I recommend incorporating Podcasts into your social marketing campaign. Podcasts are an MP3 file of you talking about anything you can imagine. Once again, these should be informative, entertaining, and valuable. You must then take these podcasts and submit them to Podcast directories. People will load them onto their MP3 players and listen to them at their leisure. I recommend incorporating podcasts and youtube videos into your blogs to generate more interaction from your visitors.

The competition right now for podcasts is so low that it is literally a wide open playing field in nearly any niche. Here is how many results come up for affiliate marketing (most are one person!):

Audacity is great free audio mixing software

http://audacity.sourceforge.net/

You need the lame plug-in for MP3s – http://lame.jthz.com/

Formatting your Podcast is simple with the software above, but you need to make sure it compares to your competition. Find a Podcast from a name you recognize in your industry. Listen to it! Do your best to mirror the level of professionalism found in the Podcast. You can get inexpensive intro audio samples here:

http://www.audiobag.com

Social Bookmarking

Social Bookmarking is just like adding a website to your favorites folder. The difference is that you are posting them to the web where anyone can find them. These websites have risen in popularity very quickly and are the secret to ranking well in the major search engines. Follow these rules and you’ll get tons of traffic quickly:

1. For every link of yours that you post, post a link of value that doesn’t belong to you.

2. Bookmark every single website and page you own including your profiles on every networking website, different blog posts, press releases, articles and every other piece of internet real estate you have.

3. Use proper tags to identify your site to others. Try to keep it under 30 tags and double check to see if they want tags separated by spaces or commas. If they want terms separated by spaces, join words with a dash or hyphen (-), pluses (+) and underscores (_).

4. Contact friends and family to request that they bookmark your websites. This will get you extra traffic, as the more bookmarks there are of your site, the more exposure you get.

I strongly recommend bookmarking your sites to as many different services as possible. You will want to do a ton of research on these sites to see what is resonating with your audience.

The main problem with this is that many people are gaming these sites. To see who is a spammer, look for sites with no true reason to be bookmarked. If there is nothing special or attractive about the site, ignore it. Odds are pretty high that it was just someone gaming the system.

Here are some tools that make social bookmarking a breeze:

Onlywire – www.onlywire.com – Submits to 15 Social Bookmarking services at once.

The Socializer – http://ekstreme.com/socializer – Submits to over 50 different Social Bookmarking websites and saves your sites information.

Popularity: 2% [?]

The methods I’m mentioning here drive the highest quality traffic. Some cost money, some don’t. The bottom line is that you should simply use them!

Safe Shopping Network

The internet is full of websites that sell different products. It’s a simple fact that people still don’t trust websites. The Safe Shopping Network tests your website and lists how safe it is for people. They run a directory of sites that someone can use to find products at a website rated based on its level of safety. This website gives you a seal to post on your website that will help people trust your site and spend their money with you. I recommend contacting them first to have them run their testing to ensure you get the highest possible rating before signing up.

They have 2 different cost set ups. The first is to pay for a category listing with unlimited clicks. You can do a single category for around $300 or unlimited categories for $900. The better answer is their PPC program. There is a minimum deposit of $329, but there is a 100% price match. This way you aren’t risking anything. You pay for results.

Niche Websites

Every single type of business online has a hub that they need to be a part of. Most of them have many. These are the best possible sources for targeted traffic. If you sell music, wouldn’t MTV direct customers to you? If you sell diapers, wouldn’t Parents.com be a good place to advertise?

This is a simple piece of advice – Find These Websites and Advertise There!

For the perfect example of this, check out Self Growth. This is the one I found for my first company online.

Expired and Mistyped Domains

Thousands of Domain Names expire every day. The dotcom boom of the nineties resulted in people buying hundreds of domain names for their niche. Now, it’s 2006 and many of those domain names are unused.

What does this mean for you?

You can find a diamond in the rough by doing the proper research on expiring domain names. The key here is to find domains in your niche that have a lot of backlinks. This guarantees a lot of traffic from people finding the links to this domain. You purchase the domain and redirect it to your website. You now have a source of traffic that will continue as long as you own it! I recommend Bizmint if you truly want to take advantage of expired domain name traffic. It not only tells you which domain names are expired, but tells you of ones that are expiring soon, too!

Can you imagine how much traffic you’d get if you owned Gooogle.com? Think of domains that are simple mistyped versions of the most popular websites you visit. Register them and redirect them to one of your sites. Make them targeted!

Yahoo Answers

Yahoo Answers is one of the best traffic generation strategies available online today. It’s actually quite simple. You go to the Answers website and find questions that are in your niche. You provide a valid answer and post a link to your website in the “resource” area under your answer. This directs a ton of traffic as Yahoo is pushing its Answers section quite hard and its Answers section is showing up in Yahoo and Google results quite often.

Post your URL everywhere!

Have you ever seen the crazy cars that companies like Red Bull have their employees drive around town? This can be very powerful if done right. I’m not talking about some bumper sticker or window sticker. I’m talking about making your car stand out!

Link to A Site!

By linking to a popular site in your niche, smart people that are looking to replicate what they have done will be looking for who links to them. They will find your site! This is especially useful for blogs.

Get Interviewed!

Getting interviewed by an expert can give you a huge swarm of traffic. This does not only apply to podcasts or blogs. This is great if you can be interviewed on the radio! A good press release can get this done for you. Doing interviews of other experts can easily do the same thing.

Public Domain Content

Every day there are thousands of different properties that have their copyright expire. You can now take that content and claim it as yours. This includes books, audio, and video content. Put it out as a free product, but include links to your websites. This works best with targeted content!

Don’t think outside the box, break it!

What do you think would happen if somebody came to your website and it was upside down? What if it flashed between 5 different languages. Do you think that might make an impact?

To have something like this work, you have to have a method that your visitors can use to turn your website back into what it is supposed to be, but this can generate insane buzz around you and your products.

Testing and Tracking

Your logs can be accessed through your control panel of your hosting plan. By seeing what is bringing traffic to your site, you can improve your results by focusing on improving the rankings of specific terms. If you find some strange site is bringing you traffic, see if you can add more content to that site!

Popularity: 3% [?]

RSS stands for “Really Simple Syndication”. Every blogging software comes with an RSS feed. This RSS feed allows people that like your blog to be automatically updated every time you post to your blog. Adding your RSS feed to RSS directories is a necessity for any feed you own.

There is a simple plug in for the Firefox web browser that you can use to submit your RSS feeds to over 100 directories for free:

Download Firefox at: www.getfirefox.com

Get the plug in here: www.submitemnow.com

You simply add in the information necessary to sign up for the 100 + different websites and a description for your feed.

You need to create an RSS feed for any of your main websites.

Syndicate your articles for your customers and host it on your website. Create a feed for new products. You can literally put anything in a feed that you update often.

You can create an RSS Feed at this site:

http://www.webreference.com/cgi-bin/perl/makerss.pl

Your RSS feed includes a title, description, and link for every item. Be sure to use attention getting titles to generate actual traffic from your RSS feed. Use important keywords in titles for SEO purposes.

Secret Tip: RSS feeds come with all types of blogs and websites you’ll be using to generate traffic. Here are sites that give you RSS feeds to submit:

• Every Social Bookmarking Service
• Myspace
• Blogger
• Squidoo

Popularity: 2% [?]

Using this system, your blog will become a dynamo attracting customers with next to no effort. Every time you post, you must ping Blog directories. I’ve included my Wordpress ping list that will ping for you, but I do it manually to make sure that the sites know I’ve updated my blog. Use these websites to ping:

www.pingomatic.com
www.pingoat.com
www.ipings.com

http://feedshark.brainbliss.com

Social Bookmark your posts using Onlywire to 20 sites. I also recommend using Propeller , Digg, Stumbleupon, and Reddit. The next step is to submit your RSS feed to blog directories. I recommend Submitemnow as a free tool that will submit your feeds to over 100 sites in an hour or less.

The next step is to find high traffic blogs in your niche. Use your main keyword and use Google’s Blog Search to see what others are talking about. Find posts that you can add value to and do it! Another great way to do this is to setup Google Alerts to let you know when someone is discussing something you can add your own spin to.

Be sure to include methods of capturing your visitors and motivate them to come back. Copy your Autoresponder code into a text module and post it on the top left of your blog! Suggest that they subscribe to your RSS feed and put an email capture form in your sidebar.

This should take roughly one hour to submit your feeds and 10 to 15 minutes every time you post. As time goes on, the links pointing to your blog will compound and give you better rankings with less effort.

View the TM 2.0 video for how to create a blog conversation.

Popularity: 3% [?]

Having your own blog is an absolute necessity. A blog or weblog is a website you can easily update and post to on a daily basis to keep your customers and potential customers know what is going on in your business, industry, and even you personally. Blogging is a simple art that must be mastered to keep your customers informed and generate more traffic and income for your company.

You can set up your blog with a blogging service like blogger.com or you can set it up on your own server. The best choice for blogs on your website is Wordpress. The reason I recommend Wordpress is that it is easily customizable. You can install plug-ins to make your blog original and the experience more enjoyable.

Download Wordpress here: www.wordpress.org Here is a directory of plug-ins: http://dev.wp-plugins.org

The first thing you need is a hosting plan with Fantastico. It is normally located on the bottom of your control panel for your hosting.

Next, you click on Wordpress.

Click on “New Installation”

Fill in all of your information. If this is going to be the root of the site (what comes up when someone types in your url.com address) then all you need is a forward slash. If this is an add-on to your main site, you can name it blog or one of your keyword terms. Be sure to use your keyword terms for the site name and description.

Your brand new wordpress blog is now set up.

The next step is to find a theme and upload your plugins. You can find a theme in Wordpress’ Theme directory. There is a list of plugins in the resource section that you can download and use. The themes go in the WP Content themes directory and the plugins go in the WP Content plugins directory. Now all you do is login and select your theme and plugins that you want to activate.

The last step I must show you is to go in and setup your permalinks before you post:

Go to Options, then Permalinks. Format your Permalinks with a custom structure: /%postname%/ or /%category%/%postname%/

This will take the title of each post and have that be the link. It will look like this: http://www.blog.com/post-title/ This is very important for SEO purposes. Otherwise, your post looks like

http://www.blog.com/?p=123. I don’t know about you, but I think the second option looks pretty stupid.

The first step is to not only start one blog, but come up with a few sub-blogs you can set up. Your main blog should be a Wordpress blog hosted on your own hosting plan. Your other blogs should be hosted by different sites (blogger, MySpace, typepad, Xanga, etc…). This allows you to create an inner linking structure and pass visitors back and forth between your own blogs. Do very focused topics for sub-blogs and a wider topic for your main one.

Your blog is ready for you to start posting right now!

Before you start posting to your blogs you have to format the posts properly. The first piece is your categories. Choose focused keyword phrases and make them categories. Each category gets its own page, so ensure that you use each one often. You definitely want to ensure that you will actually be discussing things related to these categories and you can always go back to check what categories you have to get ideas on what to post next. You should also setup a few additional pages. I have one setup for speaking engagements, my products, and my videos.

Once you write your post, think of 5 – 10 tags that you can use. These are 1 or 2 word phrases that you can use to describe your posts better. Each tag will get its own page, so your content should have each tag inside it wherever it makes sense to put them.

To figure out what your readers want to read, check out other blogs in your niche and any others you can find. What you’re looking for is the type of info they are posting. If you’re the first blog in your niche, feel free to check other niches and use what they’re doing in yours.

Your goal is to build a following, so find others that already have and replicate what they have done.

Start off with providing articles you have written about your niche. Post an article every day for your first week online. After this you can pepper in promotional posts between articles. The articles are a way to drive visitors and once you get them there, you can do some minor promotion. This is not a way of direct advertising. Keep your blog posts as informational as you can. Subtlety will get you everywhere with a blog. If someone senses advertising, they will click away before you get a chance to sell them on your products.

The content you provide will dictate how many readers you get. Typical things they love are top lists (7 ways to make more in less time), controversy, gossip, anything funny, and other topics that will pull out their emotions.

Once you build a following, be sure to make it easy for your visitor to access your products and services. You can post them to their own page, but also include links to them in your sidebar. That way they are available on every single page of your blog. If you don’t have a lot of them, use some affiliate programs. You can also find advertisers and allow them to post an image or text link on your blog. To find out what to charge, check other blogs and see what they charge for ads. You want to find blogs with similar traffic to yours and once you find them, request an advertising quote. Be sure to request more than one and charge yours based upon the average price that your competition has setup.

There are also numerous widgets you can use on your sidebar. Twitter, MyBlogLog, Blog Catalog and tons of others. I even found a tiny chat bubble you can include and use to build your list. It’s called a Shoutbox. It’s a great way to interact with your visitors! You can find free versions, but they are very hard to work with and feature poor. Avoid things like games on a business style blog.

Secret Tip: What do you think it would do if you posted on the best blog in your niche? I’m not talking about a comment, but a guest post as a writer. Create something unique that would appeal to the audience of any of the top blogs in your niche and send it to the owner of the blog. If you can guest post on their blog, it will build your reputation and get you tons of targeted traffic.

Popularity: 5% [?]