“Hi Kenneth, I have been reading your blog and it is a great resource. Of all the ways that you’ve recommended, can you share with us what are the best websites that generate web traffic?” - Nira

To me, the best websites that generate web traffic must achieve one of the followings:

- They must either help me to generate lots of targeted traffic FAST

- Or they must help me to generate traffic CONSISTENTLY WITHOUT MUCH EFFORT FROM ME.

Personally, I try to avoid traffic generation websites that require me to post ads every few days. This is time consuming and not the best use of my time.

Let’s look at some examples that fit into my criteria.

If you want lots of web traffic fast, especially in the IM niche, one of my favorite source is paid to read emails websites. For less than 100 bucks, you get thousands of traffic to your website. This type of website is what I mean by “lots of targeted traffic FAST”. You need to spend time preparing the ad every time you need the traffic, but the surge in traffic is well worth your effort.

Examples of websites that generate web traffic consistently without much effort include Google Adword, article marketing (EzineArticles.com) and of course LeadsLeap.com. For Google Adwords and LeadsLeap advertising, you set up the ad once and receive traffic 24/7. If you don’t have to modify your ad, you can just leave it running and generate web traffic to your website. Similarly for article marketing, your submitted article can generate traffic to your website for years.

The daily traffic may not be impressive, but over a period of time, the traffic can well accumulate to thousands. The best part is that the traffic is passive, i.e. you don’t have to spend much time working on it after the initial preparation.

Here’s my last advice: Many people are looking for the “holy grail” websites that generate web traffic magically. Such websites never exist. The “holy grail” is not found in the traffic generation websites but in YOUR STRATEGY. Read my old post My Best Kept Secrets To Increase Web Site Traffic From Scratch to get what I mean by that.

It’s no longer a secret that the way to get good ranking in the search engines is to build backlinks. But besides backlinks, there are two other SEO tricks that are important but often overlooked. These two factors can play a significant role in getting SEO traffic.

Today we are going to discuss these 2 overlooked SEO tricks that can easily double your search engine traffic.

1) Title That Clicks

If you are a blogger or content website builder, besides choosing the right keyword and optimizing it, you should spend some time to come out with a title that will entice people to click.

Think about it. Even if your website rank #1 in the search result, if the title of the link is boring, people will just skip your link and move on to the next result.

This is commonsense, but it’s often overlooked, especially for those who outsource article writing.

Personally, although I outsource article writing for my content websites (aka Adsense websites), I still put in the effort to rewrite every title personally. This is because freelance writers are good in writing, but they are often not good in writing juicy title.

I run a program where I help members to promote their Adsense website (membership closed). The method I use to promote their websites is the exact same method that I use to promote mine. But strange enough, my Adsense websites perform much better than theirs. Honestly I can’t think of a logical explanation except for the fact that my titles are juicier than theirs!

2) Turn Every Webpage Into A Resource Center

If you haven’t noticed, besides backlinks, Google has been putting more weight in the ‘resourcefulness’ of a webpage.

Note that I say resourcefulness of a ‘webpage’, not ‘website’.

The idea is this:

If your webpage is about headache, regardless of what your website is about, it would be good to have lots of other headache related articles (from the same website) linked to this webpage. This way, this webpage looks like a good resource center for headache.

Let me show you an interesting website that demonstrates this point:

Take a look at this webpage from Bigresources.com. This webpage, as well as other similar webpages in this website, has the following characteristics:

- All of them rank well in Google, especially in long tail keywords.
- None of them are unique content (they are syndicated from different forums).
- Every webpage contains lots of other internal links. More importantly, the links are in the same topic as this webpage. (In the example, this webpage is about javascript, update, div, frame. You can see that all the internal links in this page are related to these keywords.)

To Google, every webpage on this website looks like a great resource center where visitors can look for more information on the same topic.

Actually this is the internal linking strategy that Wikipedia adopts and it’s doing very well in the search engine. The difference between wikipedia and bigresources is that Wikipedia has unique content whereas Bigresources uses primarily duplicated content. But does Google care?

Understanding this point, when you design your website, you should make sure that the articles in the same topic are linked. This way, every single webpage in your website can look like a good resource center for that topic. For those who use Wordpress blog, this can be done by adding a ‘related post’ plugin. For static websites or other content platforms, you’ll have to think of ways to achieve the same effect.

Recently a partner of mine had 3 of his content websites delisted from Google search results and he asked for my advice. As a result, I did an extensive study into the possible scenarios where Google will delist a website from its search.

Instead of keeping my findings in my memory, I think it’s better to pen them down in this article so that you and I can refer to it in the future.

Here are some of the ‘proven’ reasons why a website is delisted from Google:

1) Repeated spelling and syntactical errors

It has been confirmed by Google spokesman that a website can be delisted from its search engine due to repeated spelling and syntactical errors.

Here’s what Google spokesman, Artie Su, said “When our systems syntactically analyze the words on a page, it’s very easy to determine whether correct grammar is being followed. When it isn’t, particularly if the errors are consistently repeated over a period of time, the site gets downgraded. That’s because most spammers and creators of junk commercial sites don’t do any kind of quality control. Grammar check is an easy way to spot them.”

If your website repeatedly contains a particular misspelled word, or it’s primarily made up of junk content (such as those computer generated content), you are at a high risk of being delisted from Google search.

2) Adding a large number of external links in a short time

If you, for whatever reason, add a lot of external links to your website, you can be delisted from Google search.

One possible scenario is where your server is hacked and spammers add lots of links to your website without you knowing. Most of these links are hidden. You won’t see them unless you study the source code.

Another possible scenario is when you are too active in link exchange. Let’s take link directories for example, most link directories will have an option for you to link back to them. If you spend one whole day exchanging links with 200 link directories, your website is at risk. (Note that I’m talking about external links from your website to other websites, not incoming links from other websites to your website.)

3) Sitemap error

This is a rare problem but it can happen. Your server may block Google bot from crawling your site. If you realize that all your websites in the same server are delisted from Google, this may be the reason. To solve the problem, you’ll have to inform your server about it.

This is a technical problem. If you want for info, it’s better to read this article: http://beecherbowers.com/2009/02/03/google-sitemap-timeout-errors/

4) Hidden links

Hidden links can get your website delisted from Google.

A typical trick to hide your links by making the color of your link same color as the background, so that your visitor cannot see them but the search bot can.

Another common trick is by putting the links in an invisible <div> tag.

5) Doorway pages

The idea of a doorway page is to present one version of the page to the search engines while showing another version to the visitors. This is against Google’s principle, which is “Don’t deceive your users or present different content to search engines than you display to users.”

I’ve just started to explore the issue of being delisted from Google. In the next few weeks (or even months), I’ll be doing several things to see if I can get the 3 websites listed in Google search again. As usual, I’ll keep you updated on any interesting discoveries.

Last but not least, I’ll end this article with 2 useful links from Google:

What to do if your site isn’t doing well in search
http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=34444

How to ask Google to reconsider your site
http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=35843

After spending weeks to set up a website, the next challenge is, how to drive traffic to your new website?

If this is the challenge you’re facing, you are not alone. One of our members, Gina, is having the same question. Here’s her question:

“Thanks to your f.ree list builder script, I now have my own website ready. My question is, what should I do next to get traffic to my new website and build list?” - Gina

Hi Gina,

Congratulations. You are one of the few action takers. Most people can’t even pass the stage of building a website.

Before you start to drive traffic to your new website, you need to get a second opinion on the website. Just get your siblings and close friends to take a look at your website, subscribe to the list and go through the entire sales process. Ask them for their opinions. Now, 99% of the time, they are going to say they are not interested in your offer. That’s expected because they are not your target audience. You just want them to comment on the look and feel of your website. You want to make sure that your new website looks professional in the eyes of others.

Once you know that you have a well-designed and working website, you are ready to drive traffic to it.

First, if you have a list, promote it to your own list. You can use this chance to test how well your new website is converting.

You can also advertise in places that can get you targeted traffic. (If your website is in the internet marketing niche, you can subscribe to our PRO membership. That will usually get you 400-500 traffic every month.)

Initially, you may have to modify your squeeze page and sales letter to improve the conversion rate. Once you are comfortable with the conversion rate, you can then increase your advertising budget. You can also start looking for JV partners to promote your website.

When looking for JV partners, you can start by emailing the small time marketers in your niche with your JV proposal. A good place to start is Google. Search for some active blogs in your niche and contact the bloggers. With our list builder script, it shouldn’t be hard for you to seek JV partners. You are basically asking people to give away a useful product to their lists and let them earn commissions from OTO sales. Bloggers or list builders are always looking for good things (contents or free gifts) to give to their subscribers. If you have something userful and free, and can help them to make money, many of them will be interested to partner with you.

In your JV proposal, tell them that you’ve tested your sales copy and the conversion is XX%. You need to convince them that your system is proven and can help them to make money, providing values to their subscribers at the same time.

Continue to advertise and strike out JV deals. That should keep you busy for a couple of months.

Meanwhile, you should make it an effort to continuously improve on the squeeze page and sales letter. In particular, you should add more testimonials to the sales letter as you receive them. This will further boost the conversion rates.

If you do not have a blog, I also encourage you to start one. It’s a good platform for you to foster better relationship with your list. With a blog, you can also start looking into other traffic strategies such as search engine optimization, which is a big topic by itself.

For other traffic strategies such as article marketing, forum marketing etc, you can use them as part of your effort to build links for search engine optimization. These are slow but consistent way to drive traffic to your website, but they are not likely to make an immediate impact in short run.

My objective of this article is to give you an overview of how to make money with affiliate marketing, so that you can make a better decision on how you want to kick start with affiliate marketing.

Generally, I can categorize the different ways of making money with affiliate marketing into 3 basic ways. Let’s discuss each of them……

1) First Way - Direct Promotion

The first way to make money with affiliate marketing is by promoting the affiliated product directly .

A popular idea that many beginners are taught is to find a good product from Clickbank, create an ad for it and advertise to get traffic and sales.

Or if it’s a business opportunity, one may simply advertise the affiliate link to get traffic and downlines.

This method of making money looks very attractive, especially among the newbies. Some marketers I’ve spoken to said that this is their preferred method because the money is fast and they don’t have to bother about customer service and site maintenance.

This may be the easiest way to start making money with affiliate marketing. But if you ask me for advice, I would suggest that you put in a bit more effort and move beyond this method.

Reason: If you’ve been reading my work, you’ll know that I don’t fancy quick money. My focus is always on ‘building’. For long term success, you need to spend your time building something, either build a list, a network, a website or a community. What I don’t like about this method is you’re sending your hard earned traffic away, without building anything for yourself.

2) Second Way - Build A List

A better alternative to the first approach is to build a list. Instead of sending the traffic directly to your affiliated site, you focus your marketing effort in building a list FIRST, promoting other affiliated products LATER.

There are many variations to this method.

The most common strategy is to create a squeeze page, give away some useful freebies, and entice people to opt-in.

Another smarter strategy is to create a product in your niche, design a big launch around it, get other marketers to promote it for you, and instantly build a huge list that you can use in the future.

It takes a lot more time to set up such a website as compared to the first approach. But you are building yourself a list and reputation in your industry. You can easily build upon any success you have established and earn more in the future.

But there is one important downside to this approach.

Other than your free gift or product, there is nothing much on your website. Once your visitors get what they want, they are not likely to go back to your website again. The only way you can build further relationship with them is probably through a newsletter.

3) Third Way - Build A Useful Website

The third way to make money with affiliate marketing is to build a useful website around your niche.

The easiest form would be a blog. You can build a list and then start a blog to update your list with useful tips, promoting other affiliated products at the same time.

Or you can create a service site that provides useful online tools that people in your niche can use. This will entice them to come back to your website again and again.

One of my personal preference is to create a content website that is full of useful articles in a particular niche. The articles will help me to attract free traffic from the search engines. The website will have several product recommendations from me and these are the products I am affiliated to.

The disadvantage of this approach is of course the time and effort required to create and (for some) to maintain the sites. But the benefit is obvious. Once the initial traffic is built, you are likely to see continuous traffic to your website and hence consistent affiliate commissions to your account.

Although this third way is my preferred way of making money with affiliate marketing, it may not be the best way for you. There are many success stories in each of these approaches. You need to try out the different methods and see which one you are most comfortable with. Hopefully my discussion above can help you kick start with your preferred method right away.

There are many ways to get free targeted web traffic, including article marketing, search engine optimization, forum marketing etc. But today, we are not going to discuss any of those.

We are going to talk about a more ‘advanced’ way to get free targeted web traffic.

I describe it as ‘advanced’ because this method may seem overwhelming for newbies. But if you are an experienced marketer or willing to get your hands dirty, it’s not difficult at all.

The trick is to provide a free web-based application that is useful to your targeted traffic.

Let me show you a real-life example:

Seobook.com is a website selling SEO training. Its targets are people interested in search engine optimization. One strategy that this company uses to get free targeted traffic is by providing free SEO tools such as keyword research tool, SEO plugin for Firefox etc.

Isn’t it a commonsense traffic strategy? Anyone using the tools will become their potential customers.

Yes, it will take some initial effort to promote your free tool to the community you’re targeting. But once the power of word of mouth sets in, you can see free targeted web traffic coming to your website like clockwork.

If you haven’t realized, that is one of the strategies that we adopt to generate targeted traffic for our members - YOU.

We develop different kinds of marketing and advertising tools that our members can use to generate leads. Since all the tools carry a link to our website, some traffic will come to our website. Some will join our membership, read our blog and visit other members websites via the ads in our network.

3 Simple Steps To Create Your Own Traffic Bait

Now that you understand the principles behind this strategy, the next question is, how to create your own tool that you can use to get free targeted web traffic?

Below are 3 easy steps that I use all the time:

1) Come out with a good idea

You don’t need to be too creative, but you need to know what are the tools your market needs.

Great ideas are usually solutions to problems. Thus, identifying problems is your first step in generating great ideas.

For example, before I came out with the idea of Affiliate ID Manager (a viral software that we give away in LeadsLeap), I was saving tons of login IDs and passwords in my Outlook mailbox and Excel spreadsheets. It was a real mess at that time. Then I asked myself what if there is a software that can manage all the IDs….. And the result of this thought is Affiliate ID Manager, which is available to you now.

2) Get a programmer to create it

There are many freelancing websites where you can find programmers to turn your idea into a product.

I will not go into the details on how to find programmers. I just have one advice: Be prepared to get your hands dirty!

Do not think that you’ve engaged a programmer and everything will be done magically. Chances are it wouldn’t.

First, you need to have a very clear idea of what your end product will look like, detail it down in either writing or drawing, and make sure that your programmer understands it. You also need to list down all the product features. The list must be specific and measurable so that both you and the programmer can use the list as a check list to decide whether the project is completed. Lastly you need to communicate with the programmer as often as possible to make sure that the project is progressing and all the features are included.

3) Promote it

Nothing can happen until you promote the hell out of it and get enough people to start using your tool. Period.

There you have it, an easy way to get free targeted web traffic. The traffic is easy, the preparation work can be tedious, but it’s well worth the effort.