Keyword selection

The first step in search engine optimization. It's also where most people go wrong. If you pick a keyword that is not used by the people hunting for your product, you won't get traffic. You must pick popular keywords to be found.

Choosing the Right keywords to target your intended audience with is more than vital, it’s the whole ball game. The best way to do this is by using a large-scale keyword generation software & services such as Wordtracker or Keyword Elite.

Keyword placement

In order for a webpage to rank prominently in the search results of a search engine, it must be

optimized. Unlike humans, the search engine spiders are unable to discern what a webpage is about unless you give them some hints. One of the best ways to tell the search engines about the subject matter is to integrate keywords into your website. Brainstorm and develop a list of keywords that are relevant to your product offering. The keywords and phrases should be terms that would most logically be used to search for items on your website. Once you have developed a list of relevant keywords and keyword phrases, they should be incorporated into your website. Each webpage should be optimized for 2-3 keywords or phrases.

Each page on website should also contain a unique description. The "meta" data, which is located in the header of the webpage, is often used by search engines to assess the relevance and topic of a specific page.

Joint Ventures

Pulling off a successful Joint Venture can be the very next best thing to having your own highly-targeted eZine list. Of course for it to be free, you’ve got to offer your JV partner some sort of commission, like the full size of your cut or better, for them to send out an Ad to their coveted list.

This is sometimes called “OPL” (Other People’s Lists) or “OPT” (Other People’s Traffic.) In fact, this is the most common form of JV structure, a simple commission split in return for a list “Solo Ad” or a recommendation.

There really is no set definition for the term Joint Venture, it simply means that two or more marketers form a temporary collaboration to benefit them both. Creativity can mold modern JVs into almost any shape or appearance.

Google AdWords - (Usually really expensive)

I felt it necessary to mention the Adwords program because the quality of their Pay-Per-Click traffic

is the benchmark for Internet Marketers to measure targeted traffic with. Almost nothing else can compete with AdWords as far as targeting, because they not only serve the AdWord advertisement boxes on relevant, keyword-targeted pages across the web, but in the Search Engine Result Pages as well.

eBay’s traffic is the notable competition. Although eBay is not as precisely targeted as AdWords, nor can it bring as many visitors as quickly, eBay triumphs in delivering visitors in a buying state of mind… And you can get those visitors for free through eBay.

Expect to pay a very minimum of five cents per visitor through AdWords, but usually more likely around $1 with more competitive keywords costing over $20!

Forum Marketing - (A Subset of Link Building)

There are countless Forums online these days for all possible niches. (And if you can’t find one in your niche, Eureka! You’ve hit the jackpot! Start the first forum there and it’s like inheriting an oil well.) Identifying all the popular forums on your market or niche is a very important thing that all marketers should do for any online marketing campaign. For the really big, active forums with over 500,000 posts, simply go search for them by your keywords at http://www.big-boards.com.

Finding smaller forums is a little more tricky. Since there are many different software packages that forums are based on, there is no one good search command to find them all, except for adding the word “forum” to your search query. Try googleing each of your top five keyword phrases, in quotes, with the word forum slapped on the end, outside of the quotes.

Once you’ve found them, the big question becomes how you market to them without becoming a “spammer.” You will rarely find a forum, unless it’s strictly a “marketers’ forum” that allows you to post a blatent ad inside of them without it being deleted.

FFAs or “Free For All” listings

Almost always a complete waste of time, FFAs simply let you post your Ad in either a classified
format or as a link in a link directory. Search Engines avoid these locations like the plague and being found in them can actually HURT your Search Engine rankings! Almost always, these listings do more harm than good. Beware!

Also see “Classified Ads.”

eZines you can advertise in Free

Easily confused with Safelists, there are many eZine services that sell Solo Ad mailings to their big, loosely harvested lists, and sometimes they’ll even offer a free emailing just to get your business. Of

course they want to sell you a much bigger eMailing down the road.

It is common to see an ad from a company that looks like a legitimate eZine “collector” company, offering a free Solo Ad submission to a list around the size of 5,000 – 50,000 recipients. I haven’t tested too many of these because of the hoops they make you jump through and the long lines you have to stand in.

In my experience, these companies have the power to collect and sort such a list out of their main, untargeted list and use it as described above in a sort of “bait & switch” routine.

I can’t verify if they all do business this way, but I have seen it happen more than once. The free mailing will go fine but you’ve got to buy a second mailing… So you choose a package, pay $67 or more for the mailing, and a month later when it’s your time to be featured, the much larger list doesn’t convert nearly as well as the little one did!

eZines - (Your own Newsletter, or your “List”)

If you’ve been marketing online more than a minute, I’m sure you’ve been bombarded with the phrase “the Money’s in the List.” Well it’s 90% true. It doesn’t end there; you still have to work at it. Keep giving to your list once you sign them up, much like a one-sided relationship.

If you ask any of the subscribers to my own list, I hope that they tell you I’ve been doing just that. 

So far, I haven’t had any more than one single unsubscribe, and I believe it is because my newsletter offers something for everyone, not just a new Advertisement each week. Anyone can send out a bunch of solo Ads from JV Partners and the affiliate programs that they’re pitching, but I wouldn’t recommend it if you’re interested in building a solid, trusting relationship with your subscriber base.

There are hundreds of places online that harvest email addresses, usually by some sort of co-registration, (where a person doesn’t even know he’s signing up for the second newsletter simultaneously) and will be glad to sell me a whole Solo Ad mailing allotment to that list of 200,000 or more for something like $50.

Sure, it sounds like a great deal, but what would it really get me? About 200,000 eMail boxes filled only with Ads that are no longer opened anymore.

eBooks - (A subset of List Building)

So, you wondered why I didn’t try to sell all the valuable information in this eBook, did you? The fact is that eBooks almost can’t be sold anymore, because every marketer and their uncle has penned at least one eBook lately and given it away!

Why would we do this? Well, it’s the same principle as Article Marketing, except that it builds more brand recognition and is much more dynamic. For instance, you’ve probably noticed an affiliate link or two throughout this PDF document. Some authors write these eBook just as a way to spread their Affiliate links alone. Some even pay a team of ghost-writers to crank out a bunch of eBooks for them to do just that, on a larger scale!

The most common use of eBooks nowadays and one that still works wonderfully for most niches outside of Internet Marketers, however, is offering a free eBook in exchange for your visitor’s eMail address. Like eBay, it’s a great source of targeted traffic. That’s it - you basically just bribe people to get on your list.

eBay (A subset of List Building)

eBay? Free Advertising?

Ok, so technically an auction listings cost 35 cents… But one sale can easily make you a profit, and

you’re allowed to sell nine of the same product in one auction at that price… So this is one exception I’m going to keep in this book because it’s really BETTER than free, all things considered.

So where does the Advertising part come in?

Simply place an information package of some kind, even if it’s just an article on your niche, and sell that infoproduct in an extremely cheap auction listing. Most people sell these things for 1 penny, although the difference between 1 cent and 35 cents really isn’t that much of a difference to the buyers looking for this information.

Naturally there are no other costs like shipping or insurance, because delivery is a simple digital download. Further advertising is up to you, and it is always a matter of just giving eBay some additional fees to make your listing stand out more. If your listing is profiting, try starting the next listing as a “Gallery item” for another 35 cents, and go up from there until you’ve reached a point of maximum returns.

Desktop Direct Messaging - (List building)

A little like a Trafficbar, Desktop Messaging is a way to send ads via an email-sized communication directly to the desktop of people you’ve talked into loading the software program.

Although this sounds like an impossible way to build traffic, it does have the very handy side-effect of being completely free of spam filters, so when using this as a way to send newsletters to your list or downline, you get 100% delivery, instantly.

It’s more like a messenger service than an email program though, and convincing a downline to sign up to hear your thoughts each week, at the cost of them hearing 13 other’s thoughts as well, sounds like an impossible task. (You only receive 1 message a week from each of the 14 people in your upline.)

Directory Submissions - (Link Building)

There is probably no better first marketing step for any website at all than submitting it to the top

400 or so Link Directories. As you can see from my rating, it’s not even close to being your best method of traffic generation. However, if you care about incoming links to your website, this is THE FOUNDATION that all other links will build on, because Search Engines start in these places and find your website through the links you place in them.

I’ve built over 300 different websites for all kinds of different purposes in my career, but I have submitted all of them to the legitimate link directories without fail. It’s a no-brainer that really should be thought of as necessary, despite the piddling amount of traffic it brings.

There are probably more link directories out there than anyone could ever submit to, but luckily it is only important to submit to the ones that have some PageRank. Even still, the number of submissions you’ll make for each site will be between 400 and 500, so this is not a quick task to do. Without software to keep up with all of them, and of course to help you paste your content into all of those forms, you’d take way too long to finish a single site’s posting.

Doorway Sites - (A subset of Link Building)

Old timers will remember this phrase with very negative connotations. Around the year 2000, a “Doorway Site” meant a “fake” site that looked just like the site you were going to, which existed just

to fool the Search Engines into thinking that they are multiple sites with different keywords, yet humans wouldn’t know that they were separate at all. (They could cover more keywords that way.)

That trick is so obvious to every Search Engine now that no one even attempts it anymore. They’d get their IP address banned for sure.

Nowadays, a lot of Internet Marketers are reviving the phrase to mean a slightly different, much more SE-friendly strategy of link building.

These new ‘Doorway Sites’ are usually just blogs or informational websites such as an “AdSense Farm” site. However, its main purpose, whether it displays Ads on it or not, is just to exist as an on-topic link to the owner’s primary website!

Craigslist - (A Subset of Link Building)

Craigslist is a hugely popular classified Ad site (a true exception to the other classified ads on the web) that started out as a simple bulletin board to be shared between a few friends in San Francisco. It has grown so large and so varied that it reached #24 in Alexa last year! (Currently # 35)

It achieved this by offering a no-frills simple classified-ad listing that was Specific to your

Metropolitan area. If you go and visit Craigslist.org right now, you’ll get to choose your nearest big city… Naturally a lot of advertisers feel that it’s not worth their time to place ads to one city at a time, so it really helps promote a spam-free atmosphere.

Placing your classified ads on Craigslist actually works pretty well, all things considered. You may have to place your ads in the top 5 or ten largest cities, all by hand, one at a time, but it clearly had brought a steady albeit skimpy stream of traffic that sticks around for weeks.

Classified Ads - (A directory of nothing but spam)

Much like a newspaper Classified Ad section, there are hundreds if not thousands of places online you can submit a “website promotional” classified Ad to promote your business. Unfortunately, the format of these things simply invites severe spamming as a few hundred webmasters out there will continuously spam each single Ad millions of times, sometimes daily, to the same directory!

 You may have never seen one of these things because they are hidden away where human eyes would not likely go. They are most usually stumbled upon from the other side, when some scam artist sells a newbie an “Ad Blasting” or some similar ploy guaranteeing that the poor guy’s listing will be posted in thousands of different places.

Banner Ad Exchanges

Most people will agree publicly that they never click on banner ads. Then they go home and click on

them without even knowing it. Banner ads today are all about creative placement which can work well when done right.

It’s true that they’ve lost their effectiveness significantly… In 1994, webmasters could EXPECT 5% or more clickthru rates for semi-targeted banner ads! We were in the infancy of marketing on the internet and back in those days we all thought that Advertising wouldn’t go very far online! How naive we all were…

But in 2000, Harvard University did an in-depth experiment on web surfing with the conclusion that we had trained ourselves to avoid looking at banner ads. Specifically, the strip across the top 10% of the screen was virtually invisible to us already.

Blog Comments - (A subset of Link Building)

Much like Forum Marketing, commenting on other people’s Blogs is a great way to build incoming links and also network in your niche.

Finding blogs that are on your niche topic is as easy as going to Blogger’s search at: http://search.blogger.com, to a great tech head’s site called Technorati: http://technorati.com, or directly to Google’s whole web Blog Search at: http://blogsearch.google.com.

Once you’ve found a blog that is on your topic, I recommend bookmarking it and the others you find into the same folder so you can watch them from time to time.

What’ you’re looking for is a question that you can answer. If you simply make a posting that sounds like an advertisement, they you’ll be spamming the blog, and surely the blog’s owner will delete it, and may even ban your IP address.

The trick is to answer a question someone else asks with your business being part of the solution. You want to show off your expertise without sounding too arrogant, and of course you want to get a link in. Always offer help and advice, and only market yourself when it’s part of a solution to someone else’s question.

Blogs (A subset of Link Building)

These great tools act as duplicate websites that are extremely easy and free to set up. All you need is some content, not even very good content, and you’ve got a great “Second site” for the search engine

to follow your links to and from.

Ever since Google bought Blogger.com, Googlebot has paid a lot of attention to what’s happening in “the Blogosphere.” Search engines still love to spider Blog content more often than other types of websites, since blogs were invented to be easy for SE Spiders to traverse in the first place.

A unique feature of even the free blogs like Wordpress & blogger is that you can set them up to automatically “ping” certain Search Engines or even social bookmarking sites to request that the spider comes out for another visit every time new content is added.

Blasting

This generic term is sometimes used loosely for sending out large amounts of (assumed non-spam)

email, such as to multiple eZines or Safelists. See “eZines.”

However, there is a lesser-understood ‘technique’ called Blasting that scammers commonly use to sell software. Beware any Software that claims to “Blast” your website out to large numbers of directories, other websites, classified Ads, FFAs, or even “free” eZine publishers. If they are charging money for this software or service, you won’t ever hear from them again.

If they aren’t charging money for it, then they’re harvesting your email address and you’ll be the next “blastee.”

A great method to bring in tons of completely uninterested traffic.

Article Marketing (A Subset of Link Building)

Writing articles about your topic of interest and sending them out to article directories, other websites, and eZines to publish is an almost ideal way to gain free advertising. I really can’t recommend it enough for long-term link building campaigns. All you need is time & writing skills for this self-compounding method to make your website one of the most respected and authoritative sites on the net.

I realize that this method has been out in the open and even done to death over the last couple of years, however I find that a lot of people who have tried Article Marketing quickly give it up before seeing any success.

It seems that everyone sets out writing articles, no matter if they do it themselves or pay someone to do it for them, by submitting one or two articles to the main article directories found in the more popular article submission software suites, such as Jason Potash’s Article Announcer. (Not free, really top-of-the line stuff)

Some sort of article submission software is pretty much necessary because it can take a long time to submit an article to even a handful of websites… The automation that these softwares offer are not just ‘set-it and forget it,’ you will most definitely still have to go to each site and make sure it populates all the right fields properly.

Affiliate Programs

If you have a website that sells a product online, and you’ve built in a fair amount of room into your price for it, then you have an opportunity to use a GREAT free traffic source.

In fact, running your own Affiliate Program helps you out in more ways than one. By signing up affiliates to go out and sell your product for you, you’ll not only build a huge salesforce, (assuming you make your offer tempting for them) but you will also be building hordes of one-way, targeted links back to your website as they advertise in the various places.

Drawbacks?

You must be persuasive to get an interested following to do some serious selling for you. It can also be slow to get all those links built up, but link building is just a side benefit anyway.

To overcome this issue, simply build more room into your price so that the monetary gain for your affiliates is too tempting for them to refuse. 50% commissions are quite standard these days on informational products, with some products go all the way up to 100% commission structure, so that the seller can build up a newsletter list.

Preface

Advertising your business effectively on the internet is the most important skill to learn for any online business to survive.

So why is it so difficult to find the effective advertising sources you need?

I probably don’t have to tell you that the internet is full of free advertising. It comes in many forms, from websites that advertise other websites, to text-box ads on the sides of pages, to spyware, spam, blogs, & auto-surfing… There are almost too many ways to get visitors to your website, because creative entrepreneurs are figuring out new ways to do it almost weekly now.

It has grown so large in fact that there are even many FREE ways to get traffic to your website. Legitimate traffic for free… And plenty of it, too. This represents an awesome opportunity for new business owners without a huge advertising budget.

That’s what this Encyclopedia is all about. I’ve spent years exploring, building, and testing these resources, and I’m going to share them all with you today. I’m even going to review them all for you with quick-glance indicators that reflect each free traffic source’s:

         Quantity (How many visitors.)
         Quality (How Targeted the Visitors are to your niche.)
         Time to Delivery (How fast all of your traffic will arrive.)

They will be rated on a scale of one to five, 5 being the best possible. A Zero rating means that it’s not applicable.

The Encyclopedia of Free Online Advertising

By Luke W Parker of the Home Biz Factory


This valuable guide reviews all of the best tactics and techniques that anyone who markets on the internet needs to be aware of!

Branding Rights of this Viral eBook available for readers who act quickly… Click here for your branding kit!

This is a free eBook. You are welcome to pass this document along as you please as long as no content is modified. Only those that use the branding kit have permission to change any of the links within this eBook, all others can & will be prosecuted.

This document copyright © 2007 Luke W Parker and the Home Biz Factory.

All rights reserved worldwide.