You may not believe this, but even though traffic from searches is still very good, there are other excellent options open to you. Having spent a great amount of time targeting search engine traffic, I became quite familiar with the subject of search engine optimization and although many marketing experts would suggest it is difficult, it really is not the case. Nonetheless I am pleased to say there is a way of finding a mix of traffic without having to completely rely on the work of the search engines to get results.

Blogging is a super way of getting traffic, but this has to be done in the right way and needs to be updated at regular intervals. When you blog, you must, of course, social bookmark your post to the top directories, and for your guidance, some of these are listed below.

1. Digg
2. Onlywire.com (with this method you will get into twenty two directories with one simple click)
3. Propeller
4. Stumbleupon

Carry out a Google search for The Authority Black Book. When you download this information, which is free of charge, make sure you read and understand it. This will tell you all you need to know about using blogging to drive excellent quality traffic in high numbers on a daily basis to your blog.

Another way of getting great traffic is to use Article Marketing. These days if you write for traffic and get your articles into a few of the best article directories, there is no worry about duplicate content penalties.

The top 5 article directories for your articles to appear in are as follows:-

1. Ezinearticles.com
2. AssociatedContent.com
3. Goarticles.com
4. IdeaMarketers.com
5. SearchWarp.com IdeaMarketers.com

No doubt by now you will have noticed the theme taking place here. It’s the theme of getting traffic from your social booking marking directories and from article directories too.

The job of search engines is to give their searchers new and relevant material. You can easily do this for your visitors without having to be concerned with the search engines now or at any time in the future.

It’s a great feeling when you know you are getting traffic every day and will continue to do so even if Google were to totally rearrange the top ranked sites in the blink of an eye, as this will not affect you and your traffic at all.

If you are a novice in the world of online business, but you want to become an internet entrepreneur, there are some easy strategies you can apply to drive targeted traffic to your site. Let’s face it, without a lot of visitors who are already interested in your niche, your online business will not survive. What’s great about a lot of these ideas is that they are free. Here are some of the most popular and effective traffic building methods:

Article Marketing

Article marketing is a marvelous way to get a lot of visitors to your site relatively quickly while at the same time providing one way links to your site. One way links (or back links) from relevant websites can increase your search engine ranking and improve the chances that your web pages will appear on the first few pages of free search engine results.

Article marketing works by writing informative articles and submitting them to article directories. It is important to keep your article focused on your niche and to include a link to your website in your resource box at the end. If people like your articles they will often click on your link to see what else you have to say on your website. Some of the best directories to consider are:

Ezinearticles.com

Articlecity.com

Goarticles.com

Ideamarketers.com

Blogging

Blogging is another very effective way to drive traffic to your website. Even large companies are taking advantage of blogs to build website traffic. You can easily create a blog for free with Blogger or Wordpress. Google regularly indexes blogs so it can be easier to gain free search traffic through a blog than a website. Simply link from your blog to your website in every blog post and you should see an increase in website traffic.

However, for a blog to be successful you need to post new unique, informative content regularly, preferably every day. Ideally, you should focus your blog articles on relevant keywords and include them in your title as well as content. If you do this, your blog can play an integral part in driving targeted traffic to your website.

Online Forums

Register on a few high traffic forums that specialize in your niche. You cannot directly market your site in forum comments however you can put a link to your website in your signature link. If your comments are helpful or interesting to others, a lot of readers will click on your link to find out more about you.

Joint Business Ventures

If you have a unique product (particularly an information product) you wish to market online but you don’t have an established marketing or distribution network, finding joint venture partners may be an effective option. Successful online marketers already have large subscriber lists that regularly convert to sales for them. By entering into a business relationship with such people, paying them a commission on sales, you can get your online business up and running far more quickly than trying to do it on your own.

Use Links Wisely

There are two ways to use links to drive traffic to your website. The first is simply to have a link and information on a high traffic and related website so that people will click on it and visit yours. The other way is to have one way links from authoritative, related sites that will help to improve your search engine results position to gain traffic from free search results.

Become an Ezine Publisher

There are two main reasons that people publish ezines or online newsletters. The first is to establish credibility or expert status over time. The second is to create a subscriber list that can be marketed to through the newsletter. Newsletters need to be published regularly, preferably every two weeks otherwise people wanting updates and new information will become discontented and look elsewhere.

Advertise in Other People’s Ezines

Some ezine publishers have built a sizable readership base and have good credibility with their subscribers. You can probably find some of these ezines in your own niche. As long as their subscriber base has been carefully targeted and your offerings are closely related to their interests, advertising in these ezines can be a way to drive traffic to your site and make sales. Test your return on investment by trialling a couple of ads. If they are profitable you can plan a long term advertising strategy.

It never hurts to try to negotiate the rates. If no one else is taking an advertising spot, a publisher may well accept a lower offer. After all, some money is better than none.
Be aware that internet marketing can be a repetitive and boring task at times. You need to be willing to be patient and persistent. It takes time to learn the ropes and to apply tried and proven methods of building website traffic. If things don’t happen as quickly as you would like, don’t quit. Building a successful online business takes time, but its time that is well spent.

What is pinging?

Pinging is a way of letting search engines know that you’ve created a new post, or updated an existing post on your blog. A ‘ping’ is a message sent to a ‘ping server’ notifying it that the blog has been updated with new content.

What is a ping server?

A ping server is a web-based service that accepts messages in the XML-RPC format. It uses the information in these XML-RPC messages to publish a list of blogs which have updated content. Some of these ping servers run their own blog search engines, and some propagate the information to a number of other ping servers and search engines.

How does pinging work?

Many blog publishing platforms, such as Wordpress, have a built-in pinging tool. In the case of Wordpress, pinging is turned on by default and pings go out to one ping server which updates several search engines.

You can also notify a ping server that you have updated content manually by going to their website and submitting your blog’s name and URL.

One popular ping server is PingOMatic, found at http://pingomatic.com/. When your blog pings PingOMatic it then notifies a number of search engines that your blog has been updated. Many of these search engines also have their own ping server as well.

These search engines can then update their listings with new content almost instantly. This of course will give you one-way backlinks to your blog from these search engines, many of which have a high Google PageRank.

4 things you should know about pinging

1. Only ping when you have updated content. Otherwise, your site might be blacklisted as a spam blog, also known as a splog.

2. If you tend to post to your blog and then re-write the post frequently you might want to make sure you only ping when you actually post new content, not on updates. If you are using Wordpress there are a few plugins that make sure that pings are only sent when a post is created.

3. It’s a good idea to ping several ping services, especially the ones that notify several search engines. Don’t overdo it though. Make sure that if you are pinging a niche search engine that your blog falls into the relevant niche.

4. Make sure that if a search engine is notified by a ping server you are already using that you don’t add that search engines own ping service to your list of servers to ping. Because blog spammers have abused ping servers if you are pinging a search engine multiple times your site might end up being blacklisted, and not appear in the search engines at all.

Popular ping servers

Finally, here’s a list of popular ping servers you might try to get you started.

http://rpc.pingomatic.com
http://pingoat.com/goat/RPC2
http://blogsearch.google.com/ping/RPC2
http://api.feedster.com/ping
http://api.my.yahoo.com/RPC2
http://ping.blo.gs/
http://ping.feedburner.com
http://ping.syndic8.com/xmlrpc.php
http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping
http://rpc.weblogs.com/RPC2

If you have any ping servers that you would like to share as an addition to this list, please leave the link details as a comment to this post. Thanks.

The methods of viral marketing are used by many people today and for good reason. That reason is that they work. Many different techniques can be used, however, it tends to be better to concentrate on one strategy at a time and continue with that strategy until the results that you desire are achieved. If ‘bum’ is something that you are already into, or article marketing, then a great strategy is to turn your articles into a viral marketing report or eBook.

As the articles have already been written, you need to undertake very little work in order to develop something that will create traffic and sales for many years to come. It is relatively simple to bring the articles together into a single document, although it may be necessary to undertake a certain amount of work in re-branding and making it aesthetically pleasing. What’s more, a little effort may be required in adding viral elements. Subtlety is not something that many authors possess and place blatant advertisements. More success may be achieved if you add some value to the reader and disguising the marketing component. One technique which seems to be one of the most popular is to add a review of several products in the particular niche. Your own affiliate links will need to be included. However, you should consider cloaking them in order to make them less obvious.

It is possible to undertake distribution in many ways. If the resulting publication is of a high quality, then you should take selling it into consideration. For the purposes of making it viral, reprint rights will need to be included. Not only will sales be achieved from the book, which is virtually written already, it will be circulated by many other on your behalf.

It is always worth taking into consideration giving the material away as well as encouraging others to do the same, with the stipulation that the material is not altered in any way, if you really wish for the material to spread. Your giveaway could be advertised in forums and in list emails. Something that is very often neglected is that of the download page of any related products that you sell. People enjoy being provided with unadvertised bonuses. It is viewed as being part of the actual order when it is featured on the download page, and it will be downloaded by a majority of people.

It costs a great deal less to implement a viral marketing campaign than that of traditional advertising. You should remember that viral marketing is one simple component of your marketing repertoire. In every way possible it should be linked with other strategies such as setting up squeeze pages in order to collect opt-ins. When this is combined with other essential business building strategies, the traffic can be generated to your website as well as building a solid customer base which will add to your sales and make all the difference towards your success.