Online Business Freedom

I have been getting a lot of questions about traffic lately.

Honestly, traffic is one of those topics that Internet Marketers seek like the Holy Grail.

It’s a constant, never ending journey, full of harrowing twists and turns, laced with the perils of unscrupulous Internet “Gurus” trying to sell you faulty product.

Here’s what I know has worked for me. All my cards are on the table, and my palms are up. So here we go.

On my blog, I currently have an Alexa ranking of 338,570.

Not great, but certainly much better than a lot of other blogs. I am trying to get over this particular hump with a few new traffic generation techniques that I will talk about in a moment.

But for the past 3 months and 92 posts (the duration of this blog) I have only been doing 3-4 things consistently.

1. Article marketing – I currently use an article submission software from an Internet Marketer named James Brausch. It’s called Artemis Pro. www.ArtemisPro.com – However I am tinkering with something called PHPList, which has been touted in our blogosphere by some reputable marketers, to be much easier to use than Artemis. You can find that at www.StevenLohrenz.com

(Although I’m not sure what Steven is doing with it right now, or if it’s even available. You’ll have to check for yourself)

The other component of article marketing is obviously a list of ezine publishers to send the articles to. I have only bought a few lists for this purpose, and have around 2500 people I send articles to weekly.

The list isn’t great and about 1/3 are bad.

(Any list you can purchase isn’t going to be A+ quality. The best way is to find your own ezine publishers and to create your list that way. The best product for this purpose is Robert Phillips’ How To Build a Big Ezine List product which you can find here: http://www.bigezinelist.com - which I can personally vouch for).

2. Blog Carnivals – Certain blogs will host what are known as blog carnivals where numerous blog owners will submit their most recent and best blog posts. The blog owner hosting the carnival gets all the submissions, and chooses which blogs to post on his carnival.

The format is a basic blog post, but with many, many links to the different blog articles that were good enough to be included in the carnival. Hope that makes sense.

But as a result you get the benefit of inbound links to your blog. This strategy works only for blogs, by the way, not for any other type of website.

Blog Carnivals happen all the time. You can go to http://www.blogcarnivalz.com for an actual free video demonstration of how to submit your blog entries into different carnivals. This includes the website to go to, etc…

I would have to say that it is probably VERY close to article submission in terms of effectiveness for me.

The problem is, it’s a pain in the patootie to submit to 20-25 carnivals a week. The website I directed you to is actually a blog carnival submission service that I personally subscribe to, from Robert Phillips. Not to make this the Robert Phillips show, but he does have some good products and services.

Or you can go to James Brausch’s site to subscribe to his service. The thing is James’ is $100 a month. If you catch Robert when he’s doing a special, he’ll lower it to $30-$35 a month, which is what I’m paying to have this service done for me. I don’t even think about it anymore.

3. Blog Comments – I use Google Reader to collect a bunch of blogs with similar topics as mine. Every few days or so I leave (what I hope are) relevant, helpful comments on these blogs, and as a result, I get “blog love” back from these people. It’s a two way street, and people are grateful when you comment first. It’s pretty powerful, and fun too.

4. Misc… - Digg, StumbleUpon, Twitter… I have accounts for all three of these sites, and regularly Digg and “thumbs up” my best blog posts for the week through StumbleUpon. I update my Twitter account almost daily, and have been seeing some results there as well.

5. For the future – I am working on creating an article directory where people can submit articles to my blog. I am probably going to use Munius, another James Brausch product www.Munius.com and will have that up and running soon.

That’s it for now. Hope that helps.

-James D. Lee

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