Tag: seo

Wiki Funnels – the Secret to Driving BIG Traffic to Long Tail Niches

Everyone knows that Wikipedia is a goldmine for quality traffic if you can get it but one significant problem is that many niches or long-tail topics on Wikipedia get, due to their nature, very little traffic. The traffic they do get may well be very high quality and the niche may be extremely profitable when you do get traffic but if the topic on Wikipedia just doesn’t get much attention then you’re out of luck. However there is a very simple solution to this problem which I am going to call Wiki Funnels (you heard it here first! (hopefully)). It should be noted that this trick applies to any wiki, not just Wikipedia itself.

What is a Wiki Funnel?

So what is a wiki funnel and how do you go about making one for your own topics? Well most people spend their time trying to get links FROM Wikipedia to their sites because it is such a powerful link to have and because it can drive great traffic, however when the subject page on Wikipedia just doesn’t get much traffic you have to find a way to build traffic to that page on Wikipedia. You could go about creating loads of external backlinks to the page in question, hoping that it will result in more traffic but that’s rather wasteful. A much better way is to build relevant links from other pages within Wikipedia to the page on Wikipedia which you are interested in.

A great thing about this is that you can do it without breaking any rules – you are actually contributing value to Wikipedia by improving navigation there, making it easier for visitors to find the information they are looking for.

How do you build a Wiki Funnel?

All you need to do is find other relevant wiki pages which don’t already link to your wiki page and which have traffic and then add a link. The key here is to make sure the pages you link from actually have traffic, otherwise you are just wasting your time. Fortunately it is easy to see how much traffic a wiki page has – just click the View history link at the top right of every page and there you will see another link for Page view statistics which will reveal all you need to know.

When you find pages with good traffic you can add the link in a couple of ways – one way is to edit the article text to add a sentence or paragraph in which you can include your page name (by “your page” I mean the wiki page you want to boost). Of course it must be relevant, you can’t just go adding paragraphs which don’t belong there at all! Another way which is even easier is to simply add the link in the See also section which is typically found towards the bottom of the page and consists of just a list of related wiki pages, so there’s nothing you need to write besides the name of the page.

So for example say your chosen subject was URL normalization, if you check the stats you will see it has about 4k views/month which is not too bad but it could better! So you go looking for relevant pages on Wikipedia which you could link to it, Canonical form looks good and it has over 9k views! So simply edit that page and add an internal link to the URL normalization page and that’s it – now some of that juicy traffic is going to find its way over to the page you are aiming to boost. Repeat this process several times so you build up a nice collection of traffic generating links. Imagine if you created a link on a high traffic page such as Search engine optimization which has nearly half a million views each month!

Finding Link Sources

Now you may be wondering how you go about finding relevant wiki pages where you can add the internal link, the answer is that you can either just google for them or use the wiki search feature. However there is an even easier way now and that is to use Keyword Predator which is what I did for the example above. Just enter the name of your page and it will return a list of relevant pages along with a Recent Interest indication which is based on those page view statistics. So if you find one which says interest is High or Very High then you just have to get a link in there! Even Medium is still a significant amount of traffic. If you can only find pages with Low interest (or Very Low but best not to bother with those) then you will just have to create more links from more pages like that.

Tiers of Joy

Which brings me to the funnel aspect – this method doesn’t have to be limited to a single tier of wiki links – every related page you link from can also be treated the same way. This means you can find pages relevant to that one and link to it from those, effectively creating a multi-tiered funnel of wiki links which all drive traffic back to your wiki page! This is particularly helpful when all the related pages you find for your page only have very low traffic – create multiple tiers so they all end up with more traffic to send to your page.

Now like many internet marketing tactics, this one could be abused but I don’t recommend trying that. For one thing you will spoil Wikipedia (or whatever wiki you work on) and for another, Wikipedia mods are usually on the ball and will ban you very soon, undoing all that hard work you put in. Do it properly and entirely within the rules, and your ultra long tail niche could quickly end up with a secret mine of traffic which can be tapped in various ways.

Of course how you get traffic from Wikipedia to your own site is another matter, it is not easy but it is possible and there are other ways to benefit from this even without a direct link to your site – just think outside the box!

April 26, 2014
Glossary of Common SEO, Internet Marketing and Technical Terms

To accompany our internet marketing guide for the bewildered, here is a glossary of common terms, technical words and general jargon which will hopefully clarify many things for you as you embark on your internet marketing journey to riches and global domination.

Affiliate – a member of an affiliate marketing program.
Affiliate Program – a marketing system whereby affiliates send traffic to a site and get paid a commission for sales resulting from that traffic. Amazon.com runs a popular affiliate program.
AJAX – an extension to javascript which allows web page content and database updates without the need to reload the page each time.
AWS – amazon web services, the “cloud” services system offered by Amazon.com
Backlinks – these are links on other sites which link back to your site and thus help drive your site up the ranks in Google. This of course makes them extremely important for an internet marketer (unless PPC is your thing).
Backup – you need one. Keep a copy of your data, preferably tracking changes, in a secure alternative location.
Blog – a simple website or “web log” typically with posts appearing in chronological order.
Cache – makes sites load faster by storing pre-created pages or frequently accessed content to minimize processing and database access.
Captcha – those annoying graphics showing some random characters you need to type in on many web site registration forms to prove you are human.
CDN – content distribution network, makes sites load faster by caching files around the world where they are closer to the end user.
Cloud – a buzzword referring to doing things, such as storing data, online using a cloud service. In web hosting terms this is similar to a VPS but with billing usually by the hour and the ability to start and stop multiple instances as required.
CMS – content management system, a web application which makes it easy to build and manage a dynamic web site such as a blog.
Coupon – in internet marketing you will typically be interested in Adwords coupons, Facebook coupons, Twitter ads coupons and often also hosting coupons or discount codes.
CPA – cost per action, in advertising this is the cost you pay for a certain action.
CPC – cost per click, in advertising this is the amount you pay for each click on your adverts.
CPM – cost per mille, in advertising this is the cost you pay per 1000 views of your advert (instead of paying for CPC)
CSS – cascading style sheets, a way to define styles used on web pages to make them look nicer.
Database – a system for storing and retrieving data, such as MySQL.
DNS – domain name system which maps internet addresses to servers.
Domain – domain name, the easy to remember address which represents the hard to remember IP address of a website or other internet service.
Double Opt-In – the act of verifying (typically by clicking a link that was mailed to you) that you really did submit your email to a mailing list – helps to prevent abuse.
eBook – enter your email in the box on the right and you can see one!
Email Blog – an ezine or email newsletter.
EMD – exact match domain, a domain name which consists of the main keyword/phrase the site will
target.
Ezine – an email newsletter or email blog.
FTP – file transfer protocol, a method for uploading/downloading files to a server, not very securely.
HTML – hyper text meta language, a simple language used to construct web pages.
IM – internet marketing (also instant messaging), what you are or will be doing if you read this site!
IP Address – an address for a server, a series of 4 numbers, separated by dots like: 192.168.1.123
JS – javascript, a client side language (runs in your browser) used to add dynamic features to a website.
Keyword Planner – a keyword research tool provided for free by Google as part of Adwords.
Lists – mailing lists, a list of people who have subscribed to a mailing list/ezine.
Long tail – typically keyword phrases representing micro niches which alone may not get much interest but when many long tails are targeted they add up and can be quite profitable with high conversions due to their highly focused nature.
LSI – latent semantic indexing, from an SEO point of view it regards using synonyms of primary keywords to help clarify the meaning of a page without resorting to keyword stuffing.
MySQL – a relational database server application, used by countless web applications such as wordpress.
Nameserver – a DNS server, every domain needs at least two nameservers.
Off-page SEO – basically creating discussion about and backlinks to pages and sites for SEO purposes.
On-page SEO – optimization of pages on a site for the search engines, one side of SEO.
Opt-In – the act of submitting an email to a mailing list.
PDF – a popular document format.
Perl – a programming language used on the web but particularly good for text processing and backend tasks.
PHP – a programming language widely used on the web.
PMD – partial match domain, similar to EMD but consists of more than just the exact keyword.
PPC – pay per click advertising, Google Adwords is probably the most popular ad network where you can buy PPC ads.
Proxy – a server through which requests are sent (such as fetching a web page) which can mask the real ip address of the person or machine making the request. Commonly used for SEO and keyword research software.
SCP – secure copy, a file copy program which runs over SSH.
SEO – search engine optimization, a combination of on-page and off-page optimization techniques to get a site ranked higher in search engine results.
SFTP – a secure implementation of FTP.
SMTP – simple mail transport protocol, basically an outgoing mail system.
Solo Ad – an advert in the form of an email sent to a mailing list by the list owner.
Spinning – a method to produce many variations from one article by replacing words/phrases with synonyms, typically from spintax format.
Spintax – the format used when creating articles for spinning, eg. “the {black|white|pink|large|angry|hungry} {cat|dog|horse} {ran|walked|jumped|died|grew wings and flew away}”. Spinning and creating spintax is usually done with special software unless you are a masochist or some kind of mad genius.
SSH – secure shell, a method for making secure, encrypted connections to servers.
Themes (wordpress) – designs which can be easily installed to change the entire look of a site.
UD – ultimate demon, a very powerful and popular automatic backlinking application for SEO which will save you months of tedious manual backlinking work if used properly.
UNF – ultimate niche finder, a useful keyword research application.
VPS – virtual private server, in web hosting this is functionally like a dedicated server but in fact several VPS instances can run on the same physical server.
Whois – an internet tool for looking up the owner of a domain name.

Hopefully the above will be useful and we will be adding more over time but if there’s anything missing, let us know!

February 7, 2014
Internet Marketing for Newbies: an in-depth guide for the bewildered and technically challenged
The purpose of this article is not to teach you specifically how to make money online, it is to present the fundamental knowledge required before you can even start building an internet based business with which you could then hopefully make money. It will explain the terminology in simple, clear language. It will tell you what basic infrastructure, software tools and utilities and web based services you need and perhaps even more importantly – what you actually don’t need right now (but may need in future).

The knowledge presented here should enable you to go from zero knowledge, beyond the ability to use email and browse the web, and take you to a point where you will better understand what is talked about in more advanced internet marketing or ‘make money online’ guides you may find online and that includes the tips and tricks and methods presented in the “Bank of Home” ezine.

After you have completed reading this you should be better able to make informed decisions about your future internet marketing activities, choose the right software and services and not waste money on things you simply do not need right now, while also helping you to not waste valuable time doing things the hard way when there is a faster and/or better system you could be using. So let’s get started..

Domains

Perhaps the most fundamental of all fundamentals for web users and internet marketers is the domain name. Every server (computer) on the internet has an address called an IP address which is just a series of numbers and dots such as 192.168.1.123 which is not exactly easy to remember so the domain system was created to add user friendly names instead. So for example google.com is simply an easy to remember address which behind the scenes maps to an IP address (actually a great many ip addresses but that is not important for you now).

Domains have what are called ‘extensions’ which in the case of google.com is the ‘.com’ part. Traditionally .com was for commercial web sites (and is the most popular) while .org was for organizations and .net was for techy stuff. These days people grab whatever they can get because all the good names were taken years ago.

As well as the big three extensions there are also country extensions such as .co.uk for United Kingdom, .ie for Ireland, .us for United States etc. and even .eu for European Union. There are also others such as .biz and now a whole array of new extensions is being created. So there is in fact a huge choice of domains and extensions which you could use (subject to trademark restrictions and such like).

To get a domain for your own site you simply go to a domain registrar such as Namecheap and use their search form to find an available domain (which can take a while!) then when you find one you like which is available you register it there and pay a small fee of around $10 – it is important to understand that you only ‘own’ that domain for as long as you keep paying for it and that $10 fee is per year.

Once you have registered your domain name you need to point it to your web site, wherever that may be. To do this there is a system called DNS or Domain Name System which just maps easy to remember domains to hard to remember IP addresses. Any time you type in a website address in your browser, such as http://google.com, your browser is actually doing a DNS lookup (often cached) to find out where the actual location of that site is on the internet so it can present you with the content hosted and served from there. DNS is actually a distributed system and DNS records (the thing that translates your domain to your IP) are propagated around the net and can be cached locally by your ISP for example to enable faster domain name lookups.

Your web site hosting company will tell you what IP you can use and it may be dedicated to you alone or it may be shared with other users on the same hosting server. You will need a minimum of two DNS servers (also called nameservers) to point your domain to an IP – this is to ensure if one DNS server crashes, your site can still be reached.

Web Hosting

When you’ve registered your domain name you need to point it somewhere, a place where your actual web site will be “hosted” on the internet – for this you need a web host. Hosts usually provide a number of options going from the simplest shared hosting account to the full dedicated server.

Shared hosting – this is the cheapest and simplest option and consists of an account on a server which is shared with many other people. It is basically just a directory on a computer where you can upload your web site and related files. Then your domain is pointed to that directory and you can usually install wordpress and many other web applications through a simple site management interface (control panel). Shared hosting will also usually provide you with email accounts using your own domain and a database (MySQL) and file uploads would typically be done using an FTP application (file transfer protocol) or through the web based control panel.

Shared hosting accounts are somewhat limiting but they do hide much of the complexity of managing your own web site or server and as such they are useful for beginners or anyone who simply wants to get a site online with the minimum fuss but who does not require the deeper level of access and control provided by more advanced hosting packages.

VPS – a Virtual Private Server is the next step up the hosting ladder and well worth getting. It is still sharing one server between many users (but less than the above type) however it provides all the functionality, access, security and control that a full dedicated server provides but for less money. With a VPS you have what is called “root access” which means you can access the superuser or administrator account on the server and you usually use an SSH application (secure shell) to login instead of FTP. SSH is much more secure than FTP and gives you command line or console access where you can run commands, install software and of course break stuff.. 😉 You may also have a control panel which in most cases allows you to avoid the somewhat riskier and more complicated SSH access method to manage your server although more experienced server admins generally prefer to use SSH and the command line.

Cloud – “the cloud” is a buzzword these days but functionally a cloud “instance” as far as hosting is concerned is pretty much the same as a VPS with the major difference being you pay by the hour and you can create (and shutdown) multiple such instances at the press of a button which allows for sites to scale up when traffic rises and scale down again when it drops. Cloud hosts usually offer all sorts of additional cloud services for more advanced uses such as load balancers, databases and more. Probably the biggest and best known cloud services provider is Amazon with their AWS system. While cloud hosting is certainly convenient it can actually cost much more than just a regular VPS or other monthly server rental so don’t go rushing head first into the cloud just because it’s cool – crunch the numbers to see if it is worth the cost for what you need.

Dedicated Server – when you outgrow (or plan to) your VPS a dedicated server is the likely next step. You rent an entire server just for your use – nobody else has access to it (although your host could gain access if they needed and of course the NSA!) and none of the resources it provides are shared with anyone else. Your server is hooked up to the network either with a 10Mbps, 100Mbps or sometimes even 1Gbps connection and hosts will often say you get “unlimited bandwidth” subject to the size of the network connection your server has, in reality the small print will likely have a fair usage restriction or something like that, however the cap will still be quite high and most people will not ever manage to use it all.

Co-Location – this is basically the same as a dedicated server except you actually own the server and instead just pay for “rack space” and network connection in a datacenter. A datacenter is a hosting facility where thousands or sometimes even tens of thousands of servers are stacked in racks and connected to the internet. Rack space is usually priced in units of “U” with servers typically being 1U, 2U, 4U or sometimes more and a full size rack will contain up to 42U although not all of that will be used for servers as other networking equipment may also be there such as routers, switches, power strips and others. Note also that these days you can get high density systems with multiple servers squeezed into each ‘U’.

Control Panels – servers can be complicated to manage which is why sysadmins get paid lots of money, however most web hosts these days offer web based control panels which make the whole process much simpler. Panels such as WHM/CPanel, Plesk, Webmin and several others are commonly offered although mostly for an additional fee. With a good panel you rarely, if ever, have to deal with the command line and logging in with SSH or anything techy like that.

Operating Systems – hosts offer servers with a range of operating systems but for the most part there are two main offerings: Linux and Windows. Within each there are multiple variations such as Centos Linux v6 or Windows Server 2008 Web Edition. It can be somewhat confusing with all the strange variations but my advice would be this: for hosting your website you should choose Linux and preferably the latest version of Centos (currently v6) or perhaps Ubuntu Server.

A common use for Windows Server amongst internet marketers is just as a remote “always on” desktop to run various internet marketing research and SEO software such as the excellent Ultimate Demon – these are programs you might normally run on your own windows PC but since they can run attended for days or weeks performing scheduled tasks it is better to simply rent a VPS with Windows and install all your marketing applications there so you don’t need to leave your own PC running all the time using precious computing power, electricity and bandwidth by constantly running such apps.

Once you have chosen a server or hosting you will need to configure it and install any software you require. For web sites this typically means you need a LAMP configuration – LAMP simply means Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP/Perl/Python which form the basic technology stack for a web server. You don’t usually need to worry too much about the details as your host will frequently provide such a stack pre-installed (certainly if you choose shared hosting or have a control panel installed since that also depends on a LAMP stack!) or worst case you can install it easily using the operating systems package management system – if case you are not quite convinced how easy it is to do that, here is the process for Centos.. login to your server and on the command line just type this and press enter:

yum install httpd mysql-server php

Mainly you just need to make sure you have Apache (the http web server software) so that web pages will be displayed, MySQL which is a database server software widely used for web sites and applications including WordPress and PHP which is simply a programming language that many such web applications are developed in – you do not need to know any PHP, just that it is installed. Linux of course is the server operating system – you could use a similarly setup Windows server and in that case such a stack is known as WAMP instead of LAMP.

This may all sound complicated and indeed there is much to learn but you do not need to know everything to get started – go with a ‘shared hosting’ option from a good hosting company and all the technical stuff is taken care of for you so you can focus on building your business and making money. You could even build your entire internet business without ever having to deal directly with this stuff so don’t worry about it now.

Blogging

One of the fundamental components of an internet marketing business is the blog. A blog (short for web log) is simply a web site where you publish articles, traditionally as a form of diary online. Such articles are generally displayed in chronological order with the newest article showing at the top although that can be changed and in many cases the date is not shown at all so there is no indication of when an entry or article was posted. Blogs are very simple to create and manage these days thanks to the existence of free platforms and software such as WordPress.

While you do not actually need a blog since you can just build a site using static HTML web pages, or even a fully dynamic database driven site if you know how, using a blog system such as WordPress makes it very easy to build and manage a web site without having to worry about the technical stuff that makes it all work.

WordPress

Probably the most popular blog software (sometimes also referred to as a CMS) in use today is WordPress which is offered both as free software you can install on your own server or site hosting, and also as a web based service (again free) which requires no installation – you just fill in a form and click a button to get your very own wordpress blog online and ready to use.
- WordPress.com – this is the web based service where you can signup for free and get a blog with an address (URL) in the form: http://yourcatchyname.wordpress.com and for a hobby blog this is fine but for serious internet marketing you will need your own domain name such as http://bankofhome.com You can actually pay a fee to WordPress to use your own domain name with their service but it is generally far better to have your own copy of the WordPress software installed on your server where you have more control and fewer restrictions.
- WordPress.org – this is where you can download your own free copy of WordPress to install anywhere you like. Installation is quite easy once you are familiar with the basics of web site hosting and they provide a “5 minute install” guide. With an installed copy of WordPress you will need your own domain name so people can find your blog online.
Once you have your wordpress blog installed you then choose a theme (how it looks) from the many which are available free or for a small fee, or you can get a custom theme made by a designer. You can also install a number of plugins which extend wordpress by adding new functions such as better search engine optimization, integration with social sites (Twitter, Facebook etc) and countless other handy features. All of this can be done through the WordPress admin panel – no messing around with the command line, just a nice simple point and click through the panel.

This is the beauty of a powerful CMS such as WordPress which has been around for long enough to mature and become what it is today – once installed it is trivial to manage your entire site, even multiple sites, everything from changing the design to adding new content and even updating wordpress itself is done through the web panel. After all, the purpose of a website or blog is for you to place your great content online so you can make money – not to waste your time with technical trivialities.

HTML

This is basically the language of the web, Hyper Text Markup Language. It is a very simple language used to construct web pages and the links between them. If you go to any web page with your web browser and (right click) select “view source” you will see the html used to construct that page – usually.. some sites, such as Google, use a lot of Javascript which is much more complicated and hard to read but which your browser understands and converts to html in the background, but don’t worry about that as you do not need to know anything about it. Basic HTML knowledge though is good to have as it allows you to quickly make changes to your web pages and add links or images or other features. Here is an example of the HTML used to create a very basic web page..
```
<html>
 <head>
  <title>Some Title</title>
  <meta name="description" content="A description of the content of this page">
 </head>
 <body>
  <center>Hello World!</center>
  <br />
  <a href="http://bankofhome.com">this is a link</a>
 </body>
</html>
```
To use the above html code you just copy and paste it into a file with any text editor and save it with a .html (or .htm) extension such as mypage.html then you can open that page in any web browser such as Firefox or Explorer.

You will notice that the page is made up of “tags” such as <center> and that there is always an opening tag and a closing tag (although in some cases the closing tag can be left out and the browser will still know what to do). There are also two sections – the header and the body.. the body is everything which appears between the <body> and </body> tags and is what will actually appear on the web page when it is viewed in the browser. The header section is everything between the <head> and </head> tags and contains meta data which is not visible in the web page but is important and it is useful to search engines – page title and description for example. The entire page is then wrapped in <html> and </html> tags.

That is really all there is to it, now you can (if you want) use raw html to construct a web page! You can find the full list of valid html tags online on many html tutorial sites. To make web pages look pretty you would also use CSS (cascading style sheets) which tell your browser how certain elements of the web page should by styled, for example what fonts to use, what colours, where to place things.. when you install a theme in wordpress it comes with a CSS stylesheet which handles all this so you do not need to worry about it – it is the job of web designers to fiddle with CSS unless you really want to also dig in there.

End of Part 1 – tune in next week for Part 2 which contains even more essential fundamentals to get you off to a running start! Got any questions or suggestions? Feel free to post them in the comments section below..
January 17, 2014
Get Unlimited High Converting Free Traffic Without Google

It is a common problem with internet marketers who spend all their time trying to get traffic from Google and work through every SEO trick in the book only to find one day that Google moved the goalposts and slapped their site down the ranks into oblivion, taking away all that hard earned traffic forever.

The important thing you must understand is that Google is NOT the only source of traffic, in fact search engines in general and SEO are not the only places you can get traffic and you must work on building traffic from other places so that if Google ever does drop the ban hammer on your site it wont matter so much and wont put you out of business.

But where else can you get traffic without paying for it? Well there are actually many places but this article will cover one in particular – Reddit.

Reddit is an extremely popular social bookmarking/discussion community and getting your article on the front page could bring you gazillions of visitors and probably melt your server in the process! However getting on the front page is no easy task since there is massive competition plus a lot of that traffic is not going to be targeted and wont convert so is just burning through your bandwidth for nothing – there are still ways to convert that though!

The Key to Success

The key to success on Reddit is to pick a relevant niche – a so called subreddit. If you browse around Reddit you will find hundreds of subreddits, many have very little traffic but some have tens of thousands of subscribers many of whom would be interested in your content and will click through to your site if you do it right and even better – they WILL click your ads and they WILL buy stuff – I speak from experience..

For example I recently spent a few hours writing a good article, targeted to a subreddit and posted it on my blog (not this one) then spent the whole night babysitting my server as it struggled to cope with the sudden increase in traffic – many thousands of visitors poured in over the next 24 hours and I got about 800 clicks on my affiliate ads and lots of sales.. it was a good day. 😉 Even better, the link got shared on facebook, twitter, forums and elsewhere which all sent even more traffic and sales over the following week. All this from just a few hours work spent on doing the job right.

Do it Right!

Doing it right means creating good quality content, relevant to the subreddit and not spamming them! There are rules on Reddit (and more on subreddits) which you should try to stick to as much as possible – they generally do allow you to post links to your own site as long as that’s not all you post – the ratio should be around 1 in 9 or 10. So go find 9 other decent sites/articles to post and then post yours.. also make sure to post good comments. Reddit has a voting system for links/articles submitted as well as comments and so the more you post the higher your score – as long as you don’t get down-voted too much. Over time you will build up a good reputation. (hopefully!)

Just posting a link to your article there doesn’t mean you will get massive traffic though – it needs to get upvoted enough to make it to the front page of the subreddit and the subreddit in question needs to have enough traffic. The amount of traffic is easy to find – on the right side of every subreddit it will show you how many subscribers it has AND how many are online at the moment.

The trick is first to find one with enough subscribers (at least thousands) and then to monitor it for a while to see what time of day and what day of week has the most people online and then you post your article at that time so it has a greater chance of being noticed and getting enough upvotes to strike gold. The reality is if your post doesn’t get noticed fast it will never make it to the front page and will quickly sink into oblivion.

Timing is (almost) everything with a Reddit post – when more people are online there you can get more attention but you could ‘cheat’ a little by getting your friends to upvote your post to give it a little boost at the start.. with luck it will then take on a life of its own. It may be somewhat against the rules to get your friends (or you with other accounts ;)) to upvote your posts so it is up to you if you want to do that.

The other key to success is researching the subreddit to see what sort of posts get attention and upvoted to the front page and study the culture of that subreddit – learn what works and then model your articles on those (but don’t just copy – be unique!). It does involve a certain amount of trial & error but that’s part of the fun and even your failures will still get some traffic, perhaps even a few hundred visitors over the course of a week instead of thousands on the first day if it is a success. It all adds up.

You should also make sure to babysit your reddit posts and reply to any comments there, even the bad ones.. that way you don’t look like a hit & run poster and there’s a better chance it will get some traction.

It is worth noting also that none of this involves using any fancy, expensive tools.. all you need is your eyes and brain to do a bit of manual research on Reddit and then write a suitable article and submit it. It doesn’t cost you a penny, just your time and the payoff is potentially huge.

How to CONVERT this Traffic

There is another very useful way to make sure you actually benefit from all the massive traffic which Reddit (and others such as Stumbleupon) can send you and that is with retargeting. This just means you will show your ads to these people AFTER they leave your site – you know they are interested in what your site is about but it is very hard to convert these visitors to buyers or members on that first brief exposure. However if they then see your advert on other sites they will be reminded or nudged repeatedly and the chances of them coming back to your site is very high and then they are much more likely to convert.

Personally I use AdRoll for retargeting as it is one of the biggest ad networks specializing in this sort of thing and it is very simple to setup on your sites. It is also very cheap and they provide great stats so you can see exactly what converts and how much each click and each conversion is costing you – probably a lot less than you think! Not retargeting your hard won traffic is basically leaving money on the table.

Over time you can build up a lot of links on Reddit which will also be indexed by Google and others and you can get a steady stream of traffic many months and years later so you win twice!

Reddit is a potential goldmine if you do it right, play within the rules (mostly) so you don’t get banned and produce good content targeted to the specific subreddit subject and culture.

As mentioned before, there are other places to get traffic as well which we will cover in other articles so subscribe to our free newsletter or rss feed to make sure you don’t miss those.

November 15, 2013
St. Patrick’s Day Killing

In the business of internet marketing there is one “ring” to rule them all and that ring is traffic, or eyeballs if you will, for without people seeing your site and your offers you simply wont make money and not making money is generally not a good thing for any business!

Of course not all traffic is created equal and there’s no shortage of junk traffic out there, particularly the cheap stuff pedalled by traffic brokers of dubious repute – if it seems too cheap, a helluva bargain, it is probably junk and more than likely not even real (bot created) so don’t fall for it! Having said that there are ways to convert cheap traffic as long as it is not just bot traffic, but it is harder to do so you really need to know what you are doing.

But what has all this got to do with St. Patrick’s Day and what’s that about the killing?! It will all make sense soon, but fear not as the killing in this case is in the context of “making a killing” or in other words making money! Read on..

For the savvy internet marketer every day brings new opportunities to attract fresh and high quality traffic and make more sales and one such way is to take advantage of holidays. Somewhere in the world where your potential customers live, there is very likely to be a holiday no matter what day of the year it is! Today for example it is St. Patrick’s Day and the Irish and Irish at heart are soon to be heading for parades and/or pubs to celebrate as only the Irish know how – it will be green and involve alcohol, of that you can be sure!

If you had consulted a calendar ahead of time you could (should) have prepared for this day with appropriate offers and themed blog posts or mailings or even paid ads. There will be much buying of holiday specific gear and much interest and subsequent googling for all things Irish and with proper planning you could be reaping the benefits now, starting even from several days (or weeks) before and until several days after – you could have been selling and making a real St Patrick’s Day killing!

If you act fast you may still be able to get some ‘luck of the irish’ before this holiday is over so go ahead and take action NOW! However in the worst case there will always be another holiday soon, perhaps somewhere there is one tomorrow which you could pounce on and in fact soon it will be easter – are you ready for that? If not then get planning!

Find a good calendar of holidays around the world and start thinking of how you could target those days, what you could offer, how you could make a holiday killing. Don’t just restrict yourself to the national holidays of the US or the specific country you are hoping to sell to because the world is a much smaller place now and there will always be a local community of people from all corners of the globe who will be celebrating even the most obscure holidays and you could be making bank on that!

Until next time – Sláinte!

March 17, 2013