» PPC

What’s the Best Ways to Get Lots of Traffic to Your Brand New Site?

Andi Putra — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 01:08:49 +0000

Hey, we’ve all been there. We’re excited when we finished building our site. If we’re making a blog, we have spent weeks or even months to design our logo and sidebars to perfection, now it’s time to sit back and relax, right? Right? Oh wait, we still need to write articles for it, preferably good ones. Maybe some podcasts and videos as well. And we need to drive traffic for it…We know how to do search engine optimization and link building so we thought it shouldn’t be a problem. Until we actually do it. Those two methods work but they are just too slow at driving enough traffic to motivate us in the beginning of our internet venture. So, what could we do? First, calm down. Second, read this post for the best ways to get lots of traffic to your brand new site.

1. Pay Per Click Advertising

You might be disappointed that the first one on this list is not free or new. You might’ve heard it hundreds of times before from other bloggers or internet marketing gurus. But, whether you like it or not, paid advertising is by far the best way to drive traffic to your brand new site fast. And if you do it properly, you’ll earn more (much more in the long term) than you spend. The key is to calculate the lifetime value of your visitors. This is easier to do if you have a blog with thousands of visitors a week as you can based it on the past conversions and sales. If you’re just starting up, however, using $1 value per visitors seems reasonable. I calculated this based on 1% conversion rate on a $100 product or two $50 products and so on. So, as long as the money you spend on pay per click campaigns to acquire the visitors is less than the the lifetime value of your visitors, you’ll make a profit.

There are lots of venues that you can spend your hard-earned money on when you do PPC ^-^. The six-hundred pounds gorilla, Google, with its Adwords, is the weapon of choice for many internet marketers. But the recent Quality Score issue, has caused many of them looking for other options. Yahoo! and Bing paid advertisings, the social media advertising (Facebook and MySpace), and media buying are all there for you to choose. The choice is yours.

2. Twitter Promotion

When people say you can use Twitter to earn money, I don’t believe them. I mean, Twitter is good for building relationship with your readers or subscribers, but it’s not an effective selling tool. But, Richard, one of my internet marketing friends, tell me that I totally misunderstood the selling tool part of Twitter. You have to treat Twitter as an indirect selling tool, rather than direct one. First, you build your Twitter followers with the help of Social Omph. Social Omph allows you to schedule your tweets and have an automated direct message to your new followers. Give something to your new followers for free by sending them into your squeeze page. Now you have a list that you can direct anytime to your site or blog.

Additionally, use Twitter Poster plugin if you’re using WordPress as it automatically tweets the latest post in your blog. Depending on your niche, how you phrase your post titles and when you make your posts, it can help you get 100-300 unique visitors a day. You can do it manually as well. Go for heavy traffic times like lunch, late afternoon and early evening US time. Always use tinyurl’s for you links and make your titles compelling. Don’t spam. Good rule of thumb is one ref post for every 4-5 normal posts.

3. Guest Posting

Guest posting is not the easiest one to do, but it’s free and is proven to work. Find the authority sites in your niche with Google Search by typing in the broadest keyword that define your niche, for example “blogging”. Be an active commentators on the blogs for maybe a week or two, then contact the owners and ask if they’re interested in accepting your guest post that contains link back to your site. If they agree, you are now set to receive tons of traffic. To get even more traffic using this trick, promote your guest post by doing some social bookmarking and article marketing so that it ranks higher in search engine. It’s easy for an authority blogs to rank high for any terms, so might as well use it to your advantage.

4. CPM Mail Drop

This is the method that Frank Kern mentioned in his List Building video before he launched Mass Control last time. What’s CPM Mail Drop? CPM Mail Drop refers to email list brokers. They can rent you a list at a cost per thousands views. You can find these brokers by going to the SRDS site. You have a choice between opt-in lists and compiled lists, which are less targeted. The thing to remember is not to send the visitors to your blog. Instead, send them to your squeeze page and offer them something for free in exchange for their opt-ins to your list. Now you have your own list that you can use to drive traffic to your site or sell products to. The broker will usually provide you with a report regarding the number and % delivered, the number and %opened, the number and %read, and other data.

These are the best ways to drive traffic to your brand new site. Start applying them to have traffic pouring in to your blog(s) fast. Feel free to leave comments or tweet it if you like it.

11 Ways to Optimize Your Pay per Click Web Site

Andi Putra — Mon, 31 Aug 2009 01:02:51 +0000

The days where you could simply set up a simple Adwords campaign are over. There have been a couple of Google slaps happening in these past couple of years. And recently, Google changed their rule again, and a couple of affiliate review sites have been victims of it. Those sites have their quality score reduced from 10 to 1 in one night. As depressing as that is, Google only have one thing on their mind, keeping the price low for those affiliates who follow the rule and provide good contents for their users. So, to avoid Google Slap, you need to follow what those affiliates are doing. These are 11 ways you could do to optimize your pay per click web site, extracted from many power affiliate marketers, to convert better and avoid Google Slap.

1. Stay away from Scam-my offers

You know those fake products that offer easy ways to make money online for only $1, but they actually charge another $25-90/month after that?! Yeah, those make money from Google, etc offers. Avoid them, simply because Google despise them. And, I believe you don’t want to trick other people’s money, do you?

2. Keyword focused

Let the landing pages in your pay per click web site optimized for your chosen keywords. You should have already researched these keywords, just like when you’re doing SEO. This would allow you to get better quality score, as you are providing an extremely related pages to your ads, which in the end would decrease your CPC (cost per click) significantly.

3. Provide value to users, not direct linking to merchant sites

As I said previously, the days of direct linking are offer. So, if you don’t want to get left out alone, getting slap by Google, while others are making money, start creating your own websites.

4. Provide testimonial(s)

You would usually find lots of testimonials in the sales page of good affiliate offers. So, why do you need to provide one in your landing page as well? That’s because the testimonials you provided in your review or pre-sell page would be considered slightly more trustworthy than the one on the sales page. The more customers read would increase the chance for the customers to buy the product. How do you get one? Simple on would be by asking your friend to try the product for you and give his or her testimonials.

5. Offer related products

Have more than one product on your review or pre-sell page. Someone might have purchased a weight loss product, from you or someone else, before. But, because the previous product is not working or other reasons, he/she needs another similar product. If you only have one product on review, then you’ll definitely lose a sale (if the product they purchased before is the one you’re reviewing). By providing more than one product in you review or pre-sell pages, you provide choices and thus increase the likelihood of them buying anyone of them.

6. Borrow authorities

Ever seen websites that put As Seen on CNN, Oprah, Facebook, Google, etc on their sales of pre-sales pages? This is what I called borrowing authorities to build your credibility. The people who search online don’t know you and they definitely won’t trust you. So you need to borrow the brands (or the authority that those brands have) so that they would place their confidence in you. Use “As seen on…” or some authority brands’ logos in your pay per click web site.

7. Personalize

You could do this by providing your name and photos in your landing page. You don’t have to provide your real name, pen name is fine, as suggested by Frank Kern. And the photo could be someone else’s photo as well. The photo just needs to provide the picture of success that you wrote in your review. So, if you’re selling a weight loss product, that photo could be someone who is slim and happy.

8. What’s in it for me?

Give them a reason to buy the affiliate products by telling them the benefits and results of the products, not the features. So, rather than telling them this acne cream contained anti oxidant and aloe vera, tell them, this acne cream would make their face as smooth as a baby’s skin.

9. Gigantic affiliate link

Make your affiliate link huge and put it at the top part of your page so that your visitors could see them without having to scroll down the page. Never left your visitors searching for the links, or you’ll lose sales.

10. Necessary links

Provide Privacy Policy, About, and Contact us pages on your pay per click web site and provide links to those pages at the bottom of your landing page. These links are not meant to draw attention. The sole purpose is to increase your site’s credibility in Google’s eyes.

11. Do split-test

Even if you follow all of these rules, you still might not have an effective and highly converting landing pages. So the final advice that I could give you is to do split-testing to see which of your landing pages convert the best. Use tools like Google Website Optimizer and Crazy Egg (show you where your users are clicking) to help you.

I guess that’s all for optimizing your pay per click web site and landing pages. Remember to do these steps to obtain better quality scores and to avoid the dreadful Google slaps. Please feel free to leave comments and tweet this if you like it.

5 Little Known Ways to Drastically Increase Your PPC Traffic

Andi Putra — Wed, 26 Aug 2009 01:52:13 +0000

Okay, so you’ve find profitable keywords that you believe is provocative and powerful. You set up a campaign, believing that you would get a whole lot of traffic. With your heart beating fast and sweat on the palm of your hands, you checked your stats. Nobody click on your ads. Your click through rate is zip, nada, zero. You wait for days and there is still no one clicking on your ad. What’s wrong? Are those internet marketing gurus lie to you about PPC…? These are the 5 little known ways to increase your PPC traffic.

1. Be Shocking

Doing PPC Advertising is tough. You are limited to a very small amount of characters and space to communicate your ideas or marketing message. So, be bold. Give big promises and shocking statements that spark their interest and imagination. Give them motivation to finish reading the rest of your ad. According to Perry Belcher, one of my most favorite internet marketers, there are a couple of ways to do this.

You could do it by asking questions. Ex. “Are you finishing too fast?”

You could tease them by using unfinished sentence. Ex. “Getting $1000/days is just…” They have to click on the ad to continue reading.

Or, you could get negative. Ex. “Is Blog Bullshit Classroom a Scam?”

There are other tactics you could use as well, like by using numbers in your ads or calling out to your prospects. Be creative but also informative.

2. Use Action URL

Your display URL or website address should contain action words. As you know, you could only have a couple of words in your PPC ad. So it is crucial for your URL to actually contribute to your overall marketing message you want to send out to the searchers. Action URLs use active words like “Get…”, “Drive…”, “Try…”, and many others. Some examples: TryGetSlimNow.com, DriveTraffictoYourSiteNow.com, or “GetXReportNow.com”

3. Give the Reason Why

The searchers have only one basic need, to know what your product could do to solve whatever problems they are searching now. So, you have to keep your ad simple and relevant. You could also increase click through rate by offering them compelling enough incentive to click on your links. Offer them something for free, like free report or free analysis. Other incentives could be in the form of social proof, by putting a phrase like, As seen on CNN, or other similar phrases.

4. Try content network

The combined traffic to blogs and social medias are actually higher than even Google itself, as much as twenty times more. By using content network, you could access all of these previously inaccessible traffic sources (if you just use search networks). Content network also has less competitors compared to the search network, so your bid would be much lower. The only problem with content network is it’s harder to grab attention. So you need to double your effort in capturing the users’ interest by, probably, using gimmicky ads that doesn’t necessarily closely related to your product. Think of it like magazine headlines. If you go to a news agency, all of the magazines are stacked in racks. And each racks would be use as efficiently as possible by the store owners to hold as many magazines as possible. So, each magazines actually have a very limited rack space and the only way they could compete is through their headlines. The most outrageous and shocking headlines are usually the one who win.

5. Get inspired

Get inspiration for your ads from social bookmarking sites, like Digg. Digg could be called the world’s largest free headline collections, as they currently hold millions high converting headlines in their database. These headlines are proven to works, as you could see from the number of diggs on an article. Visit Digg now and check out which headlines, in your niche, have the most diggs.

These are 5 strategies that you might want to try to implement in your PPC campaigns to kick-start your PPC traffic, whether your current ones, or your other campaigns in the future (If Google doesn’t change the rule that is). So feel free to leave comments below or tweet this if you like it.