MARKETING ONLINE

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How to Market Your Website or Blog!

Without Traffic, Your Efforts Will Soon Freeze and You Will Be Out of Gas!

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Now that you have built your website, how do you get traffic to it? How do you find people who are willing to buy your products?

In the other ‘real’ world outside the internet, you would normally have to advertise. If you have a great store, with some really neat products which everyone is looking for, yet they didn’t know it existed, it would be useless, right? In a way it’s the same on the internet with your website, except there is an advantage with your website.

Let’s think of it this way: what if you opened your store in the analogy above, and people who passed by saw what a great store it was, and they liked it so much that word got around by itself – without your ever doing any advertising, and before you knew it, your store became one of the top ten stores in that category in your town … or state … or country! It would be neat, wouldn’t it?

Of course, that is a far-fetched idea.

Or … is it?

Nowhere but on the internet can the above scenario be played out to perfection. Imagine having a website which is ranked no. 1 in Google for a certain set of keywords that people keep searching for in your niche. Wouldn’t that be neat to have? Let’s look at the ramifications of something like this:

- You would get a ton of traffic.
- You would earn a lot of income.
- Most of your income would be passive income, meaning it can easily happen while you’re not on the job, but you’re doing other things.

Isn’t that a dream situation? That’s what we would all like.

Okay, so the above scenario is achieved by what is known as SEO, or ‘search engine optimization’. This is basically a process which simply put, is a way to ‘please’ the search engines, so that they attach more relevance to your website, and give you a higher ‘ranking’ to get you more visibility and traffic.

The good thing about SEO is that it is mostly free. Of course, you can pay some SEO experts to do their thing, and that is fine too, but really speaking, there is nothing like studying it yourself.

There are some great tools and software available that can help you tremendously in your quest to get your website ranked higher in the search engines.

To learn more about SEO tools, please click here.

Of course, SEO is something that is best learned in a systematic process. You can simply do a search on Google or one of the other search engines and you will certainly come up with some great info. Of course, something that is as technical as SEO is best learned from a systematic method.

There are two types of traffic: free traffic or paid traffic.

Under free traffic, you can have various types of methods, like:

- SEO (discussed above)

- Article writing: This involves submitting articles to article directories with a link back to your website, which helps to generate a lot of traffic, especially if you target your articles with the right keywords – which means you have to do a fair amount of research.

- Social Networking: This involves social networks like Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, etc. In order to avail of marketing opportunities on social networks, you need to spend time building a relationship with people, and not just keep hitting them with sale after sale, which will surely put them off.

There are quite a few methods of generating traffic for free, but this is beyond the scope of this article at this moment.

Paid traffic involves the PPC model, which means: Pay per click. This means you only pay when people click on your ads. Normally when we hear this term, we think of Google. But actually, there are many methods to do this. Here is a list of some good ways to advertise using the PPC model.

- Google Adwords
- Yahoo
- Bing
- Facebook
- Myspace
- smaller search engines like Ask.com, Bidvertiser, etc.

You ought to exercise caution when trying out PPC advertising, because if you don’t know how to do it, you can easily burn a hole in your pocket fast where your expenses are more than your income.

PPC is best learned from good resources. While there are several free resources on the net, there are also paid resources.

A great free learning resource is Affilorama. They have great resources and have a good method. Of course, you need to upgrade in order to avail of all their tools.

One of the paid courses we recommend is Wealthy Affiliate University. They are tops in terms of value and have a great supportive community, eager to help you as someone who is new to internet marketing. Read more about it here.



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