Month: April 2008

How To Increase Your Site Traffic

How would you like to increase your site traffic?

It’s easy. You can do it with blog comments – this is one of the worst kept “traffic secrets” online.

So let me put it another way…

How would you like to make your blog comments even MORE effective than they are now?

Traffic to your web site is the life blood of your internet business.

In terms of Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), you can get a reasonable amount of decent back links to your site every day just by commenting on other people’s blogs. They don’t even have to be high PR blogs, although that helps.

But just having more back links doesn’t necessarily bring you in more traffic directly. Sure, eventually you’ll build up enough links to make a difference to the search engines, but that can take quite a while.

What you want is a method of bringing in traffic quickly, while also getting the long term effect of the back links.

Before I tell you about the tool to help you do this, let me tell you the principle behind it.

You go to a blog, you read a post. You see 20+ comments. You read the first four or five, or maybe more if they’re short comments, and then you either skip to the end to make your own comment or you decide to leave. (Don’t ever do that, always leave a comment, it’s a free back link.)

But notice what I’ve just described.

You read the first few comments. You ignore the rest – most people do that. Some people (me included) will sometimes click through to see what else the comment writer has to say.

Aha! Catch that? If you’re in the first few comments, then you have a good chance of getting someone to click through to your site.

Free, fast traffic, plus the long term benefit of new back links.

To make this work for you, it’s vital that you make sure that it’s YOU that makes one of the first few comments, ideally the very first one. There’s a little bit more to it than that though. You need to not only make the first comment, you also need it to be something that people might want to click.

So your comments have to be both relevant and interesting enough to make people want to read more about what you have to say – I’ll cover how to do that in another post.

So how do you find out about blog posts as soon as they happen? Email isn’t fast enough… Well there’s a little tool you need to help you do this.

You install it (Windows only I’m afraid) and it sits in your system tray monitoring the blogs you tell it to, usually the popular ones in your niche. Every 5 minutes, it checks the blogs, and pops-up a little box if there’s been a new post.

You can then quickly read the post on the blog, spend a few minutes composing a suitable reply, and most likely be the first to make a comment on the new blog post.

Ta-daa!

When the blog owner notifies his mailing list by email a little while later, you’ll have already beaten everyone else to the punch, and they’ll be reading your comment when they arrive. If it’s good enough, they’ll be clicking through to see what you have to say, and you then get your chance to capture their name and email address.

Don’t you just love this method? 😉

You can get the tool by clicking here.

-Frank Haywood

Posted by Frank Haywood in internet business

A Knight in Shining Armour To Help Your Business

If you’ve known me for a while now, then you know I very rarely do promotions for people. (Yes, I know I did one yesterday, but that was really to test my own software.)

If I like something, I’ll tell you about it, but that’s about it really.

That’s also true if I like someone too.

You see money isn’t the Primary Motivating Factor (PMF) for me. Yes it’s nice, but usually secondary. (I can already hear the crack of necks as heads whip round to see who said that.)

So I like Dave Guindon. I like what he does and I like the way he does it.

If you’ve never heard of him, Dave has a list of products that I think are really cool, amongst them are Auction Yen, Hot Item Finder, and Cam Studio Pro. (I think that last one might have got a bit of a beating when Camtasia released v3 for free.)

And he’s also known for Dave’s Online Videos, a monthly membership where he adds new videos on how to do things from, well, everything to everything really. It would take you a long time to go through them all.

So anyway, Dave has released a product that effectively replaces several services that you would normally have to pay what I consider an unreasonable amount of money for.

Thanks to Dave, those services are effectively going to be put out of business.

What’s he done? What service has he replaced?

You know when you’re on a page and you go to leave as you don’t think you want the product? Well, the service would pop up an alert telling you to “press cancel to continue”, and then show you a “live agent” who then tries to save the sale by maybe offering you a special deal or answering a question.

The truth is, there’s no-one at the other end. They’re just bits of software running.

If you were the site owner, and this bit of software saved the sale for you, then you’d have to pay a flat rate for the privilege, something between $5 and $10 per saved sale depending on the product.

Taking into account affiliate payments, plus payment processor fees, plus the “saved sale” fee, then as a site owner, you may only end up with a few dollars left over at the end.

That’s not so good.

Dave has now released something he’s been working on for several months now that allows you to run the same software that the services were providing, but on your own server.

And in my opinion he’s over delivered.

So I have no hesitation whatsoever in promoting Dave’s brand new Virtual Smart Agent.

Dave said to me, and I completely agree with him on this, that the services were tricking people into thinking that there was a real live person on the other end of the chat box.

He didn’t really like the idea of this, but knew it was what some site owners wanted, so he’s built that ability into the software. ie, you can make your site visitors (within reason) believe there’s someone on the other end.

But what Dave really liked the idea of, was to tell his site visitors that the “agent” was really a bit of software, hence the name “Virtual Smart Agent” (VSA).

He tested it and found that his visitors actually liked that (come on, we all like to be told the truth and treated as adults) and when he started using his own software, he found it actually saved more sales than the service he’d been using previously.

Dave’s Virtual Agents say “I am not a real human, I’m a virtual agent” which I believe amuses people and puts them in a better frame of mind as a result.

Anyway, it’s now all out of beta and his site where you can buy VSA is live.

Dave decided to release VSA at a reduced price for the first few days, and because I’ve been busy doing other things, I haven’t had the chance to let you know until now.

The thing is, he’s putting the price up a couple of notches.  He’ll be putting it up on Sunday, and to the final price on Tuesday.

VSA is a way you can turn your regular traffic into additional sales and I’ll be installing it on all my future web sites and I recommend you do the same.

Dave is also offering a LIFETIME money back guarantee. That’s how confident he is that his software will bring you in more money.

I believe a lifetime money back guarantee is something that is pretty much unheard of, so you really have nothing to lose by getting yourself a copy of this, even if you don’t intend to use it right away.

I also believe that just about any niche that you may be selling in is going to benefit from this software.

I just wish I’d thought of doing it myself!

You can find out the full story at Dave’s site, including some videos that show you how it works.

I’ll give you two links, and then you can decide which one it is you want to go for. You can choose to reward Dave totally for what he’s providing you, or you can choose to reward me a little too (for telling you about it) by using my affiliate link.

I’ll leave that decision up to you.

Either way, you’ll be doing your business a great favour by getting this software.

My affiliate link: http://www.virtualsmartagent.com/ida/specialoffer.php?id=1242

Non affiliate link: http://www.virtualsmartagent.com/

-Frank Haywood

Posted by Frank Haywood in internet business

List Building Nickel Sale Today At 3.00pm GMT

Apart from a nickel sale for the Nickel Script itself, this may likely be the last nickel sale promotion you’ll see me do for a while.

I almost have all the results I want, and the release version of the Nickel Script is coming to fruition.

So today at 3.00pm GMT (10.00am EST), Jonathan Paston of Monday Madness is doing a nickel sale for a really cool list building product – a set of videos, an ebook and a bonus audio.

The sale starts at just $2.02, so it’s easily within everyones reach.

Just to say it again, Jonathan has been selling this for $77 without the bonus audio – this is a special that he’s done only because he wanted first go with my new Nickel Script, and the agreement was he’d give you a special deal which also helps me in return.

Why does it help me?

Because if you know how to build a list, then you may be interested in promoting my products for me as an affiliate. I have a lot of new tools coming out this year, and I need you to promote them for me.

So by me giving to you in this way, I actually benefit myself. It’s always up to you of course if you choose to promote for me or not, I won’t pressure you.

Please don’t miss the sale today – 3.00pm GMT (10.00am EST) – a post will appear on this blog with the link to the site. If you’re quick, you’ll get it for under $5.

-Frank Haywood.

Posted by Frank Haywood in internet business