Quality web traffic is the single most challenging aspect of online marketing but is the most important way to make sales. Sales lead to money flow and then to profit. Small business owners and entrepreneurs struggle with finding free traffic for their sites, but for big companies and marketers, its easier to simply buy traffic through Google Adwords.

Paid advertising online has a real benefit, in that it can be scaled! Traffic can be enhanced to boundless levels after you have found keywords that are connected with your business. Google Adwords bring almost immediate results, where search engine optimization takes much longer.

Buying traffic through Adwords (or other forms of paid advertising) is generally considered to be the most efficient method for acquiring targeted visitors. But there is a down side: if your website is not properly designed for making sales, you could lose a lot of money and you could lose it very fast.

An immediate surge of targeted traffic is the result of paid traffic, and with the appropriate keywords and marketing plan, can yield hundreds of thousands of visitors. As with a light switch, you can turn the traffic on and off.

Paying for traffic is very popular. When a marketer makes big claims of high monthly revenue, say in the hundreds of thousands each month, he or she is most likely paying for advertising.

Knowing how to take visitors to your site and turn them into customers is the most valuable aspect of your enterprise and should be firmly in place before marketing starts. Without effective sales copy on your website, you probably won’t see anyone becoming a customer, and your Adwords campaign (and especially our money) will have been a wasted effort.

The most significant step you can take in this process is to ensure that your website is converting traffic at maximum potential before buying traffic. If anything is out of order, including the look or the stated purpose, you could lose money.

After working over your website with a fine toothed comb, you are now set to begin utilizing Adwords. At what point do you know you are making a healthy profit?

If you spend $20 to make $24, is that a good return? Yes! That’s a good 20% return on investment!

Don’t be too quick to turn down what seems like a small profit.  Just think if you had paid $1,000 and returned $1,200 in revenue? With a higher investment, 20% begins to look even better.  If you spend $10,000 on advertising, your return would be $12,000. You can feel very pleased with even a 10% return on an Adwords campaign.

Some Adwords marketers spend more than $10,000 a day and return a very strong profit. Since most of these marketers are just pushing traffic, they direct-link to the product, and avoid dealing with customers and shipping products.

Research as much as you can about Adwords before you begin, either by talking with someone who has extensive experience or reading a few books. Most marketers start out with free traffic sources before switching to paid traffic. If you think you have what it takes, skip the free traffic step and move right into Adwords.

I’m serious when I tell you there are millions of dollars to be made in paid advertising. There is a lot of money to be made with Adwords. If they can do it, so can you and I!

I have been in this internet business for quite some time and know a thing or two about making money from the internet. If you would like tips on Internet Marketing or want to find out more about me.

Feel Free to visit my blog at Winson Yeung’s Blog




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This short post on using forums to drive traffic to blogs was submitted by an anonymous ProBlogger reader.

My blog is visited by hundreds of thousands of visitors a month and other peoples forums are the number 1 source of this traffic. Darren has asked me if I’d share how I do it.

1. Identify where your blogs potential readers are gathering

I learned this from Darren here. For me the answer to this question is forums. I know that not every blog topic will have forums that relate to it online but the more blogs that I have started the more I have found that most topics do! You just need to know where to find them.

Quite often the forum is not just a standalone forum – it could be just part of a larger site. So hunt them down!

They don’t have to be big forums either (but they should be active). For my main blog I actually chose 4 forums, one big one and three small ones.

2. Join up…. and Do Nothing (for a while)

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This is key. Many people identify a hot forum and rush in, leaving links to their blog as fast as they can. All this will do is quickly get your banned, annoy people and hurt your blogs reputation.

Instead of rushing in – join up and be a lurker for a few days. Watch and learn.

  • Learn who the key players are.
  • Watch to see what topics are hottest.
  • See which areas of the forum are most active.
  • Observe what the culture and rules of the forum are.

This ‘lurking’ is all about learning as much as you can so you can so that when you actually get active you can do it in a way that actually connects.

3. Set up your Signature and Avatar

Set up a very simple yet effective signature so that when you start posting people can find out more about you. My signatures are very understated. I simply include a link and name to my blog. I don’t do it in flashing fonts or bright colors. My reason for this is that the signature doesn’t convince people to come to my blog – the posts I write on the forum do.

If the forum allows you to choose an avatar – choose a simple one of these. I use a photo of myself because I feel it makes me more personal. On that note I make my forum name my real name. Again – this ‘humanizes’ me as I interact with people.

Also at this point I add links to the forums that I am going to interact in on my blog.

4. Start Posting

You have watched, learned and set yourself up – now it is time to start interacting with the forum.

Don’t go too hard too fast. Keep in mind that this is a community that you’re entering. Nobody likes a showoff or attention seeker. A few posts a day for your first week is more than enough. This means by the end of the week you’ll have 20-30 posts which is a signal to those on the forum that you’re investing time into it.

In my first week or two I concentrate on making myself as useful as possible to other forum members. My main priority is to answer questions that others in the forum ask.

Point people to sites that might help them or answer their questions – but in the first week or two show some restraint about pointing people to things you’ve written on your own blog. There will be time for that later.

5. Write Resource Content/Tutorials

After a week or two of ‘helping’ and being useful I then begin to produce weekly tutorial type content. This is where I find things begin to really take off in terms of driving traffic to your blog and becoming a more established presence in the forum.

In these ‘tutorial’ type posts you want to be writing top quality ‘how to’ type content that people will value highly. In many ways these tutorials are the type of things you might normally post on your blog.

In some ways what I am doing with these ‘tutorials’ is similar to what people who write guest posts for other people’s blogs do. It’s writing impressive content that makes people pay attention to you.

In these tutorials I generally will either include a relevant link to my blog to a post that extends the topic or is a ‘further reading’ type link OR at the end of the tutorial I include a simple line pointing out that I write more of this type of thing on my blog (with a link). I keep these links very low key.

What I find is that as I write these tutorials that people begin to want to know more about who I am. When you help people do something it makes an impression and they begin to seek you out.

6. Make Connections

You will find that the relationships will happen fairly naturally at this point but I also put a little extra time at this point to establish relationships with people in the forum, particularly key influencers, moderators and owners. Send these people private messages introducing yourself, encouraging them (particularly owners and moderators – many of them will really appreciate positive feedback) and even making offers of help or suggestions (if appropriate).

If you show that you’re willing to help make a forum a better place you’ll find these key people within the forum will be very open to working with you at some point in the future.

7. Let Others Promote Your Blog

I find that at this point a wonderful thing happens – forum members begin to promote your blog. They come across you either through you answering questions, your tutorials or through conversations that you have with them and they begin to read your blog. When they find something on it that they like, they write about it.

Sounds a little too good to be true – but it has happened from me time and time again. It’s almost like when you find other bloggers in your niche beginning to discover your blog – but instead it can potentially be a whole community discovering your blog at once (a very powerful thing).

Last time this happened to me it was in a forum with over 100,000 members. It took me 5 months of ground work but when the ‘tipping point’ came it was like I suddenly became a celebrity or some kind of hero in the forum. I’d written 15 tutorials by this time and they’d become some of the most viewed threads in the forum, the forum owner had asked if he could pay me to write more and when I said I’d do it for free he included a small button on his sidebar linking to my blog as a recommended resource as payment.

8. Be Generous, Be Understated and Be Useful

My parting words of advice for people wanting to use forums to promote their blogs is really to be as helpful as possible while remaining as subtle as you can.

This actually takes some restraint. If you’re anything like me your natural inclination is to shout out about your blog at every opportunity but take it from me, I’ve done this and it doesn’t work. The more understated I’ve been the more success I’ve had.

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How to Use Forums To Drive Hundreds of Thousand of Readers to Your Blog




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Brian McElroy, who has generated over $100,000 in sales JUST
from forum marketing, GRILLED me and 5 other forum marketing
experts.

As someone who built much of his name recognition
and credibility, and made hundreds of thousands of
dollars via forum marketing, I’m proud to have been
one of the featured “experts.” If you were to check,
you’d see that I’m rapidly approaching 9000 posts on
JUST one forum… the Warrior Forum!

MOST of those posts were “marketing” my business. So
this is something that I proved works!

We want to GIVE you the MP3 audio AND PDF transcripts
from our interviews.

Get them here:
=> http://SageMarketer.com/ForumProfits/

Here are the top Internet marketing experts and
what we covered during our interviews:

=> The Rhodes Brothers

“How To Build A List Of 10,000 RAVING Fans With
Forum Marketing”

=> Dennis Becker

“How To Build Your OWN Community-Based Forum…
To The Tune Of Thousands Of Dollars Per Month!”

=> Rob “The Genie” Toth

“How To Monetize The Traffic You Generate From Forums
Using Smart Lead Captures and Irresistible Offers”

=> Lee McIntyre

“How To Build A Full Time Internet Business- Starting From
Scratch!”

=> Willie Crawford

“How To Leverage Forum Marketing For Profitable
Relationships And Lucrative JVs!”

Normally it would cost you $2,400 for an hour with each
of these recognized experts… but you get to listen to
us share some of our best information in these free
interviews.

Grab the MP3’s and the transcripts now.

They’re free, but I won’t say for how long!

=> http://SageMarketer.com/ForumProfits/

I gave some really great info in my interview ;-)

Willie

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