You do not have to be an expert webmaster or copywriter to drive traffic to your site or blog. Last night I logged into Success University and took a course on the subject of traffic with noted Internet marketer and attorney Shawn Casey. It was about a 35 minute audio presentation with the most important point being to simply take action.
I’ve often found myself in the “Paralysis by Analysis” boat so it was good to hear a message of avoiding it from a guy of his stature.
Strategy 1: Get Your Own Website
Casey said that you absolutely need your own website and that you will never get search engine optimization using generic affiliate sites. I agree with that and will add that it’s much easier to start and maintain a blog, but that’s my opinion. One thing he said that I found compelling was that you should never submit your site to search engines and that it actually works against your ranking. It is much better for their spiders to find you with updated content.
If you are not a webmaster or technically savy, you can do a search for hosting providers that have easy to use templates you can use to cut and past your way to a descent looking site. Once you find a hosting company you’ll need to purchase your domain name or URL if you haven’t already done so. If you haven’t, my suggestion on this is as follows:
*** If you’re hosting company sells domain names, keep it under the same roof and buy it (register it) with them. You can probably get it cheaper elsewhere but it is one less thing you have to deal with when you point your URL to your site.
Strategy 2: Keep Your Content Fresh
Search engine spiders like fresh content and on the Internet, content is king. In Shawn Casey’s explanation, he stresses that you do not need to be perfect; you need to be consistent. Write about things you’ve recently learned, what your thoughts are, anything, just do it and do it regularly.
If you don’t like to write at all, Casey suggests going to article directories to use other authors’ articles to put on your site as fresh content. You must, however, keep the author’s resource box in tact with the article when using their material.
Three of the more popular article directories are:
•isnare.com
•goarticles.com
•ezinearticles.com
There are hundreds of others smaller ones. If you are taking the blog approach, you will want to let the search engines know every time you update your site with fresh content with a process called “Pinging”. The easiest way to do this is to go to “pingomatic.com” , enter your URL and/or RSS feed link, and request pings. Within seconds, you get messages of which engines accepted your ping request.
Strategy 3 – Get Links Back to Your Site (Reciprocal Linking)
Casey, and many other successful marketers, contend that in order to get top search engine ranking, you need other websites out there linking back to yours. The more websites linking to your website, the higher your raking will be. He says that you can do this manually but it would take a lot of time and work.
Instead, he recommends using Link Metro by Brad Callen. (As I write this, it’s Father’s Day and I remember getting a notice recently that Brad just became a father so props to him and all the others out there!) With an advanced membership which is only $20 a month, you can completely automate and monitor your link building efforts. I can’t expound on it because I just learned about it last night from Shawn Casey, but I will say I’ve used other products from Brad Callen and have found them to be useful so I will give this a try and let you know how it goes later on my work at home weblog nathangurley.com. Shawn Casey endorses it wholeheartedly and there are countless other believable testimonials on there so I’ll give it a shot soon.
Strategy 4 – Press Releases
Another strategy Shawn Casey discusses on his Success University course is the use of press releases. Again he stresses that it doesn’t have to be perfect or a literary masterpiece. Just write the thing and get it out there with links back to your site. Like strategy three he says there are free to submit to press release sites but doesn’t necessarily regard them highly. Here he recommends PRWeb.com where the PR is short for,you guessed it, press release. With the increasing number of people getting their news from the web and avoiding traditional forms of media (probably because they are so biased), news distribution on the web is firmly planted and the search engines are not only part of it, they are competing to get it in front of you and people with news are competing to get it on the search engines so it should be a healthy market for years to come.
Strategy 5 – Article Marketing
In Strategy 2, Casey discussed getting fresh content from articles directories. You can be on the reverse side of that and get reciprocal links using a technique known as Article Marketing. Instead of going to these directories to get content, Casey suggests writing content and submitting them yourself. What happens is, you become the author and the expert and your links are in your author reference box pointing back to your site. Once your article is accepted, you get instant credibility and links back to your site. If others like what you wrote and put your article on their site you get more links back. It's almost like creating viral traffic.
For those who still do not want to write, Casey suggests going to elance.com where he says you can hire people to write articles for you. Either way, the reputable directories do not like self-promotion and affiliate links and such in your articles. They want information that others will find useful and will reject your submissions if you are merely trying to promote yourself.
Simply write useful information that people can use and use the strategies discussed by Sean Casey and you will get traffic.
