10 Remarkably Effective Traffic Building Techniques - Part 2 of 3

In the first part of this article I explained that if you want to grow your online customer base then you must build a good stream of incoming traffic to your web site. We covered Search Engine Optimization, Pay Per Click Advertising, and Article Marketing. In Part Two we now look at Free Ebooks, Viral Marketing, Classified Advertising, and Advertising Swaps.

4. Free Ebooks

Ebooks are books that are made available in an electronic format. The beauty of ebooks is they cost virtually nothing to produce and distribute. Ebooks initially became popular as the perfect format for information products being sold and delivered online, but they have now been recognized as a very effective resource for building traffic.

After you have written an ebook you can give it away to visitors as a reward for subscribing to your mailing list or newsletter. Your ebook for traffic building does not need to be the same number of pages as a full-length book. Many ebooks being used as free incentives are in the range of 12 to 25 pages.

You can even recruit related businesses and web sites to give away your ebook to their customers. The other site benefits because their visitors get something for free. And you benefit because you reach new readers with your information including a link to your web site.

Many ebook authors include a few advertising and affiliate links towards the end of their ebooks which can lead to additional revenue, especially if their free ebooks are heavily distributed.

5. Viral Marketing

Viral marketing is any advertising method that propagates itself. It is built on the concept of a message spreading by 'word of mouth'. Two examples of viral marketing online are "Tell a Friend" forms, and Viral Ebooks.

The idea with viral marketing is to induce visitors or readers to pass along your marketing message to other sites or people, creating a potentially exponential growth in the message's visibility and response.

A "Tell a Friend" form is designed to get one person that you have already reached to recommend your site or service to a number of their friends. You can offer an incentive for them to make the recommendation, for example giving them a free report or ebook in return for recommending you to five friends.

To make a viral ebook, you use special tools to make your ebook rebrandable. In a rebrandable ebook, certain parts of your ebook are set up for customization. By doing this you enable your partners to insert their own business name, web site links, or even their own affiliate ID into your ebook. This gives them an additional incentive to pass on copies of it, ultimately helping you to promote your business and grow your traffic.

6. Classified Advertising

Classified advertising is a form of advertising which is particularly common in newspapers and magazines. Many online ezines and email newsletters offer classified advertising spots and advertising in these can be one of the best sources of targeted traffic.

The best traffic growth comes from carefully targeting your potential visitors and with classified advertising you have the ability to select newsletters and with an audience that closely resembles your own target audience.

With online classified advertising it is especially important to consider the position of the advertisement you are purchasing. An ad spot at the very top of an email newsletter will receive considerably more clicks than an ad spot further down the message.

And while we are on the subject of classified advertising, don't dismiss offline classified advertising as irrelevant. It is possible to run a classified advertisement in an offline publication such as newspaper or carefully targeted magazine and get an excellent response of readers checking out your web site.

7. Advertising Swaps

Once you have a mailing list of your own with several thousand subscribers consider setting up 'ad swaps' with other newsletters. Make a list of possible newsletters that would make good swapping targets. This list might include newsletters on the very same topic as yours, but it could also include publications on closely related topics.

A newsletter on copywriting, for example, might do an ad swap with another copywriting newsletter. Or they might swap with newsletters on related topics such as advertising, editing, and freelance writing.

Swapping ads one of the most effective low cost techniques for building traffic. There is only the opportunity cost of not having paid advertising in those spots of your newsletter. I can assure you that the traffic growth will be worth more in the long term than a one-off advertising payment from someone for a classified ad.

In Part Three of this article I will discuss Solo Mailings, Affiliate Programs, and Social Networking sites.

Traffic, Traffic, Traffic, Why?

Assuming you feel qualified to take on the challenge of generating income from blogging (and I haven't scared you away yet), the three most important things you need to monetize your blog are traffic, traffic, and traffic.

Why is traffic so important? Because for most methods of online income generation, your income is a function of traffic. If you double your traffic, you'll probably double your income (assuming your visitor demographics remain fairly consistent). You can screw almost everything else up, but if you can generate serious traffic, it's really hard to fail. With sufficient traffic the realistic worst case is that you'll eventually be able to monetize your web site via trial and error (as long as you keep those visitors coming).

When I first launched this blog, I knew that traffic building was going to be my biggest challenge. All of my plans hinged on my ability to build traffic. If I couldn't build traffic, it was going to be very difficult to succeed. So I didn't even try to monetize my site for the first several months. I just focused on traffic building.

With respect to traffic, you should know that in many respects, the rich do get richer. High traffic leads to even more traffic-building opportunities that just aren't accessible for low-traffic sites.

If you're intelligent and web savvy, you should also be able to eventually build a high-traffic web site. And you'll be able to leverage that traffic to build even more traffic.

Viral Marketing And Vital Viral Marketing Are Further Refined For Clarity In 2007

Viral Marketing and Vital Viral Marketing are further refined and redefined for more clarity in 2007.
Viral Marketing has been defined as marketing that depends upon pre-exisiting social conditions for its perpetuation. Vital Viral Marketing, like Viral Marketing, depends upon pre-existing social conditions for its perpetuation and may also depend upon pre-existing internal conditions as well for its marketing message to go forth either as intended upon creation or as a result of its interaction with a stimulus, stimuli, or catalyst to propel it virally forward. The first usage of the term viral marketing was used to describe a viral marketing advertising campaign online by the company hotmail who used a marketing message containing a link to their website within the emails. This is still to this day credited by many as the reason why hotmail was so successful in building its business.

Nevertheless, the importance of viral marketing and vital viral marketing cannot be ignored as in 2007, viral online advertising campaigns are becoming more and more the modus operandi. There has not been a day gone by in June that I have not seen at least five different viral marketing and vital viral marketing campaigns being advertised somewhere online in some capacity. The traffic generator, though always somewhat viral, when containing viral programs within it that are dependent upon its perpetuating and replicating identical actions by new recepients, are becoming vital viral marketing softwares of traffic promotion.

Particularly funny video clips with a message that is spread easily because of its nature, are finding their way into the hands of professional marketers to use in relation to the primary message to be shared. The viral traffic generator depends upon the programs contained within it from its origination by the designer in order to function as intended and to produce replicatable and duplicatable results.

The advantage in exponential replication efficiency over the standard traffic generator that does not
have viral programs, but only other traffic building programs is quite significant and means a shift in the viral marketing niche and viral internet marketing world at large. Like the company hotmail that was studied as a case study example earlier in the article, the marketer who learns to put the efficiency of true vital viral marketing to work in place of, or even in addition, to the older traffic generator, will be able to do what many marketers before had not been able to do and that is quickly, efficiently, directly trackably and measurably, obtain large amounts of website exposure and the benefits that exposure affords. This promises to be eminent in most successful marketing campaigns for the rest of the year and beyond, especially by the one that is characterized as having little to none traffic visits and web traffic presence receiving large amounts of consistent daily website visitors.