“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.

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.

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.

As you probably know, LeadsLeap has just moved to a more powerful server.

And the reason to move the server now is because of the tool we’re launching today - LeadsLeap SlideSense

It’s a powerful advertising tool. You should have seen it in action by now.

Yes, it’s the little animation that bounce up from the bottom of this page.

What Can SlideSense Do?

If you run a blog or website, and you want to get people to opt-in to your list or simply look at your new offer, what do you do?

A typical trick is to setup a popup window. But as you know, popup is losing its effectiveness. More and more people are closing popups the moment they see it.

The solution? SlideSense.

You can use SlideSense for opt-in purpose or simply as a text ad. Here’s the demo:

Text-ad SlideSense | Opt-in SlideSense

Honestly, I didn’t come out with this idea. I first saw this animation on other people’s blog and I thought it was a great idea. So I got my programmer to design a similar one, adding some improvements here and there, and make it available to you.

(I later realized that similar tool is available for sale at USD67. Anyway, you don’t have to spend a dime. It’s free for LeadsLeap members! In fact, our version is much better in terms of browser compatibility, especially for internet explorer.)

Developing this tool was not easy. It took us 4 months to perfect every little detail. In fact, I threw away the first prototype because it was built on a specific js framework (for the non-techie, it means certain websites may have problem using this animation).

What you are seeing and using now is the second build. It was a complete rewrite of the first version.

I’m telling you all these because I hope that you can appreciate this tool.

Something To Brag About SlideSense

1) It’s easy to set up

Absolutely no script to install. If you can set up Google Adsense, you can set up SlideSense.

2) It’s highly customizable

Almost every component of SlideSense can be customized, from the image, text link , font, opt-in settings and even the animation speed.

You can use it on as many websites as you like, including your own Blogger blog!

How To Add SlideSense To Your Website?

To setup your own SlideSense is very easy.

1) Fill in the setup form here and generate the code.

2) Copy and paste the generated code into any page on your site or blog. For blog, you should put it in the template so that it appears on every page.

That’s all!

Remember to send us a feedback after you’ve played with it!

In the past, we have been talking about keyword research, link building and other search engine optimization techniques. Today, let me illustrate to you what I mean by search engine traffic.

For example, last week, I posted an article titled “4 Essential Tools To Create Traffic To A Website“. Similar to many other LeadsLeap blog posts, the title wasn’t plucked from the sky. It was the result of careful keyword research.

Here’s a screenshot of the keyword research result:

As you can see, the keyword phrase “Tools To Create Traffic To A Website” is searched 32 times a day. That’s close to 1000 searches a month!

There are two ways to tap into this traffic. One way is by paying the search engines (i.e. Adwords etc). Another way is by getting to the top of the generic search result, through search engine optimization.

Both the paid ads and generic search result for this keyword phrase are shown in the screenshot below:

Can you see who is sitting at the #1 position of the 30,000,000 search results? Yes, it’s LeadsLeap.

The article we posted last week is now in the #1 position of Google search result.

With close to 1000 searches a month and being the first in the listing (after the ads), you bet we’re going to get some traffic from there.

That’s what search engine traffic is all about!

Before I end today’s article, let’s do a quick summary of what it takes to start getting traffic from the search engines to your website.

1. Keyword research (to find the right traffic generating keywords to target)
2. Search engine optimized content (to please the search engines and human visitors)
3. A website with lots of quality backlinks (to greatly increase your chance of getting the top ranking.)

Alternatively (or should I say ‘Additionally’), post your ad in LeadsLeap. Some of the traffic we’ve generated may click your ad and go to your website.

When I started my online business, I spent lots of money on online advertising. I still believe that if you have no resources, advertising is the fastest and cheapest (in terms of opportunity cost) way to get lots of traffic.

But advertising costs you ‘time’ to set up the ad, ‘effort’ to monitor the progress and ‘money’ to post the ad. While I was heavily advertising, I was at the same time using 4 other tools to create traffic to my websites, and these are the 4 tools we’re going to discuss……

1) Referral And Reward System

The first tool to create traffic to a website is a referral and reward system.

I think most of you understand the importance of having a referral system for your website. But having a referral system for your website is not good enough. You need to have a reward system that can motivate your affiliates to recommend other people to your website.

Most rewards come in the form of money. But that is not good enough, especially when you are in the internet marketing industry where everyone is paying good money to affiliates. In addition to money, you have to think of other tangible and intangible rewards.

Many social networking sites don’t pay a dime to their users for referrals, yet their users are enthusiastically bringing their friends in. Observe the tricks these sites deploy. You’ll get some good ideas that you can use for your business.

2) Tell-A-Friend Script

I’m sure you are familiar with a tell-a-friend script. Nowadays, when you sign up a social networking site, the first thing you’re asked to do is to grab all the emails in your contact list and send an invitation to all of them.

Tell-a-friend script is a powerful tool to create traffic to a website. But you have to use it with care. This tool can easily be used to send spam invitation and the end result is your website becomes blacklisted by some mail-filtering services.

This was an annoying problem I faced in my early years.

Here’s a little story to share with you. Hope it’s not too boring…

I still remembered a time when I wrote to one of such mail-filtering services requesting for a removal of my website from their blacklist. I explained that the spam email was sent via a tell-a-friend script, not from us. But they didn’t buy my reason. I then argued that similar tools are available for websites like Facebook and I too receive tons of spam invitations from unknown individuals. Guess what, they replied and said they are Facebook, but we are not. When you’re small, you are bullied. Anyway, I continued to argue and I think they were tired of my persistence and eventually got my website removed from their blacklist.

Some of you may wonder why LeadsLeap doesn’t have a tell-a-friend script. That’s because I cannot afford to have this website and our mail server blacklisted. But we are in the process of developing a tell-a-friend script that can possibly minimize this problem… and the best part is we will make this script available to all our members when it’s ready. A programmer is working on it and it’s premature to say when it can be accomplished.

Till then, if you want a simple tell-a-friend script, you can find some free scripts at hotscripts.com.

3) Viral Tools

As online marketers, we should always think “viral marketing” because that’s one main advantage of the internet over the brick and mortar world.

Typical viral tools include:
- viral ebooks such as rebrandable ebooks and MRR ebook,
- viral software such as our rebrandable ID manager, and
- providing free online tools on your website, such as a free mortgage calculator or free keyword research tools.

Talking about providing free online tools as a form of viral marketing, the best example we can learn from is Google. Besides being a free search engine, Google provides free services such as map, keyword research tool, traffic tracking services etc. The idea is to provide useful tools to the world so that the world will come to you without you spending a dime in advertising.

4) SEOd Content

Last but not least, a must-have tool to create traffic to a website is SEOd Content - Search Engine Optimized Content.

I hope by now you know there is a difference between writing and writing for SEO. SEOd content is capable of attracting traffic from the search engines 24/7, without much effort from you, other than the initial effort of preparing the content.

This is where ‘blog’ comes into play because blog is a good content management platform. A blog is capable of creating thousands and thousands of traffic on 2 conditions:

- The backlinks to the website are well established.
- The individual article is well optimized for search engines.

Take LeadsLeap blog for example. As LeadsLeap.com is well linked from thousands of other websites, posting an SEOd content in its blog will easily get the article to the top search result and that will translate into free traffic from the search engines.

Same thing is happening to established article directories such as ezinearticles.com and buzzle.com.

“Please advice me on how best to get internet network marketing leads. I just joined an MLM company whereby I need to introduce the business to prospect and they purchase a product before I will get my commission. How best or which way can I do this in order to be successful in the business?” Winnie from West Africa

Apparently there are many ways to get internet network marketing leads. Different network marketing gurus will claim to have their proprietary leads generation methods.

I don’t have any proprietary leads generation methods. But I do know some effective ways to get internet network marketing leads and I’m going to discuss some of them here.

1) Just Advertise

Almost all internet network marketing companies have their standard lead capture squeeze page. If your company doesn’t have one, run away from it.

The easiest way to get quick networking marketing leads is to advertise the lead capture page in ‘established’ lead generation websites.

I’ve seen many of my customers (my advertisers) getting good response using this simple method.

One warning is that if your network marketing company is a popular one, this method will not be effective. This is because the lead capture page has been overused. Fresh and interesting lead capture page usually can generate better response.

2) Create Your Own Lead Capture Page

As I said, fresh and interesting lead capture page usually can generate better response. So instead of relying on your company’s standard promotion tools, why not create your own lead capture page?

Of course, in order to create one, you need to learn copywriting, basic html etc.

3) Use Funded Proposal Concept

This is by far the BEST way to get internet network marketing leads.

The idea of funded proposal is to charge your prospect upfront before selling them the actual backend product.

If this is the first time you heard of this term, you may wonder why these prospects are so stupid. Who in the right mind will pay for something upfront knowing that they will be asked to buy other things later on?

If you have such a doubt, wait till you see the example below……

Example - A $10 Internet Marketing Course

Will you pay an ‘experience’ internet marketer $10 for a half-day course teaching you how to make money online?

Many people will.

During the course, the marketer will ‘really’ teach you some good internet marketing skills and at the same time show you a good business opportunity that he is making money with.

See the idea?

The $10 fee will help to offset for his advertising cost. These prospects are in a way paying him to sell them.

4) Give Away A Book, Audio CD or DVD

Giving away free ebook for leads generation is becoming old school. Advanced marketers are now giving away a real book, Audio CD or even DVD. The cost of production is negligible but the perceived value is much higher. The response is hence higher.

5) Brand Yourself As A Guru

You must have seen some internet network marketing gurus online. They sell products to teach you how to make lots of money from internet network marketing.

This is another typical example of funded proposal, where they sell you their products upfront and then their network marketing opportunity subsequently.

Anyone can be a guru. It all depends on how you position yourself.

“How to build a list of people, if I do not have the funds to do this? I have tried some free advertising companies but nothing yet.” - Jay Rossi

If you are in the same situation as Jay, I hope this article can help you.

First thing first, stop dreaming!

Many marketers promote internet marketing as a lazy way to make money. To a certain extent, it is. But if you talk about list building, it’s definitely not a lazy way to make money.

If you think all you need is an opt-in form and people will flood into your list, you’ll be wondering why your list building effort is in vain.

First of all, you got to ask yourself the following questions:

- Is your sales letter powerful enough to get people’s attention?
- Is your offer appealing enough such that people bother to opt-in to get it?
- Is your sales letter convincing enough to get people to take immediate action?

If your answer is ‘no’ to any of the 3 questions, you should first brush up your copywriting and marketing skills, before even talking about where to get the traffic.

I hope I’m clear on this point.

Why free advertising doesn’t work?

I probably say this hundreds of times. The key in advertising is finding targeted traffic. So long as the traffic is targeted, it doesn’t matter whether the advertising is free or paid.

So instead of questioning yourself whether free advertising works, you should ask yourself whether the advertising traffic is targeted to your niche. If it is, the problem is not with the advertising media but with your skills in converting the traffic into your list.

So, how to build a list, if you do not have the funds to do it?

Well, there are many ways to build a list without having to spend a dime in advertising.

These ways include exchanging traffic with other marketers (provided that you have an initial list), building a list through your blog (provided that your blog is getting free traffic from the search engine), starting your own affiliate program (provided that you have access to a list of affiliates), as well as other standard free traffic strategies such as forum marketing, article marketing, traffic exchange networks, list building networks and social networking.

But instead of limiting your option to free traffic strategies, why not think of how you can earn back your advertising cost?

My preferred way, of course, is to use the MYOB list builder script that I’ve developed for my own use and given free to our LeadsLeap members. If you do not know what this script can do for you, you better check it out. At least you know what are the options available to you.

Don’t keep thinking of how to build a list for free or how you can get free traffic. Instead, think of how to design a good sales letter and a good marketing system, so that you can profit from your advertising effort. This was what I did when I first started marketing online without any resources (read the full story at My Best Kept Secrets To Increase Web Site Traffic From Scratch).

If you are serious about doing business online, it’s important to learn how to do online business advertising. Whether the traffic source is free or paid, if you do not understand the basics of doing online advertising, the traffic you’ve generated will be wasted.

Recently a ‘rich’ surveying company advertised with us. When I looked at the ad, I almost fainted. It was a simple sign up form, expecting people to sign up without telling them anything about the company or the offer. Isn’t it common sense to ask oneself “will I act on this ad?” before one spend money advertising the ad?

In today’s discussion on how to do online business advertising, I’m going to share with you 3 “MUST-HAVE” elements in your ad before you even start thinking where to advertise it.

Hope that helps.

1. WIIFM “in 5 seconds”

WIIFM stands for “what’s in it for me”.

If you don’t tell people what’s in it for them, they are not going to be interested in your ad, not to mention taking action.

The problem with many advertisers is that their WIIFM is scattered all over the sales copy. One has to seriously read through the sales copy to identify them. Unfortunately, most sales copies are not read and thus the WIIFM message is not delivered.

For effective online business advertising, your ad must address the question of WIIFM within 5 seconds after a prospect first look at your ad. If not, you are losing them, period.

This means your headline, subheadline and the first paragraph of your sales copy play an important role in deciding whether a prospect will continue reading your ad or simply leave the page.

2. Become their friends “in 10 seconds”

Once you successfully capture their attention with WIIFM, you next objective is to gain their confidence in you and/or your offer.

Common ways to achieve this include the follow tricks:

- adding testimonials, especially ones with photographs;
- showing your own photograph and disclosing your name, email address and even contact number;
- showing other proofs such as earning screenshots, samples of completed work etc.

3. “Impossible-to-miss” call for action

Lastly, you must tell your prospect what to do next.

The problem with many advertisers is that their call for action is hidden somewhere in the sales letter. If it takes even 10 seconds for the prospects to search for the call for action, most of them would rather click the close window button.

The 3 elements above are the bare minimum that you must have in your ad if you want to do any online business advertising.

In additional to these 3, try to build a list regardless of what online business you’re advertising. The main advantage of online advertising vs offline advertising is that it’s easy to capture clients’ database. In the world of business, winners are those who own the customers. Think Walmart vs wholesaler. Think Ebay vs its sellers. The ones with huge customer base win. Regardless of what business you’re in, you are in the business of building customers.