I don’t consider myself an “expert” but I do know that I have learned traffic tricks that I can easily put into place to get a desired outcome in the search engines rather quickly. I take pride that I have researched, tested and taught myself how to put these pieces together from seo, rss, blogging, and many other web traffic tactics.

For example recently a new competitor showed up on the scene and got national media coverage. After I watched the news segment, I flipped open my laptop and within hours I ranked number three on the front page of Google for their business name in the spot directly under them. I wanted to be sure that anyone that did a search for that business after watching the newscast knew that I existed as well. I’ll have to do a little more work so that I can finish above them then I’ll be happy . In addition, I was able to create a blog post in 10 minutes that also made it to the front page of the search engines. Is that poor sportsmanship or just the survival of the fittest on the web?

I was excited that when I started a brand new blog and only plugging away on it part time, I was able to increase my website traffic to the point that my Alexa ranking dropped from over 10 million to under 200,000 in a matter of weeks and sits in the top three spots for my keywords.

The daily questions I get from other small business owners prompted me to create my Beginners Guide to Traffic Tactics ebook. This guide is where I wanted to be sure that all beginners can get website traffic on their own and not get hung up with lack of money or technical experience as an excuse for NOT getting website traffic.

Then I think my friend Terry Wygal, who is what I would consider a website traffic expert, must have lost a bet or something during his last mastermind group and started helping me promote my ebook and decided to share some of his stealth, ninja like techniques with everyone! It’s an absolute must to check out and get on his Free Traffic Tricks mail list because I don’t know what he has up his sleeve, but I’m sure it will be priceless!

If nothing else, watching his video and seeing how Terry leveraged his free traffic tricks to earn a $17,000.00 check is motivating and inspirational!

What’s my favorite thing about Terry? (besides being a great guy & the kindness of him sharing his experience to help my first informational product?) Is that Terry is a part of the Maverick team, I have an entire review post/video coming on that subject, but for the sake of this blog post I will tell you that as a Maverick you commit to give back to others.

Terry gave back in a big way recently after holding his last event Blueprint to Financial Freedom. He helped out fellow internet marketer, Dr. Mani by donating to his charity for children with The Dr. Mani Children Heart Foundation that helps raise awareness of children with congenital heart defects.

Since I joined the Maverick Insider this month, I also took the pledge to give back and I decided to continue with one of my favorite organizations, Make A Wish Foundation. Ten percent of all sales of my Beginners Guide to Traffic Tactics will be dedicated to www.wish.org.

Now that I shared this secret free website tricks resource with you, don’t wait, like I said, I don’t know what Terry has planned, so go now and sign up so you don’t miss a thing! I’m already there and I can’t wait! Go… Here… NOW… http://www.FreeTrafficTricks.Com

Post from: Online Business Marketing For Home Based Businesses

How To Get Free Traffic Tricks

The problem lies, in knowing how to effectively leverage this technique since time in forums, social networks and various other types of online communities can literally “suck the life” out of your day and your productivity.

Secret 1:
Put thought into how you want to be perceived.

Do you want your name and business to be associated with your broken appliance stories, or as a valuable business to remember?

Secret 2:
Have clear goals.

Having a clear idea of how you want to be perceived will help you set your goals for the forum. Instead of answering 25 posts with “yeah, me too” pick out what posts you can add value to and craft an intellegent helpful and detailed reply.

If your end goal is to have people come back to your website post enough information so that other readers will see you know what you are talking about and want to read more.

Secret 3:
Know your call to action.

Like your newsletters, websites, blog postings, articles, forum marketing is no different. Have a call to action at the end of your post.

Do you want them to return to your blog to read part 2 of your answer post? Try an ending like “If you find this information helpful, I have a post listed here that covers more details http://url”

Secret 4:Make your signature line work for you.

When you create a profile in the forum you will be given the opportunity to add a profile signature that will be posted with each of your replies.

Enter a little bit of link bait there, an affiliate link, a link to a free report or a banner image.

Remember that forums are indexed by search engines, use a “keyword” that anchors your text which sends people to the website or a special landing page.

Your anchor text links, depending on the forum rules, will act as backlinks pointing to your site from various other sites, the more likely it is your site will rank higher for that search phrase.

The more anchor text links pointing to your site from various other sites, the more likely it is your site will rank higher for that search phrase. Do not try to add them all at once, 30-40 per week are fine, you start adding 100 a week and you will most likely get flagged by the search engines.

The html code (that’s what all the <> marks are) for your links is very simple but if you have problems come back and post a question and we are more then happy to help out.

I suggest you copy and paste the code into notepad and save on your desktop for easy reference. Do not use code pasted from a word editor like Microsoft Word. These type of editors will add characters that throw off your code.

Add Image To Your Forum Signature

[*url=http://www.yourlandingpageURL.com][img] http://www.whereyourimageis.com[*/img][*/url] – without the *s

If you host your own images, don’t forget to use the right directory path for your image. It may look something like http://yourwebsite.com/images/bannerxyz.jpg

If you use free webhosting most do not host images, you will need to use a third party image host.

If you don’t have an image, you can create your own image using photoshop, paint, or a free banner maker site.

Add Text Link To Your Forum Signature

[*url]http://www.yourwebsite.com[*/url] …..but take out the *

Warning: Do not use execessive BOLD or big/gaudy signatures most people are actually turned off by big signatures. Keep it simple and professional and let your call to action take front and center attention.

One of my favorite signature links for forums is promoting your blog with your feedburner feed signature. This will promote your blog, showing the latest and greatest information.

Secret 5:

Be Your Authentic Self

People have very good instincts and if you are only at the forum pushing and promoting yourself you will throw all your forum marketing efforts in the toilet and ruin your reputation before you start.

Be authentic to your personality, be genuine in your efforts to help others and be honest- if you are going to recommend a product- tell them it’s your affiliate link. I am much more likely to believe and USE someones affiliate link when they are open and most of the time I’ll even ASK for their affiliate link if I believe their recommendation is honest.

More Traffic Tactics

There are businesses that make thousands of dollars from their forum presence, if you spend time in forums and still are not having an increase website traffic or earning money from your time then I highly suggest you check out the MBC Beginners Guide To Traffic Tactics ebook. This ebook will go into more details of forum marketing plus many more website traffic generation strategies that can work for you!

http://moms-business-coach.com/recommends/forumtraffic

Post from: Online Business Marketing For Home Based Businesses

5 Secret Tips To Make Forum Marketing Work For You

Many small business owners focus on search engine optimization and paid advertising for their website traffic tactics. However, they forget that even Press Releases can bring a surge of new visitors, media opportunities and back links to their websites.

Today I created a Press Release following the Patrick Pretty PDF Press Release strategy. Check out the MBC Work At Home Tips Press Release and tell me what you think!

If you struggle with your Press Releases, I highly recommend the following resources:

Patrick Pretty
http://moms-business-coach.com/recommends/patrickpretty

Publicity Hound
http://moms-business-coach.com/recommends/publicityhound

Post from: Online Business Marketing For Home Based Businesses

How Many Website Traffic Tactics Are You Using?

The must have tool of your weekend, the “Website Grader”. Quick, do it now, before you run out the door to start your weekend go visit the useful HubSpot site. This is a site that was recommended to me during last weekends Tweet Up in Boston, and now I’m spreading the word to you.

It’s super easy and fast and will do all your analyzing for you!

When you get to the front page at the top of the screen you will see the Website Grader button. All you need to do is click that, enter your URL AND any of your competitors URLs and you will get back some incredible data.

As they state on their site about the grade your website gets, “A website grade of 99/100 for www.hubspot.com means that of the hundreds of thousands of websites that have previously been evaluated, our algorithm has calculated that this site scores higher than 99% of them in terms of its marketing effectiveness. The algorithm uses a proprietary blend of over 50 different variables, including search engine data, website structure, approximate traffic, site performance, and others.

The software is constantly being upgraded and the algorithm enhanced. The number of potential recommendations provided by the tool is also increasing frequently. Please check back often.”

The report you get on your URL will include,

• Meta Tag
• Heading Summary
• Image Summary
• Interior Page Analysis
• Readability

Even better you will see more details about your Blog, off page SEO, Social Web 2.0 sites and Competition.

When you are done, they will email you a report of your data. Download their free Internet Marketing kit and you will get ideas and tips for any area that you may be weak in.

It’s all free so please take advantage of this great resource. Oh, I did I mention they have a Press Release Grader too? Check them out- HubSpot.

Post from: Online Business Marketing For Home Based Businesses

What Did You Get for a Grade?

“..part of SEO is to attract the spiders.  I know that making changes on your site attracts them to come back and check out the changes.  To what extent do changes need to be made?  In other words, does that mean that full paragraphs of text need to be changed frequently on each page of your site, or is it more behind the scenes, like with titles, keywords, etc?  Common sense is telling me it is the visible text that ‘customers’ may see, but I can’t understand how to continually change all the text on my site.
To sum up…my question is really how much needs to be continually changed in order to attract the google-bots and other spiders?”

Answer:

As with any SEO question you can get as technical as you want, but I like to keep it short and practical, so in a nutshell;  It’s more then just changing text it’s adding content.

Go back to your keyword list and pull out your long tail keywords and add a page of information, like an article, for each of your keywords. Just think of how your site will grow if you add one article a week to your site focused on your keyword or topic. That’s an extra 52 pages that you can have “floating” around the internet and showing up in search engines that people can use as a front door to find you.

Of course, I’m not saying never change your base content, you should always keep testing and tracking and tweaking the content on your base pages for conversion purposes.

However, writing an article that is 400-600 words long should only take you 1/2 hour of work and less then that once you get used to the format.

Add linking to your other pages within the article to help the spiders effectively move around all your pages. An easy swipe line for doing is adding a line such as “As I stated in my earlier article, 5 Tips for SEO, print out your list of keywords and use those for your content base”

Let’s pause for a moment and look at this tactic:

1. I referenced you to an earlier article I wrote- keeping you on my site longer
2. I created an anchor text link that spiders will be attracted to with my keyword in it
3. I created a gateway for spiders to move from one page to another since they will follow the url
4. I added more value to you as a reader by giving you more information you were looking for, understanding SEO.

Blogging As A Free Marketing Tool

Installing a WordPress blog (remember that’s free too) on your host account, attracts spiders to your site because it’s always giving fresh content. Spiders don’t see free WordPress.com or Blogger blogs as adding to YOUR site, but to WORDPRESS.com. Even if you have a link to the free blog site from your website, they live on different IP addresses so the most it will do is follow the URL. For more information on free blogs vs self-hosted blogs you can check out, 5 Reasons You Should Host Your Blog.

The extra benefit of using a self-hosted blog, is the fact you can schedule your post. This cuts your time by allowing you to spend a few hours with your keyword list, create your articles and load them and have them scheduled to go out on certain days automatically. You can do it once a month and not think about it again.

Back to the nutshell, there is your 2 choices, add an article page to your site every week or install the free WordPress.org on your host and post every week and use this tool for passive income in addition to fresh content made easy.

Post from: Online Business Marketing For Home Based Businesses

Quick Question Tuesday- SEO, Spiders, Content

Perform a search on Google for “search engine optimization tips” and you will end up with thousands, even millions of results.  Frankly, the entire process of Search Engine Optimization can be overwhelming for anyone, and more so for those of us that are always trying to balance webmaster role with every other business role.

Search engine optimization is the process of making sure that your website content and information helps you to achieve high ranking on search engines such that you will get traffic directed to your website through these search engines.  There is a science to it, there are many hard and “soft” rules of do’s and don’ts, and there are plenty of people that will pay thousands of dollars to have another company take care of their SEO for them.

Top 5 SEO Tips

1. The very first and important step in search engine optimization (SEO) is to know all your niche keywords and phrases.   If you want to attract some potential customers to your website, you should know the relevant keywords and phrases to use. When people are looking for information online, they type different keywords and phrases on search engines, and you will need to know these keywords and phrases. By having these keywords in your website content, your website will show up on search engines when people look for information that relates to these keywords. I suggest using the Google keyword tool (free), the Free Wordtracker or the paid Keyword Elite.

2. Make maximum use of your keywords and key phrases. In order to make sure that your website is found by search engines, you will need to have your keywords in your web content and on your blog. Make sure that your web content is keyword-rich. Use your keywords in all the articles that you write. It’s easy to print out a list of your keywords that you can quickly refer to and use as your content base.

3. Build your website such that your keywords and phrases are included in the content of your website, including the <title> tag of all your web pages.

4. Expand one way and two way links to your website. Link building is one of the most effective ways to increase the visibility of your website on search engines. Build one way links by submitting articles with your website URL in the resources box, and participate in relevant forums and have your URL in your signature. Write product reviews and post them at other related websites and include your website URL. You can also exchange two way links with other web masters for related web sites. The more websites you have linking back to your website, the better your web site ranking will be on search engines.

5. Submit your website to website directories. This will help to improve your page ranking on search engines and will also drive traffic to your website. If you don’t want to spend the time doing this there are really affordable services that will do it for you. Check out Directory Submitter and they start pricing at $10.00, you can’t beat that!

SEO is very important for the success of your website. Follow the steps outlined above and make your website visible on search engines. If your website ranking is high on search engines, it means that you can be easily found and a lot of traffic will be driven to your website.

For more information and easy to follow steps and SEO Tips then check out Moms Business Coach SEO Simplified Special Report, made just for beginners to SEO and it boils it down into easy to achieve steps that anyone new to the world of online business can put to use today.

Post from: Online Business Marketing For Home Based Businesses

Kick Start Your Search Engine Optimization With 5 Essential Steps

If you own an online business, you are well aware of  how important search engine optimization (SEO) is very important is for your business. If your website has high page ranking on search engines, you get large volumes of traffic directed to your website through search engines organic traffic (i.e. free traffic). The more traffic you get, the more potential sales.

Many people try to do some SEO for their websites but fail to get results simply because they do not make their SEO strategies effective.

For many home businesses this is due to lack of actual technical knowledge, time or just being low on the priority list. What is the alternative to spending hours learning your own SEO? To start, you can pay many willing companies hundreds, even thousands of dollars to do it for you, you can hire a virtual assistant to help you with specific tasks or of course, the pay-per-click advertising.

If you are true to running an online business, then even if you outsource the tasks related to your SEO, I strongly suggest you understand the basics of SEO.  Simply put, I can sum it up in one sentance:

The Search Engines want to give visitors (web surfers) quality content that is related to what they are looking for.

Here are a couple tips anyone can put to use:

• Spend some time researching on keywords and phrases. Use keyword research tools such as Wordtracker or Keyword Elite to find the best key words and phrases for your niche. Make sure that you use precise keywords which your potential customers would use while searching for information on the internet.

• Next, you must optimize your website for your target niche. Provide relevant and keyword-rich content on your website such that your website will appear on search engines when your potential customers type your keywords.

• It is important that you use your keywords and phrases in designing and categorizing your website or blog. Whatever products or services that your offer on your website for your niche, use your best keywords as this will help you to make your website show up on search engines for these keywords. It’s also important that you make sure that the design and layout of your website makes it easy for search engines to index your content.

• Make sure that your website is useful and attractive so that other webmasters will want to exchange links with you. You will need to exchange links with other websites, but first you must make sure that your website is interesting and has high quality content so that other webmasters will be keen to exchange links with you.

• Use your keywords in the internal text links on your websites because this can also help to increase your ranking on search engines.

• All your web pages must have your keywords or phrases because search engines will pick these up first. Don’t forget the Alt Text for your pics!

These SEO can make your website rank high on search engines and also maintain that position in the long term but we all know that is just scratching the surface.

Because then comes…..

Stomping The Search Engines 2.0

If you run in the Internet Marketing space of online business or follow Ed Dale and his Thirty Day Challenge then you will know that Stomping The Search Engines 2.0 is now being released, I’m a day late in this post, but better late then never!

What is Stomping The Search Engines?  Well, my friend Lynn Terry over at Clicknewz is giving a full review of the product ..she was lucky enough to get the sneak peak…but I have no doubt that this PHYSCIAL set of CDs is going t blow the socks off anyone that wants to take their online business to the next level.

The Stomper team sold the first set of audio cds for the $400.00 range. This builds on that course plus offers the 40 plus page physical “magazine” FOR FREE… ok.. they have a membership site built onto the backend for the $35.00 a month range, but they are being totally honest about it and giving you crystal clear cancellation instructions. There are no tricks here, just people that are in a position to share their knowledge and help you be successful.

These Stomper guys know Search Engines, they STUDY Search Engines and they have businesses that use Search Engines. So go ahead and check out Lynn’s post of the full review, I’m not giving you a direct link to the “Sales Page” from here because I want you to use Lynns affiliate link. Even though it’s a free product, the numbers coming from her site are a bonus plus, frankly, it’s a good review and it’s worth reading. Go … Stomp The Engines…

Post from: Online Business Marketing For Home Based Businesses

Will You Be The Next Stomper?

The search engines now, highly favor, websites that have a large number of quality, one way links pointing to them. Because of this, it’s absolutely critical that we consistently try to get other websites to link to us, WITHOUT us linking back to them.

Yes, reciprocal linking is becoming less and less valuable. Submitting your website to website directories is an excellent way to get, quality, 1 way links pointing to your websites. You see, many of the website directories online have a high amount of page rank and have been online for several years.

These are 2 of the most important criteria for determining what a good link is, vs what a bad link is. These two criteria are:

1. The age of the website linking to you
2. The Page Rank of the website linking to you

With that said, many of these directories have both a high Page Rank AND are old websites, giving them more authority and power in the search engines.

Not only that, but there are literally thousands of website directories on the internet that are absolutely free for you to submit your website to! While it does take time to find these directories and then manually fill out all of the required criteria to submit your website, it is an excellent way to help increase your search engine rankings.

There are some good website directory submission software products on the market. The best of which is a product called Directory Submitter created by Brad Callen. You can see the details of the program here http://moms-business-coach.com/directorysubmitter

I decided to try it out after it was recommended to me, after all…

1. Its Free

2. It simplifies a process

3. It will help build traffic to my site that will ultimately help grow my business

So really, why wouldn’t you at least TRY it?

Step by Step Here Is What I Did To Start Building Backlinks

I visited the site above website

I clicked on the big DOWNLOAD FREE Button (by the way they also have an free Article Submitter)

I downloaded the zipped folder to my desktop

I then opened the program and followed the on-screen directions and chose to have a desktop short cut

I then launched the program and filled in the “new project” fields that include the basic information like your url, the catagory, sub-catagory, titles, description and keywords.

**This is where it is very important to have done your keyword research to know what keywords to use as your anchor text links!

Once you have your information entered you simply click from one site to the next off the list they provide with over 350 free directory sites. (Each site is listed and includes the PR rank)

The information is populated automatically for you all you need to do is verify the information and click submit.

Note: Some of the sites do require a reciprocal link so I kept another tab open and created a page in my blog for “links” then as each site that required a link I cut and paste, saved and moved on to the next site. By the way, I unchecked the box that says “Ping” in my blog post dashboard so I didn’t get accused of ping spamming every time I re-publish each minute. OR you can install the MaxPress Blog Ping Optimizer plug-in that automatically keeps you from over pinging the sites.

Summary

Esentially you simply enter your website details into the software program 1 time, and then click on any of the 1600+ website directories in the software and it will automatically fill in all of the submission criteria for you. Click the submit button and then your site has been instantly added to the website directory.

So, not only does it save you time in finding all of these directories, BUT it saves you an incredible amount of time filling out each and every website’s submission criteria. To learn more about this free program, visit the link below:

http://moms-business-coach.com/directorysubmitter

Still sounds like too much work? Try out the lost cost directory submission services below

Enjoy!

Post from: Online Business Marketing For Home Based Businesses

Step 1 In Building Your Backlinks