Devour The Web

The trick to making it REALLY big on the internet biz channel these days is to become an authority. It doesn’t matter what the subject is, if you are THE authority on it, you’ll be making money in no time!

Imagine it, you want to become involved in the world of selling candle wax. You’ve noticed that you and your friends all have a hard time buying candle wax online for decent prices or quality support, and you decide that you’ve had enough. You want to become the top authority in the world of candle wax selling!

Now that you’ve got your niche, you need to create an attractive and useful website. I know this is harder than I make it out to be, but I’m going to assume you can do this well enough. For these types of sites you almost have to have a message board / forum, tons of content, and fresh articles. You can get the articles from great sites such as the one you are on right now, or many others. The forums are easy to achieve via php boards, and the content is where you can put your own knowledge.

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Webmasters have so much information available to them on the Internet about how to increase traffic to their web sites, but how do you keep visitors on the site when they get there? If you happen to use the articles format in order to provide interesting content for your readers, have you considered what they do when they finish reading one of your articles?

Actions the reader will take, will include: navigating to another part of the web site (if you are lucky and have a well designed site); typing another web site address into their browser; and, closing down their browser and doing something else ? perhaps resuming their work after a lunch break. If you are a webmaster, the first of these would obviously be your preferred outcome. But a reader who randomly navigates through your pages at speed, is not the ideal. How do you not only keep a reader on your site, but also keep them engaged with your articles and possibly the products you are offering, while they finish the second half of their lunchtime sandwich?

The future of online business rest in one word: traffic. No matter how great or sophisticated your website is, if nobody comes, your online business will fail.

To setup an online business and not get sales is a travesty. There is a lot of money to be made online. "Can you generate the hits to your site?" is the question entrepreneurs are asking and trying to answer.

Great Internet business come from everywhere: boardrooms or basements but it must be supported by loads of hits. Online is no difference from offline-it is all about customers hence you need a competitive advantage to succeed.

How does one become competitive? You need a position. This position is called the Unique Selling Proposition. It means the one thing your website stands for. It is the difference not the similarities with other websites.

Coca-Cola is known for the cola business. So, years ago, when it’s competitor Seven-up wants to advertise and promote itself, they called themselves "the uncola" and it immediately gave them positioning. Seven-up simply said, "Hey, we are not cola. We are the uncola."

To improve our website ranking and internet presence we need to exchange links with other websites. Some search engines won’t even spider websites that do not have links pointing to them. But to improve the page ranking you have to make sure that big majority of links you exchange are relevant to the content of your website. For example there is no need to exchange links with travel website if your website is about food. You can still have some links to the website of not relevant content, but you should try to limit them.

So why should I bother having any non-relevant links?
Well you need many links pointing to you to build a good internet presence. If you try tools such as Marketleap’s link popularity check which can give you a detailed report on number of links to your website found in all major search engines, you’ll see that quantity of links does matter in terms of internet presence.

Page ranking goes up with number of links, but if the liks come from the websites with relevant content that page rank goes up higher.

So how do I build a good, relevant link directory?
Building a link directory is relatively easy but unless your server supports server side programming like PHP or ASP, maintaining it can be very time consuming. If your server has PHP support there are many link exchange scripts can be downloaded for free. Try searching hotscripts.com or scripts.com.

Ideally you don’t want to be in the position of having to email other webmasters asking if they’re interested in reciprocal links. You want your website to be such that people will want to link to it, whether it be because of a cool feature, generous affiliate program, whatever. The problem is unless you have at least some sites linking to you you’re not going to get noticed.

In short, if you have a fairly new website you’re going to have to email other webmasters and ask if they’re interested in reciprocal linking. So how to you go about finding suitable websites?

Here’s one of the methods I use:

Let’s say I created a website about killer whales. The first thing I do is a google search on killer whales.

Next I take the first website that’s listed and do a google search on it’s url. So if the first website’s url is “www.allaboutkillerwhales.com” I would copy and paste that url into the google search box.

One of the nifty things about Google is that if you search on a url it’ll give you an option of finding pages that link to that url. So continuing the example the above the next thing I do is click on “Find web pages that link to www.allaboutkillerwhales.com.”

Recently I came across a web site with the heading “How to get a million visitors without spending a dime in advertising.” Unfortunately the web site didn’t actually tell me how I could do that - that information was only available through an eBook sold on the site. The price of the eBook was around $200USD. Now I live in New Zealand so $200USD is more like $400 and is kind of a bit beyond my budget, or more exactly what I’m willing to pay for an eBook I haven’t even seen.

But it got me thinking, is it really possible to get a million visitors without spending a dime in advertising? And in a short time too (around a month)?

The answer is yes. There are at least two ways.

The first way is to leverage spam with a two tier affiliate program. Basically what you do is send out spam to newsgroups and/or bought email addresses saying you have this great way to make money, just visit my web site (you’re targeting potential affiliates). On your web site you get people to join your two tier affiliate program. What this means is that as well as getting money for selling your product they also get money for getting other people to join your affiliate program. And you tell them to spam newsgroups and the like. Except you don’t put it quite that way. Maybe you sell them software that automates posting of messages on newsgroups or something like that. Anyway, you get the drift.

Here’s what your website must have to get lots of traffic - links pointing to your site. The more you have, the more traffic you get.

But how do you get links pointing to your site? Well you could email webmasters and ask them to put a link on their site (reciprocal links). But that’s rather slow. You need something that will get other people link to your site.

How do you get other people linking to your site? Here are some ideas:

Content

People want content. If your site has lots of good fresh content try providing free content feeds. You get links back to your site, and they get free updated content from your site.

Articles

Write good quality and useful articles and put a link to your site at the bottom. Allow people to freely publish them. The better and more useful the article the more people will publish it and the more links back to your site you will have.

Services

For example on my website Crossword Heaven (http://www.crosswordheaven.com) I have a service where webmasters can add a crossword to their site. On my site PerkyPup.com (http://www.perkypup.com) I provide quotes that other webmasters can link to by means of a dynamic image.

This is the 3rd day of “Free Traffic Course”.

This day will be devoted to a very important strategy of getting free targeted web site traffic - link exchange.

Link exchange is a very powerful technique to rise the status for your web site. But before starting to speak about link exchange, several words should be said about PR or page rank of the web site.

The term page rank was introduced to wide online audience by Google - the search engine that enjoys the most popularity with web site users. Today this search engine offers 8,058,044,651 web pages for search. Google is used by online visitors worldwide. Let’s be fair - today Google is the leader among search engines. And catching up with the leader is still a dream for other search engines. That is why everything used by Google is of great importance to web site owner - Google gives targeted traffic.

So, page rank is a kind of status that Google gives to all web sites. Page rank “0″ means the lowest status, no status at all. “10″ is the highest mark. It means users really flood your web site. You can pack traffic in Christmas boxes and send them to children

How many ways can you get free web site traffic? Who knows, but here are some to get you started. Hopefully there will be one or two ways here that you haven’t yet tried.

1. Submit your web site to search engines. Don’t wait for them to find you. You can automatically submit to 20 at freewebsubmission.com. You’ll have to submit manually to Google (www.google.com/addurl.html).

2. Directories. Do a search for niche directories for the topic of your website. Just type in “directory + online games,” or whatever your site is about. There are also many general directories that accept submissions for free. The primary value of directories is not direct traffic, however. It is the links that help your ranking (and therefore traffic) with the search engines.

3. Forums. A great source of traffic for some sites. Talk about things of interest to you, and get free traffic to your web site (always sign off with a link). You may want to link to subscription pages for newsletters or e-courses you offer, to get maximum repeat visits from the traffic.

If you have a link directory on a website, how do you stop link theft by sites that don’t link back, or trick you into thinking they do?

Whether link theft is anything to get concerned about depends on how many links your website has, the quality of those links (Google Page Rank) and how many of those links you lose. Search Engine Ranking is certainly something that’s becoming more dependent upon the links to your website.

You might be forgiven for thinking that when a website no longer links back to you, that it was an accident your link was removed from the link directory. Of course accidents happen as I know from using some link manager software. Just one click in the wrong box and a website link disappears the next time you update your link directory. But the real link thieves are those people that use methods to rob you of a link.

Here’s 7 Top Ways Link Thieves work and how you can avoid being their next victim.

1. If a website asks you to exchange links, don’t link to them until they have given you the URL location of your link in their link directory. If you link to them first they may forget to add your link.