This is the second part of the information I have gained from David Walker’s fifth webinar in a series of 6 training webinars. It was called The Traffic Jam and covered the various Types and sources of Traffic.  These included the following:

1. Free Traffic
2. Paid Traffic
3. Content Based Traffic Generation – Blogs / Article Marketing / Forums
4. Social Bookmarking
5. Video Marketing
6. Organic Search Engine Traffic
7. Using Your Email List To Leverage More Traffic

The reason for generating all the traffic you can is to get people into your sales funnel using as many of the methods listed above as you can.

3. Content Based Traffic Generation – Blogs

Comment On Other Blogs

Enter the community as an authority figure -  Detailed information on how to do this is contained in my earlier posts from Module 3.

Comment on posts made by authority bloggers. You can find them by going to http://blogsearch.google.com or for the IM niche http://www.winningthe web.com/im-top-blogs/

High quality comments add value, don’t just write “great post” or similar it is useless and may get you marked as a spammer and barred from future postings.  Remember to link to your blog url in comment form by putting your url in the form where it asks for a website address.

Don’t just leave one comment on each blog – keep returning to them and leave more comments as this will help build a relationship with the other bloggers

High quality and calibre comments raise awareness fast, they stand out in a sea of spam comments.  Don’t forget blog owners love quality comments which are related to the subject posted about.  I have had people trying to leave comments with questions that bear no relationship to the post or even my blog at all, needless to say these comments do not get approved and are deleted.

People will visit your blog to find out more  about you and see your own posts.

Additional benefits include:

• Another way for people to find you for months to come – your comment is visible to anyone looking back over the posts on the authority blog
• The comments will help your long term search engine position by giving you links to / from the other blogs and to those who come to your blog as a result

David then showed a couple of screen shots one of which was a comment he had made on another blog and showed the link back to his blog and also his last blog post title, the link to his last blog post was formed by the CommentLuv plugin. The other was a composite of 3 blogs who used the top commentators plugin and showed his position in the comments.

Write Guest Blog Posts

By commenting on other blogs you will build relationships with the blog owners hence:

• You will be on their radar
• They may have visited and/or commented on your blog
• Their readers will also be aware of you
• You will be positioned to offer them a guest blog post from you to their blog
• You get an entire page on their blog plus a link and comment area to interact with their readers
• You should only post high quality content that you would post on your blog
• It should be an original article NOT published anywhere else

You should offer to write an on topic interesting blog post which must fit the type of content they publish.  Check their submission guidelines or email them for the guidelines.  In Module 2 there were lots of blog post ideas – Pillar Content – A List Post etc.  If they don’t like the post idea you submit think of something else, you can always pitch the rejected idea to someone else.

Benefits of writing guest blog posts:

1. Instant credibility
2. A prominent link to your blog in Bio area of article giving instant traffic and helping your long term search engine position.
3. A new audience becomes aware of you and you can interact with them in the comments section
4. It builds a relationship with other blog owners for future blog posts and other JV opportunities.

This brings me to the end of part 2 of Module 5 from David Walker’s webinar series,  I will continue with Article Marketing in part 3 shortly. Any comments will be welcome. If you wish to receive notification when a new post appears sign up to receive these notifications.

This is the first part of the information I have gained from David Walker’s fifth webinar in a series of 6 training webinars. It was called The Traffic Jam and covered the various Types and sources of Traffic.  These included the following:

1. Free Traffic
2. Paid Traffic
3. Content Based Traffic Generation – Blogs / Article Marketing / Forums
4. Social Bookmarking
5. Video Marketing
6. Organic Search Engine Traffic
7. Using Your Email List To Leverage More Traffic

The reason for generating all the traffic you can is to get people into your sales funnel using as many of the methods listed above as you can.

1. Free Traffic

Advantages

• Free – thus ideal for beginners with no budget – even the gurus use free traffic as well as their paid methods because it is so valuable in  adding to their mailing list
• The only cost is your time – initially you can spend hours driving traffic to your sales funnel
• It can help you network – by putting you in touch with other marketers in your niche
• It can help build credibility along the way – you get known by other marketers as a person who can help them as they help you so that you both get what you want
• It can help your long term search engine position – the more you have out there with links back to your site the better the search engines think of you
• It will help the long term growth of your business

Disadvantages

• It is time consuming and can take you away from other parts of your business
• It can sometime be sporadic and unreliable – you may get a large number of visitors today then zero for a few days and then another surge.  Your numbers will rise and fall from day to day and will not have any consistency
• You may need to outsource these free methods – thus free is no longer free
• The methods can sometimes be hit and miss – depending on the time of day, where you are located in the world in relation to where your possible customers are located can make a huge difference to your response.
• The methods do not always product instant results

2. Paid Traffic

Advantages

• Instant traffic therefore instant sales – no waiting for days / weeks to get results
• Easily measured – this means you can predict conversion rates
• Can be scaled up easily – spend $10 get x return spend $100 get 10 times x in return

Disadvantages

• Out of reach for the beginner with no budget
• If inexperienced you can lose a lot of money easily.  Eg. you pay so much per click and can get thousands of clicks per day so that if you pay $0.05 per click and get 1,000 clicks per day it will cost you $50 per day, $350 per week or approx $1,500 per month and you can pay much more than $0.05 per click. Think about what you would have to pay if it cost you $2 or $3 per click.
• If you turn off the paid adverts your traffic will stop – you do not want to be reliant on one traffic source
• It does nothing to build your credibility
• It will not help you to get high ranking in the organic search engine positions

The remainder of the webinar concentrated on free methods of traffic generation such as:

1. Blogging (A )Commenting on other peoples blogs, (B) Writing guest blog posts
2. Article Marketing
3. Forums
4. Social Bookmarking
5. Twitter
6. Facebook
7. Video Marketing
8. Organic Search Engine Traffic
9. Ad Swaps

This brings me to the end of part 1 of Module 5 from David Walker’s webinar series,  I will continue with part 2 shortly. Any comments will be welcome. If you wish to receive notification when a new post appears sign up to receive these notifications.