Internet Mastery Center Blog

I never believe in buying traffic. How do you think visitors come to know me? Did they pay to know me? Most probably they subscribed because of a free download in the first place. You may not remember how but YOU are the traffic. You are targeted because I hit your hot button correctly :)

There are enough free resources out there on the Net to keep one busy with getting traffic, but here are the only 7 most effective methods: search engine optimization (SEO), link exchange, pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, article submissions, blogging, viral marketing and massive giveaway events.

Search engine optimization is the practice of optimizing your pages for the search engines so that your pages are optimized for the search engines to be searched with the most optimized keywords. You get the idea? SEO English is a bit like tongue twister. If you know the exact keywords your business or industry is famous for, you increase the density of those keywords in your page.

Actually, I don't understand why some folks make SEO sound so complicated. On the other hand, other folks say SE spiders are so smart at discerning quality of content such that SEO is really much ado about nothing. Moreover, SEO English is just so unnatural sometimes and abuse may constitute as keyword spamming, unless you know the secret to writing it 'fluently'. SEO is absolutely crucial in niche markets where competition in SE listings is not hot.

Exchanging links with like-minded webmasters create a network for increased traffic distribution. Interested visitors are free to visit your site when they see your link on other people's sites. SEO targeted towards Google is only half the battle. Its PageRank tool measures your page's link popularity and ranks it higher according to scale. The more links pointing into your site as opposed to pointing out, the merrier.

* PageRank looks at pages, not sites.

Pay-per-click advertising is all about how much you are willing to pay the PPC program for a high listing so that visitors take notice of your link and visit it. You incur the bid price you set for yourself for every visit (click). Considering ROI, this is particularly useful when you are selling a product. Security features are in place so there's no point being trigger-happy if you don't like some sites. ;)

Article submissions can give you an amazing amount of traffic, but only if you use the method right. You should make sure the content you're submitting is easily understandable, and only covers one or two points, leading the people back to your site with your resource box. Most importantly, you need to make sure that your article is interesting, compelling, and of course, informative. Once you've submitted these articles to several article directories, you'll probably see a marked rise in link backs, traffic and more.

Blogging is a free way to make sure that you're reaching traffic in all regions of your niche. It has come up in stature from its days of being simply a place to 'share' with your friends and is now a valid, and often well used promotional structure for a site—or even a basis for the site itself. Using WordPress especially can mean that you've got an easy-to-promote, amazingly simple to update site structure that allows you to build and maintain effortlessly. As a traffic generation tool, it is also a good way to create, maintain and direct traffic to your site. The more you blog using popular search terms related to your niche, the more intensive you're practicing SEO as the archiving system of the WordPress blog script is absolutely well suited for Google indexing. Try to post on alternate days if not everyday.

Viral Marketing is everything and anything to do with propagating your name and URL through giving away free e-books, reports, article and e-zine submission, classified ads etc. But this is only by technological means. With people, we are talking about word-of-mouth.

Massive giveaway events come once in a while but they are really the biggest source of opt-in subscribers for anyone who participate in them. The organizer announces a proposal to carry out such an event, inviting contributors to submit a product of their own or one with resell rights to be given away for free. When the event begins, anyone and everyone can download all these exclusive products as long as they opt in. It's very easy to get 1,000 subscribers in a week.

Of course, the organizer gets the most numbers, but he also puts in the most work to make sure the web server doesn't collapse due to traffic overload, the gifts don't go missing and the event proceeds on schedule.

Awareness and application of the 7 above traffic generation methods slowly but surely builds a good list of followers who are willing to patronize us.

Nelson Tan is the webmaster behind Internet Mastery Center. Download $347 worth of FREE Internet Marketing gifts at http://www.internetmasterycenter.com

If you view web pages as the original publishing platform since the Big Bang of the World Wide Web, surely this variant platform called 'blog' and its increasing popularity heralds another mode of information publishing and communication. Maybe 10 years down the road another new platform is born ('wiki' is the latest). For now, 'blog' is in the spotlight.

The blog shares some similarities with the web page as well as being the anti-thesis to the newsletter. It has its own URL so it can also be called a site. You update a web page via FTP upload, whereas you edit an existing post or create new ones within your blog account, so it's faster in a sense. Moreover, the most popular blog services are free (for now) so you don't have to pay for a blog host service, and so is a good substitute for a site except that you don't have the luxury of web space to upload other files. Setting up a blog quickly greatly benefits those who haven't got a site up yet.

Every week we have to upload a complete newsletter in our autoresponder and click a 'mass-mail' button. Even so, it may get filtered out, but this is 'push' marketing. The blog gets read mainly on-site and with RSS newsreaders or aggregators. Through these software the blog invites the general public to opt-in if they want to keep their Inbox aside for other purposes, so that's 'pull' marketing. If they are flooded with mails they may miss yours, but with a newsreader they just click on your blog link to access all your posts past and present. The major weakness (sort of) is your readers are still 'out there' so you can't qualify them into a list unlike what you can do with an autoresponder, but if they like what they read, they will stick to you.

The blog's most powerful feature is that every post ends with a 'Comment' link. Know how to exploit this to the fullest and you can forge interactivity with your readers. Since the game of the day is 'communication', no more formalities and e-zine marketing. Write in the way you speak, keep articles short and regular, and keep your blog tightly themed by applying SEO.

Essentially, the blog (you can create one at blogger.com) becomes a communication tool which forms a very significant extension to your site. And Google loves them. So...

credibility + consistency + SEO + link exchange = high ranking -> TRAFFIC, yes!

If you already have a blog, you can submit to major blog directories for FREE and watch your traffic flood in. Do a search for "free blog submission". Or you can click into our blog at http://www.internetmasterycenter.com/blog, scroll down and look out for all the graphic buttons of the sites where you can submit your blogs.

Our little research tells us non-marketers outnumber marketers about 5 to 1 when it comes to blogging...except that only we have prosperity consciousness. If blogs are so popular, why not use it to enhance your online business presence?

Nelson Tan is the webmaster behind Internet Mastery Center. Download $347 worth of FREE Internet Marketing gifts at http://www.internetmasterycenter.com

Who controls the Internet? Don't be surprised if we say it's the major search engine (SE) companies. While it gets more baffling to keep up with their ever-changing algorithms or whatever criteria (as and when they like it) and more convenient to label them as notorious for indexing your web pages only to see them suddenly dropped altogether, there are at least some things you can do to maintain your SE visibility in the long term.

1) Create a sitemap. This sitemap page contains all possible links to sections that make up your site's overall structure. Submit this page and you are submitting the whole site to be spidered, not just the home page.

2) Keep your site flat. As far as spider algorithm goes, it's not easy to register web pages more than 3 levels deep. Pages that are too deep are considered insignificant and submitting them can be detriment to your site's overall ranking status. Focus on building significant sections of your sites, create a sitemap pointing to these sections and let the spiders search for themselves.

3) Submit everywhere except the major SEs. There are hundreds of minor SEs you can submit your site to, but as your site gets more prolific, soon the spiders from Google, Yahoo, MSN, AllTheWeb, Hotbot, AOL, Teoma and Lycos will take notice and see it for themselves. Sites 'naturally' caught by spiders are seen as quality content, will rank highly and less likely to drop.

4) Avoid CGI-generated pages. These type of pages usually contain symbols like a question mark and ampersand to separate parameters. A typical URL would look like: http://www.sitename.com/cgi-bin/pagename.pl?cat=gardens&subcat=japanese

If you observe search results from time to time, most major engines refuse to index these pages. Wherever possible, create non-CGI pages. They give no clues that they are instantly and artificially 'churned' out which is exactly what spiders are looking for to censure. Pages employing dynamic technologies like PHP, XML etc. are just fine.

5) Cultivate your site. As long as you add in fresh content, spiders will take notice and come back just as often. Spiders seem to use a 'trained' schedule to learn that your site always stays up-to-date and come back to take a look. Update less often and the spidering frequency lessens.

6) Linking strategies. More than just one-to-one manual link exchanges, you will find every possible way to submit articles, give testimonials, comment in blogs, participate in forums etc. all for the sake of creating link-backs to your site by leaving your signature behind. To put it bluntly, hijack other people's web space to create backward links. If your pages don't show up, at least your keywords or domain name shown from other sites will.

7) Create a mini-web. Build mini-sites around an overall and similar theme and link them together interdependently. This pattern of incoming links here and there establishes and builds up each site's link popularity, and links from same-subject websites are now ranked higher in the search engines than they do if stand-alone.

Nelson Tan is the webmaster behind Internet Mastery Center. Download $347 worth of FREE Internet Marketing gifts at http://www.internetmasterycenter.com

In the years I've invested myself in dedication to the business of Internet Marketing, I've observed that though technologies and different fields of expertise appear and recede overtime like any other ever-changing business outlook, only timeless, universal principles remain.

The first and foremost characteristic of Internet Marketing is automation. Alex Mandossian once said that "Internet Marketing is meant to train us as lazy workers but high thinkers." We are constantly thinking of better ways to attain 100% automation, which is near impossible, for thinking itself is already hard work.

Despite this, Internet Marketing may not be simple, but it is definitely very systematic in nature, such that it is really an easy business to do due to the availability of metrics software for performance measurement. By knowing and understanding results-by-the-numbers, Internet marketers can tweak and re-launch sales and marketing campaigns for better returns. This is not something that brick-and-mortar businesses are capable of and ready to embrace as part of their daily business handling activities.

Coming back to principles, here are 10 things you can always bear in mind as you go about doing your business online. Even if you are attempting one niche after another (and that's what some self-employed do these days), following a certain entrepreneurial pattern based on principles can help you get into the thick of action easily and systematically.

1) Provide lots of quality content on your website. The litmus test is: Would you freely publish something that you would otherwise sell?

2) Be tight, comprehensive and cohesive about your site theme. For example, your site may be about dogs rather than dog collars, which is a smaller, more focused niche. Nonetheless, you can design and implement a clear structure with different sections covering dog training, dog hygiene, dog naming, dog psychology, doggy habits, etc. You can aim for a portal or library of information and it can still not be confusing.

3) Setup a blog. You heard this many time: "Search engines love blogs." Well, go and create one, link it up to your main site, publish snippets of information and send out RSS feeds. Search engines will find you fast!

4) Create a plan of using traffic exchanges, safelists, FFA lists etc. to draw traffic to your site. I, like many people, did not believe that you can funnel targeted traffic from these places, until I came across a few experts in this area.

5) Build a lead capture page offering a powerful freebie, an e-course or a reason visitors can't refuse...on condition they must subscribe to you.

6) Create free materials like viral e-books to give away. Write articles and e-courses and submit everywhere you can. Reuse your articles to suit every possible form of online and offline media. Just keep your eyes open. What goes around always comes around. You are bound to be famous on the Internet in 6 months if not a year. Or start an article/free e-book directory service yourself! You can attract more writers and material seekers with the most minimal of effort.

7) Get your visitors and subscribers involved with YOU. Give them a role, a stake or control over the content of your site, forum, chat room, online survey or newsletter etc. You can sustain their interest and effectively build up not only traffic volume but also the quality of customer relationships overtime. The noblest yet most challenging thing to do is finding ways to build up their own monetary value. That's what Jay Abraham, Bob Proctor and many other experts do.

8) Create an affiliate program for your products and services to encourage affiliates bring new referrals to you! It's a great way to get targeted newcomers to your site.

9) Create postcards with your e-zine information and business cards to hand out at events. Also print out articles and hand them around at events (which must be appropriate in context). Your signature at the articles' end leads them to your site. Show them you are the expert here!

10) One great way to multiply subscriber addresses in your list is invite fellow online marketers to swap e-zine ads with you. Many marketers know the benefit of this, and it's free and easy to implement. All it takes is mutual agreement on how often and how many times to publish each other's ads!

Yes, there is a lot of work involved, these 10 points are only general and the devil is in the details. But you see, even though I'm no SEO or link exchange techie, I am carrying out all 10 points in my daily work and with continuous measurement of my results my income has nowhere else to go but up as I optimize the monetary value of my effort. Ultimately I am doing what these 10 points say because they can sustain online longevity.

When you seriously put them into practice, turning your actions into regular habits is only a matter of time. In one year, your situation will be much better than where you are today, and all you need to do is create a system of productive action based on these 10 points. This is my encouragement to you.

Nelson Tan is the webmaster behind Internet Mastery Center. Download $347 worth of FREE Internet Marketing gifts at http://www.internetmasterycenter.com