Listbuilding puzzles new affiliates and bloggers and it need not.
I am not saying that there is no work involved but it’s hardly Rocket Science to grow your traffic and whether you are driving traffic to a blog or sales page the techniques for producing the traffic are the same.
Here are some straightforward and action orientated ways to grow your list
1. On Page Optimization
When I survey my lists almost nobody asks me how to do SEO. Everybody wants to “make money online” or a little better, “free traffic” but does not seem to “join the dots”…
The way, the most basic and important way to get free traffic is to set up your website or blog to get visitors from Bing, Yahoo and Google.
Some of this set up is on your web page or blog post and some of it is off the page and all of it requires careful keyword research. The main purpose of the keyword research is to be able to plan the site whether blog or not to be well laid out and logical so that visitors and search engines can easily find what they are looking for.
Linking web pages
This means that your categories will come out of analysis of keyword lists and not a random choice! It means that all your posts will be focused on one major keyword and perhaps 2 secondary keywords.
And it also means that each page will have a unique “Title Tag” as well as a unique title.
This is simple stuff and is well known but widely ignored by bloggers who seem to think that being “open” or “cool” is all it takes to be successful.
Actually a well researched and implemented website is all it takes!
More to write about on page SEO soon…
2. Off Page Optimization
Each web page and each post is an island. Search engines do not see “Web sites” or “blogs” they just see web pages with links. You may think that your latest blog post is the “Bees knees” but if there are no links to it no one will see this model of insight and eloquence. The most important links are your own from your on site navigation. Your menu or navbar and the text on it is crucial.
And you can easily add some power to this by putting in extra links.
If you split a long post into 3 parts you can link between all 3 parts to help your readers get the whole picture. This kind of “deep linking” helps your site get thoroughly crawled by the search engines and gets more anchor text pointing to the page too, so the page comes up for extra keywords.
And all this is going on in your own site where you call the shots. The old days of emailing web masters and suggesting reciprocal links are gone. One way links are much more valuable and offering a webmaster some copy with a link to your site is a much more potent method of link building.
3. Recycling Your Posts
We are in a Green age nowadays so recycling is normal. Have a look at your blog or even on your hard drive and see if you can grab some good content and spruce it up to be posted in an Article directory or in one of the free content sharing sites such as Squidoo or Blogger. You can easily build 2 links per article back to your site and you can point those links at different pages and posts. Those links will help people find your site so word the text carefully!
One last point Please don’t just link back to your www.website.com – choose a page so that you link to www.website.com/neglectedpage.html Same principle for blogs
4. Social Bookmarking
You want more visitors to your blog? Well just go to where people are and create a helpful link to your post. And that is in the Social Bookmarking sites.
Caution – read the Terms and conditions and perhaps link to your material under a “pen name”.
Also get a “Bookmarking buddy” and you can help each other get noticed. You can automate this but it must be done with care and only as part of a whole link and traffic building plan.
5. Forum Marketing
We end today with the oldest traffic building method – participating in a forum. Asking and answering questions in a busy forum produces traffic to whatever link you have in your signature file.
This is an evergreen method of traffic generation and is completely free and will always work. ~forums were the original social networking sites before the phrase web 2.0 was invented. They are a super way to build relationships and pre-sell visitors
There we are, 5 action orientated methods to use to build your traffic and your list.
There are many other methods to gain traffic for your website and which ones you choose will depend on your skills and preferences.
Here at “ExpertListBuilding” we talk about doing things according to your “Listbuilding Personality”. This is nothing too psychological just the result of our years of coaching and mentoring.
Choosing and using the traffic techniques that fits your personality and skills is the most important traffic generation technique of all. Following a method designed for other people with other skills is a recipe for frustration and failure.
What is your favourite way to grow your traffic and grow your list?
I like the fact that you mentioned optimizing for bing, or rather considering bing at all. It does seem that it is here to stay and those getting the jump on using it to their advantage to better their business and build their opt in lists are playing on a open field at the moment.
Some good advice there – the mantra is that list building and traffic are simple but not easy!
I like the recycling bit – the internet is full of freebee seekers with their hard drives full of stuff!
“Simple but not easy” sums it up very well. The issue in the Internet Marketing world is that too many people confuse the two!
Nice points to have in mind for list building. Nice blog too!