Nick’s Traffic Tricks

Deciding where to host your domain is an important decision.

There are a vast number of hosting providers out there and some are better than others.

A couple years ago I made the mistake of going with a discount host that was not well known. I saved a few bucks and received a major headache.

My service with them was fine for few months but then they started having problems. My website would be unavailable for several hours a day for no apparent reason. It would simply give an error with a white background. After a few hours it would magically be fixed and my site would come back up as if it had never had problems.

After two days of this I was furious. I went to the host’s homepage looking for the company’s phone number. I was going to give them a piece of my mind. Imagine my anger when I found their homepage to be replaced with an error with a white background.

Their problems were serious.

I did a whois search on the host and found their corporate phone number. I called the number and navigated their phone menu (I hate those stupid menus) only to get voice mail.

I called back and tried every possible menu option only to get voice mail every time. It seemed the entire company was on an extended vacation.

This insanity lasted a week. The host had not returned my numerous phone calls or replied to my emails. I was in my final year of college and money was tight but I had to switch hosting providers. The money I had spent for a year’s worth of hosting was gone; there was no getting it back from people who wouldn’t answer their phones.

I switched to GoDaddy for hosting and have never looked back.

I have decided not to mention the name of the crappy host I had. I hope they have improved their service in the last couple years. I recently checked their home page and I don’t see any problems, which is a good sign.

I recommend GoDaddy for hosting. Their prices are competitive and service is reliable.

For your first domain the cheapest hosting will work fine - about $3.99 a month.

Checkout GoDaddy

With the inception of web 2.0, a lot of marketers geared up for a whole new way of marketing. The audience was, after all, sitting there and identifying their interests through groups they would join. Savvy marketers had to make a few minor adjustments and they could access a pre-identified target market.

On MySpace, for instance, a number of “add a friend” automated programs appeared so that a group of people could be identified as having an interest in your product and messages sent out to all the thousands of friends that the automated program added to your MySpace profile.

This was about as close to perfect as could be for marketers. After all, the money is in the list.

Facebook had similar vulnerabilities that allowed people to seek out friends, to use the term loosely, based on their identified interests.

On Squidoo, the iframe tag that was part of the html function of the text module allowed marketers to include links and marketing techniques that pulled their message into the Squidoo world.

These web 2.0 sites tightened up their security, adding in features that required human intervention. Squidoo simply deleted the iframe capability.

The clampdowns have had a twofold impact. One is that the social networking sites’ efforts to block marketers from essentially spamming users has endeared these sites to people who appreciate the protection offered by the social networks. The clampdown is typically viewed by users as a pro-user effort.

This means that marketers, even the good white hat ones, who might have used the social networking sites as places for easy targeting of a new market segment, have the fallout of being viewed as annoying.

While this was not the intention, all marketers fall into the “them” aspect of the we-them dyad created when the social networks set up ways to protect their users.

A second factor is that, as Google recently noted, “social-networking inventory is not monetizing as well as expected.”

Google made a $900 million ad deal with MySpace a year and half ago. It backfired, to be blunt about it. Users go to the social networks to get away from the old ad-driven world. Already jaundiced by the experience of being added as friends and deluged with unwanted ads, users of social networks seem to reject ads in general. They go to these social sites to escape from the pressures of commerce.

There is a saying in carpentry that you measure twice and cut once. This is the essence of success in just about everything we do. We need to plan ahead. You can easily wreck your own marketing campaign if you just wing it.

It is entirely too easy to assume that because the web is so forgiving that you don’t have to plan ahead. If you put up a website and notice a typo or think the header graphic isn’t just quite right, you can just make the corrections and changes and upload the new improved site.

Marketing is a little different. You are sending the words out to the world and if you are not careful, the wrong message can be out there floating virally around and doing your whole marketing efforts a lot of damage.

I have heard horror stories of people who decide to use a pay per click approach and like some sort of gambler, keep pushing the same keywords and losing their entire budget until they are maxed out on their credit cards.

Or even worse, decide that some keywords will draw more traffic because they are more popular even though those keywords are not related to your website or only peripherally related.

Another dangerous marketing approach is to follow one of those famous blueprints that just don’t fit your topic.

The point of what I am trying to tell you is that there are many ways to implement marketing and even more ways to mess up the implementation. We get caught up in tweaking and testing our marketing campaigns but by this time, we are already likely in the middle of the campaign.

Sit down, look at your budget, list three marketing approaches and start with one. If it is article marketing, lay out the steps you need to take and drive yourself to complete the steps. Implement that plan and then move to the next approach and repeat the process.

Be sure to look at each step and ask yourself the question – “what will this accomplish in my marketing plan?” Write down the answers and keep coming back to check on the plan. Are the stated goals of that plan being met?

Do not wreck your own work because you are too impatient to plan. Otherwise you are like the person who leaves reading the manual until after their project is wrecked beyond repair. Do not wait until all else fails before you think about your plan.

For many people, getting into an online business is something that they have no experience with. What they do is seek advice from the experts and then try to implement the advice. However, like any recipe, there are a number of ingredients. If you want to generate traffic, then you have to absorb the advice, make a list of the tasks involved and only do the ones that you know well.

TOP MISTAKE: Doing it all yourself

This is a top traffic mistake that marketers make. They do everything themselves. It would be cruel to show you some examples but I know you have seen the results yourself. The content might be great but the website looks like a child created it. The graphics look dreadful. The whole thing looks amateurish.

TOP MISTAKE: Being boring

Going back to the content is king rule, many marketers grab all the content they can whether they hire someone to write it or write it themselves. They pound the content into their website. But – in a rush, they did not do research on value added information or they did not consider what the target market really wants to know. If I go to a website on my favorite topic and the first thing I see is a weak article about the topic and it is all generalities without any substance, I am going to yawn and click away.

Even if it has all been said already about your topic, find a way to make the presentation of the information exciting. Pull out some interesting facts and put them in headlines or boxes. Dress it up.

Marketers have a tendency – well some of them do – to find keywords and then see what the competition is doing and do the same thing. Boooooring. Don’t look at the competition. Look at the target market.

TOP MISTAKE: Being impatient

Most of the things we buy online have a lot of hype (but hype is good from the marketer’s perspective). The headlines often have allusions to how someone went from rags to riches in 30 days.

The catch here is like the stories of overnight successes that actors have. In reality, they often work the business for years before the right combination of role and actor clicks together and suddenly they are a household word.

It’s the same for internet marketing. You might have to try and try and try again before you click with the focus that works for you. But it is a very common mistake that marketers make.

They buy into the hype and follow the blueprint and at the end of 30 days (90 days, six months, whatever the latest success story is) they think that the fault is with the plan. So what do they do? Grab the next hyped up success story and start all over again.

And again and again.

Internet marketing is a business and it needs time to grow. Your overnight success might be just a few weeks away and you give up.

Tidying up my hard drive was an experience. Not just the hundreds – maybe thousands – of files generated over the past couple of years but also the incredible numbers of downloaded ebooks and free articles on generating traffic.

It made me think about traffic generators and how we all struggle to get to the top of the dog pile. Oh wait, bad choice – Dogpile being a search engine. Great name. But I digress. The struggle is to get to the top of the search engines. Hmm, getting to the top of the dog pile might be an appropriate reference after all.

There is a lesson to be learned in the Dogpile/Google comparison. Google became so popular that the word has been absorbed into the vernacular and even in movies and on television, actors say things like, “I googled that.” No one ever says, “I dogpiled that.” Or if they did, an entirely different connotation is conjured.

Every one of the ebooks and articles on my hard drive are on thousands of other hard drives. Every one of these bits of wisdom has been read (or at least available to be read) by all my competitors.

Imagine 1,000 marketers all implementing the same techniques according to the information in these ebooks. All our materials will be created equally so which one of us races to the top of Google first?

How do you get to stand out from the crowd? There are three immediate ways that come to mind that will make your efforts the better traffic generator:

• Absorb the information you read and before implementing the technique, think about it and think about added value. How can you take it one step farther than everyone else who is reading the same advice?For instance, when you hear that content is king, don’t just stuff your site with blather and think that you have content. Give your reader real meat not warmed over spun versions of weak badly written articles.
• Be original. When you read the advice, much of it comes from gurus and gurus in the making who are into selling tools and techniques on internet marketing. Being human, we try to pattern ourselves after winners. But what happens when we pattern ourselves after the advice of internet marketers? Oops, we try to be internet marketing gurus ourselves.While we have to understand how to market in the internet, what we are trying to market should be our personal area of expertise or interest. Putting it another way, what we need to take from the advice is how to sell online not how to sell internet marketing online.
• The third way is to actually read the advice that you have stashed on your hard drive.Seriously, how many of those ebooks have you really read? Or did you skim the headlines and set it aside for when you have time?

I was over at Squidoo and checking out how to put a banner in a text module and it struck me – banners are back. In the early days of internet marketing, banners were the biggest and best way to advertise your website. They were the crème de la crème of traffic generators.

People paid good money to have their banners on top web sites in those days. Part of the excitement of banners was that once the web was released from the limitations of text only, browsed via a program like Lynx, the text-only browser, graphics were easy to install and a refreshing change from plain old text.

The first clickable banner appeared in 1993. It was created by Global Network Navigator (GNN) which was the first web publication to be commercially supported. Of course, at that time there were only about 500 web sites in the entire world.

Banner advertisements were simple jpeg images for the most part. With the simple early HTML, it was easy to make a banner clickable. Banners tended to be wide and short so that they could easily fit across the top of a web page. Given the low resolution available on the early-90s monitors, 640 pixels was a good standard width for a banner.

Advertising with graphics had previously been limited to magazines and newsletters with the money to spend on designing and printing attractive graphically appealing ads. With the advent of technology, anyone with access to a graphics program could create an advertising banner and pop it up on his website. (Yes, the majority of the early webmasters were male.)

Of course, artistic ability is not a universal trait. In the old print days, a graphic artist would be the one designing ads for print. With the web, the person only needed access to a program that could produce graphics. Microsoft’s Paint came with Windows so anyone who had a Windows-based operating system on their computer had the tools necessary to make a banner.

I don’t need to tell you what this meant. Yep, you got it. Some of those banners were incredibly ugly. When I think of banner ads, to this day I have visions of bright red and yellows glaring in banners that picked the eyes right out of your head.

For anyone following the emergence of technology and the speed of change in what’s hot and what’s not in the great wide world of web sites, the speed of change in design is dizzying. So imagine what happened to the simple clickable banner when JavaScript appeared. And then multimedia programs like Flash got into the act. Add a little sound and you have a truly frightening experience lying in wait.

In 2000, as the web matured, banner ads became passé. They were, well, so 90s.

When I saw Squidoo’s clickable banners, it struck me that as the web continues to mature, clever marketers could do a lot worse than take a look back at the benefits of banner ads as traffic generators. After all, Google Ads work beautifully and they have a kind of banner quality to them.

The way I see it, banner ads tastefully done (stay away from the optic nerve destroying reds and yellows in sharp contrast) could set your site apart from the west.

This is a guest post on “Making Tons Of Cash From A Whole Lotta Littles” by Steven Wagenheim. His site is: http://www.mysecretarticles.com

This is going to be a fairly long post, so grab yourself a brew, sit back and relax.

Over the years that I’ve been marketing online, and more specifically, over the years I’ve been successful doing it, I’ve noticed that many fellow marketers seem to be under the impression that to make a substantial income online, they have to come up with some killer be all and end all product or membership site and crank out an ungodly number of them each month.

This is certainly a doable process, and many here will tell you that their main income comes from a big selling product or service, but it’s not the only way to make a living online.

I make a very nice living on a regular basis. I have many months where I am in 5 figures for the month.

What might surprise people is that the money doesn’t come from one source. As a matter of fact, I don’t have any one particular source that brings me in more than $2,500 a month by itself.

Here is a breakdown of all the little irons of have floating around the Internet.

First, there is my very small affiliate marketing niche. I don’t promote a lot of products that aren’t my own, but I do have a few things that I do believe in and so I do actively promote them. My total income from all these affiliate products is about $1,500 a month. Now if all I did was affiliate marketing, that would be my entire income for the month.

Next, I have my first product that I ever created myself. That product is now exactly a year and a half old so it doesn’t make as many sales monthly as it used to. Still, I manage to make about $1,500 a month with that product. All it takes is about 30 sales a month, or one measly sale a day to pull that off.

Then, I have my second product that I ever created. It is only about 6 months old but doesn’t sell very well at all. Fortunately, because it is a higher end product, only 20 sales a month makes me close to $2,000 a month from it.

Then, I have my membership sites that I promote. I don’t really do a lot with these, but altogether I make about $1,000 a month from these.

Then I have my individual “cheapo” products. You know, the $7 ebooks, short reports, etc. They may be cheap in price but they are not cheap in content. I take a lot of pride in giving away a lot of value for very little. I have about 10 of these things floating around the Internet and try to come out with at least 1 new one each month. My monthly income from these ranges from $2,000 to $4,000 a month.

So my average monthly income, if you add all of this up…

Affiliate Products - $1,500
First Main Product - $1,500
Second Main Product - $2,000
Membership Sites - $1,000
Cheapo Products - $3,000 (on average)

Total - $9,000

My total advertising expenses for the month are under $300

I don’t do a lot of advertising. Truth is, I’m too lazy when it comes to advertising. I’d rather just create as much different content as I can and do as little promotion as I can for each. That way, I make enough from each little stream to keep the lights on and not drive myself crazy with the dull details of promotion.

Yes, I know that if I promoted more I could make more. But I’d rather have more new product out there that people haven’t seen than just pour more money into advertising stuff that’s been around for a while. My 2 main products, I spend exactly $0 on advertising expenses. Truth is, all my advertising expense goes towards my affiliate products because they are harder to sell.

Why?

Because I’m not the only one selling them, which is why I concentrate mostly on my own products. What few affiliates I have, and trust me they are few, bring me in a nice additional income. And they have an easy time doing it because they have no competition. My Clickbank gravity for both products is somewhere around 2 or 3 last I checked.

Point is, from doing a whole lot of little things, I am making more than enough to keep me happy.

Am I rich? No. Are there people making more than me? I should hope so. But I guarantee that they’re working a lot harder than me too, or they’re doing a ton of outsourcing, of which I do very little. My total outsourcing expenses monthly are about $50. But that $50 saves me about 24 hours of work.

There will be a number of people at this forum who will say that this business “plan” is so backwards, messed up, stupid, or whatever they want to call it, that it’s a miracle that I make any money at all. They’ll tell you that this is absolutely NOT the way to run a business, that you need to focus on ONE thing, create your funnel for it and so on and so on.

Well, like I said, you certainly can do things the “right” way. I’m not knocking it. And while you may agree with the “experts” that my business plan is cockeyed, I am living proof that you can make a decent living doing this.

And the great thing about it is, you don’t get bored. You’re doing so many different little things it’s just not possible to get bored.

No, this may not be for everybody. May not be for anybody but me. But it does work. I’ve got Camtasia videos up the wazoo that prove it works. My Clickbank videos alone look like the who’s who of Internet marketing. I’ve yet to seen screen prints on all those sales pages that have as many different sale amounts as mine. The reason is simple. These people are making all their money from selling one product. And like I said, there’s nothing wrong with that.

But then what happens when that one product goes south for the duration?

I just don’t like to put all my eggs in one basket.

Anyway, I don’t know if anybody got anything from any of this. I hope so. This post is intended to serve as an inspiration to those who think that the be successful you have to create some super duper product and get 6 JV partners to promote it for you.

There ARE other ways to make a nice living online.

This is a guest post on Are You “Willing” To Succeed? by Willie Crawford. His site is: TheInternetMarketingInnerCircle.com

I thought that I’d share an editorial that I ran in my ezine this morning. I wrote if after a number of conversations including conversations with some clients… but with a chat with a trusted advisor pushing me over the edge.

Given that the editorial is “edgy,” I do expect it to lead to some unsubscribes, but at the same time it will give some of those that I serve the nudge that they need… making it a success.

I’d love your feedback!

Here’s the “sanitized” editorial:

I started this morning out having a LONG talk with a trusted spiritual advisor. I called him because I woke up “agitated” and somewhat “frustrated!”

My conversation with my advisor centered around the fact that so MANY people come to me telling me that they want my help but then don’t USE it once it’s offered. So I end up spending a lot of time and resources working with people who simply WON’T do what they absolute have to do to build successful online businesses.

I actually feel much better after that long talk

My advisor/coach merely told me several things that I already knew. He reminded me that:

1) Success requires moving outside your comfort zone, and people naturally prefer remaining in their comfort zones. They do this because staying in your comfort zone DOES, at times, keep you safer. It’s an instinct that helps to ensure the long-term survival of the species.

I already knew that.

I learned long ago that “Successful people do things that unsuccessful people don’t like to do.” Those things are actually the same things that SUCCESSFUL people don’t like to do… often requiring stepping outside of their comfort zones… but they do them in-spite-of the discomfort.

I was reminded that people only change when the discomfort of NOT changing becomes greater than the expected discomfort of changing

2) Each person is ultimately responsible for their own success. They have to want it bad enough to decide to, and then actually take action.

That reminded me that while I can actually want your success MORE than you do, there is nothing that I can do about it. Since I can often see the possibilities better than the individual on the verge of success can sometimes see it, and because I can often see how CLOSE they are, I can actually feel more PAIN over their failure than they do.

3) Many people in many communities are destined to reach old-age living from paycheck to paycheck, and since I’m not God, I don’t have the ability to change that UNLESS they let me. That was a very powerful reminder. I don’t run the universe, and since we all have freedom of choice, I can’t MAKE another person choose success over failure.

That long talk with my advisor was just what I needed. It reaffirmed that I have held up my end of the bargain. I have actually reached out and helped many of those who are WILLING to be helped.

I’m still reaching out to YOU though.

I currently have over one-dozen projects that I’m actually looking to joint venture with people on. Many of these are longer-term business relationships, and I will find the right partners, but it’s not something that I’ll rush. Maybe you’re the right person for one of these… maybe not.

All of the people that I’m partnering with, coaching, and just getting to know better are people who have proven to me that they are willing to take responsibility for their own circumstances, rather than “playing the blame game”

My advisor reminded me that my own happiness and health hinge upon surrounding myself with the right people. Whether you acknowledge it or not, yours does too.

We all need to spend time periodically examining what we are doing… and asking why… and even examining if it’s working. maybe today is the day that you need to do that. Doing it certainly made me feel much better.

Willie

One of the most important lessons I have learned in life is “Don’t re-invent the wheel.”

The idea is simple: Don’t work really hard figuring something out when you could look at someone else who is really successful at this thing and do what they do.

If you want to play basketball like an NBA star then look to NBA Stars and figure out what they have done to be so successful. What do they eat & drink? How much sleep do they get? How do they workout and how often?

Sounds simple enough, right?

This same principle applies to Internet Marketing but is often overlooked.

If you want to write killer ad copy for your Google AdWords ads on Poodle Manicures then go search for Poodle Manicures on Google and see which ads come up top.

A large component of an ad’s placement is how often it is clicked on; more clicks means higher ad placement. Search for Poodle Manicures everyday for a week. There will be be some changes in placement and yet it won’t take long to notice that some ads will keep showing up somewhere near the top. Most likely these ads are getting lots of clicks. Pay close attention to what these ads do or don’t do in their ad copy.

If you want to have a top ten rank on Google for the search term Poodle Manicures then search Google for Poodle Manicures and take a close look at the sites that come up in the top ten. These are your competition.

It doesn’t matter that 50,000 other sites also come up for that search phrase. These other sites are examples of what not to do, examples of how not to get to the top, examples of failure. Don’t waste your time on them. What matters are the ones that made it to top ten. They are your case studies.

How many pages do they have?
How often do they update their content?
How many incoming links do they have?
How long do they have their domain registered for? Etc.

Figure out exactly what they do and do the same!

Hopefully you get the idea here.

It’s so simple and yet so often overlooked and under utilized.

The gurus of marketing out there will give you all sorts of advice.

Just never forget your (successful) competition and what you can learn from them.

Keep your friends close, and your enemies closer.
- Sun-tzu: Chinese general & military strategist (~400 BC)

I would change one word in the quote so it reads:
Keep your friends close, and your competition closer.

To begin with I should say that I believe all of God’s creatures have value and place on the Earth.

The notable exception to this would be flies (and possibly mosquitoes). I rather strongly dislike flies. Whether it be at a picnic in the park, or at a family barbecue, or (like today) they are buzzing around my head while I am trying to work, they really irritate me.

Today as I was working on my laptop there appeared out of no where three obnoxious flies buzzing around the room, occasionally landing on the table and on my arms. Someone must have left a door open and a gang of three flies had trespassed into my house.

When I turned on some music on my laptop the flies were attracted to this and began landing on my laptop. There’s nothing more distracting than having a fly walk on your computer screen as your are typing.

Frustrated by this I went in search of the fly swatter. I looked in all the usual places: the hall closet, the coat closet, and under the kitchen sink. But it was no where to be found.

So I decided to try to ignore the buggers. I had a lot to get done and didn’t want to spend the 20 minutes to go buy a fly swatter at the nearby Walgreen’s. That turned out to be a mistake.

For nearly 2 hours I was distracted by the little buggers. They continued to harass me while I spent my working time trying to find new substitutes for a fly swatter. None of the things I tried worked mostly due to my lack of hand-and-eye coordination.

And guess how much work I got done. Very little.

I finally got fed up and took the 20 minutes to go buy a fly swatter. That was the best decision I made all day.

The new fly swatter and I came home with a vengeance.

Walking in the door I announced to the flies that I was back and I had a new friend. With a smile I asked the flies if they had any last requests. They declined to respond and then the slaughter commenced, complete with karate like “hi yah” sounds.

The cost of purchasing the new fly swatter was a measly $0.95 plus 20 minutes of my time which isn’t much considering I wasted two hours trying to kill or trap the flies. (I should mention I was successful in trapping one of the three in the upstairs bathroom which left two to tag-team against me.)

Now if I had been smart I would have realized that this problem wasn’t going to disappear or go away and that trying to ignore it wouldn’t do anything except significantly decrease my productivity. I should have stopped my work and addressed the distraction immediately.

Everyday we encounter numerous distractions that seriously hurt our productivity.

In my field of software development distractions cost companies huge sums of money. And the worst part is that companies usually have no way to account for the cost!

The range of distractions we face is broad:

• Sleep deprivation seems to be a big one for a lot of people. Speaking from personal experience, 6 hours of work from me when I am well rested is worth much than 8 or 10 hours of work when I am tired. If you are tired consider taking a short nap. It’s time well invested.
• Co-worker chatter is another distraction. What a difference headphones with noise cancellation make! It’s also helpful to ask people to take cell phone calls outside the office.
• Having a chair that hurts your back or that just isn’t comfortable kills your focus and can adversely effect how well you sleep at night. The fight to get better office chairs is long and hard but it’s worth the battle.
• Sometimes there will be a personal issue that is stealing your focus. Maybe it’s an important call you have been putting off or an apology that needs to be made. Whatever it is, take care of it so you can be productive.

Everyday we are bombarded with distractions and most of them can be prevented. So don’t try to just ignore them. Instead take action and take care of business, even if it means going to the store to buy a new fly swatter.