1. Quality over quantity. Sometimes the most important principles are also the most obvious, but people still overlook them all the time. While you want your links to be visible and attract the attention of as many people at once, you do not want to flood the internet with irrelevant links. If you are foolish enough to do that, you will dilute your brand, and your links will become synonymous with spam. Instead, be mindful of where your links appear, and make sure if someone clicks them, they lead somewhere relevant and engaging. Remember this is the guiding principle of good SEO practices. You provide quality content that is optimized so people can find you, not junk content that is trying to trick people into landing on your page.
2. Embrace social media. It seems every web page you go to these days is asking you to like it on Facebook, Tweet about it on Twitter, or share it over a variety of sites including Digg, delicious, and LinkedIn. If someone does decide to do any or all of those things, you have just received the most valuable word of mouth possible. We all tend to pay more attention to these because people we like and admire are deciding something is noteworthy enough to recommend. Depending on your venture, this can seem silly sometimes, but it is a simple element to integrate into your website which can pay off big time.
3. Share your opinion. Both Review and Q&A sites are extensions of social media, but they do deserve their own special category. While tracking what others say about your company and responding in a professional way are both good practices, writing reviews of other products and answering questions are also excellent ways to establish yourself as a resource. Amazon’s review and list sections are great ways to build relationships (and links) with consumers. Make sure that when you do this, your submissions are genuine, relevant to your brand, and truly helpful.
4. Expand your website. These days, the most interesting (and SEO link friendly) websites are ones that offer more than just an avenue to whatever you are selling. Resource sections that explain things that relate to your products and provide instructions or ideas on how to use your services can add some quality content to your website. Yes, your website needs to be functional, but it can also be fun and informative. Blogs and forums are two other great ways to expand your website’s reach and foster deeper connections with prospective clients. Just make sure you are offering quality content and not content for content’s sake. If you need to hire a person or an SEO firm to manage that for you, do so. It will be a worthwhile investment.

Focus on what is a good fit for you. Whether you are manufacturing widgets, making rock n’ roll, or offering a service that makes people’s lives easier, your primary focus should be on doing whatever it is you do well. When you provide something of value, link building will happen as enthusiasts spread the word. That does not mean you should not run contests, upload instructional videos to YouTube, or be an active internet presence. It means that balance and authenticity will mean more than throwing everything on the web to see what sticks. Invest your resources wisely and do not hesitate to secure some professional SEO help.

Link building is still one of the best ways to increase your website’s link popularity and page rank. Building SEO links in positive ways makes a significant impact. Ryan Michael Farrell is a professional off site SEO specialist for the search engine marketing firm Wpromote.

I feel like kicking myself over and over again. At least my Jeet Kune Do training will be of some use. Sometimes the simplest things can increase traffic tremendously. And I am mad at myself for not doing it sooner.

Do you know that most of your blog readers would definitely have some kind of social media account? It could be Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus or maybe something else. Why not? Don’t you have a social media account with any of those websites? I bet you do. Because you are a blogger, a part of a blogger natural skill is to network online. And social media is a no-brainer thing.

If you have a social media account, why don’t your readers?

And because of that, you could easily be increasing traffic to your blog if you simply add a simple way for your existing readers to share your website with their friends.

I am going to tell you how — including a little ninja technique along with that will get more of your readers to share your website with their friends. (this guy does JKD and now he’s a ninja?)

I am sure you have seen it on other websites. You see little icons and buttons with logos of most common social media sites. Those little things are so tempting to click on. Especially when the blog that you read really captures your attention and you feel that this is worth sharing.

And when you click on them, the URL of the page that you are reading instantly appears on your Facebook Wall, or maybe just got Re-Tweeted it on Twitter.

Well, if you are using WordPress, there a really easy way to do that. You can simply add a plugin to your blog. And I recommend Socialize.

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/socialize

Now, this part of the ninja thingy.

With Socialize, you can simply add buttons to major social media sites like Facebook and Twitter in each of your blog post instantly. It will appear in little buttons with the share count. Of course the share count starts with zero, indicating nobody has shared your blog post. But the share count itself acts like a reason to click on because you feel like you are obligate to get the numbers up.

And here’s the ninja technique: when you have bigger number in those boxes, they tend to get shared a lot more. So here”s what you need to do. First install the Socialize WordPress plugin. Next share those blog posts yourself first, especially all the new ones you just created. Just make sure that the number in the box is not zero.

Now, the second part of the ninja technique to increasing your traffic with social media. With Socialize you can have the social media share button appears on the top right or at the bottom of the blog post. The one at the bottom is called the Call-To-Action box.

I want you to use the one that makes the buttons appear at the bottom. Because that is the best time to ask your readers to share your blog post with their friends. Well, in business, you got to ask for the things you want. If you want your readers to share your website, ask them to do it. And that is exactly what you are going to do.

Write a big headline calling the readers to do something after reading your blog post. It could be “Finished Reading? Now Do This…” or “Tell Your Friends”. You could test those out and see which works best for your blog. Well, blogs write about different things and communicate differently to different readers. I believe you know your readers best. So I am going to leave the call-to-action phrase to you. But make sure you do have a call-to-action. Customers are more likely to act when you tell them to.

Now don’t start saying that these are not really ground-breaking techniques, even though they aren’t. If you have not done this, do it. Give it a month and then compare your statistics from the previous month. You will be amazed.

When I did this at one of my old blog, traffic increased by 35%. I am not getting any new keyword rankings at Google. I wasn’t doing any new link building. But I am seeing a lot more traffic coming in from Facebook, Twitter and StumbleUpon.

Maybe it is your turn?

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By Iszuddin Ismail – Apart from helping businesses and online entrepreneurs get start blogging with his WordPress blog installation service, Iszuddin also shares his wisdom on how businesses can generate new leads, build stronger relationship and increase profits. http://blog.prowpinstall.com

Without consistent and healthy amounts of traffic, your blog doesn’t stand a chance of becoming profitable. It’s a simple concept to grasp, but many still struggle to attain the numbers they want. While there’s no one-size-fits-all solution to the problem, there are some general best practices every webmaster should follow to maximize their traffic numbers. Here are five simple steps you can take to increase your daily page views. Follow these tips, and you’ll be guaranteed a noticeable uptick in the traffic you receive.

Link To Your Own Content – When Google sees that a site has a lot of internal links, that helps your PageRank because it views your site as having some depth and value to offer. If you have a particular post that’s ranked highly in the search results for a certain keyword, link to that post from other posts in your blog using that same keyword as the anchor text. It’ll boost that post in particular and your website as a whole in the organic results. Do the same with other posts and their main keywords and you’ll see a significant increase in your rank overall.

Interact With Your Readers – Your job isn’t done when you post a great new article. If people react positively to your content and leave comments, you should go out of your way to respond to them and keep the conversation going. It’s always flattering when something you write inspires passion in other people. Capitalize on that momentum by making your blog a site that people remember for being more interactive than most of the others they visit throughout the week.

Ditch The Small Talk, Solve A Problem – Nobody cares about how your day went or what your thoughts on Donald Trump’s defunct bid for the presidency are. Instead of broadcasting your inner monologue, use your blog to give people a solution to a problem. Write a step-by-step tutorial on something you just learned how to do or give them information that’s not widely known that can save time and money. Our time is precious, and people will pay more attention to you if you cut right to the chase and deliver the goods without the extraneous commentary.

Tweak Your Title Keywords – Sometimes, a post you write gets a decent amount of search engine traffic from people who were using an entirely different keyword than you would have expected. You can see this by looking at your analytics and back-end stats, under your traffic sources section. If that’s the case, change the title of the post to include the keyword that’s getting you that traffic in the Search Engine Results Pages. It’ll boost the ranking of that article even further, bringing in even more unique hits.

Get Social – Social media has been over-hyped to some degree over the past few years. But it’s still a valuable tool when it comes to raising your profile. The key is to take a more targeted approach to attracting new readers. Don’t “friend” everyone you run across on Facebook or follow every Tom, Dick, and Harry on Twitter. Find people with similar interests, and start to build an actual community and following that matters. A hundred like-minded followers are worth more than a million who will never read your blog.

In Closing – These suggestions are easy to implement, but nonetheless quite effective when it comes to driving more readers to your website. Of course, this is just the tip of the iceberg and there are many other techniques which you can use to boost your blog’s search engine rankings. You probably won’t see immediate results overnight. But Rome wasn’t built in a day, and if you use these optimization methods consistently they’ll begin to pay off in short order. The trick is to just keep at it. As with anything else in life, the key to success in blogging is persistence.

Nicole Rodgers has been blogging in the finance and technology industries for three years; she encourages you to create a website and start blogging today.  Blogging is a great way to increase your business network and Nicole’s small business phone is constantly ringing with incoming leads for new clients. Blogging has definitely changed the way Nicole conducts business.

Twitter and Facebook!

Though many of these links are no-follow links, the exposure will often get you in front of other people who will create permanent links to your site.

Have a Facebook group or fan page. Also make sure the like button and the retweet button are both on all the pages that you want people to link to.

Link Bait

Create content designed to spread virally on sites like Reddit and Digg. What tends to do well on these sites?

* Infographics tend to get a lot of attention. Put a bunch of little-known statistics into one infographic.

* Slightly sarcastic content.

* Funny content.

* Content relevant to a news topic that these groups support. They tend to be more liberal than conservative and also more technologically oriented.

Guest Articles

There are many sites in your industry that depend on outside articles for their success.

Do a Google search for terms like:

* Keyword + “Submit an Article”
* Keyword + “Guest writer”
* Keyword + “Guest article”

And so on. Try to find websites that regularly host other people and try to get an article on their sites.

Directories

Directories are one easy way to build a bunch of backlinks quickly. You can submit them by hand or hire out the process very affordably in internet marketing forums.

Submit Press Releases

Send press releases to news services like PRWeb, PR Newswire and PR Leap. Some offer free press release services, though typically you’ll have to pay a small amount of money.

These releases will almost definitely generate a handful of backlinks to your website. If your story is especially good, you may even get picked up by news media or a prominent blogger and get a high profile link.

Chamber of Commerce

One easy, high quality link is to get a link from your chamber of commerce.

All you need to do is show up at your local chamber and register as a business. They’ll then put a link to your website from their high authority, high PR site back to your site.

Forums & Blog Comments

Forums and blogs are two easy places to get links. The most important thing to keep in mind with these link sources it that every post you make should be a high quality post, not a junk post designed just to get a link back.

Write high quality responses in forums and blogs and include a link back to your website. You’ll build both your backlinks and your credibility in the field as you get more well know.

There are many link-building techniques out there. While some work more than others, they all work to some degree. The most important thing is that you get out there, take action and start building links today.

Incoming links help you climb your way to the top of the search engine rankings. They boost traffic. Create a plan today to start increasing your links and grow your business.

For more non-stop, viral traffic ideas, click here.

Google Website Optimizer is the most popular split testing platform online and it’s also 100% free.

To get started, go to Google Website Optimizer and start by clicking on “Create an Experiment.” You’ll be guided through the step by step process of setting up a split test.

If you choose to do an A/B split test, you’ll basically set up two different pages and Google will automatically split the traffic for you and report the results.

If you choose to do a multi-variable split test, you’ll have a single page with different PHP codes on the page that publishes different versions of each variable every time the page loads.

Once you have a split test setup, Google will show you data on your visitors, conversion and conversion rate on your front page. It’ll also tell you how far you are from having statistically significant data.

For example, if you have enough results that Google is 75% sure you have a winner, it will tell you that. You can then decide if that’s good enough for you and call the test complete, or you can wait for more data to be closer to 100% certain.

The way it works is you create two or more versions of the page you want to test, each one slightly different than the other. You “split” your traffic between these two versions and see which one performs better.

For example, if you’re selling a dog leash you might split test two different images: One of a dog on a leash, another of a pet owner who’s smiling.

After testing the images, you might find that surprisingly the pet owner smiling brings in more sales than the dog on a leash picture.

Instead of just creating a site and hoping that it sells, split testing allows you to increase your conversions over time.

Types of Split Testing: A/B Tests and Multi-Variable Tests

There are primarily two different types of tests you can conduct: A/B tests and multi-variable tests.

A/B tests are the tests we talked about above, where you test two different sites and see which performs better. It’s called A/B because there are two sites, one called A and the other called B.

The other type of test is called multi-variable testing. It’s a type of testing where you test many variables at once and use software to mathematically figure out the best combination of variables.

For example, you might test the headline, the layout, the picture, the price and the order button – All at the same time. The software will tell you which is the best combination of all the data.

Multi-variable testing is generally used only once you have a lot of traffic.

For our purposes, we’ll go over how to run A/B tests in this report.

What Should You Split Test?

There are a few things that affect conversions more than anything else. Start by testing these factors, then test less important factors later.

The Price

The price will often affect your conversions more than anything else. Should you charge $20, $40, $80 or $100? The only way to really know is to test it.

Be careful when testing prices. Generally you want to test it only for a limited time, or else you’ll be sending mixed messages to your market about what your price is.

If someone buys a product and later realizes someone else paid less, always refund the difference for them.

Headline

Next to the price, the headline is often the highest impact factor to test.

The headline’s main job is to capture the reader’s attention and get them to keep reading. It’s their first impression to your website.

If you spend 50% of your copywriting time on your headline, that’s time well spent. Split testing your headline can have very, very dramatic results.

The Layout/Design

The layout speaks to your users emotionally, non-verbally. By layout/design, I mean things like: font color, font size, width of the page, background color, etc.

Studies have shown that certain layouts can increase conversions quite drastically in certain markets, while reducing conversions in others.

For example, red headlines tend to work great in markets that aren’t heavily marketed to.

In markets like marketing, weight loss and dating tips however, people are so sick of seeing red headlines that a red headline actually reduces conversions. Instead, a deep blue headline which builds trust actually tends to convert best in these low-trust high-competition markets.

Each market is different. After you’ve tested your price and headline, start testing your layout to see what converts best.

Shopping Cart Dropout Rate

One thing marketers often forget to split test is the shopping cart’s drop out rate. In other words, once someone clicks “buy” what percentage of them actually completes the transaction?

Online, the drop off rate can be as high as 50% or more. With split testing, marketers have been able to cut down their shopping cart drop off rate by as much as half, effectively doubling their income.

The main things to split test in this area are:

1) Making sure the shopping cart page looks like the rest of the site, so a buyer doesn’t feel like they left your site when they hand over their credit card.

2) Safety. This is perhaps the #1 factor to lowering shopping cart dropoff. If you can help your customers feel safe giving you their credit card, they’re much more likely to be willing to pay.

3) Symbols like the “BBB Certified” symbol, “128 Bit Encryption” symbol and the “Hacker Safe” symbol have all been proven to increase conversion.

What is “Statistically Significant” Data?

One word that you’ll often hear in conjunction with split testing is “statistically significant data.” What does that mean?

It basically means you have enough data to know that if the test continued indefinitely, the results will be similar.

For example, if you flipped a coin 5 times and you got 4 heads and 1 tails, it would not be accurate to say that you’ll get tails 1/5 times by flipping a coin if you did it 1,000 times.

You just haven’t flipped the coin enough times to get statistically significant data.

On the other hand, if you run an A/B split test and find that out of 5,000 impressions one made 100 sales and another made 20, you have enough data to know that #1 will outperform #2 if you gave it a million impressions.

Any time you’re split testing, you want to make sure you have enough data that you’re getting statistically significant data. Meaning you have enough results to know that the data will stay constant when it’s scaled up.

http://analytics.google.com

If you don’t already have a Google account, sign up for one now. If you already have one (through Gmail or Blogger,) sign into your account.

If it’s your first time, Google will present you with a brief tutorial of their system. Go through the system the tutorial to get a feel for how the system works.

Once you’re at the main analytics page, click “Add a Website” to get started.

Follow the on screen instructions to install analytics. After giving it the domain you want to track, Analytics will give you a snippet of code that needs to be placed on your website.

If you’re building the site yourself in Dreameaver, XSitePro or through another editor, just paste that snippet of code before the </body> tag at the bottom of the page.

Make sure you put the code on the bottom of every single page of your site, not just on the home page. This will allow you to get data for your entire site rather than just one page.

Once you’ve setup the code, go back to Google Analytics. Click “edit” next to your newly setup site profile.

At the top of the page, Analytics will say “Tracking Not Installed.” Next to it will be a refresh button. Click the refresh button.

If Analytics now tells you that tracking is installed, that means everything is working properly and Analytics is now gathering data.

If it still tells you it’s not installed, wait a couple hours and try again. If it’s still not working, any number of things could have gone wrong:

- Was the domain typed correctly throughout the whole process?

- Was the code copied in its entirety?

- Was the edited HTML file uploaded, not just edited?

Back trace your steps and make sure you did everything right. If all else fails, try just re-uploading your files and hit refresh again.

The Basics of Using Google Analytics

When you get to the Google Analytics results screen, you have quite a lot of options to choose from.

Date Range Selector

One of the most important things to learn is how to use the date range selector. This tells Google what period of time to look in when it gives you data.

If you want to see all the data from all the traffic you’ve ever gotten, you can do that. If you want to just see last week’s data, you can do that too. Just select the dates.

Main Data Screen

The main data screen is the data that’s centered, taking up the most space. Analytics separates its data into different modules that you can easily take in.

The Left Sidebar

On the left sidebar is where you choose what kind of data you want to see. You’re presented with options like Visitors, Traffic Sources, Dashboard, etc.

Each link should be pretty self-explanatory. Just click your way through and see what you can learn about your visitors in each of the subsections.

Once Analytics is setup, all you really need to do is come back to Analytics and find whatever data you want, whenever you want. It’s generally a good idea to check your stats at least once a week.

Tracking With  Piwik

If you’d rather not use Google Analytics, another great choice is Piwik.

Piwik is free and open source. Rather than being web hosted, you download the software and install it on your own server.

Piwik offers about the same functionality as Google Analytics, with the downside that it’s harder to setup and the upside of not having your data on anyone else’s systems. The choice of which to use is yours.

How to Get Started with Testing and Tracking

Testing and tracking are two skills any online marketer or business owner needs to learn if they want to succeed.

What Tracking is and Why It’s Important

Tracking can be put simply as “understanding how your visitors behave.”

By properly tracking your user behavior, you can learn a lot about how people interact with your site. You’ll learn things like …

• How many people come to your website
• Which pages people read carefully and which pages they just leave
• Where people come to your website from
• How many of them buy, how many of them click through
• Which of your newsletter sign-up boxes actually work
• Etc.

If you want to build a great website that generates real money, understanding how your customers behave is crucial. That’s what tracking allows you to do.

What Should You Be Tracking?

There are a lot of things you should be tracking. Here are some of the most important factors, what they are and why they’re important.

Website Traffic - This is the most basic metric that every webmaster should know. How many people are coming to your website? Ideally, this number should be going up over time.

Page views – How many page views do you have? This number is less important than your visitor number, but, if you plan on using advertising as a way to make money, you want to work on increasing your page count.

Simple tactics like splitting your articles into 3 pages where they click “next” to continue can double your page count and thereby double your revenue.

Traffic Sources – Do people type in your URL in their domain bar and land on your site? Or do they find you via search engines? Does most of your traffic come from Google, Yahoo or MSN? Perhaps most people really just come from 3 referring sites?

The data may surprise you. For example, if you’ve built a brand for yourself from speaking, most people may actually already know about you by the time they land. Your SEO strategy may not be nearly as important as your public speaking strategy.

Or, you might find that 90% of your traffic comes from Yahoo. Sure, they have ten times less traffic less than Google, but if you’re ranked top 3 in Yahoo and on page 4 in Google, it only makes sense that Yahoo will bring you most of your traffic.

By knowing where most of your traffic comes from, you’ll be able to better spend your time on increasing things that are already working rather than spin your wheels trying to get things that aren’t working to work.

What People Type In to Get To Your Site – Often time’s your site will be ranked for keywords that you would have never expected. The keywords people type in to get to your site may be completely different than keywords you were optimizing for.

Most tracking software will be able to tell you what people actually typed into search engines to get to your site. You should review this list periodically to see if you can find any “gems” of keywords to intentionally target in the future

Opt In Rates – Out of every 100 people who land on your website, how many sign up?

Your newsletter is one of the most important assets to your business. Most people won’t buy the first time they land on your site. Instead, they buy as they build more and more trust for you over time. Having a newsletter allows you to stay in touch with your visitors over the course of weeks, months and years rather than just the one time they land on your site.

Tracking and optimizing your opt in rates can help you exponentially grow your business.

Conversion Rates – Out of every 100 visitors, how many people actually pull out their credit cards and buy?

Naturally this is a number you want to test and improve as much as possible. If you can get a 1% conversion to a 2% conversion, you’ve doubled your income without having to double your traffic.

What Country Your Visitors Are From – You might be surprised. Often times traffic comes from a combination of the U.S. and Europe, though occasionally you’ll have a website where most of your traffic comes from other countries.

For example, a PDF Search site was originally built for random internet users who wanted to find documents. Its site owner discovered however, that the site was being used primarily by students in India to find sources for research papers.

Once he knew that, he was able to cater his site even more for his audience and improve his income.

Wouldn’t you love to increase your income by tweaking your site? Make sure you learn more about Advanced Web Metrics with Google Analytics.

Website/Blog

In order to market and sell your information product you’re going to need a website. Your website can be a single page site with a sales page and that’s it. It can also be a content rich website packed with information. The choice is yours.

The benefit to a content rich site is that people will come back to your site again and again. You can sell a number of information products. You can benefit from affiliate sales and advertising income.

The foundation of a website or blog is content. This means writing a lot of articles or blog posts. You can also create audio or video content. When you’re creating your business plan decide what type of website you want to create. While you may be turned off by the content creation aspect of a blog or multi page website remember that you don’t have to create it all yourself. You can outsource it and use PLR.

Content

Apart from your blog or website content you can use content to market your business. For example articles can be written and published on article directories. This content will generate links to your website and website visitors. You can also publish content in a newsletter. Additionally, content written and published n your website will help you get listed on the search engines.

Whenever someone is looking for information on your topic your website will show up in the results. You get visitors and potential customers. For many information publishers content both on their website and on article directories is a primary marketing tactic.

Social Networking

Social networking has become a mainstream pastime. Savvy business owners have caught on. As a social networker you can post links to content on your site. Mingle promotions with interactions to establish a genuine presence and following. You can also create a business profile on a social networking site. Facebook Fan pages have become significant marketing tools for many business owners.

Email

Email marketing has been a long time success strategy. As an information publisher you’d likely motivate people to sign up for your email list by giving away free information. For example, you might give away a report on the top ten garage organization mistakes. You now have permission to send your subscriber more valuable information and promotions. You can market your book to them through strategic email marketing messages.

Email is a great way to build a relationship with your customers and prospects. They may turn to you repeatedly for information and become lifelong customers.

Advertising

Of all of the marketing tactics discussed, advertising is the only one that really can cost a lot. However, with a strategic plan and control over your budget advertising can generate a good return on investment. There are different types of advertising: Pay Per Click,  banner ads, Facebook, etc. Before you advertise make sure your ad is targeted. Maintain tight control over your budget. Test and track your ads to make sure they’re effective.

Affiliates/Partnerships and More

As your business grows you may look into affiliate programs. In this case you’d pay people a commission to promote your information products. You may also establish partnerships with other relevant companies. Partnerships work well to cross promote and to build an email list. For example, you might partner with a home organization retailer and promote their products. In exchange they would promote your book.

Resources for  marketing information products:

Happy Outsourcing

Craigslist Outsourcing Secrets

Outsourcing Webinar With Rachel Rofe

Free Quality Traffic

Video Traffic Secrets