traffic

Backlinks and Traffic Plugin

Update: The plugin is now available and is currently $27.00 until the plugin goes officially live.

Buy now

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On Thursday 21st April, I’ll be running a PRE-ORDER Easter Special for a new plugin called Backlinks and Traffic.

Funnily enough there are two parts to this plugin. 😉

Part One: Backlinks – is all about getting people to create links back to your site, and rewarding them for doing so.

Part Two: Traffic – is all about rewarding people for sending you traffic.

Now normally you can do this kind of thing by running an affiliate scheme, and you can still do that in parallel if you want to. But this new plugin is all about an extra, additional method of reward that will get people talking about and linking to your site. The reward can be anything you want, such as a direct cash payment in return for backlinks (yes I pay for some of my backlinks), or even an attractive product or service you can offer them.

If it’s something they want, then it will be worth their while to take a few moments out to create a few backlinks.

Here’s the thing, and one of the driving principles behind this. Many people are time rich but money poor.

They have time to go create backlinks for you, but they may not have the money to buy one of your products.

So what you can do is, you offer them your product for free in return for 10, 20 or whatever you decide, backlinks.

This is a win-win for both of you, and here’s why. They get the product for free. You get those all important backlinks to your site. And an even better idea while doing this is to tell them to join your affiliate scheme and use their affiliate link – that way it’s even more of an attractive deal to them.

They get the product for free, and also the opportunity to make some money from affiliate sales.

Just don’t make the mistake of saying to yourself “No I don’t want them to use their affiliate links.” Of course you do. Don’t actively do anything to block the flow of enthusiasm and you will reap the rewards from following that approach.

You WANT people to be excited and chat about your site on forums and blogs. Don’t you?

Every link is a potential sale and a potential new subscriber. 😉

Now looking at the second part of the plugin, you may decide you also want to give them an additional reward for sending traffic to your site. Let’s say for instance that you “know your numbers” and that for every 100 new visitors to your site, you pick up 60 new subscribers and a sale. And of those 60 new subscribers, 4 of them eventually purchase one of your other products, and that you get 6 sales of third party products you promote to them.

When you crunch all the numbers, this may mean to you that for every 100 visitors, your total earnings are $100 after affiliate payments and payment processor charges etc.

This in turn means that you could easily afford to pay 10 cents per visitor – that’s just 10% of your earnings – as an additional bonus payment of $10 per 100 visitors. If you didn’t want to pay cash, then you could even just supply another product for free.

How ATTRACTIVE do you think this would be to any potential affiliates that read about it?

Very? 😉

Part two of this plugin – the traffic bit – will count the number of clicks coming in from sources that are registered by the people promoting your site. We use a simple method of doing this, but it works a treat!

In fact the method we use allows people to link directly to your site without using an affiliate link, which means they can link to your site from forums without having their links removed by a moderator. 😉

Is that cool or what?

Like the Lightbox Popup, I’ll be releasing the Backlinks and Traffic plugin on pre-order in just over 24 hours as I write this, on Thursday 21st April at 6.00pm GMT (1.00pm EST).

More news tomorrow.

-Frank Haywood

Posted by Frank Haywood in internet business, software, wordpress plugins

Fame And Traffic

For a long time now I’ve been saying that having a personal blog is a very good idea, but a lot of people still don’t get it.

People like to buy from people, not from busineses, and as an example of what I mean, the first thing I always do when considering purchasing a product is do a quick search for the product owners name.

If I find it, I take a quick look at the site just to see if there’s a real person behind it all and for peace of mind, and in most cases it’s a blog.

Usually if there’s a couple of other products they have for sale, I check them out too, and at any rate blogs are good place to see if there’s any special deals going on, like product bundles at a reduced price.  I’ve managed to pick up a couple of those and been really pleased with the purchase.

Make sense so far?

But there’s also a traffic aspect to owning a blog too, which isn’t apparent until you stop to think about it.

My answer doesn’t vary…

You can buy traffic, or you can generate it yourself.

By buying traffic I mean any method that costs you money.  Pay per click, banner ads, directory listings, affiliate traffic (you pay a commission), hiring content writers to write articles and submitting them and so on.

Generating it yourself is for all those people who have the time but not the money to buy it.

And doing it yourself (or seeming to) is a lot more effective in most cases than paying for it, as it’s the “Holy Grail” of traffic generation – highly targetted.

It’s certainly easy to do.

#1 – Write something interesting and useful for your target niche and post it on your blog.

#2 – Go hunting for similar blogs in your niche and leave valid and interesting comments.  Can I EVER stress this enough?  No “me too” comments EVER.  Okay?  If it’s a good enough comment, then REAL people will start to click through and find your site.  When they do, capture their name and email address.

#3 – Sign up to a few forums in your niche, put a link back to your blog in your signature, and get involved in a few interesting threads.  I’ll say it again, no “me too” comments.  Be helpful, and don’t discuss stuff you don’t understand.  If you see a thread that’s gone bad, such as a flame war or has gone over the top in some way, DO NOT COMMENT.  If you join in, you will be seen as a jerk and won’t be taken seriously.  Remember, you want to help and be interesting.  REAL people will start to click through and find your site.

#4 – Goto #1.

If you have products for sale, then list them somewhere prominent on your blog, but not “in-your-face” prominent.  The sidebar near the top after your sign up box is just fine.  (Remind you of any blog you know?)

Traffic that comes through to your blog means people will find ALL your products.  If you run affiliate schemes for your products (and you should be), then people signing up will drive even more traffic directly to your sites.

Wow!  It’s as simple as that, it really is.

You may even want to pump it all up a bit…  How?

Well, here’s a brilliant method I’ve just learned about that will bring in a torrent of traffic to your blog.

Yes it takes some work, yes you might find it a bit scary, but if you have the chutzpah and energy to do it, the rewards are incredible.

And… you don’t have to go at it as hard as this person did, you can also scale it down just to try it out.  But definitely, definitely…  Doing it will bring you in highly targetted traffic, guaranteed.

You can read more about it here:-

http://www.frankhaywood.com/go/htbwt/

-Frank Haywood

Posted by Frank Haywood in internet business, traffic

Writing Experiment

I’m doing a bit of an experiment in blogging.  (And I also wanted somewhere I could just write for pleasure, about me and mine.)

One of the things that marketers always want more of, is traffic.  The idea is, the more traffic you have, the more sales you’ll do.  Hmm, yeah, okay, not always true, but a good general principle to adopt.  (What you actually need is well targetted traffic, but even so, any traffic is good.)

I’ve always said you can get traffic just by writing, and that you also don’t need to go out and get loads of backlinks either.  The concept is, if you write about anything and everything, you’ll start to get search engine traffic because some of what you write will end up on the first couple of pages of Google.  (The power of WordPress and the pings it sends to the highly spidered global update servers.)

So I took out a new domain a couple of weeks ago using “Frank Haywood” with a .me extension.  (Work it out, okay?)

I don’t want to link to it just yet as I want to see how much search traffic it will get just by me doing nothing but writing about stuff that occurs to me, and that I want to write about there and then.  (It’s good practice for writing other stuff.)

This is proof of concept that just using a self-hosted WordPress blog and then writing every couple of days or so will start to pull search traffic.  No backlinks, article marketing or ANY kind of marketing, just writing about stuff that happens to me or pops into my mind, with no thought for good taste or any of the marketing stuff.

As a result, I’ll begin to see the kind of things that people are searching for, and I’ll learn this almost randomly – it’s based purely on what I decide to write on for pleasure.

There’s absolutely no monetisation on the site whatsoever yet, and there are only links out to stuff that I find interesting, and NOT marketing related.

Okay?

So three weeks ago I took out the domain, and a week ago I got my first two visitors via Google search for a write up of a cheap camera I bought from Tesco on an impulse buy because of the price.  (It’s a good camera too – I’m pleased with it.)  The camera itself is small enough to fit in my coat pocket, so it’s great for taking with me wherever I go, and I can pretty much forget about it until I need it.  It took me about an hour to do the write up.

Since then I’ve had another 7 visitors to the site, all from Google search, and all for that camera.

Now while I didn’t write about the camera to make money from the review of it, I did write about it for pleasure and lo and behold, I started to get traffic.  I could monetise it by sending people off to the Tesco site using my aff link, but I’m not going to bother as that’s not what that site’s about.

For now.  😉

But you tell me.  How hard is it to get traffic?

Isn’t this proof enough that if you pick a product that looks like it could be popular, and do a little research and a write up about it, that you will inevitably get visitors?

Now here’s the thing.  People agonise over how to get traffic and then more traffic.  It’s the one thing I get asked about more often than anything else.

I’ve proven to myself again that it isn’t that hard to get traffic, and yet people still seem to have a difficult time getting the right traffic to their sites to match their topic.  That’s what I get told.

But maybe, and this is a message to everybody who’s interested in earning a living online, you should be looking at it the other way round.  Maybe you should instead be looking at what people are searching for, making sure there isn’t too much competition, and then supply them useful content based on their interest, and then use your affiliate links to monetise it.

See the subtle difference?

Many people choose a topic that’s either too broad or too competitive.

The learning point here is if you want to make money from blogging, then choose a more tightly focussed topic and make sure there’s some interest, but also not much in the way of competition.

You’ll then find if you write about the subject and because you’re filling an empty content gap, Google etc will be interested and take notice of your site.

Okay?

I’ll continue to write for pleasure (and to blow off steam every now and then) on that site, and maybe sooner or later I’ll come across some niche or another that gets a lot of interest, purely by accident.  Who knows what it might be, and when that might happen?

I won’t lose any sleep over it because that’s not what that site is for, but it’s certainly an interesting experiment to do, don’t you think?

-Frank Haywood

Posted by Frank Haywood in internet business, traffic

Comment Bait Nickel Sale Now Live

The nickel sale for my brand new WordPress plugin “Comment Bait” is now live.

The price is starting at just $1.97, and rises by 5 cents with each sale.

The first 20 people to buy will get it at under $3.00.

You can get it here:-

Comment Bait

-Frank Haywood

Posted by Frank Haywood in internet business

AutoBlog Plugin Questions Answered

After all the interest in my last post about autoblogging, and all the questions too, I’ve had a bit of a rethink about it.

I now realise that for most people, just releasing the plugin and docs isn’t going to be enough.  It also needs a short report explaining a few things in more detail.

So after wrestling with that one yesterday, I decided to sleep on it and I’ve just made the decision that’s what I’m going to do.

I’ll now release the plugin (plus a short report I’m going to write today) on Saturday (26th September) afternoon.  That will also give more people a chance of grabbing it in the nickel sale as I know that some of my subscribers are currently in full time jobs.

I’ll start the nickel sale at 4.00pm GMT, that’s 11.00am EST I believe, if the US is still on daylight saving time.

So I’m sorry about that, but I reckon that’s the best way to approach it.

I’ll just cover a few of the questions raised in that last blog post now, and I’ll try to put more detail in the report.  Of course I’m a little pushed for time right now so we’ll see how far I get with that – I’ll likely continue to update the report until I’m happy with it.

I can also see there’s probably a need for something with a lot more detail in it, so I’ll release that as a separate product at a later date.

Elise asked some interesting questions about original content, sourcing articles, and posting frequency – here’s my reply to that.

Yes the blogs are profitable, but that’s really no big achievement when you stop to think about it.  If you get traffic and you select the right monetisation method that’s appropriate for that niche, then you’ll make money from it.

By that I mean that if your chosen niche is a physical product such as footwear, then it makes sense to monetise the site via Amazon / eBay.  If your niche is about fish care, then you may be promoting ClickBank products.

I’m not a big fan of AdSense, but I understand that in some cases it’s easier to use that method of monetisation.  You might want to do that initially but it’s always worth investigating to see if there isn’t a trick you’re missing, and there’s better money to be made using a different monetisation method.

Also, maybe the product is your own and you’re running a blog to draw traffic.

Next, concerning the time it takes.

If it costs me 4 hours of my time to do market research, register a domain name, install WordPress via Fantastico and add the various plugins and queue the articles, then my time is well spent.  I have both reseller hosting and also a dedicated server, so those are fixed cost overheads for me anyway, the only real cost apart from my time is the .com (if I can get it) domain registration of $9.69 from NameCheap.

As soon as the blog passes that $9.69 (which sometimes happens quite quickly), then I consider it as in profit, ignoring the value of my time, but even if you cost it out as $30 / hour then it might take anything from 6-18 weeks to make my money back, and then it’s in the black.

Learning Point: Have plenty of niche sites all earning you a little money.

Now for sourcing articles.

It’s not as difficult to grab a pile of on-topic articles as you might think.

You could spend an hour of that four hours and end up with enough to last you a couple of years with two posts a week.  All you need to do is use one of the many article directories out there and just enter keywords in their search box.  Then copy and paste, copy and paste and so on.

It really doesn’t take that long once you get into the swing, and there’s the side benefit that you’re scanning and vetting the articles for suitability as you go.  I mention that as for instance I grabbed a pile of articles about lawn mowers (using an automated method I’ll mention in a moment) and about a quarter of them were off topic.

Learning Point: It’s well worth checking out the content of the articles and not just blindly posting them.

There’s a quite useful $10 tool called Article Gatherer which will scrape articles from two of the biggest article directories and output them as text files.  You can get that here:-

http://www.frankhaywood.com/go/ag/

About the SEO plugin.

Yes I’ve been using the SEO All-In-One plugin, but I don’t bother tagging the articles or writing descriptions for them, I just let the plugin do its thing.

An alternative to that plugin is Headspace 2 which will auto-tag via Yahoo, and also attempt to add keywords for you based on the content of the article.

http://urbangiraffe.com/plugins/headspace2/

I normally post several articles over the first month, maybe 3-6 a week to get it all started, then 1 or 2 a week after that.  Sort of like when taking a course of antibiotics, your first dose should be a double dose to quickly build up the antibiotic in your system – well that’s what I always do anyway.  That’s advice from my mother who is now a retired nurse.  😉

BIG TIP.  You can also get full article email notifications from one of the article directories when any new on-topic articles are posted, so once you’ve set up all the post-dated articles, you could just add those new ones immediately as they appear in the article directory.

Here’s the page you’re after:-

http://www.submityourarticle.com/articles/publishers.php

And you can also do something similar at:-

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/article_announce/

Either sign up to Yahoo, or join the group if you’re already signed up.  You’ll then start receiving full article emails from there too.

Once you’re receiving those emails, if you use something like Outlook Express that will filter emails on keywords, you can get it to take the strain by moving the emails into relevant folders, or I guess even just discarding them if they don’t meet your keyword criteria.

As the related emails start appearing in your niche folders, you can just copy and post them directly and immediately on your niche blog.  Alternatively, if you’ve enabled blog posting by email, you could reformat them and forward them to your blog, which is probably faster.

Okay, that’s it.  It’s also worth reading my replies to other questions in that last post, as there are a couple of other tips in there too:-

Installing and configuring WordPress and plugins, and also cloning existing WordPress installations.

The penalty for duplicate content myth.

Finally, I’m sorry for delying the release of the plugin, but I think it’s the right decision to make, and together with the report will make it a better product purchase for you.

Here’s the launch time again.

Saturday 26th September, 4.00pm GMT (11.00am EST).  The starting price is $1.97 and will increase by 5 cents with each sale.

-Frank Haywood

Posted by Frank Haywood in internet business