Capture Free Traffic Like A Superhero Catches Villians - Business - Entrepreneurship

Everyone , and I mean everyone, needs traffic for their site and they need traffic to be successful in any form of online marketing in any niche. Its one of those universal truths. And everyone also loves free traffic, despite what youll sometimes hear PPC proponents or gurus saying about it being less targeted. The fact is 99% of the people telling you this employ, or have employed , one or more techniques for free traffic in the past.

But before we get in into these Batman-style free traffic tips, lets first look at the 3 different types of traffic .
1) Purchased Traffic- This is traffic you pay for- Pay-per click(PPC), listbuilders ,and all the other methods people use to literally buy traffic for their site. This of course, has its advantages and disadvantages( just like any other method) but the biggest weakness with this sort of traffic is you dont always know what youre getting, but youre still on the hook to pay for it.

2) Borrowed Traffic- this would include any of the social media sites-Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc., where in this case you are going to where the traffic already is and attempting to siphon off some of it for yourself.

3) Organic Search Traffic-This is labeled organic because it includes not only your rankings in the Search Engines ( alas, you can t just pay Google to rank your site higher in the search engines) so this is how basically, you get found; this method entails Search Engine Optimization (SEO) , article and video marketing, and a plethora of lesser known techniques. The big plus to this sort of traffic is people are actually searching for what you are promoting in this case, whereas this is not always true with the Social Networks or list building purchases/exchanges.

Now this is not to say the other methods dont work-they do, if used correctly, but free traffic can pay you longer dividends as well.

Now if youre familiar with most kinds of free marketing techniques online, especially article marketing, you already know theres been two schools of thought on this in the past : submit a lot of articles to a ton of different places ( usually through using an article submitter or spinner or both); or attack high-quality sites like ezine articles and goarticles that get a lot of love from the search engines. So what Im going to do here is demonstrate some little used techniques for boosting your search rankings and getting you more traffic. One of the key things to remember in marketing is carving out your niche, and if everyone if doing the same thing, maybe you should look elsewhere. If you intend to be a thought leader in any market , youre going to want to stand out.

What follows are a few techniques you wont see anyone else talking about, mainly because they dont want anyone else to know !

First, lets talk RSS feeds. This is basically a type of feed that scans your blog and syndicates it to numerous blogs and sites on the web. However most people dont take advantage of it like they should, perhaps because they havent been taught the power of this type of traffic. Did you know you there is a separate RSS feed for every post you make on your blog, and every video you produce on YouTube ? So What you say ? Heres how you can take advantage: every time you create a piece of content and put it on your blog or YouTube or even Ezine articles, you can then take the RSS feed from that piece of content and go to a site called RSSMix.com. You simply enter the sites in separately and it creates a new feed for which you can then enter to all the RSS syndication services on the web ! Do this every time you create a post or piece of content and you will have literally hundreds of backlinks pointing back to your site. In something that only take a few minutes.

Alright , technique number two: BlogBurst.com is a site that actually submits their work to such large publications as the WallStreet Journal and Cnet. All you have to do is to sign up at their website and then submit your website RSS feed. Once you are accepted all your articles will start being picked up by some of those publications. It is really that simple. The point is , if you can get you content picked up and syndicated this is much more powerful than and efficient than slaving away to create backlinks all night.
Third, make use of forums. Forum links are another link building tool for getting traffic and links. In order to get the most out of this technique you first need to begin your search and find the largest forums in your niche. Head over to Big-Boards.com, visit their forum directory and look for you niche. Now comes the boring part, and this is where I can see a lot of resistance toward this technique, but remember, when youre marketing you can use either money or time, but not both. And if youre choosing to go with free traffic, then youre going to have to put the time in. When contributing to a forum, make sure youre actually adding value to it; however one cool trick you can use to get more people to YOUR site more quickly is if you are able to use excerpts from your articles to answer questions on the forum-with a link back to the article at your site. The thing you must keep in mind is DO NOT spam the forum, actually provide value to people here or not only will peopl e not respond to you, but they will verbally stone you as well, and perhaps even boot you out of the forum. There is nothing more powerful than your name, so dont run it through the mud by trying to be cute. People are smarter and more aware on the internet these days than ever before, and will see through whatever charade you are trying to slip behind.

Fourth, video marketing. Video marketing work so well because it is visual. ( Obviously , right? )It can be completely useless and you can still get people to watch it. And although many folks have perhaps explored video marketing before , there is a way to take your video marketing further.
Syndicating your videos is key to getting maximum exposure views and traffic.

Now if youre reading this and dont know how to make a video already, it is really simple and Ill try to cover it quickly. Windows Movie Maker, which comes with Windows XP, can easily help you edit and share any vids you create. Animoto.com is also a free site that does a more thorough job if youre looking for something else. I would then suggest you use a free service called TubeMogul that makes all the hard work for you in a matter of minutes.

Sign-up for a free account and then sign up for all the video sharing sites you will find inside the members area. After this simply enter your username and password for each video site upload the video from your computer, enter the title, the description and the tags and let Tubemogul get to work. The Kato to your Green Hornet.

Another cool thing about video is you have the ability to take multiple Google positions for your keywords. Google will continue to display your videos as long as they find them listed on different video sites.
So in creating your video choose a targeted keyword phrase first. I like to target long tail keywords- keywords with at least 3 words , and to ensure the competition is under 50,000 ( meaning when you type the keyword in "quotes " )in Google.

Another reason I am recommending you make use of Youtube and video sharing sites is that they can easily outrank other kinds of content, like articles, in the search engines.

Now your keyword must be at the beginning of the title and if you can use the keyword again at the end of the title. Sounds weird but it will really help with your SEO . ( I should probably not even risk telling you all this , but hey. ) An example of what that looks like would be if you were marketing a book on how to beat the odds in vegas : Beat The Odds In Vegas: Expert Tips On How To Beat The Odds In Vegas. You can make it whatever you like of course.

By creating multiple title for the same video , you will also be able to target multiple phrases.
You also want to make use of the description box, first including the keyword youre targeting at the beginning of the description , and second, remember to give people a reason to leave the video sharing site and visits. If you know anything about writing what is referred to as a call to action this is the place.
The last step is creating backlinks to your video : you could write an article or two with a backlink to your video, ( this is its own strategy in itself that I hardly ever see anyone use), create a new squidoo lens, setup a new hub at hubpages and definitely, definitely ,social bookmark your videos.

Lastly, lets cover internal link building. This is something most people have no idea about namely because it has to do with that big scary monster , SEO. But if you could boost your sites rankings with a few simple adjustments, wouldnt you? You dont even need to answer. So basically, every one of your site pages has its own link power and you can use this to help you site.

All you need to do in order to apply this method is to place backlinks in strategic places on your website. The best places to put your links are the category pages and the footer section.The category pages are listed as navigation points through your site and this makes them tremendously powerful for ranking for your chosen keywords.

The footer links are probably the most used part of this technique, but a surprising number of people dont take advantage of this, particularly when it comes to bloggers. A number of websites out there employ this feature to rule the search engines. The links you need to be inserting here are the keywords you are going after with your site- and of course your site name-as long as it also contains a keyword you are targeting.