If you haven’t heard of them … well, I’ll let TechCrunch tell you about Fiverr since they did such a fine job telling me:

Fiverr is a marketplace for gigs that are priced at $5. Essentially, you can sell and buy tasks for $5. So anyone can create a gig for small service on the site, and visitors can accept gigs as well. Gig prices are fixed at $5. Buyers can order gigs and are required to pay for the gig in advance. Fiverr takes $1 off of the $5 fee.

So the money question is – how can this generate traffic for you?

Two ways. The Advertising section. You have to do some due diligence to get a really good deal. But since you’re only giving up $5 to sample services, if it doesn’t work out, you haven’t bet the farm.

So why isn’t this likely a scammer’s dream? Well, it’s in Fiverr’s interests to keep scoring that buck. So if word gets out that the guy you keep giving fivers and getting hosed, they’re out future monies.

You’ll have to do a bit of digging, and I say, as always, at least Google the person you’re trusting, and check them out on the social web to be as sure as possible that you’re not getting burned.

The other way you can get traffic from this is to offer bite-sized samples of your services to people through the site. Give people who inquire links to your work on your site. Host the form that collects buyers info on your site. Find a way to get them to your site and/or on your list so you can follow up with them in the future.

Note: I’m less trustful and still testing the Social Marketing section out. There are a lot more variables in play. More on that another day perhaps.

If you can’t get the traffic you need on your own, get bundled in with someone else’s promotion. Let them drive all the traffic, and you just slip in a high quality item of your own for free.

Now, there ARE dangers to this. You need the full endorsement of the party whose package you’re included in, or your stuff may be seen as just some free filler junk.

But when this is done correctly – Oh. Boy. The traffic is unstoppable because first, you’re in front of an audience of known buyers.

Second, you’re associated with and endorsed by someone they trusted enough to buy from.

Third, if you’re good, they’re going to talk about you. They’ll tell their friends, their spouses, their kids, fellow entrepreneurs, people they work with, people they want to impress.

Heck sometimes they’ll tell people they don’t even LIKE.

Who knows where this human impulse to be seen as a resource of goodies comes from? Use it to your advantage and BE the resource.

So how do you get bundled in? Look for people making bundles.

Zero Cost Promotions helps you find authors who want to boost their sales with related giveaways.

Help a Reporter Out has a new list for gift bags that can help you find people to get bundled with, or help you find people to be included in your bundle.

This $17 special has several good resources for finding list-building giveaways, and some advice on running one of your own.

You can contact conferences – sponsors and speakers often get a spot in the swag bag. Or you could be an exhibitor at an expo and just give swag away in exchange for emails. I could do a whole tip just on swag…. maybe I will…

The essential thing to remember here is that you’re leveraging the resources of the combined group of related items to widen your exposure among audiences that don’t know you yet.

What makes a good piggyback ride?

1. When the other person is much bigger than you. Otherwise what’s the point?
2. A willing and able piggybacker.
3. Mutual benefit – for example, you’re both having fun.

The same is true in business. If you look carefully, you’ll often see some of the companies you work with offer to share the might of their promotional powerhouse with you.

I love Google Checkout. Over the years, my clients have grown to enjoy them as well.

It seems like a lot safer way to be paid for large sums of money than a check – up to several months later if the recipient of my services is dissatisfied, they can reach me through the system. I don’t have to risk checks that may bounce, and there’s an easy way for customers to leave me recommendations.

In the last year or so, they’ve begun to include me in their holiday promotions.  I haven’t had enough notice from them to actually make sales from them, but the two-way promotion still benefits us both.

I get listed as a company having a promotion through Google Checkout – the association between my company and Google is a nice perk. They’re already promoting holiday discounts and I get included in that.

Meanwhile, they get promoted to my audience and some of the trust I’ve built with them transfers to Google. My clients see a safe way to try my services, knowing I’d never want to sully my reputation with Google. I, in turn, am protected against fraudulent orders.

Win-win-win.

Check with some of the bigger companies you work with, or even smaller companies with wider audiences. There are all kinds of joint promotion opportunities out there.

Every month of the year has a holiday. And every holiday is an excuse to get in touch with the people around you — why shouldn’t that include your customers and clients?

Whether it’s a funny video, a sale, a contest, or a quick email with warm holiday wishes, holidays are a fine reason as any to follow-up with the audience that has requested information from you.

It doesn’t have to be a big deal, but don’t opt for just the boring “Happy Whatever Day!” message every time either. Give something away, hold an event, give an award – whatever you do, make it a memorable experience as often as you can.

This helps your traffic and sales because sometimes it’s just a matter of reminding people who were on the cusp of buying that you’re there to serve them.

This tip is goes really well with a tip I got from Jimmy D. Brown, which is to focus more of your affiliate  marketing efforts on membership sites that pay you a commission every  month.

If I was starting over with an online business, I would have built my  empire every differently, in anticipation of the days when I would be  unable to work.

First, I would have built  a better membership than the one I  have now, more like the one I used to have.

(Which is why I’m  completely revamping my membership site.)

Second, I would have joined  and found the most valuable memberships and shared them with my  audience.

If you really want to go into detail about this, you  should join Jimmy’s blog.

For now, all I’ll say is this. If you sell 200  memberships to a site that pays you a profit of even $10 a month, if  you’re like most people, you can quit your day job. If you do that in a  month, then do it again the next month, you’re not starting over, you’re  doubling your income.

But let’s get to the part about the traffic tip. What’s the perfect traffic tip to complement the membership site model?

Membership sites are a different animal to promote.  You can’t leverage the content to promote the site because the content  is what makes the site worth paying for access, and most of the great  social media and search methods for promotion are based on content. So  you can either pay for content, or do this.

As an affiliate,  you’ll want to use the micro-tip.

Build content around the topics of the  membership sites you want to promote. Find the gap between the  knowledge the membership is offering and the knowledge of the newbie,  and give pieces of that content away for free as bait to get them to  join your content stream.

Then leverage that content stream -  free membership site, daily tweets, newsletter, whatever – to introduce  them to different membership sites in that area, until they say yes to  one or more of them.

This doesn’t always mean a whole article,  or even a whole paragraph. Sometimes, a sentence is enough. If I was  selling a site with monthly personal development tips, I could pick an  expert for that month and quote them.

Mike Dooley says, Thoughts Become Things. I could pop the video about that into my blog with a link leading to his site. (If he had a membership site.)

It can be that simple.

Find a topic, find membership sites in that topic, find micro-tips to lead prospects to sign up to hear from you, then given them micro-tips matched to various membership sites until they join.

An affiliate marketer, is, of course, a person who makes the majority of their income marketing other people’s products.

As someone who sells my own products, I give affiliates incentives to sell my products by calculating how much I would spend to get a new lead to buy a given product, and passing that income on to my affiliates.

Sometimes that’s up to 50%, so on a $100, an affiliate would incur none of the cost of creating the product, paying for professional graphics, sales copy, hosting, etc.

If you’re an affiliate, you do, however, have to figure out how to get people to buy a product with the cost of doing so as close to zero as possible, to maximize the money you put in your pocket, and reduce the amount of up-front money you spend on expenses.

Confused about how this is possible? You’re not alone.

Because if you simply dump as much money as you can into advertising, you’re not always certain of the return. You might turn to free traffic methods, but you can only be sure that your time investment will be profitable IF you’re able to predict a steady conversion rate of immediate visitors to sales.

Then there’s the fact that you’d constantly be starting over again. Once the customer decides to buy or not buy, or the hype for the product dies down, you’ll have to start your search for the perfect customer all over again.

Unless you apply the super affiliate traffic secret.

The secret is right before your eyes. In internet marketing circles, who always seems to make the most money from a big launch, you know, besides the product owner.

Yes, the JV partners. And who makes the best kinds of partners?

People with their own audiences.

People with lists they can mail out to whenever the next new thing comes out.

Now, I’m not trying to tell you that you need to go out and get a list of 100,000 people before you can be a super affiliate. You could start out well enough with a list of 1000. But you’ve got to start out with some kind of list, at some time.

Start a site of your own to capture people who are all interested in the area you most often market in. It could be as simple as a one page site with a video, a short summary of your newsletter and a sign-up block. Or it could be a blog that you maintain daily, maybe a forum.

The point is, start a central location, a base of operations where you start your own community of like-minded individuals. Then you’ll be making suggestions to the same group of people each month.

There’s another big secret super affiliates have, but that’s technically another tip.

The next one, in fact.

We’ve all had this same thing happen to us. We’ve heard about a new site or stumbled across one that the wish to visit from time to time – and guess what – we either didn’t make note of it, forgot the name, blah, blah blah.

Well here’s an add on that will help.

Monitors web pages for updates. Useful for websites that don’t provide Atom or RSS feeds.

Features:
* Select how often each site will be scanned
* Changes to pages are highlighted automatically
* Minor changes can be ignored
* Full international support

Beta Channel

The Beta Channel lets you test an experimental new version of this add-on before it’s released to the general public. Once you install the beta version, you will continue to get updates from this channel.

Check it out!

Here’s another Popup Translater – this time it’s in Chinese!

Chinese Popup Study Tool: Mouse over on words you dont know and it will give you the pronunciation and meaning. Supports Chinese to English and German. Browse websites and add words to a wordlist in the sidebar and export them later for studying.

Yes, she is.

Having lived in Japan during the early ’60’s this Add-on caught my eye.

I had a wonderful time there, learned the language and wish I could have stayed forever. The Yen to Dollar ration was 360 Yen to $1.00 dollar!

Japanese Popup Study Tool: Mouse over on words you dont know and it will give you the pronunciation and meaning. Supports Japanese to English, French, German, and Russian. Browse websites and add words to a wordlist in the sidebar to export later.

This post is part of our 68 Traffic Tips day. To find the complete list when we’re done, see the original post. Be sure to subscribe to get a weekly round-up of our daily traffic tips.

1. Before you write your first blog post, make a list of topics that speak directly to what people in your industry are most asking about. If you don’t know, consult WordTracker Questions.
2. Do keyword research on your topic to use as tags and as subjects to write about. Run them through an online thesaurus as well.
3. Optimize your blog for search engines. Properly configured blogs can get a continuous flow of traffic from search engines that is easy to maintain.
4. Already have a blog? Double your blog posting for a week. Look at your traffic stats – this can bring 25 – 200% more traffic.
5. Comment on more blogs by people in compatible markets. If  you’re an interior decorator, it’s all well and good to comment on other interior decorator’s blogs, but you have more of an exclusive market among, say, local realtor blogs
6. Submit to as many blogs taking guest blog posts as you can.
7. Get some guest blogging happening on your site – it’ll give you a break and help you form partnerships.
8. Don’t discount blog carnivals, or think that they’re beneath you. They tend to drive a lot of targeted traffic that’s actively interested in the topic.

This post is part of our 68 Traffic Tips day. To find the complete list when we’re done, see the original post. Be sure to subscribe to get a weekly round-up of our daily traffic tips.

1. If you have a blog, you have an RSS feed. Its job is to talk to other machines about your site on your behalf. Those bot to bot conversations increase your traffic and help more people see your site, either directly through listings, or indirectly by helping your search rankings. Do at least the basics to take care of your feed.
2. No one loves RSS, okay? I never actually liked it much, but I always understood that it was necessary to grow. Stop trying to hug it, and start having a basic understanding of how it helps your business.
3. If you don’t have a site newsletter, use RSS to make your blog posts into email newsletters, then put the email subscription box at the top right of your site, as a fade-in after entering or as a slide-up from the bottom of the site. Aweber will do this for you automatically.
4. About once a week, make sure your feed is validating. Sometimes all it takes is a rarely used character in the title to break your feed.
5. Submit your feed to the top RSS search engines. There aren’t hundreds of them as there once were, but for the good ones remaining, like Syndic8, the links can’t hurt you.
6. RSS is what helps your site speak to social media sites automatically, but what if you aren’t sure what is helping and how often? Try FeedBurner. It’s my opinion that the service has been on the decline since Google took it over a year ago, but that take into account the height it was at when the fall began. It’s still does a decent job of tracking your traffic, (< vent > even if I can’t log into my account after asking for a whole YEAR what happened during my feed transfer (< /vent >)
7. Google Reader. Yes, that’s the whole tip. Of the minority of people who use a Feed Reader, Google Reader is the top choice. Stick the button on your site, glance over your headlines in Google Reader now and again. Wouldn’t hurt you to share some items over there too.
8. In the full-feed vs excerpt feed debate, it depends. You get more RSS readers with full feed, and more comments. You get more page views with excerpts, and less theft of your intellectual property. My solution with new sites is to offer both, and allow the short feed to be syndicated by anyone, with a link at the bottom of each short feed post letting readers know we offer full text as well.

This post is part of our 68 Traffic Tips day. To find the complete list when we’re done, see the original post. Be sure to subscribe to get a weekly round-up of our daily traffic tips.

1. If in a crunch, you can’t get your social media activities done in an hour a week, you’re doing it wrong, if you’re doing it for business. There’s no reason you have to be on Twitter for hours to see results. There is a much better way.
2. While you can pick two to five major channels to concentrate on and echo content into the lesser channels of that type, it’s not the best strategy to do that with all of them. In other words, if you like Twitter the best of all the status update type sites, and you want to echo posts into identi.ca, it may not be Best, but it’s… okay. However, it’s not smart to implement a status update strategy on a site like LinkedIn. Professional networking is a lot more than status updates, and if that’s all you’re going to do on LinkedIn, why are you using it?
3. Numbers matter. They shouldn’t but they do. That doesn’t mean pursuing higher numbers at all costs will help you though. 5000 followers looks better than 100, but it’s not helping your steak restaurant if they’re all vegetarians.
4. Quality matters. It should. That doesn’t mean you should stop at 10 painters for your gallery’s account. You need to develop relationships with people who love art, people who talk or write about art, people who hang out with artists, and the people who sponsor them. Get a good mix.
5. Facebook now drives more traffic than Google in many instances, and is a top source of traffic even in the exceptions. Even if you don’t want to use your Facebook profile for networking, get serious about your Facebook page. You don’t have to love Facebook to use it for business.
6. Don’t be afraid to use social media as part of marketing – just don’t confuse social media participation as  marketing activity by default. Although social media itself is not a campaign, there IS such a thing as a social media campaign – case in point, if you organize bloggers to talk about your event at the same time, that’s a social media campaign. It has a beginning a middle and an end.
7. All media is social. Keep that in mind when you create web content. I can tweet, blog, podcast about anything I want. Social media as terminology is defunct, and only still used as a frame of differentiation between the old way and the new way.
8. Remember why you’re using social media. If you can’t leverage ANY of the social media relationships you’re forming to help you in your business, in some way, you have to ask yourself what the purpose of your participation is.
9. Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Digg and Delicious aren’t the only social media sites in the world. There are other top sites like BusinessWeek’s Business Exchange, StumbleUpon, PlugIM, Sphinn, and Ecademy that can help you just as much or more than the current favorites. Test the ones in your niche, and get promoted there, too.

This post is part of our 68 Traffic Tips day. To find the complete list when we’re done, see the original post. Be sure to subscribe to get a weekly round-up of our daily traffic tips.

1. Choose one cookie based and one IP based statistics program, as the numbers are a bit different depending on which one you use.
2. Look at a snapshot of your traffic using your statistics program weekly or monthly.
3. Before you do keyword research, make sure you’re using the right keywords.
4. Try asking your audience what they’d type into a search engine to find you.
5. Instead of pursuing just the competitive, short tail terms (short phrases like “internet marketing“), or only less competitive,  long tail phrases (longer phrases such as “how do I get started in internet marketing?”), use some of the longer phrases to reach the shorter phrases – rank for both.
6. Choose one family of keywords and optimize for it. Unless you’re a seasoned expert, you’re not going to rank for dentist, dental practice, cosmetic dentistry, california dental work and los angeles crown settings. Pick an area, dominate it, then if you can, leverage your way into some of the other less competitive areas.
7. Getting good search rankings is mainly about the quest to present to the search engines a balance of content and links.
8. The harder, or more competitive, the keyword, the more complex it is to correctly balance the equation of content + links= a good ranking.  The harder the keywords, the more multiple subtle factors come into play, but they are all related to these two items.
9. There’s more than one way to skin a cat (and I still want to know when and why, in history we inherited this expression.  Why would I want to skin a cat?) Nearly every theory of search can be debunked or supported by theory. What you want to find is the method that got results for companies like yours.
10. Now that Google is trending towards personalization based on social circles, the quality of your social circle matters more than ever, as does the content you submit. Keep keywords and content in mind.
11. Get into Google News with a press release.
12. Get into Google News with an article.
13. Get into Google News as a news provider.
14. Pay more attention to Video. Film and television are the two mediums the masses are used to, and by far appear to be the most successful vehicles to promote your content.  It’s far easier to rank with video than with text as many companies fail to realize how important video is.
15. Go into any videos you have on YouTube and request the new auto-captioning available for all videos on YouTube with clear audio tracks. You can later take the auto-captioned file, improve it and re-upload with your corrections.
16. Google is also placing more of an emphasis on localization in its shift to more personalized results. Be sure to log into the Google Local Business Center, as well as Yahoo’s, and get your local business office set up, whether or not you have a site.
17. Google Blog Search is increasing in prominence as Google continues to change the look of the results page. If you don’t have a blog, start one. If you do have one, make sure it’s positioned correctly in Google Blog Search, not just for a general search, but for the times you publish a new post.
18. Updates are another featured area of the upcoming new Google results page (you can already see this new Google look as the default on new computers, reportedly). To get in on this action, you want to make sure your tweets, and other real-time updates are on-message. That doesn’t mean talk about yourself all the time, it means, be consistent.
19. If you have things to sell, Google products is for you. It’s much easier to submit than it was back when it was Google Base.
20. Don’t forget about Yahoo, Bing, Ask, or the major directories, general or niche. Just because they aren’t Google doesn’t mean they aren’t important. Those of us who thought Yahoo was the only place that mattered were blindsided when Google came along, as were those who refused to add social media to their marketing mix, now that Facebook is driving as much traffic, or more than, Google. Today’s newbie could be tomorrow’s giant.
21. Pay attention to the major players, and niche rulers in search and directories, but be selective about anyone outside the top ten. The idea that submitting your site to 6000 directories will get you anything other than links at the 10% of them that count at all, is a myth. And you can get 600 equivalent links from article marketing, forum marketing, or buying them, so what’s the difference?

This post is part of our 68 Traffic Tips day. To find the complete list when we’re done, see the original post. Be sure to subscribe to get a weekly round-up of our daily traffic tips.

1. There’s two types of article marketing, high profit and high link value. To maximize exposure and be considered a thought leader, you want to do a lot of the first type, in order to get noticed by people who can offer the second type to you.
2. In high link value article marketing, you’re attempting to get your articles published in as many venues as possible that are noticed by search engines.
3. In high profit article marketing, you want two things. First, to be published in ezines. Second, for the high link value articles you’ve written to be noticed by editors on major publications, so they can invite you to write as part of their small, exclusive bank of expert writers. Some of these publications have tens of thousands, even millions of subscribers.
4. In high value article marketing, you can worry about things like anchor text (what words are used when linking to a page) or other issues that associate your content or site with a given keyword, but don’t obsess. Search Engine Optimization (SEO)  in article marketing is secondary. The primary goal is the same as the primary goal always is – make more sales. Don’t lose sight of this in the name of SEO.
5. If you’re having trouble coming up with a topic to write about, start with your product. What problem does it solve? What are people who have that problem typing into search engines?
6. The number one thing to worry about when writing an article isn’t the title, the resource box, the keywords, the links, or even the content. It’s how many people that article can reach, followed by what percentage of those people can be persuaded to take your most desired action after reading it.
7. If you don’t like to write, record yourself talking about the issue for three to five minutes, then send it to be transcribed. Clean it up and you have an article.
8. Try and tie your tip to breaking news when you can. If you can’t get an editor to publish it quickly enough, post it to your blog first.
9. If you’re trying to leverage search results to your site, post articles to your site first. Then the article on your site is the original, and every one else’s is the duplicate.
10. If you want to leverage the search power of another site that has a better chance of capturing a top ten ranking than your site, publish your article at that site first.

This post is part of our 68 Traffic Tips day. To find the complete list when we’re done, see the original post. Be sure to subscribe to get a weekly round-up of our daily traffic tips.

1. The first thing you want to do when attempting to drive traffic to a site is assess whether or not methods other than advertising will work on the site. For example, you can’t do article marketing successfully with an affiliate link.
2. The next thing you want to do if a site is viable, is determine which of the available methods will go with your site, prioritizing from the most compatible to the least.
3. Every business that has a web site, and many that don’t, can benefit from organic search or social media, usually both. The complicated part is how. When in doubt, rely on a plan with those two things at its center.
4. Make sure that at some point before proceeding, you have a goal for the project. You can’t evaluate whether you’ve been successful if you don’t know whether traffic has gone up, if sales are rising, if more people are subscribing etc. Choose a traffic goal that’s directly related to your business objectives.
5. Determine the desired path through your site to a sale – what is the money funnel, and is it sound? Do people come to the site, subscribe, buy? Should they see your ad and then call? If so, are they doing it? If not, why not?
6. Never rely on one traffic method – what happens if it fails or is suddenly obsolete?
7. Don’t try to do ALL the traffic methods you come across either, not unless you have a staff to execute on your behalf. Instead of attempting to do every traffic method you’ve heard of, add one at a time of up to five methods. Drop the ones that don’t work and replace them with new techniques.
8. In selecting the five core techniques you want to use, it helps if they play off each other. In other words, if part of your mission is to build links, then article marketing or forum posting might help you get there faster. Approaching them with a mind to maximize those particular strengths will be more effective than doing so as an after thought.
9. Test each traffic technique by isolating as much as you can. Try blocking a page from being indexed by search engines, and testing the method on only that page.
10. At the same time, don’t get so attached to testing and test results that you can’t proceed without 100% proof positive that the specific technique works the way you wanted it to – sometimes that gets in the way. For example, a tracking link in a resource box of an article will get much less traffic than a regular link.
11. Get help if you need it. No one expects you to be brilliant at your business And at marketing it. Even if you are, you only have two hands. Get a virtual assistant. Hire a marketing team or a search expert.
12. When you hire someone, or choose someone’s advice to follow, do your homework. Google their name, their site and their company, and pay attention to both compliments and complaints. Check if they’re respected by their peers – are they guest speakers or authors outside their own web site? Who are they affiliated with?