Entries Tagged 'Increasing Web Traffic' ↓

Imagine if you had x-ray vision about your competitors…and even your partners and clients!?

Well, lately, I feel like I do.

I’ve been using a free tool for a month now and it allows me to instantly see the following things about almost any Web site:

• How relevant Google thinks they are in their space
• How Many Web Pages They Have Built
• How Many Other Web Sites Link To Them
• How Much Traffic They Receive
• Their Ranking by Traffic
• How many of the social networking sites (such as Twitter, StumbleUpon, etc.) link to them
• What organic position they appear (on Google) when people search certain keywords

It’s called the SEO Toolbar (instructions on downloading it are below); it provides you a toolbar on your Firefox Browser that you can turn on or off while you’re using the Web.

Let me explain a few of the top ways I’m using this SEO Toolbar (using eBay as an example)

In the first screenshot, I hit the blue info button in the upper left-hand corner to get the pop-up yellow screen of information about eBay).

Doing so tells me the following about eBay (I’m going to pick highlights):

• In the first column (of the yellow pop-up in the screenshot above):
  • Page PR and Site PR (both of which are — This represents a 1 to 10 Page Rank score that Google is providing on eBay (Google’s Page Rank represents how relevant Google thinks the Web page and Web site you’re on is (the higher the score (out of 1 to 10) the better).
  • Site Age — This is when the Web site was first launched (e.g. useful to know if this is a veteran Web site or the new kid on the block (eBay’s been around since June of 1997).
  • G Pages indexed — This is the number of eBay Web pages that Google indexes (I tend to use this to measure how serious a Web site is about producing content)
• In the second column (of the yellow pop-up in the screenshot above):
  • Compete.com Uniques — This represents an estimate by Compete.com of how many unique visitors visit this Web site per month (e.g. 89 Million in eBay’s case)
  • Alexa — This is the ranking of eBay by traffic (e.g. it’s the 23 largest Web site in the world)
• In the third column (of the yellow pop-up in the screenshot above):
  • del.icio.us — This is the number of bookmarks that members of the Delicious Web Site have made of eBay’s Web site (Delicious is a site that allows members to bookmark their favorite sites and Web pages and share them with friends). So, in this case, Delicious members bookmarked eBay 16,000 times.
  • Diggs — Digg is a Web site that allows its members to “Digg” articles or Web pages they enjoy; and then the most Dugg Web pages are shown on Digg’s popular home page (so, 826 of eBay’s pages have been “Dugg”).
  • Twitter — This is the number of times that members of Twitter have linked to a Web site (e.g. 100 times in eBay’s case).

In the next screenshot, I’m showing the Rank Checker feature which allows us to type in any keyword (search term that people type into Google) and see where any given Web site ranks on the search results for that keyword.

So, as you can see in the screenshot, ebay would rank in the following position on Google (on the left-hand “organic results” if you searched those terms):

• 1st for the term “eBay” (this makes sense (though if the name of your business does not rank first when someone searches it, please comment below so that we can help you out!)
• 2nd for the term “Auctions” (eBay is the dominant auction provider on the Web (the company that ranks 1st is a Live Auction proider called Auction Zip).
• No Ranking for “Make Money From Home” — This means that eBay probably didn’t crack the top 200 positions on the Google search results
• 50th for “Businesses for Sale”
• 39th for “Pez Dispensers” (I thought I’d give this a try since Pez Dispensers is supposedly the first item ever sold on eBay)
• 46th for “Michael Jackson Memorabilla”
• 44th for “Bernie Madoff Memorabilla”

Rank Checker allows many keywords (at least 100 at a time) to be ranked.

Now, I highly recommend you couple this Rank Checker tool with Google’s Keyword Tool (which tells you how much any keyword is searched on Google) which SEO Toolbar also includes.

So now you can tell how well a Web site is doing in terms of its relevancy on the most popular keywords in your business!

If you use Google Analytics on your own Web site, you can simply copy and paste your top keywords from your Analytics account into Rank Checker and see where you’re ranking on Google.

The Rank Checker also shows you where a Web site ranks on Yahoo and Microsoft Bing — I just didn’t have room in the screenshot to show it!

There’s a lot more to the SEO Toolbar than this, but those are some highlights for me.

Here’s how you get SEO Toolbar:

Go to SEO Book Tools and download all three of the tools:

1. Keyword Tool
2. SEO for Firefox (if you don’t use the Firefox Browser, it’s worth it just to have the SEO Toolbar’s functionality)
3. Rank Checker

And if you have questions on any of this, feel free to post comments below and I’ll do my best to answer them.

If you like this article, you may want to check out my Got Googlejuice? posting.

Best of luck!

I chatted with DocStoc Founder & CEO Jason Nazar the other day.

You should know abut Jason and DocStoc because Jason is an amazing networker (among other things) and DocStoc has been one of the fastest growing Web sites in the last few years (ranked 407th by Quantcast with 15 million unique visitors per month, according to DocStoc).

Jason and I had a little chat in which I asked him a few questions. He agreed to let me share it with you.

Q: Hi Jason, you really value business networking — tell me your philosophies.

I personally enjoy networking. I like meeting smart, interesting successful people.

From a professional standpoint, I believe the principal of it’s “who you know not what you know” is very true.

One thing about the Internet is that we spend a lot of time behind our computers…you’ve got to get out there and meet people.

Typically the larger the network you have, the more opportunities you have.

We spend a lot of time behind our computers…but business still gets done in person.

People want to work with other people they like, trust and respect.

And you don’t do that by just sending emails and sending IMs…you have to get out and meet people.

And if you want to have opportunities such as getting hired, raising money, building your company, and hiring the right people…you need to have a large network.

Typically, the larger your network is the more opportunities you have.

The business we’re building is a consumer-facing Internet company – we’re trying to get pretty much everyone in the world to use DocStoc.

There’s a lot of value in reaching out to other connectors….people like you and your sphere of influence…and now DocStoc and its hundreds of thousands of people is in your sphere of influence…and that’s one of the ways you get things to grow virally.

Q: Would you share some of your business networking principles?

I have three main networking principles:

1) Habitualize the process – like anything else you need to make time for it. I carve out a couple of hours a week to reach out to new people.

2) Make it One to Many — You want to do not just one to one but also one to many – You want to get to the point where people reach out to you. This is one of the reasons we put on events, which attracted 2,000 people last year.

Now instead of just me reaching out to every conceivable person who might value in a win-win situation, there are many people attending who are telling lots of other people about it and telling them about me.

I’m leveraging a one to many approach. More people know about you then you know about. Then it’s just a matter of filtering out people you don’t want to talk to.

3) Maintain Your Relationships — Networking has no intrinsic value unless you do something with it. My goal is not to be popular. It’s the fact that you can get things done that you couldn’t do otherwise. You have to be clear about what you want to get but more importantly what do you want to give.

What matters is how you build and maintain those relationships. What really matters is that’s the more important part to habitualize.

You can’t approach networking out of your own selfish interests.

Think of it as a bank. Do lots of things to help out other people.

Know that you’ll have credit in your bank and one day you’ll need that credit and people will really want to help you out for what you did.

People will gladly want to pay you back. .. for all the things you’ve done for them.

Q: What are the top networking mistakes people make?

Here are the three biggest networking mistakes people make:

1. They don’t go up to talk to the people they should.
2. If they do go up to people they should talk to, they don’t do a good job building and maintaining the relationship.
3. If they do talk to people they should and build and maintain a good relationship, they often come at it from a selfish standpoint of what’s only good for themselves.

What they really should do is:

1. Talk to as many people as possible.
2. Keep and maintain as many good relationships as possible.
3. And always come at networking from the standpoint of what can I do to help other people out.

If you do those things, and you do them consistently, it’s gonna come back your way…and probably in ways you couldn’t imagine.

I’m a good example of that.  I’ve always tried to do that as an adult. I’ve been very lucky in what’s come my way…in large part because of that.

Q: You’ve created a top 500 Web Site in  just a few years – would you share what the top keys you used to drive free traffic?

[Jason referred me to a presentation he did on these 7 ways to drive free traffic to a Web site:]

1. Search Engines (distinct URLs, more content, more links)
2. Referring Traffic/Press
3. Social Media
4. Online Partnerships/Distribution Deals
5. Refreshing Content
6. The Viral Loop/User Email
7. Solve a Personal Compelling Need

The full presentation can be found here: 7 Ways To Drive Free Traffic To Your Web Site

Q: Tell me more about your growth

We have a way to provide valuable content, give it to them for the most part for free and monetize it with ads as well as some paid content.

And we deal with user-generated content where we were able to unlock two million registered users with millions of documents being uploaded (about 2% to 4% of the users upload documents).

And when you do that, you become a magnet for search engines. And when you do that, you’re able to raise a lot of money, a lot of people know about us, there’s a lot of referral traffic.

Q: Can you talk to me about the financial side is working – what’s the business model.

Our goal is to build the largest repository in the world of publicly available professional documents. And the premiere marketplace to buy and sell documents on the Internet.

Q: Who’s the competition? Scribd?

Yep. Our business approach is different [than Scribd] but our products are similar.

We focus on owning the small business market and on professionals.

It seems to me they (Scribd) are more focused on publishing and book publishers.

Q: What’s your biggest challenge these days?

To iterate and grow at a face pace. How to take a site that has a lot of traction – that’s grown quickly — and turn it into one of the premiere brands on the Internet…that everyone knows. And how do you cross that chasm.

How do you measure success?

Revenue and profits. We have very significant revenue growth year over year.

We have 2.5 million registered users, over 10 million publicly available documents and we do over 15MM unique visitors per month.

How do you sell advertising these days?

A couple of one-off deals but it’s mostly AdSense.

Thanks, Jason.

My pleasure.

Note: Thanks to Drew Kossoff (another amazing networker) for introducing me and Jason.

For more business networking tips, check out the series of articles in my networking category.

Have you heard of the Google Wonder Wheel?

It’s been available for 8 months, but few know what it is…and I hadn’t heard of it until recently.

I use Google Wonder Wheel (it appears within the “Show options” after you search something on Google) as a word reference tool when I’m writing a new article –  to get an idea of things to include.

Google Wonder Wheel = More Efficient Content Creation

For example, I wrote an article two articles on the SWOT strategic planning tool (SWOT Analysis and SWOT Analysis Examples) the strategic planning tool. And when I searched “SWOT” on Google Wonder Wheel, I got back the following topics:

1. Strategic Planning
2. SWOT Definition
3. SWOT Marketing
4. Personal SWOT
5. GAP Analysis
6. Porter’s Five Forces
7. SWOT Examples
8. SWOT Template

I ended up using the majority of these related topics as keywords within my articles.

Why? As I wrote about in Got Googlejuice, it’s important to be specific in your content in order to attract visitors from Google who are searching different variations of your topic (another way to find out exactly how many people are searching a specific term on Google is to use the Google AdWords Keyword Tool)

So, if I can cover such topics as “SWOT Definition” and “SWOT Examples” in my SWOT Analysis article, then I will attract additional traffic from people searching those terms on Google.

The Google Wonder Wheel allows for what I call more “efficient content.”

An additional use of this word reference tool is to suggest to you ideas for additional articles for you to post.

For example, I ended up writing separate articles about Gap Analysis and Porter’s Five Forces.

There’s a super-useful video of how this all works here: How To Use Google’s Wonder Wheel.

I’ve seen traffic from my blog go from zero to 8,000 visitors in eight months…and I’m starting to learn how to get incoming links.

I thought I’d share some tips (many of which I still need to master myself!) on how to get incoming links to your blog (or Web site).

Top 8 Tips for Getting Incoming Links

If you’re like me, you’re going to learn all sorts of things as you try these tips out – including finding potential business opportunities beyond just incoming links.

Ok, let’s begin the list of my top 8 tips for getting incoming links:

Incoming Links Tip 1: Provide Valuable Content on Your Blog

For starters, you should have valuable content on your blog — if you do, others on the Web will eventually find you and link to you…it’s that simple.

That’s how I got this blog up to 8,000 unique visitors per month in six months.

For example, if you write helpful advice, then you’ll initially get found through search engines such as Google (who will find you through the keywords you have typed)- and then when users are searching Google for advice they will find you.

As they said in Field of Dreams, “If you build it, they will come!” As visitors do come to your valuable content they may: link to you without even asking;  ask you to publish your advice on their Web site (with a link to you); tell their friends; add you to directories of blogs, etc.

Creating valuable content on your blog takes time and it also takes time for people to find you and link to you…but in the long run, you’ll be successful generating incoming links by following this advice alone: write valuable content!

Incoming Links Tip 2: Write Comments On Blogs

Search other people’s blogs to find topics similar to those on your own blog and contribute a comment to their blog along with a link back to your own blog posting of the related topic.

Note/Warning: You should add genuine value to their blog posting (not just post a link back to your own posting) as the administrator of the blog your commenting on can easily delete your comment for being too selfish.

Incoming Links Tip 3: Insert your Blog link or RSS Feed into Your Social Network

• LinkedIn
  • LinkedIn has a “MyBlog” field on your profile to let you put in the address of your blog.
  • LinkedIn has “Applications” that allow you to insert your blog feed into your LinkedIn profile so that people will see an excerpt of each new blog posting you make.
• Facebook
  • Your profile on Facebook allows you to insert an RSS feed of your blog to your Facebook page so that every time you post a new item on your blog, it will show up on your Facebook page. note: if your blog is a business blog you may want to set up a separate Fan page on Facebook).
• Twitter
  • Insert links to your blog on Twitter. These links may be clicked on by your Twitter followers or also come up in search engines which now index Tweets (you may have to use a URL shortener (such as TinyURL or bit.ly to get your link to fit on Twitter.

Incoming Links Tip 4: Alert Content-Sharing Sites of Your Pages

Each of the below sites allow you to share your content by allowing you to submit a title and short description of what your site/content is about.

• Digg.com
• Reddit.com
• StumbleUpon.com
• Delicious.com
• Folkd.com

Visitors to these sites below then rank your content good or bad and the more good ratings you get the more visibility you get.

Incoming Links Tip 5: Link Swapping

Create a process on your own blog in which you let visitors submit their own Web site/URL that YOU will link to in exchange for them linking to your Web site.

This could be as simple as a manual process in which you say on your blog that you’ll accept mutual link relationships or something more complex where you create an automated system that does this.

Note: You should only allow Web sites that are relevant to your blog or Web site (and you will likely have to reject many Web sites) who are irrelevant to you.

Incoming Links Tip 6: Link Directories

There are plenty of directories that allow you to freely provide a link to your blog or Web site.

I’ve listed some examples of ones below ranked by largest to smaller ones (rank = their rank in terms of traffic on the Web (e.g. Yahoo is the second largest Web site) and unique visitors is per month).

• Yahoo (rank: 2; 120,000,000 unique visitors)
• Blog Catalog (rank: 233; 4,600,000 unique visitors)
• Technorati (rank: 529; 2,868,383 unique visitors)
• MyBlogLog (rank: 802; 1,294,037 unique visitors)
• Dmoz.org (rank: 1,774; 1,015,926 unique users)
• Scribnia (rank: 90,510; 19,115 unique visitors)
• OnTopList (rank: 98,802; 17,308 unique visitors)
• Dr. 5z5 (rank: 124,385 13,221 unique visitors)
• FeedPlex (rank: 214,466; 6,948 unique visitors)
• ooBdoo (rank: 329,927)
• DayTimeNews (rank: 397,805; 3,328 unique visitors)
• rss001 (rank: 548,185; 2,274 unique visitors)
• FeedMil (rank: 629,551; 1,931 unique visitors)
• Blogbal (rank: 736,845; 1,611 unique visitors)

Note: The source of the rankings and traffic is a combination of Quantcast and Compete.com

Niche Directory Submission

There are also more specific niche directories for you to be listed on – you should try a search on your favorite search engine for “keywords related to your business + directory.”

For example, if you searched “business advice in the United Kingdom” you would find that a site called FreeIndex provides a free listing of your blog/business/web site

Incoming Links Tip 7: Write an Article for Someone Else

You can get a link back to your Web site by writing an article on such sites as ArticleBase and eZineArticles. I checked ArticleBase and it seemed to allow you to use at least two or three links back to whatever URL you choose.

Incoming Links Tip 8: Acquire An Existing Web Site/URL

You may consider acquiring a Web site that has a high Google Page Rank.

For example, go to Sedo and check out existing Web sites for sale and then look at their page rank (which you can do by downloading Google’s tool bar).

If you can acquire a Web site that has a higher page rank than yours, you can then control that Web site and link to your own blog or Web site.

Note: I only recommend doing this with a Web site that is relevant to the blog or Web site you want traffic to.

For any external link you seek you should know about the no-follow link.

What Is A No-Follow Link?

If any site links to you (including some above), they may include what’s called no-follow code within their HTML.

A no-follow link indicates to search engines that the Web site publishing the link does not necessarily want the search engine to associate its reputation with the site it’s linking to.

That said, there is still value to you of being linked to from a no-follow link since you will receive traffic and some believe it is another way to let a search engines know that a particular page on your site exists (especially useful if your blog/site is a new one with few to no links to it yet).

How To Determine if a Link is No-Follow

To determine if a Web site uses no-follow you can click on the page on which they are providing links, click View/Page Source on your browser and search for a URL and see if it is preceeded by the words “no follow.”

You can also search the Web for “do-follow” Web sites – some people have compiled lists of them.

A link without the no-follow in the HTML is more valuable than a link with no-follow.

Pam White has helped affiliates sell millions of dollars of  products…and those sales were made at little risk to the affiliate marketer’s she managed, as they were primarily performance-based (they didn’t layout any cash until the products were sold!)

She generously agreed to answer some questions to help us understand the affiliate marketing business.

Q: Welcome, Pam. A lob-ball question first: What is online affiliate marketing?

A good description, I believe, is “selling other people’s stuff” on the Internet and receiving a commission for doing so.

Affiliate Marketing Expert Pam White

Q: If you’re a business, and you have products to sell, how do leverage affiliate marketing?

Determine the financial benefits of handing over the marketing expertise of a “staff of affiliates”, versus the cost of marketing the product through your own marketing department’s expertise.

Does the competitor have an affiliate program?  Maybe you should consider it as well.

Q: If you want to run a business, but don’t have any products of your own, how do you leverage affiliate marketing?

1. Learn all you can about affiliate marketing – in general.  SEO, PPC, etc.

2. Research products or services of which you have expertise and are passionate about.

3. Analyze keywords and quantity of searches performed for the   niche.

4. Realistically analyze your budget and ROI goals

Q: You mentioned earlier that the top affiliate marketing programs are offered by Commission Junction (CJ), Sharesale and LinkShare — please tell us more about each of them?

Commission Junction /LinkShare/Shareasale and many other networks, contract with hundreds of merchants selling products, and for a fee, handle the management, tracking internal listing of the Merchants Affiliate program.

Those interested in joining an affiliate program within the network can peruse the various products offered once they have completed the signup and approval process.

Generally speaking, however, the affiliate must have a domain name and website or blog to be approved to sell the merchant’s product.

Q: You also mentioned, that if you’re selling a service you can utilize Clickbank: how do you make money with Clickbank?

Clickbank is similar to CJ, in that there are several merchants listed in the Clickbank Marketplace and you can choose which products you wish to promote.  With most merchants offering up to 75% commission per sale, it’s very popular for those wishing to sell digital products or membership site offers.

Q: What’s the “Clickbank Elite”?

Clickbank Elite is a program sold by a 3^rd party merchant that extracts the “hot” selling products at Clickbank as well as cloaking the Clickbank generated hoplinks.

Q: I understand that Google has entered this space — what are your thoughts on the Google Affiliate Network?

I must be honest and say that I’ve not had the opportunity to search their offers or speak with any Merchants who are currently using the Google Affiliate Network.

Q: Speaking of Google, I hear stories about affiliate marketers who receive “Google slaps” — What’s a Google Slap?

A Google Slap occurs when Google views your website’s content and the Adwords keyword used to drive traffic via that ad to your landing page as not relative, or of poor quality.

This will result in an increase in your PPC costs to as high as $10.00 per click.  Additionally, your page rank, and thus your Quality Score, will be adversely affected.

Q: How do you avoid getting Google-Slapped?

Consider the keywords you are bidding on and the landing page and Adwords Ad group to make sure that they all “relate” to the content on the landing page as well as offer value to the visitor.  Be sure the page has adequate “original” content.

A great place to learn all the basics of Google Adwords is from the Google Adwords Learning Center. You can also view the Youtube videos published by Google.

Q: I hear that Pay Per Click (PPC) is key to affiliate marketing — would you elaborate on that, including defining a PPC Affiliate?

A Pay Per Click affiliate bids on and pays for each click on his targeted Sponsored ad at Google, Yahoo, Bing or any PPC network.

PPC is the key to gaining an immediate presence for your brand or campaign in the search results.

Q: What do you consider to be the best affiliate marketing program of all time?

I don’t know that I’m qualified as an expert on that question, so I’ll go with Amazon, since they were one of the first to enter the space.

Q: Who do you consider the best affiliates in the marketplace?

Not to hedge that question, but “the best” I believe, would be relative to the vertical.   Best CPA, Best CPL, Best CPM.  I haven’t worked in all those verticals.

Q: What’s a super-affiliate?

Again, this is relative to the vertical.  A “super-affiliate” may be an individual, an agency, or a network.  It’s any affiliate that has the ability to drive high volume sales (consistent with the niches expectations) which outperform the “average” amount generally produced over a given period of time.

Q: What’s the best way to recruit super-affiliates?

Network, know the competition, review who is the top PPC advertiser in your niche, identify them through various online tools, contact them, present your offer and metrics and invite them to join your program.

Q: What’s the best way to learn affiliate marketing?

Forums, Blogs, E-books, Industry leaders, Google Learning Center, Articles, Mentors, Coaching programs, trade shows like Affiliate Summit. Twitter, Facebook

Q: What’s a good affiliate marketing website to check out for beginners?

Affiliate Tips owned by Shawn Collins, who is also the co-founder of Affiliate Summit.

Q: In our last conversation you mentioned ABestWeb.com — would you describe the affiliate marketing forums they provide?

Basically, almost any network you choose to join will have a corresponding forum at ABestWeb where you can discuss openly any issues, complaints, questions, or accolades you wish and have it viewed and answered by a moderator/associate of that particular network.

Q: Thanks for sharing your perspective, Pam. If someone were to want to get in touch with you, how might they do that?

You’re more than welcome.  Those who wish to reach me may do so by contacting me at my e-mail address pam.white@gmail.com.