Lesson #7: Drive Traffic
Once everything is ‘live’ and you’re ready to start accepting new subscribers you can begin to think about driving traffic to your squeeze page – after all if nobody ever sees what you are offering you’re never going to build your list!
In truth traffic generation doesn’t have to be that difficult.
What I’m about to explain to you is a simple traffic strategy anybody can start doing today.
It’s all about taking one article, turning it into multiple formats, distributing it across the Internet, and watching visitors from various sources come streaming to your website.
The strategies in this lesson work very well for me, and they will work very well for you too.
So let’s get straight into it…
Step 1: Writing Articles for Article Marketing
The entire process starts with article marketing and just explodes into different pieces from there.
So first you need to write a few articles for article marketing. This isn’t hard.
Just write 3-5 articles on different topics within your niche. Make them all about 500 words. The easiest and most effective articles are list-articles. Things like ‘Top 5 ways to…’. That way you can just list a few key points and expand on them.
You also want to include a resource box at the end of each article where there will be links back to your website and blog. You usually can have 2 links in a resource box, have one go to an article on your blog and the other link go directly to your product page.
This should be pretty straight forward. Get the articles done and ready for submission.
Step 2: Article Submissions
Once you have your articles completed and ready for submission, it’s time to actually submit them to article directories.
We’re going to focus on submitting them to the best article directories. Now you can do this yourself, but it’ll take ages. Just outsource it. It’s much easier.
Head on over to http://www.fiverr.com and search for people who will submit the articles for you.
It’s not a lot of money and it’s not a hard thing to do. Find providers who have a lot of positive feedback and seem to be doing a good job.
Step 3: Convert Articles Into Press Releases
A press release is similar to a regular article but it usually has more of a news feel to it.
So just take the articles you wrote before and rework them into a news item.
For a better picture of how to write a great press release go to this website: http://www.publicityinsider.com/release.asp
Follow the instructions there to convert your articles into press releases. So if you wrote 5 articles, you should have 5 press releases as well.
Step 4: Distributing Your Press Releases
When you’re done writing your PR you need to submit it to some PR directories.
Now you have 2 options with this: the free way, or the paid way.
If you choose the free way, you can submit your PR to these free sites:
Of course, if you would rather outsource this process, you can always go back to Fiverr and find people to do it all for you.
Step 5: Contribute Guest Posts
This is a terrific source of traffic that most people overlook.
All you do is rewrite your articles so they are completely unique, then just find sites in your niche that accept guest posts, guest articles, or anything like that.
This is high profile content syndication at its best.
So if you have a site on dog training, you could find other sites that are in the same niche and accept articles, contributions, or tips from others. Most (if not all) want you to submit unique content, so the articles that you write for article directories won’t cut it.
Just rewrite them and make them unique, or hire someone to do it.
Now, to find these sites just head on over to trusty old Google and search your niche along with one of these:
[niche] + submit article
[niche] + submit content
[niche] + submit tutorial
[niche] + contribute
[niche] + writers
[niche] + submit
[niche] + guest blogger
[niche] + guest blog
[niche] + guest post
[niche] + article guidelines
[niche] + writers guidelines
[niche] + write for us
…and any other variations you can think of.
Go to the page on each site where you can submit your content and make sure you follow their guidelines. If they want articles that are at least 1000 words, make sure you articles are at least 1000 words.
Not all of your articles will be accepted, but the ones that are accepted are the ones that will send you significant traffic from these sites.
Step 6: Time To Get Social
By now you should have some articles and press releases out there sending some traffic to your site. What we’re going to do now is to tell more people about it through social bookmarking.
There are literally 1000s of social bookmarking sites out there, but we’re only going to focus on the best ones.
If you want to do it yourself, you can, but really you should just outsource this part as well.
There are a lot of service providers on Fiverr who will happily bookmark your site for $5. Some of them will do 200 for you, others will do 100 or 20.
Just browse through the providers and find a good seller who has a lot of positive reviews.
Bookmark each piece of content you have already put out.
Step 7: Social Networking
Social networks are some of the most popular and powerful websites going around these days.
Try going a day on the Internet without seeing, hearing, reading something about Facebook or Twitter. It’s incredible.
A few years ago they weren’t all that important (or well known) now it’s almost impossible to ignore them.
So what we’re going to do is create new accounts at some of the most popular social networking sites. Even if you already have one, it’s best to create a new one with a different email specifically for each particular niche you are marketing in.
Just create the accounts and fill them out with as much detail as you want. If you don’t want to have your own photo up, that’s fine, a fun way to do that instead is to have a cartoon image of yourself.
A couple of places to get that done are:
http://www.southparkstudios.com/avatar/
Choose maybe 5 social networks to join and focus on those. Joining all of them will take a lot of time to manage, so stick with 5 or so.
What you can also do with Facebook and Twitter is pay people to send followers and friends to you. That way you get a bit of a following and when you share stuff on the social networks there will actually be real people to see it.
Again, just head to http://www.fiverr.com and search for Twitter and Facebook followers/friends and you should see a bunch of providers who can do it for you. Always stick with service providers who have good reviews.
This will send you a good boost of traffic without doing too much extra work.
Step 8: Submit Content To Document Sharing Sites
This is a cool twist on traditional article marketing.
What you do it take your article and convert it into a pdf document.
To do this just go to http://www.youconvertit.com or http://www.pdfonline.com/convert-pdf
Now, take that document and submit it to document sharing sites.
Some of the best sites for this are:
If you stick with these 7 you’re doing well. And to be honest, that’s probably where 90% of your traffic will come from with pdf/ebook sharing.
But if you’re keen, some other places to submit your documents to are:
http://www.Directory.pdf-search-engine.com
http://www.e-booksdirectory.com
Always remember to have your resource box at the bottom of the document, just as you would when submitting an article to an article directory.
Step 9: Convert Articles Into PowerPoint Documents
To take the document sharing idea to another level, we’re now going to convert that article into a PowerPoint document and share that.
Just go into a PowerPoint program and have each paragraph of your article on a separate slide.
It doesn’t have to be fancy, unless you want it to be.
Then just take your PowerPoint document and submit them to these sites:
Not a lot of people will ever do this type of thing, so just take that extra bit of effort to get it done and you will be ahead of most of your competition.
Step 10: Get Social Again
What you’re going to do here is again go to your social bookmark and networking accounts and tell people about your documents and PowerPoint slides.
This is something you want to do every time you have fresh content out on the Internet.
Just tell people about it. There is no point having content out there and nobody ever sees it. So tell people about it and get them to visit and tell others about it as well.
Step 11: Turn Articles Into Videos
This is massive.
Videos are so popular these days that when you do a Google search for just about anything, there’s a good chance a video (or 3) will be in the top 10 results.
Now a lot of people will get turned off by this part.
There is a lot of technical stuff to understand and frankly for the most part it is over my head as well.
I’d much rather focus on the primary tasks of my business, instead of spending hours trying to figure out all the technicalities of how to create an article video.
But we know videos are crucial to marketing success these days…
So, what do we do then?
Get someone (or something) to do it for us!
That’s where Article2Video comes in… it is an absolute beast!
It’s a great piece of software that allows you to convert your measly article into video in a few minutes, with a voice over as well. It doesn’t get much easier than that.
Seriously, if you’re even thinking about doing video marketing, you need to check it out here.
Just spend the day converting your articles into videos. It actually gets quite fun after a while.
Step 12: Distribute Your Article Videos
So after you’ve created your videos (probably in a couple of hours) submit them to the top video sharing sites.
Video.google.com
Brightcove.com
Photobucket.com
Youtube.com
Dailymotion.com
ifilm.com
Break.com
Blip.tv
Grindtv.com
Metacafe.com
Vids.myspace.com
Vimeo.com
Buzznet.com
Liveleak.com
Stupidvideos.com
Flixya.com
Gofish.com
Kwego.com
Lulu.tv
Pandora.tv
Viddler.com
It might take you a while to submit your video to all of them, but the exposure will be massive!
Alternatively, just go back to Fiverr and find someone who will do it all for you.
Step 13: Converting Your Article Into A Podcast
This is another one of those technical things that can be done extremely easy.
All you do here is read your article and record it on your computer. That’s it.
Then share it on one of the most popular platforms for audio distribution.
So to get started you need to download a software that records audio on your computer.
The best option and the one I use is Audacity. You can get it for free here: http://audacity.sourceforge.net/
Now most computers these days have microphones built in so you can just speak into that and record it with Audacity.
Otherwise, you can speak into Skype and record that.
When you’ve recorded yourself (or someone else) reading your article, make sure you save it in mp3 format in Audacity.
Now you’re going to upload your audio file to iTunes.
How many people visit iTunes?
Over 500 million!
This is one of those untapped traffic sources you really need to take advantage of.
iTunes is massive and you should not ignore it. To submit your content to iTunes download the software from Apple here http://www.apple.com/itunes
Step 14: Social Stuff Again
Once you’ve got your videos and podcasts out there, tell people all about it on the social bookmarks and social networks.
----------------------
And there you have it. If you follow all these steps, and take a bit of action each day, your traffic problems will be a thing of the past.
It’s all about multiplying that 1 article and distributing it EVERYWHERE in different formats.
Most people just do article marketing the traditional way…all they do is submit an article to article directories and stop. Not you.
You now have the power to take article marketing to an all new level. You can repeat this entire process over and over again.
It’s one of the easiest ways to get more targeted traffic; syndicate your content all over the Internet.
And keep in mind this is just one traffic strategy.
There are so many more that you can take advantage of today. If you’re looking for a complete traffic training course, I highly recommend taking a look at this.
