Traffic

Link Wheels Made Easy – A Guide For Beginners

This is a guest post by Kenneth Javellana. If you want to guest post on this blog, check out the guest post guidelines.

At the heart of every successful online business is good traffic. By that, I mean traffic that is high in both number and quality. You already set up social media accounts for cross-promoting your website. Basic link building techniques like blog commenting, forum posting, participating in guest posts, and link exchange are quite familiar to you as well. As a matter of fact you constantly do them to keep the traffic flowing. With everything set in place you can now move on to link wheels, a more advanced way of attracting high-quality traffic. Although its effects are not immediate, a link wheel proves to be beneficial for any online business.

The concept behind it
A link wheel consists of a set of websites with links flowing from one to another. These links will close in a circular pattern. In the middle of this pattern is your website. All other sites should be linking to it. Below is an example of a basic link wheel.

Now ideally, you should use Web 2.0 sites and link them towards a main website. Web 2.0 sites could be blogs, social networking sites, photo-sharing sites, or video sharing websites – anything that promotes interaction. The purpose of building link wheels is to dominate the web with content. In turn, that will increase your brand’s visibility on search engines and the amount of traffic that flows to the target website. Web 2.0 sites also help to ensure that you bring in quality traffic to your website. Of course, proper implementation of a link wheel is necessary. All elements of a link wheel need to be related to the products you are trying to sell or the theme of the target website. This will increase chances of conversion and decrease your bounce rates.

There is no specific pattern when creating a link wheel. They can be made as simple like the illustration above or complex like by setting up separate blogs which Web 2.0 properties link to before linking back to your website. When planning to create a link wheel, just remember to stick to a pattern and use a variety of Web 2.0 sites. A Web 2.0 site must never be used more than once in a link wheel.

Benefits and uses
The main purpose of a link wheel is to generate traffic that is both high in number and quality. Where this traffic leads is entirely up to you. Internet marketers commonly use Web 2.0 properties to generate traffic for their websites. However, other business models also use it to strengthen their social networks like Facebook, Twitter, and Google+. A link wheel can therefore be used as an internet marketing strategy or as a social media strategy.

Now before you create a link wheel out of whim, look into your business model and analyze what you need the most. Is it traffic that you need or do you want to multiply your followers on social networks? Clearly define what you want to happen so that you can create an appropriate pattern. Slowly build your link wheel over an extended period of time to make it look natural. Once set up, give it some time and you will slowly find yourself nearing your goal.

This post was prepared by Kenneth Javellana. During his spare time, Ken enjoys writing articles that tackle SEO techniques and tips on blogging. He also writes for his business at BroadbandExpert.com, one of the top internet providers.

How To: Increase Blog Traffic 10 Useful Tips

This is a guest post by Jane smith. If you want to guest post on this blog, check out the guest post guidelines.

Why need traffic?
Every blogger wants increased traffic to their blog. Traffic allows for people to read the blogger’s viewpoint, give their opinions and feedback through their comments and allow an indepth discussion on the topic at hand. In order for the blogger’s reading community to grow, it is very important to generate traffic to make these people aware of the blog first. Professionally designing a blog can be very appealing for the reader’s but it will not spread awareness of the blog’s existence itself. There are several familiar and unfamiliar ways of increasing blog traffic.

Increasing traffic
There are many ways of directing traffic towards your site.
1. Going through and commenting on blogs other than your own always helps. Using plugins such as Commentluv, a useful comment can include a link referring the readers to the blogger’s site or blog posts, increasing traffic.

2. Joining online communities such as forums also helps alot. Adding the link to your site or blog to your signature can be a good way of advertising it and can direct traffic. Becoming a helpful commenter, more people might be interested in clicking your link to keep track of your work.

3. It is also very important to be steady and patient as traffic takes time to flow in.

4. Updating a blog frequently can also be an attractive factor as the readers will know that the blogger is committed, efficient and active. The reader’s will always look on and wait for blog entries, especially if the blogger has an organized schedule. Being inefficient can cause the readers to lose interest.

5. Communicating to the people who comment on your blog is always useful as it makes a helpful bond between the blogger and the commenter. This freindly relationship will encourage the commenters to keep visiting the blog continuously. The more useful or helpful you are to the commenters, the more they will refer your blog to others, increasing traffic.

Nowadays, social media is growing more and more popular and there are many ways of generating traffic through social media.

Generating traffic through Social Media
1. Alot of traffic can be acquired from social media websites. They are one of the more recommended places to post articles. The community on these websites are usually very large and therefore they allow a very fast generation of traffic in less time. There are popular social media websites then there are other that base themselves around particular topics. It’s useful to broadcast awareness to both these kinds of sites for maximum recognition and traffic.

2. If you are a video-blogger or sometimes post videos on your blogs then it is important to be creative, organized and appealing to more people than just the readers. It is important to pay attention to presentation as video-blogging is very different from regular text-based blogging. Sites such as YouTube are most popular for uploading videos. Giving users feedback via comments can also attract new viewers.

3. There are many applications and programs that allow you to access multiple social networking sites at the same time. This will save alot of time and can prove to be very convenient for an avid blogger. These applications are easily available and are mostly free so finding, downloading and installing them shouldn’t be trouble.

4. Facebook is one of the most popular social networking sites of today and it can be used to generate traffic aswell. Facebook allows for the creation of fanpages, these can prove useful when trying to promote your blog. Customizing them with links to your blogs and regular updates can keep readers interested and attract new ones at the same time.

5. Twitter is another social networking site that can be used to keep people updated on your activities frequently. Make intelligent, smart and meaningful tweets. Post links to your blog but don’t overdo it as followers might lose interest due to excessive referrals.

6. If your blog is a very popular one, generating lots of traffic and revenue then advertising your blog on such social media sites can prove to be very useful when trying to appeal to a mass audience.

This is how one can generate traffic to their blog using many different methods including the use of social media sites.

Jane smith is from Pass Certification which is Exam Preparation Tool for IT Certification Exams like MCSE Certifications. Visit to download Free SelfTestEngine and Demos for Self Preparation.

“Cool, Promote it!” Orkut secret link: Get a rank badge

Its been some time since Orkut started allowing its users to advertise their business on Orkut, with ‘promote’ feature: a free tool to help you spread the news to all your orkut friends…and beyond!

At first I thought this could be a great opportunity for bloggers and marketers to explore and leverage from Orkut community. But to my dis-appointment, there are many people who are randomly creating some community message and asking to promote it! And the dis-appointing things is, these communities are not at all taken care by anyone, people just create it, promote it and forget it 🙁

So, am I saying this Orkut promote is waste of time? No. Since many Orkut users have no idea about how to set this up or what to do with this feature, its a great thing for few people who understand and have some goals to achieve from it.

Here are some points to keep in mind to write a good copy
1. First make sure whatever you are trying to promote is of use to the users.
2. Let your message be clear.
3. Don’t tell half things and ask them to click the link to read rest of your story. Everyone is busy with their life!
4. Make sure you have a call to action.
Ex: You can ask people to promote it or you may ask people to do something after seeing your ad.

How Orkut promote works:
When you first create a promotion, only your friends will be able to see your promotion. Once any of your friends click on “Cool, promote it!” button, the promotion copy will be shown to their friends.. and so on.

Secret Link!
Some months back Orkut stated showing a secret link(promo URL) in the promotion page, using which we could ask our friends and followers to promote our ad copies. But in just 24hrs time, they removed that feature. Now once again they have introduced the same feature. So just grab the links and ask your friends to promote it.

Log into your Orkut account -> Applications -> Promote -> (Promo URL)

If you are on Orkut, promote our stuffs too.

Here are the links to some of our promotions:
Promotion 1
Promotion 2
Promotion 3
Promotion 4
Promotion 5
Promotion 6

Orkut Badge:
Recently Orkut also introduced ranking users based on some criteria, one of which is based on the number of views of your promotion.

So, if you still care about Orkut and want some exposure and the badge!, then go ahead, grab these secret links and promote them.

By the way, I am on facebook at http://facebook.com/technotip 🙂

Note:
It may not be a promotion as beneficial as that on Facebook and Twitter, but it has got me 500 – 600 visitors to my website so far, which is not bad for a small site.

5 Tips to Finally Start with Social Media Marketing

This is a guest post by Amanda. If you want to guest post on this blog, check out the guidelines here.

The newest addition to any Internet marketer’s arsenal is social media marketing. Sites like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn connect people to people and people to brands continuously while allowing constant interaction. Many are weary of Social Media; if worked with unfocused campaigns, it can eat up your time and take you away from other necessary projects. The key to Social Media is to connect your company to consumers, and this can be done in just 10 minutes a day.

Getting Started With Social Media Marketing

1. Take It One Step at a Time
If you only have 10 minutes to spend on your Social Media campaigns you should choose which platform to start with. To have an exceptional social media presence you will eventually need a solid presence on both Twitter and Facebook, but that does not mean that you need to get bogged down with both at once. You should pick one platform and run with it; master either Facebook or Twitter before moving on to the other. If you try to divide your 10 minutes between the two, you will fail at both.

If you start with Facebook, you’ll need to have proper branding and bio. The most important part of your Facebook page is the wall where you can interact with your fans. If you already have both your Facebook and Twitter pages started, rather than dividing your time between the two each day you should spend one day on Facebook and the next on Twitter. Make sure to spend the full 10 minutes each day on one platform in order to get your desired results.

2. Respond to Your Fans
Most people following your Facebook or Twitter pages are not listening to you. You should respond to your fans rather than talking at them or advertising to them. Your social media involvement is an opportunity for you to create an experience for your customer base and add to your company’s narrative.

Responding to your customer base means spending most of your time responding to @’s, messages, & wall posts. You can also utilize your social media position to respond to any negative PR or responses from your customers. To respond effectively, you must listen to your customers and embrace detractors; you do not want your naysayers to have any ammunition.

You should also spend your social media time getting to know your fans and followers. This attention can turn these fans and followers into customers and customers into prospects. You have the power to turn anyone into a brand evangelist if you treat them well by responding and listening to them.

3. Reach Out To People
Find people through searches on your social media network; look for those who have a question about your industry and niche market, or people who just need a little bit of help. Give them the information they’re looking for without asking them to follow you or linking them to a product.

This may lead to an invitation to join you on Facebook, Twitter, or your blog but that should never be your goal. Your goal is get on people’s radar and get them to talk about you. By doing this you will show them who you are and how to find you without being pushy.

4. Choose Your Actions
With limited time, you’ll want to focus on one or two actions per day. You do not need to spend your entire day putting out fires or replying to everything that comes up. Sometimes it’s better to just spend time on your social media sites without sending marketing messages; they usually go unnoticed anyway. Tell the story through your actions and send your message through your interactions.

5. Organize Your Efforts
Although you may think that it is a waste of time to reflect on your social media marketing, you might find some very useful information that can help you improve your marketing efforts. Look back to what efforts were the most successful and try to continue following those. It seems like such an easy task, but you might be amazed by how much time you can spend studying this. However, it can pay off if you can find better, more efficient ways to handle your social medial marketing.

Follow these internet marketing tips and you will rock the social media universe.

Author Bio:
Amanda is a writer and blogger living in San Diego, CA (USA). Visit her internet marketing website for more information.

Charts and More Data Available: WebMaster Tool

If you havn’t logged into your webmaster tool account recently, then you do it now: there are some very useful features added to it recently.

Log into your webmaster tool account and click on the “Top search queries” link.

New Features:
1. Addition of Charts to visualize your Top search queries, click throughs, impressions etc. You can filter the results by date, location and the medium used to access your website.
2. You can now see the keywords to which your pages ranked and also the position of your website in the search result pages.
3. You can see and analyze more data: Now webmasters tool shows more than 100 keywords, to which your website ranked in the search result page.
4. In the “labs”, Sidewiki has been added. It is a service offered by Google that lets users contribute helpful entries about the current webpage.
5. Now you can also configure Google Services at your hosting panel.

Using all these useful data you can clearly analyze what topics you are ranking high and what you need to do to retain the position. One of the trick is to write more of what people want and to which you are already ranking high in the search engine. This way, you can increase your organic traffic.

3 Steps, Extra Traffic! : StumbleUpon

With 3 simple steps, add a StumbleUpon badge to your site so your visitors can easily submit your content to StumbleUpon and you can start enjoying additional traffic from StumbleUpon users who want to see content like yours! Simply copy and paste the code into your site and start receiving free exposure on StumbleUpon.

As you all probably know, StumbleUpon doesn’t crawl the web pages automatically. It only adds those pages which are added by its users. And then it rotates or displays these user submitted/voted quality content to its other users (who share similar interests). Providing quality content to its users and good traffic to the source. So everybody is happy.

Over years we have seen so many products claiming to generate huge traffic to our websites through Stumbleupon, but the trick is simple. Produce quality content (suitable for StumbleUpon community) and make it easy for StumbleUpon members to find and submit, vote for the story.

Having quality content is mandatory. Next thing is making it more accessible.

All these days we use to have a simple banner or a link to submit the article to stumbleupon, but now we can show a badge and encourage or remind our readers to submit and vote for the story, if they find it interesting.

Get your content discovered with SU Badges
With 3 simple steps, add a StumbleUpon badge to your site so your visitors can easily submit your content to StumbleUpon and you can start enjoying additional traffic from StumbleUpon users who want to see content like yours! Simply copy and paste the code into your site and start receiving free exposure on StumbleUpon.

These new badges reflect a real-time count of how many times your page has been viewed by members of StumbleUpon’s community of over 10 million users. Show off your big numbers!

Users clicking these badges will be prompted to submit a page to StumbleUpon’s index (if not already in the index) so other users can enjoy your content or to view the ratings and reviews of your page from other StumbleUpon users. Your site will not be framed when users click any of these badges.

Reason for this post: I had seen these badges some time back, but had never used them. Out of curiosity, I took some time to put them on the blog and to my surprise – traffic from Stumbleupon has significantly raised. I still thought it’s a coincidence. But after watching for some more days, I thought I would recommend using this badge for all my fellow bloggers/webmasters to generate good traffic from Stumbleupon or atleast try this out and share the results with us, in the comment section.

The badges are somewhat similar to that of the TweetMeme/Re-Tweet Buttons. But what I feel is, the color is too dim to notice.

You can check badges in these posts, to see them in action:
7 Ways To Get Traffic – Before You Need It!
10 Ways To Make Your Blog Load Faster and Save Bandwidth

You can get the code for implementing the badge at: SU Badge.

The numbers really encourage visitors to take action and hit that stumble button. Try it and share your experience with us.
“Simple Steps, extra Traffic!”

Bonus Tip:
You can even use the StumbleUpon URL shortener, it provides some easy, lazy way to hit the thumbs up button.

7 Ways To Get Traffic – Before You Need It!

One common question we all hear, and at some point of time have asked – How to get traffic to our new blog?

Here are some examples of how I got my first 500 – 800 visits per day in my initial days of blogging:

I started it before I actually needed it:

1. Commenting on other blogs: I had spent some time in selecting a domain name(even though I din’t have much knowledge about selecting a good domain name at that time). And started participating in comment section of various blogs – niche which I was interested in. And included the URL of my blog in all the comments(not within the comment section).
Tips: Do not leave your new website blank. Atleast have a single introduction page, or better if you can have atleast 10 good articles published.

2. SEO benefits: As I already had the blog up, most search engines had already crawled my blog and was visible in results page for some keywords.
Tips: If you know your niche, then have atleast 10 good articles published – which are fully concentrated on your niche. Include keywords related to your niche and take time to carefully optimize those 10 articles, so that you rank high for some keywords.

3. Put up the email/rss subscription options on your blog: Even though I had a single page on my blog – where I wrote about myself(profile kind of), many people subscribed to it! I had 30 – 40 subscribers when I started blogging – when my first real article was live.
Tips: Put a big and highly visible(yet not annoying) subscription link on your blog. I guess people who signup for your blog updates in the initial stage are email subscribers, so make sure you put email subscription option and highlight that its a free service.

4. Include your blog link in any social networking site you use.
Tips: Have conversation with like minded people, who are interested in the niche your blog falls in. This strategy would help in more conversion rate, and you will enjoy the social networking as you communicate with like minded people.

5. Participate in forums: Forums are good place to meet like minded people and to share your knowledge and to gain knowledge from other participants. Use your blog link in the signature area of the forum and in your forum profile.
Tips: Do not try to promote your blog in any ways. Because you don’t have an active blog yet and that may act against you. So be genuine in helping as many people as you can. This increases your credibility and builds a community around you before you actually need it.

6. Write Testimonials: As you probably read some books, attended some course, used some online services before you started your blog. Send your testimonial to those people, if you really like them and recommend them to other people. Again be genuine and don’t do it just to get a link back.
Tips: See previous testimonials. If the owner of the product is linking to the person who gave the testimonial, then you can expect a link back, if he thinks your testimonial helps his business.
Take time and form a very good, real testimonial. Do not make it over hyped inorder to get through.

7. Public Speaking & Presentation: If you get a public speaking opportunity and/or you have to give a public presentation for a social cause, then at the end its not a bad idea to show your blog Name and URL along with your Name and designation or whatever. This will give people a way to follow up with you, in case some one is very much impressed with your presentation and want to get more from you.

Caution
At this stage do not try to promote your blog in any ways, because it may have an adverse effect. Just enjoy the benefit of having a blog before its actually fully active.

Do not keep postponing the date to start blogging actively. no time is perfect time.
Imagine, if you are planning to have a blog and never actually taking your first step to find a good name, register it and write atleast 10 good articles – you would miss a lot of opportunity. You will have to leave comments on other websites/blogs as an anonymous guy, you will loose the SEO benefit etc to name some.

Do not plaster your blog with ads when you’re not yet blogging consistently, because this may give people a wrong impression.

I am not saying that – If you don’t start your blog/business now, you will loose money. But you will surly loose some benefits of starting it early enough. You will loose all the extra benefits I have talked above.

Finally
Its a good idea to take some time out of your busy life and find a good domain name(which is the only thing probably which will take some time), register it, and try to write atleast 10 quality articles concentrating on your niche.

Often times we get a brilliant idea for a blog post, but only to know that – “It would have been great, if I had started a blog”. Let that not happen to you, start a blog early and learn along the way.

Slow and Steady Wins the Race. Stop thinking about all the details, just start a blog/business. You are bound to stumble along the way, but you will figure things out as you move along.

It would be better to make a mistake while blogging than to never start the blog. Learning never ends and if you are thinking of starting a blog or a business after learning everything, then take it from me – You are not going to start your blog or business. Because learning is a never ending process.

Promote Your Business/Blog/Service on Orkut: FREE!

After status update, suggested friends, chat, SMS, widgets etc features, here comes one more important and most awaited feature orkut ‘promote’: a free tool to help you spread the news to all your orkut friends…and beyond!

Now marketers, bloggers can invest their time in tweaking the ad copy to impress Orkut users, to drive traffic, leads and sales.

When you first create a promotion, only your friends will be able to see it. Once they click on “promote it!”, their friends can see it.. and so on.

To see the number of clicks, views, Promotions, Trashes, goto “promote”, then click on “my promotions” tab.

Source: Orkut Blog

Ad format support:
For content creation, it supports Text, Image or YouTube Video. Text also supports the regular scrap markup, and is limited to 200 characters.
Only images that you have uploaded to Orkut and which is set to public viewing can be used. You can stop or delete a promotion that you’ve created at any time.

How to make your promotional content VIRAL ?
It is obvious that, the content that you are showcasing must be interesting. Along with that, you have to have friends who you actually know. If you just add every friend request and have no idea of who it is, then you most probably will not receive vote for your content(ad).

On the other hand, if you have 1000 active, and known friends your content will go VIRAL very soon.

1. If you are a blogger, you can find 1000 blog readers in Orkut and send them friend request.
After they have accepted the friend request, you can use your blog logo and good ad copy to promote your blog/product/service/business.
2. Publish your “Orkut Promotion ads” on your blog, so that your readers are familiar with the ad copy, and can vote for you when they see it in Orkut.
3. Remember, there are more Indian and Brazilian citizens using Orkut, so language also counts. It depends on who you are targeting and more importantly who your friends are.

orkut-promotion-my-ad

New things to be expected from Orkut:
1. Algorithm to track people who are trying to game the system.
2. Ability to create a Vanity URL for our profile.
3. Indexable by search engines(except the data which is set private)

Down side:
Also expect
1. More spammers.
2. More scammers, telling that they will make your ad to be shown to millions of Orkut users.
3. More and more people wasting their time trying to game the system.

Do not ignore the potential of promoting your business on Orkut. For more details of Orkut users, you can have a look at their advertise page.

If you are presently seeing adsense ads, then remember, Orkut Promote is used by both advertisers and orkut users. You can advertise on Orkut using AdWord also(which costs money).

Do you already have a strategy to make your content(ad) go viral on Orkut?