Nick's Traffic Tricks

Video: I got 1,300 visitors fom StumbleUpon in the last week

Nick Stewart — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 15:05:47 +0000

Links from the video

My Traffic Generation Checklist

6 Reasons Quality Content Receives More Traffic And Makes More Money

Video: How I do keyword research

Nick Stewart — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 14:12:29 +0000

What is your biggest traffic or money making question?

Nick Stewart — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 05:00:21 +0000

I want to help

I want to know what your biggest traffic or money making question is. And I will do my best to answer it.

Just leave a comment at the bottom of this post and I will answer your question.

Some possible questions

How do I do keyword research?
How I get my site indexed by Google?
How do I get my site to rank higher in the search engines?
How do I use social media to drive traffic?
How do I get targeted traffic?
How do I use pay per click?
How do I do search engine optimization?
How do I get people to come back to my site?
How do I use twitter to drive traffic?
How do I use the article marketing to drive traffic?

So what is your biggest question?

If you could hire me or one of the gurus and ask them any question, what would you ask them?

The reason I’m asking this is because I am trying to improve what I write about by focusing on what you need.

So what is it that I can help you with?

Leave a comment below and tell me how I can help.

2 Winners Of My 84 Traffic Videos – Saturday Nov. 14, 2009

Nick Stewart — Sun, 15 Nov 2009 15:49:26 +0000

Today’s Winners

Today’s winners are:

@LisaMarieDias on Twitter
Adam from my email list: adamful***@ymail.com

Enter to Win My 84 Traffic Videos

Discover 2 ways to win here.

65 Website Traffic & Link Building Techniques

Nick Stewart — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 05:00:20 +0000

This originally posted as 65 Website Traffic & Link Building Techniques. It has been reposted with the author’s permission.

1. Write something great about your niche and email other bloggers to let them know – there’s a good chance they’ll link to you

2. Have a signature link in forums that points to your site

3. Post links to your pages to social bookmarking sites.

4. Leave comments on other people’s blogs and link back to your site (tip: look in the digg upcoming section for blog posts about to get a lot of traffic).

5. Have the opposite opinion on everyone else on a popular topic, providing you can justify it. Everyone will get annoyed and link to you saying your wrong

6. Answer questions on Yahoo Answers – quote your website as the source.

7. Post in Yahoo and Google Groups with a link to your site in your signature

8. Make a 404 page that redirects to your homepage – no point losing visitors

9. Have an opt-in form – trade links with someone else who has an opt in form on your confirmation page

10. Review a product or company – if your review is positive email the company and ask to be featured in their press section. (this has worked really well for me)

11. Write articles and submit them to article directories

12. Write a Press Release and submit it to PRWeb (make sure it is newsworthy)

13. Use PayPerClick Traffic (e.g Adwords, MSN Adcenter, YSM)

14. Add an RSS subscribe button/link in a high profile spot on your site

15. Add a mailing list subscribe form in a high profile spot on your site

16. Add a bookmark this site link in a high profile spot on your site

17. Use a Tell A Friend Script on your site so people can email their friend about an article on your website.

18. Submit a blog to a blog directory

19. Submit you RSS feed to RSS feed directories

20. Mention your website in a post on Craigslist (don’t spam)

21. Optimize the titles of your pages for keywords people will search for

22. Buy links to your site

23. Buy reviews about your site on other people’s site

24. Buy banner space on other websites if you can get a good ROI

25. Send articles to ezine publishers with a link back to your website

26. Do a big viral push for a piece of link bait, post it in forums, social bookmarking sites like digg, email bloggers, and get a few people to vote for you on social bookmarking sites – this little push could start a viral chain reaction!

27. Have a link to your site on community sites like MySpace and FaceBook

28. Use a traffic trading system like BlogRush

29. Purchase misspellings of competitors domains and redirect your site (be careful of trademark infringement)

30. Create a freebie product to give away (ebook, software, whitepaper etc.)

31. Submit your site to the hundreds of free directories – use the viles-silencer list

32. Do a group feature where you get other website owners in your niche to participate – maybe asking them all an opinion on something.

33. Hold a competition for the Top 50 in your niche – 1 month later post the results and let everyone know who featured – watch them link back to say what there position was.

34. Pass out business cards when you go to industry events in your niche

35. If you have a product start an affiliate program and start approaching affiliates

36. Submit videos to video sharing sites like YouTube and Metacafe. Include a link in the description and within the actual video.

37. If you have a product send it to website owners to get reviewed.

38. Look at a big website within your niche and ask to write some guest posts for them

39. Create pages with links to your site on places like Squidoo and Hubpages

40. Place classified Ads on eBay with a link to your website

41. Use an autoresponder on your mailing list to keep people coming back to your site

42. Exchange links with a few related sites in your niche

43. Network! Email other site owners, phone them up, go to industry events and get yourself known. If they know your face they will likely talk about you on their site if you do something interesting.

44. Many forums have a place for you to advertise your site once – find them and do it.

45. Purchase advertising in other people’s mailing lists and newsletters

46. Create an Amazon profile and start submitting reviews

47. Create profiles on MySpace and start networking in groups that are interested in your site’s niche.

48. Conduct a survey and publish the results – make sure you let people know about it.

49. Get your hand on a load of PLR content for your niche. Add a commentary to the top, create a unique title, and post them all to your site – lots of new content and lots of new traffic.

50. Create a cartoon mascot for your site – then hold a competition for someone to create the best game for it – pay the winner a decent amount.

51. Make sure you have a memorable domain name that is short and catchy.

52. Use a well-searched for keyword within your domain name to help rank for that keyword.

53. If you sell a product ask someone else who sells a product to list your product with theirs, and you’ll do the same for them – split commissions on sales.

54. When you write a new article on your site – link to as many blogs as possible – they will likely see your site in their pingbacks, website stats, or Technorati. They will visit your site and possibly subscribe to it and link back at a later date.

55. Get your RSS feed syndicated to different sites like Zimbio and hubpages and Topix.

56. If your site is popular and has quality unique content then apply to get listed in Google’s News search.

57. Create a sitemap and submit it to Google (not great but might help)

58. Use your robots.txt file to stop Google indexing certain directories and pages on your blog (such as archives) to avoid duplicate content issues).

59. Create a couple of small 10 page sites related to your main site. Offer links on these smaller sites in return for links to your main site (this is triangular reciprocal linking).

60. Get yourself known as an expert and get featured in offline magazines, TV and radio stations.

61. Use an auto-translator service to translate your site into other languages – put it in a subdirectory and watch foreign traffic come in.

62. Make posts about sex (don’t have to post anything rude) – and watch the porn surfers find their way to your site through Google.

63. Post about celebrities current events if it relates to your niche – there’s always a lot of people looking up celebrity stuff.

64. Write good headlines/titles – good titles get more clicks.

65. Get some stickers with your domain name on. Go out and stick them on strangers and say “My Website Yeah, Check it out.”

What is your gender?

Stop the madness and start getting traffic by selecting the correct keywords

Nick Stewart — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 13:49:04 +0000

A very common question

I frequently get e-mails from individuals wanting to know how they can get their website to rank high for a highly competitive keyword i.e. forex or real estate.

And the worst part is they don’t have that keyword in their domain, title tags, or anywhere on their page.

And yet they expect me to somehow give them a magic bullet that will make them number one on Google for a supercompetitive keyword.

Sorry folks, but it just doesn’t work that way.

The Secret

The secret to getting traffic is to select the correct keywords. This is the very first step.

If you skip this step then nothing else will work.

Sure, I have lots of posts with creative ways to build back links get your site indexed and to rank high in the search engines. But all of this is built on the assumption that the correct keywords have been selected.

How to select the correct keywords

Selecting the right keywords comes down to two things: relevance and competition.

If you take care of these two things everything else will fall in place.

So what do I mean by relevance?

When selecting a keyword you must make sure that it is super relevant to whatever product you’re selling.

You must know the needs and wants of the visitor you want to attract. You must define exactly what they are looking for. And then choose your keywords based on this.

I recently received an e-mail from someone asking me how to get their site to rank high for the keyword: computers.

The problem is that you know nothing about people that search for computers. They could be looking for computer parts, or computer repairs, or computer software, or computer tutorials, or computer classes, or computer books.

The picture below displays the most common computer related keywords according to the Google wonder wheel. (Learn more about the Google wonder wheel here.)

You can see how it is very difficult to advertise to people that have such diverse wants and needs.

So the solution is simple: choose keywords that are very specific.

A good keyword phrase tells a story about a person and helps you to understand their wants and needs.

For example, the keyword phrase “stop hair breakage” immediately tells you what a person is looking for. Armed with this knowledge you can select highly targeted advertisements and making more money and get better conversions.

Typically good keyword phrases are comprised of 3 to 6 words. “Stop hair breakage” has 3 words and “how to stop smoking” has 4 words.

How to determine the competition

Once you’ve selected a good keyword phrase it is time to evaluate the competition. It is very likely that you have found several potential keyword phrases and you would like to know which one is best.

One thing to remember is that keyword phrases with more words in them typically have less competition.

For each keyword phrase that I am considering I go through the following steps. I have outlined how to do keyword competitive analysis in other posts but I will put it in this one for your convenience.

The process

I use Google’s free tool to determine how many people are searching for a particular keyword phrase. You can check use the tool here.

For my keyword stop hair breakage there are 2,900 monthly searches on average.

Next I will go to Google and search for: stop hair breakage
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&source=hp&q=stop+hair+breakage&aq=0&oq=stop+hair+br&aqi=g4g-m6

Looking at the search results I can see that there are 75,300 websites competing for this phrase.

Next I will go to Google and search for: “stop hair breakage”
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=”stop+hair+breakage”&aq=f&oq=&aqi=g2g-m2

Looking at the search results there appear to be over a million competing sites. This seems a little off considering the previous search results. I may choose to ignore this.

Now I’m going to search Google and see how many people have the the words stop hair breakage in their title
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=allintitle:stop+hair+breakage&aq=f&oq=&aqi=

There are only 1,480 sites that have these words in their title. This is a low score and it looks very good.

Now I am going to search Google and see how many people have the words stop hair breakage in their URL
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=allinurl:stop+hair+breakage&aq=f&oq=&aqi=

Only 373 websites have these words in their URL. I can definitely compete with that!

I go through this process for each keyword phrase that I’m considering. When I have completed this process there will usually be at least one keyword phrase that stands out having the most searches and the least amount of competition.

The next steps

Once you have identified your keywords it is time to optimize your site for the search engines using those keywords:

After you’ve optimized you need to start creating back links and start getting traffic:

18 VIDEOS: Idiots Guide To Internet Marketing With, SEO, YouTube, MySpace, Facebook, RSS Feeds and More….

Nick Stewart — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 05:00:37 +0000

Introduction

Below are 18 short videos taken from a seminar where Jeff Johnson spoke.

In these videos he gives some incredible content. After watching the videos I had a couple pages of notes on how to get more traffic to my websites.

I hope you enjoy the videos as much as I did!

Part 1

WPvideo 1.10

Download!

How To Get Traffic 101

Nick Stewart — Sun, 08 Nov 2009 01:40:36 +0000

I Want To Get Traffic To My Website, But Where Do I Start?

Often I hear people say, “I want to get traffic, but where do I start?”

The purpose of this post is to give a roadmap of where to start.

And if you ever have a question, feel free to ask me. I will do my best to answer your questions.

Know What Google Wants

If you’re going to get traffic from Google and other search engines then you need to know what they are looking for.

In my article What Google Really Cares About I cover what you need to know about the kind of content Google is looking for.

Search Engine Optimization

Before you worry about getting links and trying to get traffic you need to take a few steps and optimize your site for the search engines. It’s not hard and it’s well worth your time:
Search Engine Optimization and Keywords

Also check out:

Keyword Research

Part of search engine optimization is keyword research. Selecting the correct keywords is crucial to getting traffic. I have covered this in detail in several posts:

Get Your Site Crawled & Indexed By The Search Engines

Getting your site crawled & indexed is easy and has nothing to do with submitting your site to 10 gazillion search engines.

For proven ways to do this (and they’re all free!) read:
11 Ways To Get Indexed By Google Super Fast

Build Links To Your Site

One of the best ways to get traffic is to get other websites to link to you. I have covered this in several posts:

Article Marketing

If you are a decent writer then you can quickly build backlinks to your site and get traffic with article marketing. This will work well for people who have a lot of time and little money.

Social Media

You can get quick traffic from social media. This works best if you have unique and quality content.

Google AdSense

Advertising

Affiliate Marketing

Article Marketing

Blogging

Domains & Hosting

Email Marketing

Keywords

Link Building

Making Money

How 2 Hours Of Work Makes Me $100 A Month

Motivational

Question Box

StumbleUpon

How I Got 25 People To Stumble My Site And Give It A Thumbs Up

Traffic

Twitter

YouTube

4 Ways To Get Traffic From YouTube

Writing

2 Winners Of My 84 Traffic Videos – Saturday Nov. 7, 2009

Nick Stewart — Sat, 07 Nov 2009 16:12:50 +0000

Today’s Winners

Today’s winners are:

@Paul_ic7 on Twitter
Marie from my email list: marie.san***@rocketmail.com

Enter to Win My 84 Traffic Videos

Discover 2 ways to win here.

10 Ways To Get More Traffic From Twitter

Nick Stewart — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 12:58:15 +0000

There has been a lot of buzz about the growth of twitter and many people are looking to use twitter to get traffic to their website.

Here are 10 simple ways to get more traffic from twitter.

1. Tweet about new posts to your blog

Whenever you post something new to your blog or website you should Tweet about it. For me this results in instant traffic to my website.

2. Use great titles to get more clicks

Having a great title will result in more of your followers clicking on your link.

One of the simplest ways to make a good title is to have it start with a number. For example:
3 Ways To…
5 Reasons Why…
7 Strategies For…

Numbered headlines get your attention and give you a preview of the content.

It is also a good idea to have your title promise to solve a problem that the reader has. If it promises real benefit to the reader they are far more likely to click on the link.

For example the title of this blog post promised to show you how to get traffic to your website using twitter. Getting traffic to your website is a difficult task and a common problem that people have. The title promise real value.

Putting these two concepts together (using numbered headlines and solving readers problems) you can create great titles that will get more clicks on twitter.

3. Only tweet about things of value

We live in a age of information overload and one of the ways of coping with this is to ignore stuff. In fact we ignore most of the information out there.

So if you don’t want your tweets should be ignored by your followers and make sure they have real value.

And don’t try to sell something via twitter. A lot of people have lost their followers because they tried to make a quick buck.

Remember that people follow you because of the value you provide to them. The minute you stop doing this is the minute that you lose followers.

4. Tweet about old blog posts

There will be some days when you don’t have any new blog posts to tweet about.

When this happens simply find an old blog post with good value and tweet about that. Chances are that many of your followers have never seen it.

5. Use Google Analytics to track the best days & times to tweet

Some days a week and sometimes the day are better than others for tweeting about your new blog posts and getting traffic.

I recommend trying different times to see what works best. I use Google analytics to help me determine how much traffic I get from different tweets.

Gary McCaffrey has gathered data that suggests that 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. (Pacific Standard Time) are the best times to tweet and get traffic.

This is probably a good place to start. But you need to test and discover what works best for you.

6. Make it easy for visitors to tweet about your site

If you use WordPress there is a simple plug-in that puts a “ReTweet This” button on every blog post. It allows visitors to retweet your post with a click of button. It also displays how many people have tweeted about it.

It’s called the Tweetcount Plugin and you can download it here for free:
http://www.backtype.com/plugins/tweetcount

7. Use url shorteners

On twitter you only have 140 characters and it would be a shame to waste it with some long and ugly URL. So I recommend using a URL shortening or like tinyurl.com.

This allows you to devote more characters to an eye-catching title and description and fewer characters to your URL.

8. Keep your Tweets less than 120 characters

I want people to be able to easily retweet my stuff and so I try to have all of my tweets be 120 characters or less. Then when someone retweets something of mine there is plenty of room for the “RT @NicksTraffic” which is placed at the front of the retweet.

And having more retweets results in more traffic for me.

9. Get more followers

Obviously if you have more followers then each tweet get more attention and result in more traffic to your website. Here are a couple ways to get more followers:

Place an invitation to follow you on twitter on your homepage. I recommend putting it above the fold where people can see it without having to scroll down.
After your main content block on every page post a link to your twitter account that says something like “Follow @NicksTraffic on twitter and great tips on X”

10. If you tweet with a link to a video or audio make sure you mention it in your tweet

Sometimes I’ll find a great YouTube video that I want to share with my followers. I know that some of them are at work and may not appreciate having a video come onto their screen alerting their boss that they are watching videos and not working.

So whenever I tweet a link to a YouTube video I always begin the tweet with the word Video so that my followers know it’s a video and can choose whether to watch it at that time.

For example: “Video: 11 ways to get more traffic for free”

Doing this builds a level of trust with my followers. They trust that if I tweet about a video they will know before hand and not be caught off guard. And this results in more traffic for me.