The Traffic Snowball will feed of itself!

Unlike a computer virus that will destroy your software and damage your business, a traffic virus isn’t harmful at all…except to your competition. A traffic virus is NOT a computer virus but the concept is the same. A virus can spread around the net very quickly. This form of Marketing can be the most effective and far reaching.

Everyone who uses the Net will have heard of Hotmail.com which uses the concept of Viral Marketing to build a massive customer base.

How?

Well, everytime you send a message using a Hotmail account there appears a footnote at the end of each message promoting the Hotmail service. Imagine how many emails are sent out every day promoting their service.

Lets take a look at how we can emulate the same technique to create our own viral marketing plan.

Create an email signature:

As you will be using email a lot you should always make sure that you leave your mark on every message that you send. A signature file is a short message that goes out on the bottom of each of your emails. It should give people your contact info, usually your email address, and contain a benefit .

Here is an example:

————————————————–
Colin Hartness: admin@web-at-work.com
Web-At-Work Ltd
The Cheapest Domains: www.web-at-work.com
Traffic Builder Systems: www.trafficbuildersystems.com
TrafficBuilder can guarantee search engine listings with the potential
to deliver thousands of high targeted visitors to your site
—————————————————-

Of course there are many ways of presenting a signature file. You can basically post as many links or information as you wish as long as you think it will be useful and not distracting from your email content.

A good idea is to direct to an autoresponder rather than a website for providing further information on the products that you are promoting.

You can set-up your signature file(s) within your email client so that you are promoting your business each time you send a message.

Start Your own FREE Web based email service

To take this concept a step further consider again the Hotmail module. Every user that signs up for a Hotmail account will be promotion Hotmail services. We can do exactly the same by offering a FREE email service and branding our clients email with our own promotional message. This service is provided at www.everyone.net

Write articles for ezines

How would you like to reach a couple of million people with your products and services…for FREE? That is exactly what occurs when you start writing articles and submitting them to hundreds of ezines online. Currently there are tens of thousands of ezine publishers online and almost all of them have one thing in common. They are all looking for good content to publish in their newsletter.

If you have good content (not a sales letter cloaked as an article), then you can be their savior. You can give them exactly what they need. Then, they will give you what you need in exchange. They will give you exposure for your business. Every article comes with a resource box attached at the end of it. While your article should not be an effort to promote your business, your 4 to 6 line resource box should be an outright ad for you and your business. You are free to advertise your web site, your products, your services, or any affiliate program that you are a member of.

Recommend a friend

The main obstacle for any online business to completing a sale online is the element of trust. A sale can ONLY be completed if the customer feels secure and safe with parting with credit card information. The problem with online business is that the visitor does not have any idea as to the nature of company that is behind the website. For all he or she knows it could be operated from a back bedroom by a one man band and they may well be correct. Once we have established trust then the visitor will feel good about purchasing from our website.

You have probably heard the phrase “the best form of advertising is word of mouth”. Well this is certainly applicable to Internet business and even more so due to the total lack of physical presence .

Therefore recommendation is very, very important.

There must be a customer testimonials on the website. Get into the habit of storing any positive comments in a separate folder and publishing with permissions on the website.The testimonial is a vital feature and could sway a buyer to go for the purchase. But even more effective is the use of “Recommend a friend” feature.

This is a simple form of viral marketing that uses the “word of mouth” principle of advertising. A visitor may wish to inform others of your website using such a tool installed on your site. You can even offer a prize as an incentive to send the recommendation.

Check out www.recommend-it.com for a remotely hosted service of this type.

Logos

Your logo is important - close you eyes and think of McDonalds and what do you see? A logo will immediately establish identity and confidence. Your logo should be visible on your website but be careful not to over expose it. The logo should be there but not intrusive and subconciously the visitor will remember it and link the image with the product or service. On the Net image is all important . A good business site will be a mixture of corporate identity and sales pitch that establishes confidence with the potential buyer and at the same time pitches the sale.

The offer must be irresistible with a unique selling point and the full benefits laid out with explanations why for every listed feature. Remember the customer is thinking only one thing “What’s in it for me !”

eBooks

eBooks are amongst the most effective methods of viral marketing as they are products since they are both informative and can be used as bonuses for purchases. An ebook can given away free or sold with re-sell rights.

The ebook will be a collection of informative articles that are related to our products and services and will include links to our main website plus additional links to affiliated products that we are indirectly promoting through the leading articles. Once the ebook is completed and complied in the correct format then we can decide whether to give the ebook away as a freebie, either as a bonus for subscribing to our list or for purchasing our products, or we may wish to sell the ebook.

If we decide to sell the ebook then we need to produce a good sales letter and explain that the purchaser will receive the re-sell rights to re-sell the ebook on if they wish. If we decide to give the ebook away we need to include within the content of the ebook a statement that the reader can feel free to give the ebook away as a freebie to compliment their products /services or for any other purpose.

eBooks are a perfect for adding value to products and services and if the ebook is worth reading then readers will be inclined to use it and the word will spread fast!

The advantage of providing the ebook free of charge is that it will be downloaded and may be used many times over. The disadvantage is that it may not be read as often as the paid version. Why? Because there are so many free ebooks out there that lots are downloaded and not really read thoroughly. However if you have paid for the information then you are more likely to read it !

Customizing

As a real incentive for your readers to distribute your ebook you may like to include a customizing feature. This could allow the reader to be able add their own web address.

With the knowledge from the previous article, now you know more about Google Adsense and Google Adwords. Let me tell you a strategy that could earn you unlimited profits from Google Adsense. A good web programmer can blend in Adsense nicely into the webpage that readers do not even feel that it is an advertisement. However, without traffic, that would render it completely useless. Now, where would the traffic come from? Blogging? SEO? Just by counting on SEO would not take you anywhere.

The trick is to be a traffic middleman. You have to combine Google Adwords to do this. Get quick, cheap and quality traffic to your website by purchasing keyword advertisements with Google Adwords or Yahoo. Bid on only the minimum of $0.05 to $0.10 or buying one of the top 3 positions on the small PPC search engine. When readers from the world wide web clicks on your advertisements, they will be taken to your web site that shows exactly the relevant information that they are searching about. Google will do a good job in analyzing to show the relevant advertisements in your page, so optimize your page content that you want readers that clicked on your advertisements to click onto your Adsense advertisements.

You will be paying pennies to obtain a visitor, a very small price to pay for traffic. By paying this small price, you can gain dollars with the Adsense advertisements on your page. Later in this article, I will show you a list of keywords that Google advertisers currently pay the most, per click.

You can bid $0.05 for a keyword and gain $0.50 for that back in your page. This is superb. There are hundreds of thousand of keywords that could literally be bidded cheaply on the smaller PPC programs as stated above this page. These keywords may be VERY expensive if you bidded on Google Adwords. The key is to survey the price of various keywords from the smaller sites and choose the larger programs (Adsense) as publisher.

EXAMPLE

I did a search on the price of keywords of “Search Engine Optimization” on Miva.com and found out that it costs $0.21 to bid for the first placing. I did a similar search in Google Adwords for the same keyword and found out that i costs a WHOPPING $7.00 for it. The same keyword, one at the price of $0.21 and the other, $7.00 per click. Now, tell me, is that a huge difference? The fact is larger programs have a higher bidding price if compared to the smaller ones.

The only program that tells you how much an advertiser is bidding on a keyword is Overture (Yahoo). However through experience and research, I found out that Google has quite the similar maximums. The have a look at the list of most paying keywords, click here. You might be surprised that some advertisers even bid more than $100 for a single click on a particular keyword. Do you see the potential now? A few pennies to exchange with at least 50% of $100?

WARNING : Google has very strict policies. Any wrong-doings will lead to a bad for life. Please do not overlook these policies. You can view the Terms And Conditions and the Program Policies here. A few quick pointers if you are too lazy to read all the small caps in the policies :

1) Never click on your own Adsense advertisements
2) Never put Adsense in a page with little or no contents
3) Never point and guide the reader to click the Adsense advertisements (eg. Click here)
4) You can only put “Sponsored Links” and “Advertisements” above the Adsense snippets
5) No adult contents allowed

Pointers for your ads to blend into the page and to trigger relevant Google advertisements

1) Do not use borders around the Adsense advertisements. Make it look more like a part of your content
2) Use the same background colour for Adsense and your site page.
3) Put Advertisements within your content, thus to look like a link
4) Make sure that you have the keyphrase “Search Engine Optimization” in the page title
5) Make sure that you have the keyphrase “Search Engine Optimization” in the meta tags
6) Make sure that you have the keyphrase “Search Engine Optimization” in the the description tags
7) Make sure that you have the keyphrase “Search Engine Optimization” in the content several times, with at least 1 rendering it with “bold”
8) You should have a H1 and H2 heading tag on the page for the keyphrase “Search Engine Optimization” as well
9) Make a link back to the homepage with an anchor text of keyphrase “Search Engine Optimization”

NOTE : Sometimes getting contents are quite a hassle. You just can’t seem to find enough content to put into your website or you are too lazy to write, think and type contents into the website. Do not worry. This is not the end of the world. There are tons of sites that provides thousands of free articles and you are free to use it on your site. Here are some of those sites that you might be interested in:

Article City
GoArticles
Ezine Articles

Alternatively, you can use an automated tool to generate contents about the keywords that you input. Below are the sites that you can use:

The Article System
Article Bot
Traffic Equalizer

The most important factor is to find and create a page with Good Paying Keywords. The ones that is in the Excel sheet above. (I hope that you have successfully downloaded it). Another important thing to do is to bid variations of those keywords such as “biggest”, “cheapest”, “most affordable” and “cheapest”. Create lots of variations, again, be creative! The next thing is to send click-throughs to the page that you have just created and you would most probably get the advertisers that bidded $1-$100 for the top spots. You will also obtain a 20%-50% click through rate if you have followed my instructions earlier. Keep doing this for more and more keywords. Impressions and click through rates may be low, but you can do this with thousands of keywords. Let us imagine, if you get $1 out of each keyword, multiply with 1000 keywords per day. you would get an average of $30,000 per month! Now, how’s that. Keep increasing your max bid penny a bit at a time, until you reach your definition of “peak” profit rate.

NOTE : There is a danger of choosing high paying keywords to advertise to your site. Let us take for example of a $50 advertisement. It is an average that Google Adsense will pay around 50% of the revenue to you. In this case, you SHOULD be paid somewhere around $25. However, to protect the advertisers, if you own a fairly new site or your article does not really match what the advertiser is advertising, you could get lesser than the amount of what you should get. I would approximately guess that it would be somewhere arounf $15-$20. DO NOT PANIC. You could easily tweak your page content back to the original advertisement that was put on your page. For instance, if the advertisement is regarding to “Computer Software” and you are showing “Computer Repairs” on your site, you can easily tweak and add contents about computer software to match bank the advertisements. You would need to test alot of different keywords to choose which one is the most profitable to you.

For me, I would always prefer to stick to those of $1 to $2 advertisements and bid a less amount ($0.05-$0.10) in Miva.com and get a click through rate of 20% or so. For $1 i get 20 visitors. 20% of click through rates would give me somewhere around 4 clickers per $1. Now, 4 clickers would be doubling or tripling off what i invested. While I playing around with cheap and low-bidded keywords I have a few advantages:

1) I can play with thousands of those keywords
2) I can keep on testing and retesting as those keywords are CHEAP!
3) I can avoid the possibility of not getting full percentage if compared to high bidded keywords
4) I always get favourable percentages as these are the keywords that is not usually played with

Another way to attract clicks is to place pictures around the Adsense snippets. (Be careful not to put graphics such as “Click this” or something that resembles that). Here is an example:

It’s also important to create a “channel” in your AdSense account for each of your domains. You can also create
sub-channels for different pages within each URL. This will enable you to track exactly which pages are earning you the most money.

Advanced Middleman Traffic Trick

Here is a simple trick that can be an alternative too for gaining profits from Adsense. This trick uses the technology of the search engine. Create a search engine for your site that returns a pre-populated searches for the smaller PPC search engines and make the first few results SPONSORED results from Google or SearchFeed.

The following is an illustration of what i was talking about:
http://www.uncoverthenet.com/search/?q=pay+per+clic

Now if UncovertheNet were to purchase the keyphrase “pay per click” on Miva or another small PPC search engine for say 10 cents, they would make sure their paid ad led people to the URL above. Now when visitors reach that page, they will see results for the same keyword they originally typed in, so they won’t likely understand what happened when they were shipped to UncovertheNet’s results. Now if they click on the sponsored ads at the top of UncovertheNet’s pre-populated page (which are from searchfeed), or the sponsored ads on the right (which are from Google), UncovertheNet will make 20 cents, 40 cents, or whatever the current rate is on Searchfeed and Google.

Basically you will be paying Miva or another PPC search engine to send people to your search engine that shows relevant results. And hopefully the visitors will click on your sponsored ads because:

1) What they are looking for are relevant
2) The advertisements are on the top-right. This place is the best placement for click throughs
3) They look like real results. Readers do not like advertisements. This serves a very good way to blend in

Now that you have harnessed the power of Google Adsense, i believe you can start a crusade on gaining profits from it. Our next stop, Google Adwords! Enjoy!