So, is blog commenting a smart traffic strategy?

Well, it depends on how you do it. Let’s take a look.

Blog Comment Spamming Sucks!

There are A LOT of people out there who are trying to drive traffic to their own sites by posting spammy comments, manually or by using software, on other people’s blogs. If you’re one of those people, stop right now.

First of all, most blogs have “no-follows” scripted into their comments so that you’ll never get any search engine traffic from those postings.

Secondly, there’s not a REAL person on the planet that’s going to follow your link when you post some kind of ridiculous comment that doesn’t make any sense and only promotes your link.

People are smarter than that.

I seriously doubt that you’ll even get any curiosity clicks, so don’t waste your time.

Build Blog Commenting Relationships For Traffic

Now that we’ve gotten that whole spam thing out of the way, let’s talk about how you can use blog commenting to gain traffic. The key to success is to build relationships on any blog that you peruse.

If you’re the blog owner, it’s really a piece of cake to build relationships with your commenters.

But here’s a newsflash — you can build relationships as a commenter too!

Talk directly to the person who wrote the post, talk to other commenters, comment about other comments, and get involved in the blog.

Bloggers Build Community

It’s no secret that many of the people who comment on blogs, especially business oriented blogs, are bloggers themselves. That’s why relationship building on blogs is so important.

When you meaningfully participate in the community aspect of a blog, you’re creating relationships with other people who can send you a significant amount of traffic through blogs and other social media.

In other words, you have to give in order to receive.

Provide great content, post thoughtful and compelling comments, re-tweet posts, make comments about posts on facebook or other social outlets, and bookmark great posts. It all adds up to a lot of interaction with the blog community, gets the attention of the blog owner, and gives you credibility when you post a comment on that blog.

And other bloggers will reciprocate in kind.

That’s the way content REALLY spreads and how you get the kind of traffic that REALLY counts.

It takes time to build traffic this way, but it’s well-worth the effort because it becomes an unstoppable flood of traffic to your site or blog — traffic that converts.

In the end, blog commenting is a REALLY smart traffic strategy if you do it right!

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Of course she was absolutely certain that the affiliate program was ripping her off — She’d actually made sales but they weren’t credited to her affiliate account.

Maybe that was true in her case, I don’t know, but there are also other factors that could explain here lack of affiliate sales.

1.  Does the affiliate sales page convert?

This is probably the biggest thing that all affiliates should consider before joining because it will have the biggest impact on your bottom line.   Does the sales page for the affiliate product that you want to promote have a good conversion rate?  In other words, how many people who click over to the sales page actually buy the product?

Believe it or not, conversion rates average around 2%… but I’ve see affiliate sales pages converting at much, much less.  It’s not unusual to find affiliate conversion rates in the tank at 0.01%.

2.  Does the sales page offer “untracked” sales?

Sometimes an affiliate sales page offers prospects other forms of payment that can’t be tracked to the affiliate who referred them.

For example, if a prospect can order by 800 number, then the affiliate may not get credit for sales they’ve referred who purchased through that toll free number.

I’ve seen a lot of Clickbank merchants do this kind of bait and switch thing to affiliates… let me explain.

The merchant joins Clickbank and sells one of their products through them.  Once they’re in the Clickbank marketplace and affiliates start promoting them, the merchant switches over to take payments through PayPal, phone, or another payment system and cuts the affiliate out of the sales.

3.  Is your advertising targeting the right market?

This is what I think happened to my coaching client… she was getting plenty of clicks, but they weren’t people who were interested in actually buying the product she was advertising.

It’s easy, especially with pay-per-click, to get a lot of people clicking through your ad.  All you have to do is word the ad so that it provokes a lot of clicks.

But clicks aren’t what really matters in a pay-per-click campaign… quality clicks are what matter.

That’s why most PPC experts use negative qualifiers and precise information to weed out all the tire-kickers.  Once you do that and specifically target who will see your ad, you’ll find that the quality of your clicks and your return on investment (ROI) improves tremendously.  (If you want to learn more about PPC, then I highly recommend The Definitive Guide To Google Adwords!)

In the end, there are probably lots of reasons why some affiliate products don’t sell, but these are the most common problems that affiliates face.

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There’s really no secret.

I’ve been practicing attraction marketing for years in my own business.  If you’re successful, I bet you have too.

So here’s the big secret… Attraction marketing is any marketing strategy designed to “attract” people who are interested in your products, services, or business to you or your website like a magnet.

Frankly, I think attraction marketing and pre-selling are pretty much the same thing.

The idea is that you don’t want to SELL people your wares.  People hate to be “sold,” but they love to buy stuff when it hits their hot buttons and the buying experience is pleasurable.

In my mind, attraction marketing really comes in two parts… attracting interested people and enticing them to buy.  Let’s talk about each one separately.

1.  Attracting Interested People

The key to making a good living with your business, no matter what business you’re in, is to get your business in front of people who are interested in buying what you have to offer.  The more interested people who see what you’ve got, the more money you’re going to make — simple as that.

In the online world, there are lots and lots of easy ways to do that:

• Write great keyword rich content that attracts interested people through search engines.
• Write articles that will interest your target audience.
• Create videos that will attract interested people.
• Offer a free ebook, ecourse, or report to your target audience (lead capture).
• Advertise your free offer, rather than your products, services, or business.

You want to help interested people find you, but you don’t want to sell them.

You can practice attraction marketing in the offline world as well:

• Advertise a free offer on your website in newpapers, signs, flyers, billboards, etc.
• Create and advertise a recorded message about your business or products.
• Put a sign on your car.
• Use your own products publicly.

The essence of attraction marketing is that you want to give people who are interested in your products, services, or business a reason to be attracted to you and do it in a completely non-threatening way.

2.  Enticing People To Buy

First of all, you’ve got to get the dollar signs out of your eyes.  Too many people operate their business like a used car salesman.

Let me draw you a picture and you’ll see what I mean.

As you’re driving up on a car lot, you notice a group of salesmen sitting together near the entrance.  As your car turns in, all the salesmen turn towards you and you see the cold glint of dollar signs in their eyes.

You flinch just a little, but still find a parking spot and stop the car.

As you get out of the car, you notice that the salesmen are urgently talking amongst themselves until one of them puts on one of those fake smiles and starts walking towards you while the others quickly disperse.

“Hey what kind of car are we looking to buy today?”

YUK!  I hate that so much that I actually refuse to talk to sales people and make my husband deal with them.

No one likes to be treated that way in any situation.

But if you’re hard selling everyone who visits your website, then you’re acting like that money-hungry used car salesman and driving potential customers away.

You’ve heard it before, people buy from other people that they like and trust.

Your job is to give people the things that will attract them to your business, build a relationship with them, and then gently recommend your products, services, or business when they show an interest.

That’s the essence of attraction marketing.

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The Google Slap

Let me lay out my story for you.

I’ve been running Google Adwords campaigns for years from the same account, for several different niche websites.  I’ve never had a problem with them — I’ve always diligently followed the rules:

1. No squeeze pages.
2. Content-based landing pages.
3. Keywords matching the landing pages.

In fact, the majority of my landing pages have always been plain old article pages directly from my website — nothing fancy.

I had a pretty good thing going here… then I made a silly mistake.

For some reason, I got in a hurry and didn’t set up a proper article-type page for a new campaign that I started.  Instead, it was a php redirect to an affiliate sales page.  It ran for about six weeks and I made a killing with it — then Google caught it.

My sales plumetted and it didn’t take very long to figure out that I had been the victim of the dreaded Google Slap!

Every one of my landing pages in every campaign I was running (not just the offending campaign) carried a 1/10 rating.  That means that NONE of my campaigns were showing for any domain or product I was promoting through Google Adwords.

Further investigation revealed that Google also dropped my pagerank for iMarketingWatch.com site from a PR3 or PR4 to a PR1.

I immediately deleted the offending ads and hoped that Google would return my “good” campaigns to their normal 7/10-5/10 ratings.  Days went by and there was no change in my account status.

Then I deleted ALL my campaigns and started over fresh with brand new campaigns that went to articles that I have running on my blogs on other domains.  They were only designed to generate traffic, not sales, but Google ranked them at a 1/10 too, making it impossible to run the campaigns.

I repeatedly emailed Google to see if they would review my account, see that I was following the rules, and maybe stop punishing me for my one error in all these years.  They never answered my questions.

They did manage to send me an automated survey to see if I was satisfied with customer service however.

Google Slap experts claim that once you’ve been slapped you should get rid of the offending domain and start over with a new domain.  They claim that once you’ve been slapped, your site can never recover and make it back into Google’s good graces.  I haven’t decided if I want to dump iMarketingWatch.com and start over or not.  I sure hate to start over!

Apparently, you can never use the Google Adwords account that’s been slapped again either.

I deleted my account over the weekend and moved all my advertising dollars over to Yahoo.

I don’t know if starting a new account at Google would allow me to continue working with Adwords, but I’ve heard horror stories about Google tracking your IP or credit card and giving you the old Google Slap again on your new account.

Frankly, I’m not too inclined to give Google a second chance, despite it’s enormous search engine market share.  At Yahoo I’m paying less money per click and getting keywords that I would never be able to afford at Google — even before the Google Slap.

Although Yahoo generates a lot fewer impressions than Google, Yahoo seems to remember that advertisers are customers and they treat them like customers.

Obviously, Google doesn’t really care about it’s customers.  Rather than being punitive, they could easily just disable the offending campaigns for any advertiser – but they choose to brutally punish advertisers instead.

I guess you can do whatever you want when you’re the 800 lb. Gorilla.

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Most websites offer the typical ebook, report, or audio, but I think it’s high time to go beyond the typical and do something a little different.

Here are 3 seldom used, but highly effective ideas for freebies that you can use on your website to increase traffic.

1. Offer A Complete Plan

With a little research, you’ll find that many of your targeted visitors are actually looking for a specific plan to accomplish something within your industry or niche.  You can capitalize on that by offering a plan of your own.

All you have to do is find a targeted keyword for your industry that involves some kind of plan like a wood project plan, weight loss plan, craft plans, business plans, etc.  On one of my websites I even offer a plan for planning children’s birthday parties!

Once you find out what kind of plan that people want – create it and offer it on your website.

People love a good plan.

2.  Form Up On New Visitors

Speaking of things that people love – everybody loves free printable forms.

Take a look at your niche or industry, browse your keywords, and come up with a free form that your target audience is looking for.  I’ve seen forms for shopping, homeschool, legal forms, organizational forms, you name it.

Find out what your target audience is looking for, create a form for it, and offer it in a PDF.  Free printable forms always attract visitors.

3.  Cash In On Checklists

Checklists are probably the easiest of the seldom used freebies on this list to create.  All you have to do is to look at a process within your niche or industry and create a step-by-step checklist for that process.

For example, you could offer a checklist for how to create a website, baby-proofing your house, moving, planning a wedding, buying a house, etc. There are checklists for just about any niche you can think of, all you need is a little creativity and thinking outside of the box.

People love using checklists because it helps them keep organized and on track.  So all you need to do is create your checklist in a printable form, market it, and offer it to visitors as a PDF.

NOTE: Be sure to put your URL on every PDF and freebie that you offer.  It will keep your visitors coming back and may help you get new visitors when people use your freebies.

In the end, it pays big dividends to find new types of freebies to drive more targeted visitors to your website.  Be inventive and original with your visitor enticements to stand out from the crowd in your industry.

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Today I want to tell you about a ridiculous joint venture offer I recently received, show you a quick traffic tip for stealing traffic from other people’s sales letters, give you a review of a crappy product I bought this week, and play you an amusing subliminal advertising clip.

The whole podcast only runs about 10 minutes and I’ve posted my notes from the podcast below in case you’d like some to follow along.

Joint Venture Debacle

• I get JV offers frequently, but this one was absolutely ridiculous!
• The product was aweful and the offer was unprofessional (I explain in detail during the podcast)
• If you want to succeed in offering your own JV’s, you’ve got to sell it.  “What’s in it for me?”

Quick Traffic Tip

• Your search engine ranking improves when you have one-way backlinks.
• Most websites won’t give you a link unless it’s in their best interest.
• Submitting genuine testimonials is a great way to get one-way backlinks if you follow my guidelines.

Product Review

• I bought Magic List Bot, but wouldn’t recommend it to anyone.
• Find details of what it does and why I don’t recommend it in the recording.

Subliminal Messaging Gone Wrong

Sorry, you’ll have to listen to the podcast to hear this clip.  It’s a cute spoof of how advertisers use subliminal advertising.

[podcast]http://imarketingwatch.com/podcasts/week2.mp3[/podcast]

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Pre-selling is one of the best things you can learn how to do to sell more of your products and services… and who doesn’t want to do that?!?

It’s also a really excellent way to promote affiliate products to increase your income.

But most people really don’t understand what pre-selling is and how to do it.  That’s why I’ve created a simple, no-nonsense report to explain what pre-selling is and how you can use the art of pre-selling to make more money with your website.

And all it will cost you is a re-tweet!

Here’s what the report covers:

• Pre-Selling Fundamentals to get you off to a good start
• Mistakes people make that prevent them from reaping the benefits of pre-selling
• Creating pre-selling promotions that will skyrocket your profits
• Ultimate pre-selling tools to amplify your efforts and rally your bottom line

My straight-to-the-point report shows you how you can increase sales and make more money by learning how to pre-sell for profits!

Simply re-tweet through the form below and get your copy now!

Get How To Pre-Sell Your Way To High Profits Now!

Tweet Me Now To Get The Report

Twitter Username:
Twitter Password:
RT @arvadayates Make More Money Now –> Discover How To Pre-Sell Your Way To High Profits! Get Your Copy Now at http://imarketingwatch.com
Only 1 tweet will be sent and and no information is EVER stored or shared.

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Increase your sales

1. Nail Your Niche

I’m sure that you already know what a niche is and that it’s important in your business, so I won’t belabor the point here. Design your web site to be a targeted resource center for your niche market. You’ll gain repeat visitors that are interested in that topic and increase your sales overall.

2. Fabricate REAL Freebies

Freebies are a great way to give people a taste of what you have to offer, gain traffic, and increase subscribers, but it must truly be free to work.  Otherwise it destroys your credibility and will actually reduce the number of sales you get.

Worse still is when people offer freebies that are total garbage full of affiliate links.  Make your offer genuine and you’ll improve your bottom line.

3.  Lasso Leads

Websites prove to be excellent lead generation tools and you’re missing a lot of sales if you aren’t working to capture leads for your business.  Appropriately marketing your products and services to your permission based leads can increase your sales tremendously.

4.  Track Your Traffic

Visitor analysis and complete website tracking is extremely important for any online venture.  It’s the only way to track what’s working and what isn’t for your business.

5.  Elevate Emotions

When creating sales pages and promotional materials for your products and services, be sure to engage the reader’s emotions.  Triggering your reader’s emotions will always increase your sales.

6.  Design For Dollars

When it comes to generating revenue with a website, you’ve got to design your site to make money.  It should be compatible with all the popular browsers, engage your target audience, and lead visitors by the hand to make a purchase.  Your website design should have one goal and one goal only — make the sale.

7.  Pen A Plan

Sit down and write a plan for how your website will generate revenue and gain targeted traffic.  It doesn’t have to be anything formal, but a marketing plan is a must to increase your sales.  You must plan to profit.

There are tons of other strategies that will help you increase your sales, but this basic list is a great place to get started.

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1. Redesign A Product

The easiest way to increast your target market is to redesign a product or service that you already sell in order to promote it to a completely different market.

For example, let’s say you currently sell an ebook called “Lead Generation For Real Estate Agents.”  It would be really easy to tweak that ebook for other markets like day spas, beauticians, or oil changing businesses.  Once you create an ebook called “Lead Generation for Day Spas,” then you’ve increased your target market to include day spas.

You can easily repeat this strategy over and over again to increase your target market to be as large as you want.

2.  Create A Companion Product

Another pretty simple way to increase your target market is to simply create a companion product to one that you already sell.  For example, if you sell a really great software program for online marketers, you could create an ebook that outlines ingenious ways to use the program and get more out of it.

You’ll find that some of your target market will be interested in you for your software first, then buy the ebook, while others will be more interested in the ebook and then purchase the software so that they can use the creative strategies you’ve outlined.

In addition, you can also use this strategy to create companion products to other people’s products.  That would really increase your target market!

3.  Joint Venture With Others

This is a no-brainer idea to increase your target market.  All you have to do is find people to team up with in similar, but non-competing markets, and cross promote your products.

For Example, let’s say that you sell WordPress themes/templates.  You could easily create a joint venture with a WordPress plugin developer.  Your joint venture could simply be cross-promotion to each other’s list, or you could actually package both products together for sale to claim a much larger target audience that’s interested in both WordPress themes and plugins.

It’s really easy to to increase your target market exponentially and increase sales and profits with a little creativity and thinking outside of the box.

If you’d like to learn more about how to increase your target market and become a maverick in your own niche either click on the links or subscribe to 10 Days To Smokin’ Traffic Now!

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