You see, at times I like to only focus on the most “easy” ways for generating free website traffic, and I used to think that taking the time to post to blogs or forums wasn’t an easy and effective way of generating more free website traffic.  Well, I was wrong.  It just so happens to turn out that not only is posting to blogs and forums an “easy” way of generating more traffic, it is actually also a “residual” way of generating more website traffic. 

I learned the simple fact that posting to blogs and forums gives you “residual” website traffic shortly after finally deciding to start doing so.  I started to notice almost immediately that I was getting more and more clicks to my own blog and home page.  I guess that’s why they call it social marketing right?  The whole point here is that it can help you out extremely well if you decide to post to other people’s blogs and forums, so the lesson is to stop hiding behind the computer screen and to start being more social!

Daniel Pereira

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Will this trick work for all blogs?  Nope.  Unfortunately, there are a large number of blogging software programs out there, so this is definitely not going to work for all blogs.  Also, if your blog is hosted on a different website like WordPress.com, or Blogger.com, then it is going to be a lot harder to put these social bookmarking buttons at the end of your posts.  Also, depending on which website you are using, there may not be a way for you to automate the process.  If you want these buttons automatically placed at the end of each of your posts, then the easiest way to do this will be to install a WordPress.org blog on your own website.  There are tons of benefits to doing this, and if you are serious about blogging for free traffic, then you should take the time to learn how to incorporate the WordPress.org software on your own website. 

So, if you want to add these social bookmarking buttons for a blog that you are promoting on blogging website, then the best advice I have for you will be to search for “Digg button” or “Social Network Button” on that websites FAQ.  Generally, if you can add these buttons to your posts, then the answer will be revealed in the FAQ. 

If you want automation, and you have already installed the latest version of the WordPress.org blogging software, then you’ll be pleased to know that there are a number of different WordPress plugins that you can incorporate on your blog for almost all social networking buttons.  Many of them work well, and at the time that I am writing this, one of the plugins that many people use that gives you a lot of options is the “Share This” plugin.  This plugin can be found at the following link: http://alexking.org/projects/wordpress

The funny thing about WordPress plugins is that some of them will work great for a while, but then after WordPress has made too many updates, the plugin may stop working all together.  I share this with you in case one day you find that the “Share This” plugin no longer works.  Then you will know to look for a different plugin that does the same thing.  Also, you may want to install the “Share This” plugin along with other plugins that function similarly in order to see which plugin you like most for your blog. 

Daniel Pereira

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Now I would like to share with you additional sites that are going to allow you to get more free blogging traffic.  Basically, this is a list of Blog directory sites.  You will want to use this list and submit your blog to these handful of popular sites. Doing this while using Digg.com and Technorati.com will all allow you that extra boost of free blog traffic that you deserve.

So, what I want to do is start off with a list of the 4 of the most popular blog directory sites.  Afterward, I wam going to share with you an additional list of blog directory sites where you can submit your log.  Here is my top four list: 

#1:  www.BlogCatalog.com.  BlogCatalog.com was started in 2004 and has quickly become known as the premier blog directory site.  At the time of writing this article, it has received an Alexa ranking of 784, meaning that according to Alexa, it is the 784^th most popular website on the web.

#2:   www.BlogTopList.com  Was started in 2006 and is another great website where you should post your blog.  It currently has an Alexa ranking of 2,230.

#3:  www.TopBlogArea.com Also started in 2006, TopBlogArea.com has an Alexa ranking of 5,010.

#4:   Dir.BlogFlux.com  O.K., I also suggest submitting your blog to this blog directory site.  With an Alexa ranking of 9,491, it isn’t a really popular site on the web, but it may still give you a decent boost in traffic. 

Did I mention that there are hundreds of blog directory sites on the web?  If you want, you can pay for services that will submit your blog to a lot of them.  Would this be worth the money?  My guess is that it probably wouldn’t be.  I have tried to give you what I have found to be the most popular blog directory sites thus far.  The following list also includes a few sites that are decently popular as RSS and blog directory sites.  Go ahead and add your blog to these sites as well if you want even more exposure. They probably won’t give you very much free traffic when compared to the top 4 list, but all you need to do is submit to these additional sites once and you can get even more free traffic over months and years to come.  These additional sites are ranking by popularity according to Alexa:

#5:  www.Blogged.com

#6:  www.DMegs.com

#7:  www.BlogIt.com

#8:  www.rssFeeds.com

#9:  www.BlogHub.com   

#10: www.BlogRankings.com

#11: www.TopRankBlog.com

#12: www.BloggingFusion.com  

#13: www.Feedster.com

#14: www.SuperBlogDirectory.com

#15: www.Blogoozle.com  

Happy Blogging!

Daniel Pereira

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Lucky for me, and for anyone else who uses blog and article marketing, Google, Yahoo, and the other well-known search engines are really good and ranking content found on blogs and in articles.  So, if you find a blog in your niche market that has a high page ranking, then what you will want to do is simply start to post great comments on those blogs with an occasional link to your blog or website.  As a result, you will have placed a link to your own website on a web page with a high page ranking. 

Now, in one of my niche markets I was really struggling with this tactic of posting on high ranking blogs.  Why?  Well, I couldn’t find any!  I found a few blogs that were similar to mine, but I couldn’t find many with a high page ranking.  As a result I realized that the more I grew my blog, the more I would dominate my niche.  And, it didn’t take long for my blog to get the number one search engine ranking for many of the keyword phrases in my niche market.   So, with a little bit of research you can discover which blogs you should be posting to, and if you are having trouble finding the blogs in your niche market with a high page ranking, then you will know that you have a great opportunity to dominate your niche market.     

I wanted put the focus for this article on the absolute easiest ways to get free traffic for your website.  Sometimes I feel that I share techniques that people think would require “too much work.”  Many of the techniques I share with people do require some hard work, but it is well worth your efforts.  But there are also some really easy things that you can do in order to get more traffic free.

To start off, one of the easiest things you could ever do to get more free traffic is by submitting a sitemap to Google and Yahoo.  This is the easiest way to “ask” the search engines to spider your website for content.  It is 100% free and is a great way for getting some of your website pages extra exposure.  Sure, Google will “naturally” start to spider your website for content, but as an entrepreneur, I know you are patient.  By submitting your sitemaps, you can start to get your site spidered within a couple of weeks rather than waiting months or even years for the search engines to “notice” your web pages. 

Another really easy thing you can do for some extra free traffic is to take some of the content on your site, and then modify it slightly into article format.  You would then just simply submit a couple of articles per week to an article directory site such as EzineArticles.com.  You will start to see that these articles will get pretty high rankings, usually higher rankings than the web page that you “copied” this content from. 

After creating and uploading your articles, I like to take a few minutes to turn each article into a couple of videos.  It is really easy and still looks professional to simply have someone film you in front of a dry erase board as you explain those same concepts that were in the article.  You can then just upload those videos to the more popular video sharing sites like Yahoo Video, Google Video, and YouTube.  Make sure you mention your website in your videos and give people a compelling reason to visit your website in order to get more free info. 

One more simple technique that will help you increase your website traffic will be to have a few links on your website that “remind” people that they can bookmark your page on the many social bookmarking websites.  This is a popular practice that people use on their blog pages.  They hope that people will bookmark their blogs pages, but they know that if they include the links that remind people to bookmark, then the pages will have higher chances of getting that bookmark.  Once your web pages have been bookmarked by enough people, you will see that you will start getting even more free traffic for these social bookmarking sites like Digg, Technorati, and Del.icio.us.

Since a lot of your free website traffic will be generated to your actual blog using these techniques, you will want to take this opportunity to grow your mailing list through your blog.  You have probably heard the saying “the money is in the list,” and frankly, this saying is true.  If you have a mailing list, give them great content, and occasionally place offers in front of these subscribers, then you will make money.  Most websites only grow their lists on their “normal” web pages, but the second you put up your blog, you will be able to grow your list to larger numbers by putting that subscribe box with an appealing offer on all of your blog pages. 

There will be a large amount of people who will decide against your offer, so you will need to have additional ways to drive these visitors to your website’s home page, pitch page, or products pages.  One of the best ways to do this is to provide offers for more information at the end of each one of your posts.  If someone reads and likes your post, then there will be a good chance that they will want to visit your other web pages for additional information, especially if you provide them with an offer (or reason) to do so. 

Now that you have your blog visitors visiting your other web pages and subscribing to your email list, the question is how do you grow your blog in order to get tons of free visitors each day to your blog?  Well, in the case of blog marketing, content is king.  If you optimize your website pages for the search engines, and if you use simple a simple blogging software such as WordPress, then you are probably going to have all of your blog pages indexed by the search engines.  Now, I mentioned that content is king.  What I meant by this is that if you only do a couple of blog posts each week, then you aren’t going to get very much free traffic to that blog. 

Now imagine if you start posting maybe 2 blog posts each and every day, then your content will grow and grow.  Imagine,  at 2 posts per day, after about 6 months time you would have about 360 posts.  Now, let’s say that all 360 posts are indexed and all 360 posts teach people about your website’s main theme.  That means that you will have 360 pages of content relevant to your website’s theme, just through your blog, on your website.  Now, let’s say that little by little you tagged each post so that you were able to dominate certain keyword phrases one-by-one on the search engines.  Once you dominated a certain keyword phrase (by getting the number one spot for your blog), you would then decide to focus on a different keyword phrase.  After 6 months time, you could easily have the number one spot for a number of long-tail keywords.  Because your site has been able to get a rank for a lot of the long-tail keywords, chances are that your entire website and/or blog will get ranked for shorter keyword phrases, bringing you tons of free traffic from the search engines. 

This entire method of driving over 100 free website visitors to your website each and every day involved doing blog marketing, but following a few key steps in order to optimize your blog along with your website as well as following a few specific steps while you actually post to your blog.  To simplify this explanation, I will assume that you already use WordPress for the blog on your website.  You can set up your blog for free using this software, and have this blog right on your website by going to www.wordpress.org .  You are going to want to take this effort to set up your blog on your website using www.wordpress.org instead of just going to www.wordpress.com and setting up a blog on the WordPress website.  This is because you want to drive this free traffic to your own website and you want to start to get your entire website ranked in the search engines using these techniques.

After you have set up your website with your blog, you will want to follow one simple step that will get your website spidered for content through Google.  This simple step is simply going to www.google.com/webmasters/tools in order to submit a sitemap to Google.   When you submit this sitemap, you can also tell Google approximately how often they should spider your website for content.  If you plan on posting daily to your blog, then you will be able to tell Google that they should spider your site for new content on a daily basis. 

Once you have submitted your sitemap, you can then start to pick your keyword phrases that you want to dominate on the search engines.  You will start with the long-tail keywords.  If you had a website for blogging tips, you may try to dominate a keyword phrase such as:  blog marketing for beginners.  O.K., so what I would then do is start to post a bunch of content on my blog relative to this keyword phrase.  You would make sure you included this long-tail keyword in tags of your blog posts.  You may also include similar long-tail keyword phrases such as:  novice blog marketing, marketing your blog and blogging tips for beginners.  It is possible that you could get the #1 ranking for many of these long-tail keyword phrases on the first post, or it may take a few posts to get to the #1 spot for some of these phrases.  With the number one spot on some of the more specific keyword phrases, you will start to see the free traffic to your website each day. After you get the #1 spot for some of these phrases, then you will go after others. 

Now, let’s pretend after about 1 year of doing this you have the #1 spot for over 50 long-tail keyword phrases.  In our example we said that you had a website for blogging tips.  What you really want is your website to get the #1 rank for the keywords:  blogging tips.  Once you have dominated a bunch of these longer keyword phrases, you should see that your website will start to get ranked for some of the “harder to get” keyword phrases.  Then you will likely start getting thousands of free website visitors to your website each and every day instead of just 100.   

Some people online seem to think they have to interest every single person who reads their ad or sales letter. Not true! You only need to interest a select few. These are the 3% that WILL buy. These are the people you are speaking to. These few will make you all the money you need. You want buyers — not warm bodies! The people who get on your optin list and are just looking for free info take up your valuable time and resources. But they do not return anything to you. Avoid them!

But you still have to GET to those select few. And the only way to do that is with dynamic, powerful and very skillfully done marketing materials. This could be electrifying copy writing, powerful videos, or a well done eBook that goes viral and ends up in the email boxes of the all of the 3 percenters. If there is nothing about your service or product or opportunity that excites readers, you are going to have a hard go of it. That’s why you should only concern yourself with those that WILL be excited.

Tin my opinion, this is the only way to work with niche markets. To appeal to a particular subgroup of buyers, you must slant your communications to be more relevant to them. You want to use language that your niche market uses. You certainly don’t want to use words that a software author would understand if you’re writing for an audience of stay-at-home moms looking for easy recipes! If you’re writing to the average American reader, you would use PhD level literary skills.

You have to believe in what you offer. People who have passion about their opportunity, product or service are more successful almost without exception.

At the same time, your customers and prospects need to have a little passion about your product, service and opportunity. Your passion must be contagious! They must sense what you sense. The reader must feel what you feel. You have to get them caught up in the intensity of your strong beliefs service, product and opportunity. This comes automatically if you have the belief, but skills are a big plus. Targeting your market correctly also wins a big head start. If they’re passionate about the problem you’re helping them solve, why would they NOT be excited about the solution?

What are you offering people that allows them to make a strong emotional connection to you, your company, or your product and opportunity? It doesn’t matter what you provide, be it a line of vitamins, toys, or plumbing services. Your prospective customers need to feel the value of the product. They need to see and understand what your product will do for them. They must get excited!

Project your passion to your prospects and some of them will respond.  The ones you want to respond will respond! And that’s what counts. That’s why you’re only trying to get THEIR attention.

You can make a big profit catering to a select minority. You don’t need to appeal to the majority of people. You just have to make a small group of people like your offer and like it very much. For example, in your business a person may pay $3000 or more for a simple direct mail package. Now, that sounds like a lot of money to some people. And it is. But if that person builds a million dollar business from that one direct mail package the $3000 is mere pocket change! So everything is relevant. You want to appeal to buyers. In most cases, price is not a factor. People will pay the price if it’s valuable to them. You want your offer to appeal to people who want, and are actively seeking what you provide. Not people who really can’t afford the product. People that can’t afford it are not actively seeking it. But they may be curious about free info…(They’ll most likely stay on your autoresponder forever)

You want to target your message to the type of people you want to respond. If you want buyers, you target buyers. Of course this tends to make the group you are aiming at smaller. But if you hit them with a personalized message they will be more responsive than if you use the so-called “shotgun” approach with a weak, broad message that ends up being of little interest to anyone. These messages are not heard above the roar of marketing that people are inundated daily.

Don’t be politically correct in this. Target certain age, gender, race, religion, political views, anything that will get their attention.

Your marketing material must have a powerful punch. I see sales letters everyday written by people who mean well. They simply don’t know how to get their point across. And they try to target too large an audience. If you can avoid these traps you can join the ranks of the successful marketers. Remember that the 80/20 rule applies everywhere. 80% of marketing success is had by 20% of the marketers. What are you willing to do to become one of the 20 percenters?

Dan Dimit

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Now, the question is, what are some really great ways to build that huge opt-in list for free? Well, a method that I really enjoy is making sure that I have an opt-in box on my blogs. Now, if you haven’t created and optimized a blog for your website, then you are missing out on a whole lot of free traffic that you could be generating for your businesses. Creating even just a mediocre blog can generate a great amount of traffic for you if you learn some simple techniques to maximizing your exposure for your blog. For example, just one of the simple things that I do when I post my blogs is to use a simple blogging tool to submit each blog post to all of my MySpace pages, my Blogger pages, and my WordPress blogs. If you make sure you capture people’s names and email addresses when people visit these blogs, then you will start to get more and more leads for free each day as your blogs grow in popularity.

Another really great way to build your list for free is by always providing people with a free offer in your social marketing. If you haven’t started to use social marketing to grow your business, then you are missing out on a huge opportunity to grow your business free. A few of the simple techniques that people have been using is providing people with valuable content on video sharing sites, and on sites like MySpace and FaceBook. Every time I create a video, I make sure that I provide people with some good content for free, and then make them an offer in order to learn even more, for free.

This offer is usually in the form of free eBooks, conference calls, and mini courses. In order for people to get the free info, they just need to visit my homepage and then become part of my double opt-in list. If you create some really great content to share with people for free, then they will easily become part of your list, plus they will possibly become an affiliate of yours, or just tell others about your website since you are providing great information for free. When this happens, you start building your list for free even more through viral marketing techniques as well as through affiliate marketing. I’ve tried to provide some pretty great examples of how all of this works here on this blog and at our homepage. Check it out!

Daniel Pereira

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Step #1:  Try to capture an email address.

If people visit your blog, and they like your content, then they will likely join an emailing list.  But if there are no options for joining an emailing list, then you have just missed a great opportunity.  A lot of bloggers have set up their blog so that people can subscribe to an RSS feed, but the truth is that a lot more people will sign up for your emailing list before they decide to subscribe to a feed.  This is due to the fact that most people still have no idea what a feed even is, but almost everyone uses email.  What I do is set up a special offer for people when they visit my blog.  The subscriber’s box for this special offer is always fairly large so that people will see the box.  I try to make the headline for my offer stand out so that anyone who has found my blog will see my offer to join my emailing list.  If I can get them on my list, then I have great chances of being able to sell them something. 

Step #2:  Provide highly visible links to your product pages.

I’m not going to lie to you.  The real reason why I got into blogging was so that I could get free blog traffic and then send people to one of my affiliate links or to one of my sales pages.  The easiest way to make this happen is to once again take the headline approach.  I will use a specific benefit that will catch people’s attention.  For example, I may say something like:  “Click here to learn how to drive massive amounts of free traffic to your websites.  If these techniques don’t work, then I’ll generate over $1,000 in free traffic to your website for you.”  Just like my subscriber’s box for my email marketing, I would want these headlines somewhere on my blog so that most everyone that visited my blog would see them.

Step #3:  Create a compelling offer at the end of each blog post. 

If someone actually reads your entire blog post, then chances are they thought that what you wrote was worthwhile, so if you offer them more of the same information for free, then why wouldn’t they take you up on that offer.  What I like to do is to create a great offer for more of the same or similar information for free at the end of each blog post.  For example, maybe I have a free book to give you, or free conference calls, or maybe a mini course.  Whatever it is, I want to make sure I offer it to you at the end of my blog post, because once again, the real reason why I use blog marketing is to try to send you to one of my sales pages or through one of my affiliate links.  Like you, I’ve got to pay the bills, and the bills are going to get paid a lot easier if I design my blog so that it is sending traffic through my links that are going to make me the green stuff. 

Daniel Pereira is an expert at driving free traffic for your online businesses.  Get free eBooks, conference calls, and a free mini course, all designed for driving free traffic to your websites (a $197 value).  Just visit me at my homepage:   www.TheFreeTrafficFormula.com.  

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