff gets shared:

"If you believe that your intellectual property rights have been infringed upon by one of our users, please contact us by sending an e-mail to abuse@rapidshare.com .

Please note that we will only process complaints that meet the following requirements:

• Please provide us with your name, address and telephone number.
• Please describe the copyrighted work that is affected.
• Describe the exact location of the infringing file by providing us with the exact RapidShare link (example: http://rapidshare.com/files/123456/example.jpg).
• Add the web address under which the link has been published.

If your request applies to more than one RapidShare link please make sure that all links are complete.
Do not send attachments. Include the illegal file links directly in your message.

Please make sure you can receive messages on the e-mail address from which you contact us.

Anonymous or incomplete messages will not be processed. Thank you for your understanding."

I’ve contacted them twice now. They responded well, I’m sure they’re used to this sort of thing.

Here is somebody I’d like to introduce you to. He is a successful person in many ways and there is a lot to learn from him.

1. The Rich Jerk

He still is and possibly always will be, the best internet marketer. As a friend on the rich jerk forum recently wrote:

“There is a reason RJ will likely be the #1 affiliate for yet another monstrous product launch, namely, Mass Control.

I can’t say for certain, but I am willing to bet anything that he gets the highest conversions by a landslide.

Here’s why:

1.) Copy - Bar none, the greatest, most entertaining emails you’ll read

2.) He only promotes the really BIG stuff.

3.) His Bonuses: If I understand correctly, he’s going to be giving away a copy of his soon to be released software to those that buy Mass Control from his link? Ok, right now I’m telling you that if I buy Mass Control, I’m buying it from him. (and I don’t even know what the software does yet)

4.) He’s RJ

5.) His followers are faithful. You either love him, or you hate him. Most atleast admire his marketing. So, we generally trust what he promotes.

6.) Half of everyone in the IM world got started with the Rich Jerk’s guide to making money on the internet. For some reason, we tend to stick with those that originally got us started, and there’s no doubt RJ is in many respects a pioneer.

So, I’m not trying to brown nose, I’m just pointing out that RJ’s the man, and will be for a long time.”

I got quite a response from my last post talking about how I liked StatCounter better than HitTail. Right now I’m giving props to Mike Levin, creator of Hit Tail for taking the time to contact me personally. Here is the content of the email he sent me:

With all due respect, the $10/mo covers up to 125 sites. In fact, the
fully free (pricing link on my name) product supports up to 5 sites
per registration.

Regarding it not collecting data, did you contact us? We are usually
very responsive–right to the point of monitoring customer satisfaction
on the Internet at large, so we can step in and help users who are
having difficulty.

Regards,

Mike Levin
Creator of HitTail

What’s not to admire about a guy that cares enough about customer satisfaction to contact a small blog owner to try and satisfy him with his service? The answer: nothing.

Am I going to go back to try to use HitTail again? Not right now, I’m still a bit of a “stubborn old jackass” when it comes to changing my system. I’m all set up with StatCounter again and I don’t REALLY want to go back through my sites again and change stuff up. But where will I look first when I want to change? HitTail.

So how do I make money online?  Lots of people are asking that, and all of them seem to have the same illusion that somehow all of us webmasters are like a mafia that makes bank by surfing the net and they all want in on it.  Is there an online mafia?  Sort of, they’re called “gurus” and are both worshipped and hated all over the world. Hated by the jealous, worshipped by the newbies, and understood by the experienced.

What do I mean by “understood” ?  I mean that the gurus don’t really have some top secret thing that they are actually going to sell you.  What they sell are different versions of basically the same business model that goes something like this: find a niche, get traffic from that niche, build a list of people in that niche, offer products to your list.

There’s no secret to the basic model.  People offer different tactics but most of them all look to that same strategy.  Sometimes the product is to get you to click on an Adsense ad, sometimes it’s to fill out a form for a CPA offer, and sometimes it’s to fork out your credit card and pay for something you didn’t know you needed until now.

What pays the best though?  I don’t have an ecommerce stores, but I’ve seen lots of those fail miserably.  Lots of them them boom though, so there’s potential there.  Can you make huge money with affiliate marketing? Yes, you can. But you gotta pretty much have your system already established, and NOT blab about it to anybody.  What about services? I like services.  The only real cost is getting customers.  The pay is assured and you know you’re getting paid for your time.

The drawback is time.  I would definitely prefer to have an automated dropshipping store online, but that’s not my style.  Doing SEO work under contract is what I enjoy, it’s tough to say I’d rather be selling digital cameras and ipods on autopilot than researching, tweaking, and working the way I do.

For now, I make money online for all of my time. The goal for 2008 is to make a lot more of it, and invest the profits into building the automated systems that bring in the big dough.

So I wasted about two minutes of my life away reading an article entitled “SEO is Dead” by Julian Adams.  The article had no basis for its claims and was more of a rant than any actual analysis or prediction. The author called all SEOs keyword spammers and claimed that all tactics were deceptive and said that everybody would be better off if there was no SEO.  As I read it I thought, “nobody is going to respect this author, because all this article does is whine, bitch, and complain.”

I’m calling you out Julian.

Here are a few reasons why SEO is great.

1) Ethical SEO practices enable new businesses to reach people who are searching for their services or products.  I SEO for a family business that is extremely profitable now, but hardly made any money before the company website had any SEO.

2) SEO is like a check and balance on the “power” of the search engines.  If we let the search engine companies have all the power is ranking, personal bias leaks through. It is impossible to be 100% objective when making judgement calls because everybody has bias. The ability to work to deserve a higher ranking displaces the authority of search engine companies.

3) The author accused SEOs of allowing companies to just “buy their way to the top”.  Um…all search engines do that anyway with paid search listings.  People who are interested in meeting their target market without “buying” their way to the top use SEO, even though there are costs for SEO services.  Natural search rankings can either be given by chance or by design. SEO services allow it to happen by design.

Anyway, SEO services are great and do a lot of good for both customers and companies.  Like all things in life, the system can be abused, but whining about it and concluding that “everybody would be better off if SEO was dead” doesn’t solve that problem and only makes you look like a little kid who cries because he’s too little to play on the high school football team. “Everybody would be better off if the football team was dead!”  I can hear that little boy crying now, exploding with jealousy of those who are able to run plays on the gridiron while all he can do is watch.

So my web site rocks one day and sucks the next, then rocks again. It really is tough to know whether this free traffic website has Google’s “divine” approval or not. I understand full and well how a site should be optimized to become more Google friendly, but it really pisses me off when this site bounces between the top 20 site for the phrase “free traffic” one day then the next ranks #857 for the same phrase.

In this situation, Google is a lot like a neurotic girlfriend. Did you ever have one of those? (or boyfriend…) It’s like today they love you and tomorrow they don’t give a damn about you. It’s a tough situation to be in because you’re a imprisoned in the relationship. You want in, but you don’t know if you qualify. You’re stuck in limbo, watching, andwaiting. It’s more irritating than the chirping birds that eat the box elder bugs in the tree in my back yard (one day I’m going to shoot them all…)

So what is a guy to do? Well, I update, I build links, I re-examine my site’s structure and content. It’s like in the cruddy relationship where you do all kinds of cross-examining of yourself trying to find the defect that’s messing things up.

But I think, in this case, just as in a neurotic dating relationship, the fault is with Google and not with my site. My site is playing clean ball, no cloaking, no automated content generation, no doorway pages, nothing that should give Google a reason to distrust my site. The relationship brings so many benefits, however, that it’s worth hanging in there a while longer. I can always try to seduce a little Yahoo or MSN love, but in the end, not even the both of them combined give the benefits of being Google’s favorite.

So for now, Google, we’re still together. Thanks for all you do for me, but let’s try to open up a little communication or something babe.

Man I am so sick and tired of hearing about “bum marketing” and all these lies that “all you have to do is submit a bunch of articles about your niche with your link and you’ll start making sales…” Do sales happen from traffic that articles bring? Yes, I’m not saying people won’t buy anything if they came to your site via an article. What I am contesting, however, is the idea that it will bring thousands of targeted visitors desperate to buy from your website.

Just to get one thing clear, I think any traffic from articles is just a bonus. I write articles purely to get more keyword-rich backlinks to my site, which is why I use Article Marketer to submit and distribute my articles. I’m interested in speed and quantity. Quality happens when the article is written, so that’s not the issue here.

Everybody knows that the author box is where you stick an ad for the site you’re promoting right? And according to outdated marketing methods, these articles will bring you lots of free traffic. That’s not really the case, but here are a few tips to get a lot MORE out of your article marketing.

#1) Make the title of your article match almost exactly a commonly searched long-tail phrase.

Not really black hat, but it changes the motive behind your “creative writing”. Use a keyword tool like WordTracker to find a really long keyword phrase and then make that keyword phrase the title of your article. You may just take the #1 spot once you get your article into ezinearticles.com

#2) This is the big one. Put the conclusion of your article inside the author’s box, not the body of the article.

Have you ever noticed that there’s no seperation between the author’s box and the article body when you article appears on ezinearticles.com ? Take advantage of that. Make your conclusion a really short paragraph of it’s own, and include a keyword text link there, making it look like you are linking to an authority site that isn’t yours.

Be sure to include a second paragraph with links as your “author’s box” though so the paragraph with the keyword link looks like EzineArticles approved your link to an “authority” site. You’ll get way more visitors that way because people won’t see your link as an advertisement!

Happy New Year to everybody out there! I wish you all prosperity, health, wealth, and happiness!

-Tyler Ellison

So I was having some serious issues with my last hosting provider.  Ipowerweb is not officially blacklisted as far as I’m concerned.  I’d been having problems with them for a long time and their support is friendly and does their best but my issue is with their actual servers, not the service.  I think their machines are overextended and they have no business selling more hosting because things on my site seemed to work one day and the next day they wouldn’t.

I’m OK with starting over though. This will be a fresh start for my blog for 2008.  I have some big plans for the coming year.

1. No more scraped articles.  I’d been using this blog to simply post articles I got from other places - articles that were GOOD, not automatically posted or anything like that. I won’t do that anymore, however. From now on, this blog will only have 100% original stuff from me.

2. I won’t be posting tons of ads to programs like I was before. I was experimenting with stuff and didn’t really give this blog the attention it deserves. I plan to make this a resource worth bookmarking.

3. More videos. Video blogging is the wave of the future, and I’ve decided to embrace it. There will definitely be more videos on this blog. All will be hand picked for quality so only the best stuff will show up here.

So with that being said, I’ll go back to work to customizing this bad boy.