SorenJordansen.comInternet Marketing Revealed, Reviewed & Discussed

With the launch of my new Tweet My Blog, I have received a lot of questions from my readers and members. These question generally fall into two categories:

1) What is Twitter and why should I use it?
2) How can I use Twitter to promote my internet marketing business?

I have found a great video that explains the first question, you can watch it here:

And now for explaining the marketing bit…

First of all, as the video above states, Twitter is a place where you can let people know what you are doing, in between emails and blog posts. This will help your members, customers and prospects put a face on you as the marketer. They can relate to the things you are posting and feel like they are getting to know you.

Building a solid relationship with your readers will do wonders for you bottom line. Twitter is especially powerful if you engage in conversations with your followers. Make them feel like they are part of your community, like they are special - and you are on your way to getting customer loyalty for life.

Twitter is also a very powerful way to get noticed by leaders in your industry. You want to seek out people in your industry who are more successful than you are, and add them to the list of people your are following.

When they post at Twitter, you can reply to their tweets and they will be able to read it. Don’t spam them, you need to add to the conversation, offer your help on something, or post an intelligent question. If you do this the right way these “industry leaders” will start to notice you, and remember you - and trust me that’s a great thing

Also sometimes these “industry leaders” will reply to you, and that is where the fun begins… All their followers will see that they have found you worth talking to, and they now have the chance to go check out your Twitter page and start following you. You are in other words becoming “famous by association”, and you can really pick up a lot of new Twitter followers this way.

And then you can of course use Twitter to make announcements to your followers for example when you have put up a new post on your blog. That’s where Tweet My Blog enters the picture. It will automatically ping Twitter every time you post at your blog. And the Tweet My Blog widget will help grow your Twitter following on auto pilot.

Just to sum it up… you can use Twitter to direct traffic back to your blog or site and it can be very powerful for that, especially when you build a huge following. But you have to use Twitter as a networking tool. Don’t just spam your links to the world - engage in conversations, network, build relationships and post tweets that have some value. If you do that, chances are that a lot of people will click your links when you do post a “marketing tweet”.

If you grab a free copy of Tweet My Blog today, you will also get a free copy of a great Twitter marketing ebook called: “A Geek’s Guide To Promoting Yourself & Your Online Business In 140 Characters Or Less With Twitter”. Click the banner below to grab your copy now!

Pat Marcello shot a great video about my new Tweet My Blog plugin yesterday. It show you just how simple it is to install and use this Twitter plugin on your Wordpress blog. You can watch the video here:

Grab Your Free Copy Of Tweet My Blog Here!

Ever wondered how you could harness the power of Twitter to drive massive amounts of traffic to your blogs - and how to convert that traffic into cash?

Together with John Merrick I have just come up with the perfect solution for you… Our new product called Tweet My Blog.

It’s a Wordpress plugin that makes it super easy to combine the powers of Wordpress and Twitter - driving massive amounts of traffic to your blog.

And the best part… It’s 100% FREE!

TweetMyBlog will automatically…

1. Post a tweet whenever you update you blog. The tweet will link back to your blog, driving a ton of interested readers your way.
2. Highlight your latest Tweets on your blogs sidebar - increasing your Twitter following.
3. Promote your affiliate link on auto-pilot, whenever you use the plugin and sidebar widget. Earn commissions just for posting to your blog.

This is far more than just another Wordpress plugin - This is a fully fleshed out marketing plan that will put the power of Twitter at your finger tips.

And… Even though we are giving this plugin away for free, you should take a close look at the special offer we have in store for you when join. We are very proud of that one and we know it can skyrocket your marketing power when using Twitter and Wordpress.

Grab Your Free Copy Of Tweet My Blog Here!

In last week’s list building article I was discussing how to drive massive amounts of traffic to your squeeze page. Though very effective, the traffic sources I listed were also very beginner friendly. Today I’m going to take it to the next level and show you have to drive even more traffic, with some more advanced resources - note that these aren’t supposed to replace the resources in the last article, they are meant to be add-ons to your overall traffic strategy.

But before we get started on that we need to take a close look at your conversion tracking…

Conversion Tracking & Split Testing

Hopefully you have set up your conversion tracking after reading last week’s article. As I mentioned there are a couple of reasons why you want to pay close attention to your conversion tracking stats, let’s take a close look at two of them…

1. With proper conversion tracking you know the exact cost of one new subscriber to your list. If you (on average) pay 25 cents per subscriber at source A, and 50 cents at source B - you of course want to focus your advertising budget on source A (all other thing being equal).

But since you have monetized your sign up process and have a good auto responder follow series - you also know roughly how much money you make from each new subscriber going through your follow up series.

So if you earn $1 per person going through your follow up series (that’s a very realistic number btw), and we take a look at the example above - you would of course keep purchasing as much traffic as you can from both source A and B, for as long as the conversion rates and earnings stays up.

And that’s the beauty of doing proper conversion tracking and knowing your numbers. You can pretty much automate (pay for) most of your traffic generation and still be in profit - and that leaves you with time for testing and tweaking your pages, emails etc. to improve your conversions and earning, and for developing new systems and products.

2. But just because you are in profit doesn’t mean you should be satisfied. You should use your conversion tracking to continuously improve your squeeze page. That way you can raise you conversion rates, decrease your cost per subscriber and in turn allow you to build your list faster, for bigger long term profits.

What you want to do is run some simple split tests on your squeeze pages. I’m not talking about advanced taguchi testing, although you can do some pretty advanced stuff with a free Google Analytics account - I’m talking about simple A/B split tests, here’s what you want to do:

1. Make two versions of your squeeze page (for each different traffic source). Rotate the two pages so each of them get 50% of the traffic. This is very easy to manage using Hitsconnect as they have both have conversion tracking and rotators.
2. You want to test simple changes, like a different headline, changing one of the bullet points, changing the font style or background colour etc. You ONLY want to split test one thing at a time, otherwise you won’t know what is causing the change in conversion rates.
3. When you have collected enough tracking stats to determine e.g. which headline is converting the best. You toss out the losing squeeze page and keep the winner.
4. Then you try to beat the winner by creating a new squeeze pages testing something else, like changing a bullet point.

This sort of split testing is an ongoing process, that will continue to improve your conversion rates and thus both speed up your list building and earn you more money.

If you want to know more about conversion tracking, I recommend that you download this free ebook “Tracking Your Way To Profits“.

And now it’s time to start generating even more traffic to your squeeze page…

Step 1: Using JV Giveaways

I have been using JV giveaways for years, and as a result I have added thousands of new subscribers to my lists. Contributing to a giveaway is one of the fastest and most effective list building techniques I know of.

Essentially a giveaway is a huge co-registration/list building JV… All the contributers upload a gift and then promote the event to their existing lists. The members, who sign up for the giveaway, can then browse all the gifts, and if they find something they like, they need to sign up for that particular contributors list to get the download link. As a general rule gifts will rank by the number of referrals contributors put in - and the higher your rank is, the more subscribers you will likely get from the event.

If you have followed the steps in the first two articles, it should be easy for you to get started using JV Giveaways. The squeeze page set up and follow up series are perfect for this - and as you build your list using the other traffic methods, you can leverage that list to rank well in the giveaways, and thus bring in even more subscribers.

Power Tip: You want to be on the first page of the giveaway, but you don’t want to put more of your own subscribers in there, than absolutely necessary to achieve it. I tend to use safelists and list builders a lot when promoting giveaways. That way I can still build my gift rank and get a lot of new subscribers, without having to share my existing list with all the other contributors.

Here are a couple of recommended JV Giveaway resources.

JV Giveaway Secrets an excellent free to join site with some good information on how to best use giveaways. But the main reason I’m recommending it, is that they will also keep you updated on new giveaway events that are worth contributing to.

My Giveaway Secrets a great ebook by my good friend Derrick VanDyke. It’s an excellent step-by-step guide for people who want to start using giveaways to build a profitable email list. You can read more about the book and Derrick’s affiliate program here “Giveaways, Paypal Payments & More“.

Step 2: Using Article Marketing To Build Your List

Article marketing is a long term strategy that can build a consistent flow of traffic to your squeeze page. Here’s how it works:

You write some short 400-600 word articles on the same topic as your squeeze page, free gift and follow up series. Whatever you write about make sure it does not read as a sale letter, your articles should be purely informative. If you don’t want to write your own articles you can do like me, and go to somewhere like elance.com to find a ghost writer.

You then submit your articles to all the popular article directories, my two favourites are Ezine Articles and Isnare

When webmaster and ezine publishers look for free content to reprint on their websites and in their newsletters, they turn to the article directories. In exchange for the free content, the publishers agree to leave the article intact and include your resource box. This is where you get your traffic… Every time someone reprints one of your articles, your resource box is included, with a link to your website. Because the article directories often have a good search engine rank you are also likely to get some search traffic to your articles - provided that you write about a topic people actually search for (and use a headline + keywords that are optimized for the search engines).

The key to getting good results from article marketing is to write an awesome author resource/bio box. This is an incredibly crucial part of the system, that you need to spend some time on. Don’t waste the efforts of your article writing by slapping down an ineffective bio box like,

Joe Schmo is an expert in golf. Click
here to find out more info on golf
–> www.golfmastery.com

Consider the author resource box like an ultra-small salespage where your one goal is to get that reader to click on your link. You only have a few sentences to hook the reader with curiosity and then give him a powerful reason why he should click on your link.

In our example, I would probably use something similar to the following:

Joe Schmo is a golfing expert who recently developed an
eCourse that details a step by step process for adding greater
distance to your long drives. If you are interested in learning
more about his “5 Ways To Add Distance To Your Drives” eCourse
and shedding strokes of your game, please go here:
=> www.golfmastery.com

Power Tip - The 2 Part Strategy: Consider breaking your articles up into two parts. You can then post the first part to the article directories (include “Part 1″ in your headline) - in your resource box you then people to click the link to get part 2 of the article. If you articles are good, that will give your click trough rate a significant boost. You can either post part 2 on your blog (which would then have some form of lead capture on it) - or you can send them to a squeeze page where they opt-in to get part 2 (and probably another freebie to convince them to part with their contact details).

If you want to learn more about how to use article marketing effectively, I recommend that you download these two great free ebooks: Free Traffic Secrets and The 22 Step Plan

Step 3: Using Your Blog To Build Your List

Using a blog is the absolute easiest way to rank well in the search engines. Set up a Wordpress blog and start posting articles on the niche topic you are trying to build your list in. I’m not going to write a whole lot about how to set up your blog and get traffic to it - I’ve already covered that in this article: How To Setup A Profitable Blog

The key is to convert some of the search engine and web 2.0 traffic, your blog will be generating, into subscribers for your list. I know I’m a bit biased But the most effective way I know of, is to add a Floating Action Button with an optin form to your blog. You can see the FAB script in action over at Mike Paetzold’s blog

If you want to learn more about blogging I highly recommend these resources:

FirePow
Wordpress Made Easy
7 SEO Tips For Wordpress
15 Minute Blog Traffic

Step 4: Building Your List With PPC Advertising

I’ve saved Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising for last, because it’s one of the hardest traffic generation methods to master - also I don’t use PPC very much, so I’m by no means an expert. But it deserves to be mentioned because it can, without a doubt, be one of the fastest and most cost effective ways to build a list. If you want to learn a bit more about PPC advertising I recommend that you download this free ebook: Adwords Made Easy

I’ve seen a lot of people waste a ton of money on Adwords, because they rushed into something they didn’t really understand. Here are a couple of warnings you need to pay attention to, before you start your first PPC campaign.

1. Remember that you pay for every click - it does not matter if people subscribe or not. Use the other traffic source to make sure you have a squeeze page with a decent conversion rate before you start running it in Adwords.
2. Figure out what you earn on average per subscriber going through your one time offers and follow up series. That number along with your conversion rate will determine the maximum you want to pay per click. For example, if you have a 50% conversion rate and you earn $1 per new sub you could afford to pay up to $0.50 per click and still break even.
3. Google will assign a quality score to your landing page - basically the better your quality score, the less you have to pay per click. The short squeeze page we have been using so far is not that good for PPC campaigns. What you can do is take that page and add an article beneath it (the article needs to relate to the keywords you use in your campaign)

If you really want to get into PPC advertising I highly recommend seeking out Perry Marshall, he is THE authority on PPC advertising.

So Was That All The Traffic Sources

Nope… Not by a long shot. As I have said before there are hundreds if not thousands of ways to generate traffic to your squeeze page. What I have highlighted here, and in the last article, are the methods I use the most. As a list builder the key is to look at all the different traffic generation methods and think, “hmmm… how can I use this to build my list?” And again, I highly recommend that you also read the Free Traffic Secrets.

What You Have Now & What Is Coming…

We are approaching the end of this this article series. If you have been following my suggestion so far, you should now have a fully monetized squeeze page system, a great follow up series and a steady stream of traffic that converts into new subscribers. Your job is to keep that flow coming and to keep testing and tweaking, so you can keep increasing your conversion rates and earnings.

With a constantly growing list of subscribers you are well on your way to true internet marketing success - in the final article in this series, I’m going to discuss how you can leverage that list to get in on juicy JV deals, create your own products etc. This is where we start talking about getting “filthy rich” on the internet. Stay tuned for the next article

Got Any Questions Or Comments?

Please leave a blurb below if you have any questions about some of the traffic methods, a comment on the article - or maybe there is a particular aspect of JVs and product creation you want me to talk about in the next article? Thanks for reading - I hope you found the information useful.

Written by Andrew Hansen from FirePow

Step 1 - Niche Research

The first key to the success of a blog or mini site is that it has to target a group of people (a niche) who are hungry for information of a specific nature. In other words, I’m talking about the selection of your niche.

The group of people that your blog or mini site targets has to be a group of people who have problems. Problems in the sense that they are looking for a solution to something, looking to improve something. Furthermore, in a great niche, that SOMETHING, is something that causes pain. Financial pain, physical pain, emotional pain, some sort of pain, for the simple reason that people who have pain are the people who will want to buy solutions to that pain, and hopefully from your website.

If that sounds a bit sick, trying to exploit people with pain, it’s not. It’s called marketing. You’ve had marketers doing it to you your whole life and you probably never even knew about it, why can’t you do it too? And what’s more, you’re actually going to provide these people with a real solution, so you’re being helpful!

Anyhow moving on.

So you’re looking for a group of people with a problem, but that’s not all.

Your next concern has to be whether there are enough of these people searching for solutions to their problems on the internet. How many is enough you ask? It’s a good question. With certain kinds of sites, all you need is 10 visitors to your site a day and you can turn a nice monthly profit. Other niches and products that you promote you might need thousands per day. It all depends on what you sell, and who to, AND how much commission you make when you sell to them.

The things you should do are look at the search volume, as indicated by a tool like Wordtracker. Here you’re simply looking at how many searches per day a particular keyphrase gets in the search engines. Then after that, you want to look at whether there are other sites or blogs that are competing in the same niche.

Contrary to what alot of people think, NO competition isn’t necessarily a good thing. NO competition could and often does mean that it’s not a profitable niche. What you actually want is SOME competition, but CRAPPY competition that you can DESTROY by making a better site, providing better content and in a better way.

The final piece of the puzzle of finding a good niche, is whether the niche has a quality product for you to promote. You need something to sell to these people, that is high quality, has great marketing material (sales letter etc, so it will convert your traffic well) and pays a decent commission.

This is of course assuming you’re looking at the affiliate marketing model of making money with your blog - which I suggest if you’re looking to retire from your job and earn a full time passive income, you SHOULD be. There are other ways to make money where you might think about some different factors in your niche selection.

So if you can combine all of the above factors when selecting your niche, you’ll be giving yourself and your new blog the best possible chance of success. I hope you’ve found this valuable.

Step 2 - Site CreationOnce your niche is selected, you obviously need to create a website to capitalize on it.

Blogs in particular have become such a popular choice for niche marketers because of their extreme ease of use, ease in maintaining, and ease in updating. Not to mention that the structure of a blog is generally by nature, search engine friendly. AND furthermore, where it isn’t, there is always a third party plugin to make it so.

There are many ways to create a successful blog, and the one you choose should reflect an understanding of your target market. What we’ll look at here is an example of one such method, that focuses on the generation of free traffic, and the promotion of an affiliate program for monetization.

The first thing you need to do is create a blog that’s visually or aesthetically sound. A visually sound blog, other than just looking pretty, is arranged in a way that maximizes all the content you create, by maintaining your readers attention, and drawing the most attention to your affiliate program.

There are a few ways you want to do this:

1. Choose a blog theme with a predominantly white background and with black text. Simple advice, but often ignored. Black on white is the easiest for the eyes to read. Other colour schemes can quickly tire the eyes and make it hard to maintain concentration.

2. Choose a clean and neat theme. You don’t want too much going on. It should be very clear where your content is located, very clear where your sidebar and navigation is located, where your other categories can be viewed and so forth. If a reader comes from a search engine, they should know exactly where they have to click to get the information they want. Generally I say the less options the better in terms of other features on your blog.

3. There are certain pages you absolutely want to have on your site. These are a Privacy Policy page, an About Us page, and a Contact us page. Google in particular looks at these things as indicators of a serious, quality, non spammy site. Furthermore, you want to have an archives page (easily achieved by the SRG Clean Archives plugin if you use Wordpress), so as not to have your archives taking up valuable room in your blog sidebar.

There are more factors but for the sake of this article not being 9000 words, we’ll move on.

Once you have an aesthetically pleasing blog, you need some reader pleasing content.

We’re going to assume here that you have a product selected. Of course the next step after picking your niche (sometimes these tasks are one and the same) is to select a product that you’ll promote to the niche. This is where you’ll earn your cash.

So once you’ve got a product selected, and the base of a good blog created as above, your job is to create some content that the people in your niche will find valuable and use that content to drive your website’s visitors to the merchant’s page and earn an affiliate commission.

At this point, you should have your niche’s keywords researched - by that I mean you should have some idea of what might be a good place to attack the niche from. Ideally you’d have some keyphrase related to your niche that are uncompetitive in terms of the number of pages optimized for them in the search engines.

Where you’d ideally start your content creation is by writing an article on this uncompetitive term, posting it on your site and getting it ranked in the search engines. From here, you can develop as much content on search phrases from your niche, as you desire (remember you got those phrases from a tool like the Wordtracker keyword tool) in order to increase traffic to your site.

Some factors we didn’t get to mention in this article are things like On page optimization, making your pages of content rank well in the search engines - and monetization - the art of getting the highest percentage of visitors to your site actually making you money. But for a basic overview, I think we’ve done alright.

Step 3 - Traffic GenerationLets look at how to drive traffic to your blog or mini site - the element of online marketing that most people get stuck at.

Here we’ll look at the primary ways of driving quality traffic to your niche site. Keep in mind that the phrase QUALITY traffic is important - we only the want the visitors who might buy our products and make us money - we don’t want freebie seekers in this business model.

The first and best way to generate traffic is to do as I’ve described in the previous article, which is to produce content based on long tail keywords from your niche. After optimizing your page well for this term, and using the in built pinging fucntion to notify other websites of your new content - you can be ranking and getting traffic for uncompetitive terms within the first few days of your site’s existence.

After this, there are many ways to approach your traffic generation.

1. Article Marketing: This is essentially (though often misunderstood) the process of having articles you’ve written, published on websites other than your own, for the purpose of including a link back to your site and funneling traffic from their site to yours. You can do this with article directories or with other blogs and websites by contacting the site author. Either way, the extra exposure from these sites can drive through important relevant visitors to your pages.

2. Ongoing Keyword research and SEO: The reason I believe in having a big focus on SEO is that the people who have a specific problem and are looking for a solution, tend to gravitate toward a search engine. Yes there are millions of web viewers who don’t go near a search engine but they can be harder to target and can represent not as high a quality traffic. In other words they don’t tend to make you as much money.

Continually finding new keywords that represent relevant traffic for your products, and continually creating content to target those visitors is about as smart as you can be with ongoing traffic generation.

3. Link Building: This is both for the purpose of boosting your search engine rankings and increasing exposure to your website. You have probably heard that links back to your site from relevant websites indicate your site is more trust worthy and worthy of better SE rankings. At the same time, a link on a relevant website, whether in a piece of content on a sidebar, can increase visitors to your website. You should make it a point to continually do activities that motivate similar sites in your niche to link to you - or even if not in your niche, site’s that could send you relevant visitors.

4. Using Social Networks: Using the myriad social networks like Digg, Mysapce, Facebook, Stumbleupon etc can be another great way to increase traffic to your website. Just by submitting all the posts you make to your blog to site’s like Digg and Stumbleupon, you can earn yourself extra backlinks, and the potential to have your content seen and then shared by new members of your target audience. As is becoming clear, almost EVERYONE online hangs out at some social network for some reason, and if you can find where your target market is hanging out and leverage that, your traffic can increase exponentially.

Finally, remember that when trying to generate traffic to your blog, you should consider your niche before deciding which methods to utilize. As I’ve said before, using a social network might be great, but certain niches might be too technically unadvanced to know about social networks, and they only use Google. Some niches might be more easily approached by use of visual media like video rather than article content. The bottom line of traffic generation is where are my target market hanging out, and how can I get my site in front of them in a way that contributes value to their lives.

I hope you’ve found this traffic generation article helpful. Next we’ll look at the management of a successful blog.

Step 4 - ManagementThe final step in the process of having a successful and profitable niche blog is the management of your site.

Here I’m talking about management in terms of keeping your site running, monitoring what’s working and what’s not, and monitoring the success of your site so you know how much effort to commit to it on a continual basis.

Here are some of the elements involved in the management area of a successful blog.

1. You need to manage and track your search engine statistics. Here I mean two things. 1. is the doings of your search competition and 2 is the rankings and traffic from various pages of your site.

In 1. You need to be always checking up on your search competition. Just by knowing what sites link to your competitor site can allow you a way to gain new backlinks. You contact the same people and get the same links PLUS keep doing all the good SEO you’re already doing, you can steal their spot.

in 2. You need to monitor your own search rankings to see what search terms are bringing you traffic. At this point you can either choose to focus more of your content on those terms, giving readers coming from those terms more to look at and more opportunities to get pushed to your affiliate link OR you can look harder at the monetization of those pages. This might include testing different affiliate link positionings, changing the text, and more.

Following on from that, something else that needs to be tracked on your blog, is how successful your content is at converting visitors to sales.

This has traditionally been tough on a blogs because the way they are set doesn’t generally allow for any form of split testing. However, a new blogging software called Firepow has made this possible. What you can do is test which content your audience responds best to. You can use variations of two different posts, have them alternate for each new user to the blog, and see which version of the post generated the most affiliate link clicks.

Optimizing your content like this may be the easiest way to increase your bottom line. After all think about this: If you want to double your profits from a site, you can either double your site traffic, or you can double your conversion rate… what’s easier? In a lot of cases, it’s doubling your conversion rate.

Finally, something that needs to be managed on your blog is the updating of your content. The most successful blogs and mini sites always have something new for their readers all the time, and when you’re running more than one blog, this can be an ongoing challenge. The best thing you can do here is get yourself the help of some software like the above mentioned Firepow, which can help you manage a number of blog’s content from one control panel. Something like this will give you the ability to post content on schedules, get notified of when a blog needs updating, and offer you options of how to get relevant content on to your site without your effort.

Combined with all the elements we’ve talked about in previous articles, managing your blog will put the profit icing on your blogging/mini site cake. I trust that you’ve found this series informative and helpful.

Welcome to the third article in my list building series. In the first two articles I discussed “how to set up your squeeze page” and “how to write your follow up series“. Today I’m going to show you the next step - how to drive traffic to your squeeze page, and how to make sure that traffic converts into new subscribers, and thus money in your pocket.

There are hundreds of ways to generate traffic - I’m going to focus on the ones I use the most, which of course also are the most effective for me. As with the other articles I’m going to rank theses step by step - note that it does not mean that #1 is the best, it means that I believe #1 to be the easiest to master and get results from. You don’t have to use all the traffic sources, you need to figure out what works best for you and how many sources you can use effectively. But at the same time you don’t want to limit yourself to just one source.

You will always hear a lot of people say that this and that traffic source does not work or does not create results. I couldn’t disagree more, there is no such thing as bad traffic. It’s what you do with your traffic that matters - what offer you present and how you do it. Sure you will likely get a better conversion rate from PPC than you will from traffic exchanges - but at the end of the day, what matters is your return on investment (money or time). Comparing conversion rates across methods is like comparing apples to oranges, but you can compare cost per sign up and use that to find the traffic methods that work best for you.

Tracking Your Conversion Rates

I mentioned this briefly in my first article - It’s very important that you track your conversion rates, because you want to know:

1. What works, so you can focus your time and money on the traffic resources that performs best for you.
2. What to change on your squeeze pages, in order to improve your conversion rates and what version of your squeeze page works best with a given traffic method.
3. The cost per sign up - You can then compare that to what you earn (on average) per subscriber going through your follow up series. Knowing these 2 numbers will allow you to put your list building into overdrive, because you can basically use this to “buy” unlimited traffic and still be in profit.

In my next article I will go into more detail on tracking, how to split test and improve your conversion rates. But for it will be enough to say that you need to track your conversion rates - here’s how to do it…

You need to use a tracking service that allows your to track conversion rates. I use and recommend Hitsconnect (you want a partner membership, so you can do conversion tracking).

When you set up your tracking link, you will get a small piece of code that you can add to your thank you page. You will then be able to see how many subscribers you get , where they are coming from and what that cost you. As I said this in invaluable information - you need it to build a truly effective and profitable campaign.

I recommend that you add the conversion tracking code to your download page (or whatever page they go to after clicking the verification link) - that way you will be tracking what matters, new subscribers. Not much point in advertising somewhere that brings in a ton of (fake) sign ups, if none of them verify their subscription.

If you want to know more about conversion tracking, I recommend that you download this free ebook “Tracking Your Way To Profits“.

And Now The Traffic Generation Methods

Here are 4 very simple traffic generation methods you can start using today (and they are all free to low cost). I have chosen these 4 today because they are the easiest to get started with, and because they are the best suited for the squeeze page set up, I taught you in the first article. In my next article I’m going to show you some more advanced strategies, if you can’t wait, there are links for a couple of extra ebooks in this post. But for now lets get started driving traffic and building your list with…

Traffic Method 1: Traffic Exchanges

Traffic exchanges are one of the most misunderstood traffic sources out there. A lot of people will tell you that they don’t work and that they provide worthless untargeted traffic. Nothing could be further from the truth, but as with other methods you have to make them work for you, by using them the right way.

First off all we know exactly why people are using traffic exchanges. They want to make money online, they want free traffic, and they are likely using that traffic to promote a “make money program” of some sort. As you can see the traffic is very targeted if we provide what people want e.g. “how to make money online”, “how to get tons of free traffic”, “how to recruit more people to their biz opp” or any combination of these 3. On the other hand you will be wasting you time marketing other niche products on traffic exchanges, people might be interested in e.g. football, but they are not surfing traffic exchanges to learn about football. If you want to promote niche products on exchanges you need to spin in from the “make money” angle.

And since we know people are busy surfing to generate traffic to their own pages, we can’t expect them to read a long sales letter. You only have a few seconds to catch their attention before they click on to next site so you need to get their attention fast - then you want to get their contact info so you can follow up and make the sale. It’s extremely difficult to sell directly on a traffic exchange, because people are not searching for products they are advertising their own business… So always use traffic exchanges to build a list and then go for the sale on the back end.

The squeeze page and monetization plan outlined in my squeeze page article, is perfect for traffic exchange use. For a bit more info on how to optimize your campaigns for traffic exchanges you can read Mike Paetzold’s Using traffic exchanges article.

With a good traffic exchange optimized hook and squeeze page, you are ready to venture into TE land. But before you go I must warn you that there are thousands of exchanges out there, but very few of them are actually worth using. I highly recommend that you focus your efforts on 5-10 of the big ones - basically you want to have your site shown 24-7 in the exchanges and if you are just starting out you can’t do that with 30 (you will just dilute your efforts). Furthermore, the people surfing the smaller exchanges are likely also in the big ones, you might as well grab them there… As your advertising budget expands, you can start testing more exchanges and adding the good ones to your list.

Here are a few of the best traffic exchanges:

1. Dragon Surf
2. Traffic-Splash
3. I Love Hits
4. Advertising Know How
5. Traffic Bunnies

These 5 exchanges are a good starting point, and you can then expand with the exchanges that make it into the top 10-15 over at Affiliate Funnel.

At first you are probably aiming for 1 new subscriber per 200 views on the exchanges, but over time you will be looking to bring that down to 1 per 100 (or better) - That may not sound like much, but when you factor in the low cost of traffic exchange credits, this is actually very cost-effective. If you have implemented the monetization steps from article one and have a good follow up series in place, you will very likely turn a profit, when you buy credit packages from the 5 exchanges above.

Of course you can also surf a bit to get some extra free advertising, but I don’t recommend surfing too much. Time is money and the time you spend surfing is better spent tweaking your squeeze page and follow up series - and on using the extra traffic methods below. For more info on this you can read the “Surfing or buying?” and “Missed the point?” articles by Mike Paetzold.

Traffic Method 2: Safelists

Safelists are another great source of free advertising and leads. They used to be extremely effective, but the emergence of auto submitters, inbox cleaners, validators etc. almost brought the industry to it’s knees. And you will hear a lot of people tell you to stay away safelists. They are partly right, you need to stay away from all the automated rubbish, but…

With the invention of credit based safelists, the industry has gotten a real revival and safelists are once again a very profitable advertising venue, if you use them the right way.

Most of what you just read about traffic exchanges also applies to safelists. It’s basically the same kind of users (target market) and it’s very important that you use them to build your own list. Here are a few extra points that will help make you a successful safelist advertiser…

The basic principle behind safelists is that advertisers get together and agree to receive email ads from each other. Therefore you can expect a lot of email especially when you start using a lot of different lists. So under NO circumstance should you use your main email account when you sign up for safelists. Quite a few companies will try to sell you “safelist friendly” email accounts, but don’t waste your money – nothing works better for safelists than a free Gmail account.

As with traffic exchanges, there are thousands of safelists on the market and most of them are worthless. They are either small “hobby” lists run by amateurs or they a populated by auto submitters with no real people reading your ads. You need to focus on 5-10 good solid credit based safelists, and then post to these as often as possible.

As I said it’s the same target market as on the traffic exhanges. Work at home/make money people, who are often just getting started. They are looking for free traffic and for information on how to “make it” in internet marketing. With the the squeeze page and follow up series you created after reading the first two articles, you are poised to give them what they are looking for.

You don’t want to write long ad copy for your safelist ads, and you certainly don’t want to send people directly to a sales page. Here’s what you need to do:

1. You need a good strong, and interesting, subject line to increase open rate on your ads.
2. Your ad should be short and to the point – you just want to create enough curiousity to make people want to click on to your squeeze page. A good strong sub headline, a few benefit laden bullet points and a strong call to action is all you need.
3. Understand that most reader will only open your ad because they need to get to the credit link at the bottom. Your job is to either stop them before they reach it and send them to your squeeze page, or to at least pre-sell them on what they will see when they click the credit link.

Focus your safelist advertising on capturing leads. Link to your squeeze page both from the ads and from the credit links

Many get overwhelmed with the amount of emails they receive from safelists, and by the time it takes to use these programs. You need to follow a good system that will minimize the amount of time your spend and maximize your results. In the Ultimate Safelist Survival Guide you will discover how to become a super effective safelist advertising machine, generating thousands of leads from free traffic.

Recommended resources:
Ultimate Safelist Survival Guide
Affiliate Funnel Safelists
Traffic Hoopla Top 10 Safelists

Traffic Method 3: Viral List Builders

These programs are even more effective than safelists. You can’t mail all the members like you can on a safelist, you can only mail your own downline. That means that people receive fewer emails from these lists, and therefore they are much more likely to use their primary email address. That translates into a better conversion rate for you. The downside is that you actually have to build/start a downline you can mail. But with most good viral list builders you can upgrade and instantly be able to mail thousand of people.

Like with safelists you should use these viral list builders to promote a squeeze page, so you can build your own list, and you do it in much the same way. However you should note that there are usually no credit links on viral list builders, so you subject line and ad copy is much more important for conversion rates. List Bandit and ViralURL are two excellent viral list builders, and taking up then one time offer in both of them was one of my best decisions ever.

There are a couple of credit based viral list builders out there, I guess you can say they are a crossbreed between the viral list builders and safelists. List Joe and List Auction are both worth joining and upgrading in. And you can see more list building programs in Affiliate Funnel.

Join a few of the better list building programs and upgrade (you get the best deals on the OTO when joining). Then mail them as often as possible, always linking to your squeeze page. I can guarantee you, that this will build you a nice list fast.

Mike Paetzold also wrote a short article about safelists and list builders, you can read it here: Generating traffic - Safelists, List Builders etc.

Traffic Method 4: Signature Links

Email signature: With most email programs you can automatically set up a signature link. Put in a couple of lines of catchy text and then link to you squeeze page. Once you set it up, it’s a very hands off form of advertising. It can really compound over timer (just think about how many emails you send a day). It also gives you a good reason to pass on those funny emails your annoying friends keep sending you. Forward them to yourcontacts and hope they go viral, just remember to include your signature ad

Forum signatures: can be one of the most effective forms of advertising generating highly targeted traffic. Simply add a line or two of text and a link for your squeeze page. It’s very important that you don’t just rush in and spam forums. Pay attention to the rules, participate in the discussions, network with the other members etc. If you become a part of the “community”, people will be more than happy to click your link and sign up for your list. To put your forum advertising into overdrive I highly recommend that you get your hands on Cindy’s Forum Traffic Gold

What You Have Now & What Is Coming…

If you have been following these articles you should have a fully monetized squeeze page system and follow up emails series set up. Start implementing the traffic methods above and put as many people as possible through your sales funnel. Remember to track your conversion rates, so you can focus on the traffic sources that works best for you. Read the “Free Traffic Secrets” ebook for more ideas on how to drive traffic to your squeeze page.

In my next article I’m going to go into more depth on the conversion tracking, showing you how you can easily split test your way to better results from any traffic source. And I’m going to give you the skinny on a few advanced traffic generation methods.

Got Any Questions Or Comments?

Please leave a blurb below if you have any questions about some of the traffic methods, a comment on the article - or maybe there is a particular traffic generation method you want me to talk about next time? Thanks for reading - I hope you found the information useful.