If you are looking to promote your website or blog using social media then your at the right place!

To get started all you need is a computer, something to promote and a few friends.

Friends

Friends are powerful in small business and start ups but since we can amplify anyone’s voice online, friends are more influential than ever before. The only challenges is giving people who are willing to support you sufficient leverage for their “small” voices.

Viral traffic from a base of 200 friends can be crazy.

Clout

Those with clout are the ones who influence. Finding people with clout within your niche is an essential step in formulating your social media plan, because ultimately you want to influence them to spread your message. If you can influence the influentials your job will be much easier.

How To Find Your Clout:

Find popular blogs within your niche.

• Found the most influential blogs using blogcatalog, Alltop, Delicious, Technorati and Ask. More on this in a post to be written.

Find twitterers with large followings within your niche.

• Use wefollow to search for tweeters within you niche, rank them by “Most Influential”.
• Use Twitter Karma to arrange you followers by follow count (weed out some spammers while your at it..). The ones with high follower counts (and lower following counts) are likely to have clout.

With Them Over

It is essential you win these guys over. A long term strategy is far better than pestering them and becoming another spammer.

The key is to get noticed by them first. An easy example online is to do them a favour. For example if they are a blogger, comment on their posts, if they are a tweeter, ReTweet their messages (especially links to their own content/self promotion) etc,

Then approach them about your product. But be prepared.

What To Prepare

• You need your freebie/giveaway (high perceived value).
• An easy to tell story/point of interest or discussion.
• A system that will leverage each person’s voice.

Freebies

You need to find a freebie or something to give away that actually has high perceived value for the customer. This can be relatively low cost (or even free) for you.

Ideas:

• Give your product away – This is the best as it means customers actually get to interact with what you’re selling, it wins them over and they are more likely to spread the word. This wouldn’t be an effective strategy if you were selling houses..
• Free eBook – Overdone but still effective if well targeted/of interest to your niche
• Webinar – Same as eBook must have valuable content
• Invites – To your new service website, early access to the 2.0 release etc. Very effective for getting people to pass on and spread the word. Invite your influentials and give them another 10 to give to their readers. Much like the Google Wave release.
• Money – Will always draw a crowd, but gets expensive.. and it’s a pretty “cheap” marketing strategy.
• Your Time – If people value it as much as you do this can be a winner
• Physical Stuff – A “Limited Edition” branded t-shirt, pen.. It might cost more than an email, but someone with clout wearing your shirt is priceless.

A Great Story

If your story is hard to tell or boring it wont spread. Having a story that will stick is powerful in getting your story to spread. And ideally your story will make you look good.

For more on what makes ideas stick have a read of this excerpt from “Made To Stick” by Chip and Dan Heath.

You want to have a memorable story, or point of interest about your product/business before you approach those with clout.

Leverage Their Voice

Initially our voice would only go as far as it was audible, then came cave drawings, anyone who came into that cave would benefit from our work. Next was twitter, ok so there was a few developments in the middle.. but with Twitter we can send one 140 character message, @aplusk (Ashton Kutcher) can ReTweet us and 4million people benefit. Technology has changed how loud one man’s voice can be. And when marketing online we can selectively amplify our positive customer feedback.

Find Your Customers

Find out where the customers are online and what they are looking for. Focus especially on social networks, what will they be reading socially online, what will they share? Will it be YouTube. Develop your campaign that around these social mediums.

Interact with your customers and leverage their voices (the ones that like you). Set up a blog and share their stories, tweet their exploits, do a video on them/promote their videos on your site, use testimonials etc the list goes on. But the key thing is to get them interacting with you.

Competitions are a great place to start.

A Great Competition

Get creative. A competition should be related to your niche in some way, empower people to take part and reward everyone for their involvement.

Launch the competition through your existing friend networks, with databases of existing customers and with your newly acquired influential friends.

Essentials:

• Have a good prize (the better the more response)
• Have more than one prize. People don’t like entering if there’s only a 1 in a million chance. The more people you can reward the better. Can you reward everyone? An eBook, an invite, the VIP section?
• Get everyone participating, not just entrants. Getting people to vote is one way to increase involvement from readers.
• Get everyone promotiong. Give entrants all the “vote for me” tools they need. Prewritten tweets, Facebook updates, Emdedable banners/buttons, and emails are all good.
• Make it fun, and then promote the winner

Close well

Lots of competitions are big and exciting but once the hype of the competition is over, it’s forgotten. Think of a way to extend the life of you competition beyond prizegiving. Think about “The Best Job In The World” competition, where Ben has been blogging about his experiences as the winner.

The End

Phew! Longest post ever. So much to say and yet still so much unsaid!

This is  far from complete guide, but it is one that works.

If you have any pointers or ideas leave a comment. Would love to hear your approach.

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A lot of people are asking the question how to get more traffic to your blog. And a lot of people are giving the same answers, “build up all traffic streams” “target keywords” “comment on blogs” etc. This works well for the established blogger but it’s a long and painful road for the new guy. Good thing the game is changing. There are now easier ways to compete with the big players.

The Shortcut

Normally traffic is built up by compounding returns. Each traffic source adds on the previous. Once you target enough keywords and have enough backlinks your site will build up significant traffic. The only problem is it all takes work, and the more competitive your topic the harder it is to get traffic. This means that for weeks or even months you may not get beyond 30 hits a day. I have one site that is nearly 2 months old and is only getting 10-20 visitors a day outside of Twitter. Including Twitter it gets around 400 a day.

How Does It Work

Social sites give the small guy a mouth. No longer does it depend on your SEO experience or your established domain names, now you can get quality traffic just by producing quality content. With social sites once you write a quality post (with a catchy title, see How To Write Article Titles For Traffic) you will naturally generate traffic even if it’s your first post ever.

There are many social sites you can use to build social traffic but I’m going to focus on Twitter.

How To Leverage Twitter

Using Twitter to get jump start your traffic still requires a little bit of effort but you will see quick results even if you are in a competitive industry. Here’s how:

1) Set up a Twitter account (best if the name is related to your blog).

2) Add followers who are interested in your niche.

Either find them through search.twitter.com or follow those who follow of other tweeters in your niche. Read 3 Ways To Get Target Followers (For Free) or use Twitter Snipe to do it automatically.

3) Add followers who are on other social sites (digg, stumble upon, reddit etc). Find them with search.twitter.com.

4) Tweet about your new posts.

5) After a few days tweet to remind people and ask them to retweet and submit to social sites.

You will get visitors to your site straight away (the more targeted Twitter followers the better). The traffic from the following retweets/bookmarks is also very powerful. For example I made the Digg front page a few weeks ago and had nearly 2000 views in about 15 minutes (resulting in server crash.. make sure your hosting is prepared). For more on social bookmarking see Social Bookmarking 101 and Getting Popular on Social Bookmarking Sites.

Long Term

By following this strategy and building your Twitter following you will see a constant growth in your traffic. As a bonus you will be improving your search engine ranking as your site naturally builds up backlinks. Remember to target keywords along the way as eventually you’ll have substantial search engine traffic to support your social traffic.

All the best!

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5 Points To Target Keywords

Have the keyword in your title (the nearer to the start the better).

Include the keywords in your page headings (these have more weight to google than regular text).

Have the keywords in the Page description (once again feature near the start of the description).

And obviously have the keywords in the post (about a 2-4% keyword density is good).

Make sure you interlink with keywords (eg when linking to the page from another post don’t say “click here for more about keyword”, say “check out keyword for more info”).

How To Choose Keywords To Target

Go to Google Keyword Tool and type in your terms.

Then click “show estimated average cpc”, and then match type by “exact”.

Now you have a list of keywords and an idea of which ones pay well for advertising (if you click on “Estimated Average CPC” it will arrange the results so you can see the highest paying keywords first”)

Here are the two factors you should consider when choosing keywords to target:

Competition

If a keyword has a lot of searches but there is extremely tough competition it will be hard to rank well even if you effectively target the keywords. So once you find the good keywords type them into google and see how many results there (less is better, 1 million is bad). Also have a look at the quality of the top page results, tips on how to do this can be found in How To Dial In Your Keywords – Part 2.

Look for key-phrases. 3 word phrases are much easier to target than single words. Although there might be less total searches for these keywords you will find it much easier to rank on the top page and will get more traffic quicker.

The CPC

If you are targeting a bunch of keywords with a low CPC (cost per click for adwords ad) you might be able to get a lot of traffic but you wont make much from your adsense. So if you have adsense on your site and want to make more money have a look at targeting keywords that pay well. The trick is finding high paying keywords with a lot of searches and low competition.

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How To Increase Blog Traffic

Over the time I have seen quite a few videos which have helped me get my head around different blog subjects. A common challenge for all bloggers is figuring out how to increase blog traffic, so for your benefit, here are three videos that cover some very foundational elements. I hope you find them useful too.

6 Tips For Increasing Blog Traffic

So many people focus on increasing blog traffic so much that their content starts to suffer. I liked the way David ties producing quality content and increasing traffic to your blog as a long term strategy. Plus he has some other great techniques which all produce traffic for me. I highly suggest you watch.

Blog Marketing: Optimize Your Blog Posts for SEO

90% of us use google to to find what we want online. This is a natural targeted source of traffic and too many bloggers don’t pay enough attention to targeting google traffic . Watch this video and learn how to significantly increase blog traffic by doing some simple SEO and keyword targeting. For more on targeting keywords check out 8 Essential Strategies To Improve AdSense Cashflow and How To Dial In Your Keywords – Part 1.

Increase Free Blog Traffic In Seconds, Increase Blog Traffic

An essential key when optimising your blog for search engines and targeting keywords is your URL. Daegan covers the topic of changing your permalinks to a more search engine friendly version. Follow this and watch your search engine traffic increase.

Did you find something useful in the videos?

What are other blog videos you have found useful?

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The two biggest factors for getting a good search engine ranking is having backlinks and having great SEO of your site. Getting the right keywords for SEO can be tricky but here are a few simple tips to help out beginners. 

This is a two part post. The first part of the post is about finding good keywords and the second part is finding out about competition.

Finding your Keywords

You should already have a good idea about your blog and what you are talking about before you start looking for keywords to target. Sometimes good topics to target are the ones that you have already had success in. Othertimes they are new topics, or if your blog is brand new you can start from scratch.

Tool Number 1

Adwords Keyword Tool

Type in your topic as the main keyword to search for. You can be as broad as you like here.

The once your results pop up click the Approx Avg Search Volume button to order them in terms of popularity. Then change the match type to ‘exact’ (the option next to Approx Avg Search Volume) for more accurate results. Now you want to be working a keyword that has at least 50,000 searches in the main topic (the keyword at the top of the list). If you scroll down you will find another list of words under Additional Keywords To Consider. Between these two lists you should be able to find a good amount of keywords wit enough traffic.

Tool Number 2

Word Tracker GTrends

This is a powerful tool to use in conjunction with the adwords tool. Take the keywords you have found and type them in one at a time into the Word Tracker site. You will see results in a 3 column layout. The search count on a daily basis is very useful, then there is the keyword and finally on the right is the ‘G’ column. This is what you want to focus on.  When you click on it there are three key parts

1) Google Competition

The number of other sites that come up if you type the term into google.

This important but it is good to check out how well the competition has done their SEO. GTrends could fail this keyword but if the competition has bad SEO it may still be relatively easy to get on the top page.

2)Actual Visitors From #1 In Google

If you get the number one ranking in google this is how many visitors you will get.

3) Keyword Trend

If this graph shows a significant decline then I would recommend not targeting the keyword as it is past its prime. You are better to target keywords that will last. That way your work will have a longer shelf life.

By now you should have a good idea of your top keywords.

Read Part 2

Resources (sponsored)

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InstaCash Keywords – I recommend you at least watch the YouTube video near the bottom.
Membership Site That Delivers Niche Keyword Lists In A Daily Basis.

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Not being a loser will get you a long way in life and forums are no different. They key to getting more traffic from forums is being popular but if you can’t handle that then starting popular threads will do the trick.

Popularity of forum threads is an easy formula. When first posted the power of a post lays entirely in its headline. If you are having trouble writing headlines check out writing titles for traffic. Once your thread has a been there for a while the number of replies will be the new test of popularity. The more replies a thread has, the more people are intrigued to see what is going on. Write content that people will want to respond to.

Here are the top 3 ways to get a response:

Ask A Question.

This is by far the easiest suggestion. Most people actually want to help others. And then of course there are the lip flappers who have an opinion on everything. If you ask a simple question you will probably get a lot of responses.

Some of the threads that have had the most responses are as simple as “Do you use adsense?”

Have A Controversial Opinion.

People love to debate. Pick a controversial topic and then write a post supporting one side. You will be surprised about how many people will want to share their two cents on a topic. These kind of things can go crazy with tons of viewers.

For Example “Adsense is the best way to make money online.”

Write An Informative Post.

Writing an informative post on a form is like putting a teaser out for readers. People get a taste of your writing style and of the value of your information and if they like it they will want to link back to your page and see what else you have to say. They will often comment back either thanking you for your good advice or adding more to the conversation. This will increase the replies to the thread and also increase you and your websites popularity. All good things.

An example of an informative post would be “The secret to improving your Adsense click through ratio”.

Informative threads are the most powerful strategies for long term forum marketing.

Any more ideas to share?

Resources (sponsored)

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Niche Choppers Unlocks Vip Doors For A Limited Time To All Marketers, Affiliates, And Publishers. Watch & Learn With 6 – 7 Figure Earners. In-house Products & Opportunities Incl.

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Fast And Free Advertising. Get High Quality One-Way Links Search Engines Love. We Have Located Over 100 Forums That Encourage Advertising On Their Sites. Many Of These Sites Have High Pr Rankings And Receive Vast Amounts Of Traffic.

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After reading Google and SEO: The Real Story you will understand more about targeting your neighbourhood. If you haven’t read it do that now. Done that? Good, now lets address the question you really came here for:

The essential 10 step checklist of FREE marketing techniques.

Understand that your niche may require a different order and to take advantage of other niche specific opportunities (such as blog carnivals for blogs, competitions for quality design etc).

1) Search Engines

• Are you taking care of your keywords? (use Adwords Keyword Tool and Keyword Spy to find more information)
• If you know your keywords then make sure you feature them in your copy.
• The following steps will all contribute to your SEO
• Google Ranking: Making Friends With The Spider, Google and SEO: The Real Story

2) Directories

• Submit you website to niche directories (google “-your niche here- directories” to find them. Also remember to submit to DMOZ)
• Submit your product to product directories
• Do Not Make These 4 Mistakes

3) Blogs

• Create a blog to link back to your website
• Blogs 101 The Essential Tips For Setting Up WordPress
• Comment on other blogs in your niche (insert your URL)
• Why YOU Should Start A Blog – The Top 10 Reasons And 26 More

4) Forums

• Participate in forums in your ‘neighbourhood’
• Put a link to your website in the signature
• Get Traffic From Forums By Not Being A Loser.

5) Social Networking

• Build up a network of people who follow the same things as you.
• Post about your topic, and if pages on your site a relevant then post them too. (Dont spam..)
• Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn etc
• Increase Your Twitter Followers – 7 Ways To Get And 3 Ways To Keep, 3 Ways To Get Targeted Twitter Followers (For Free!)

6) Article Sites

• Submit articles relevant to your topic
• Submit to Article City and EzineArticles
• Make sure you have read Article Blog Secrets – How To Write Article Titles For Traffic

7) Videos

• Create a YouTube channel and link back to your domain.
• Video sites have a lot of traffic and are very popular with google.
• Remember to write standout titles for your videos.

8) News Sites

• Submit articles and stories to news sites in your niche.
• Write great articles for them and they will get used.

9) Social Bookmarking

• These can create massive traffic if you can get enough votes for your posts.
• Usually you will need a base traffic flow for the posts to get enough votes to get noticed.
• These are sites such as Digg, StumbleUpon, Delicious and many more.

10) Auction Sites

• Create a back link to your site from popular Auction sites.
• Create and about me page or blog on eBay and you can link back to your site.

This is just a checklist and over the next few weeks I will post on each of the topics explaining in more detail how you should approach each one and include the successful strategies that work plus the resources to get your site cranking.

So to get more detail make sure you sign up to the site and stay up to date.

Any more startup ideas that should be covered? Leave a comment..

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The secret to better rankings and more traffic is being (or looking like) the cool guy in your neighbourhood.

The Neighbourhood

Search engines build their results based upon relevance. Your use of keywords is important, read How To Dial In Your Keywords, but the other major contributing factor is whether the search engine has determined that you are a part of the neighbourhood. The neighbourhood is all of the related sites to a search topic. A search engine will find out whether you have links from other popular sites within a neighbourhood and this will greatly influence your search ranking.

How to get into the Neighbourhood

Think of the neighbourhood as different ares in town. You need to show the search engines as many reasons as you can that you are a part of that area. The proof that you are in the neighbourhood is how many other relevant sites have links to you (the more popular the better).

This works well for internet marketers because not only does having links within the neighbourhood increase search rankings but it also builds natural traffic from people visiting other sites in the neighbourhood. We need to recognise the sites in our target neighbourhood and leave our mark on them in any way we can.

Cool By Association

Being in the neighbourhood is good but if all your friends are losers, (sites with no traffic) then you wont be cool either. Just like when the popular kid at school hangs out with you, if a popular website links to you, then your ‘cool factor’ goes up.

The ultimate is when the most popular site within your neighbourhood links to you. This is like William Shatner talking to you at a Star Trek convention. An online example would be the most popular blog in your niche linking to your page. Not only does this give you a lot of traffic from that site but also google recognizes your new coolness and increases your search ranking.

To learn how to really establish yourself in the neighbourhood check out the Web Traffic: The Essential 10 Step Checklist post.

Any More ideas?

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Most authors are wasting their time producing quality articles that will never get read. 95% of a books success is based around the title of the book. Therefore if we just make the title catchy then our work will finally be read, right?

Wrong!

However, having a catchy title is an important part of title writing, so lets get that right first.

Lets look at it this way. A sentence like this will sink into the background, even though it is just as important as the next sentence to my point. If I put a word like KILLER! or MURDER! into a sentence, they stand out. If someone is looking over your shoulder and see this they will think you are a psycho. Which is exactly my point, there are certain things that get peoples attention.

I have been thinking about things that grab my attention and here are four:

Be wrong!

People love when other people are wrong.. they will be all over your blog to see just how wrong you really are. Bam you have their attention then you turn your wrong statement into something entertaining or informative and before they know it they have read to the bottom and want more.

Be right.

People love people who are right, especially when they are looking for help. If you can establish that you are right then people will want to read more. Implying you are right is as easy as using numbers (“7 ways to..”, “5 people who”, “90% of…”), by telling people ‘how to’ do something and by knowing something they don’t know (“Secrets about..” “5 People you should know..”). This works in the title but to maximize your return readers you must back this up with quality content.

Be funny.

People are always want a laugh. People also want to be the people who give other people laughs.. If they can be the start of the funny message that went around the office then you just made their day. Just the hope of being that guy keeps people on youtube all day. For example your headline could read.. “Crazy Spam Emails: What the Arabian Princes Think.”

Be dramatic!

Whether you are right or wrong, if you accuse someone, are threatening or scare people you will get noticed. Think of Kanye West “George Bush doesn’t care about black people” bam, right or wrong he has your attention.

The big secret:

It’s not just about how catchy the title is. Yes that is true for regular books. That’s because when someone walks into a book shop and they are browsing, catchy titles hold their attention longer. On the internet however the key to getting your articles noticed is search engine popularity. Keywords are very important to any search engine and your title must include them.

Little known fact!

The first 3-5 words in a title are THE MOST important words in getting search engine attention and high rankings. Most titles waste these first few words on “how to write a…” or “the top 7 ways to” or “5 things you should…” when these first few words should be your keywords. Instead of “5 sure fire ways to get a free lunch” try “Free Lunch: 5 sure fire ways to not pay” and you will get surprising results. For tips on deciding what keywords to target I recommend you read this article How To Dial In Your Keywords

Also don’t use any symbols that search engines struggle with such as commas, brackets etc.

Follow these key tips and your reward will be massive amounts of traffic to your article and blog from the search engines that love your titles!

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