Depending on what you are offering, classified ads can be a great source of traffic. To generate traffic, your ad must be made to draw in a potential customer. The whole idea behind placing this ad is to get a customer to your website or store, where you can get them to buy your products. Give good and important details, but don’t give too much if the product is for sale somewhere online. It’s better to post a link to the website where your product is available and your ad space is unlimited.

You should get into a routine when submitting your ads and come up with as many variations as you can. Craigslist is notorious for catching marketers and removing their ads. Vary up your ads to ensure you get the most out of your efforts.

Include images whenever you can. You can edit your images in any graphics program to include your direct url. If you are using classifieds for affiliate promotions, be sure to buy a domain and redirect it to your affiliate link. This way, it is easier for your prospective customer to type in your url.

Here are the best classified ad sites:

• http://classifieds.yahoo.com/
• http://classifieds.myspace.com
• http://www.craigslist.org/
• http://adlandpro.com
• http://www.backpage.com
• http://www.oodle.com/
• http://www.adpost.com/
• http://www.sell.com/
• http://www.adquest3d.com/
• http://www.chooseyouritem.com/
• http://www.domesticsale.com/
• http://epage.com/
• http://postaroo.com/
• http://www.usfreeads.com/

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Submitting press releases gets you exposure on sites like Google & Yahoo News, along with many other websites related to your business. This generates targeted traffic and then some. What do you think would happen if you were featured in a large magazine or on a television interview? You would get a ton of traffic to your website.

Press Releases must be formatted for the press and not as an advertisement. You must tease the reader and hope that a valuable member of the press will want to know more about you. You can submit as many press releases as you want for any relevant event. Some examples are:

• A new website
• A special sale
• A promotion within your company (New CEO)
• A new product
• A special event
• A strategic partnership
• An award received

The best Press Release site is: www.prweb.com

Here is the basic format for a decent press release to promote a website:

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE 11/21/2006

The headline should capture your readers’ attention and include your best keyword.

- The summary should arouse curiosity in the reader to read the rest of your press release. It is very important to make it interesting and not dull.

City, State – date – Intro statement

The intro statement should read like a story and begin to answer who, what, when, why, and how. DON’T pitch your website here. At the first “whiff” of a pitch people are going to be turned off from your release.

Instead of pitching you should continue to “tease” the reader into wanting to find out more information by visiting your website.

You can start with a quotation or a statement that gets attention. It should speak to a hot-button that the media can quickly begin to picture for a story… or give other readers an intriguing story so they want to learn more about you on your website.

Now expand on your intro statement.

You can include quotes or statements here to add news value. Statistics are also useful, but should be simple and to the point.

A Tip or Topic List

Examples For A Tip List Include:

- 7 Quick and Easy Ways To Lose Weight
- 10 Ways To Stay Hydrated During Hot Days
- 5 Ways To Have Your Kids Stay Safe This Halloween

Examples For A Topic List Include:

- There are 3 different reasons people fail with diets
- There are 10 causes of tooth decay
- There are 7 reasons parents fail when raising their child

For the topics you would expound on each one and tell what you are.

These topic and tip lists should give a taste of what else you have to offer. Make it short and sweet with the purpose of leading the reader to want to contact you or visit your website and buy.

Summary or Concluding Sentence

Mention your website here, explain how it will help the public.

Example: Dr. John Smart studies the effects of tooth decay and publishes his results in a free monthly electronic magazine entitled, “Tooth Decay Chronicles.”

Contact (your name) for more insights into this topic. Direct line: (555) 555-5555 Email: Other helpful information regarding the can be found at: http://www.YourWebsite.com.

Important Note: It is important to include the website URL that you want ranked at least 1 time in your body and at least twice for the entire release.

For More Information Contact: Your Contact Information

Write to your audience with a press release. If you want media exposure and are pretty sure you can get it, go for it! If you are happy with pulling in a few new customers, then customize your release to speak directly to them.

Don’t be shy! If you have a story that would fit your local news, pick up the phone and find out where to send your release for their consideration. If you have contacts at a local TV station, use them.

PRWeb is the premier press release distribution service. To get amazing exposure, you can spend a few hundred dollars and be on their front page. You will get thousands of visitors for this. When deciding whether to upgrade to a high cost distribution, you must figure out how large your audience is. If your products or services apply to the masses, pay for the upgrade!

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Writing articles and submitting them to article directories is one of the oldest ways to create quality links to your website. The concept is simple: You write good content concerning the topics that fit your products and are allowed to include a resource box at the end with a link to your website. You submit your article to article directories and other webmasters will take that article and publish it on their website. Article Marketing is the most effective method of advertising I use for a few specific reasons:

• It costs absolutely nothing.
• Establishes your professionalism, expertise, and knowledge in your industry.
• Some of the best links you can get are from the top article directories.

Writing articles should be easy for you. You know your products better than anybody outside of the manufacturer or creator (unless that is you). What you need to do is think of what the consumer needs to know about your products. You should easily be able to come up with 10 or more ideas about articles you could write. Here are sources for when your ideas run out:

• Forums in your niche – pay attention to the questions being asked. Odds are that others are wondering about that same question.
• There are hundreds of article websites online, but www.ezinearticles.com is the most prestigious. This is important, because you can get ideas for articles by reading ones that are already there. Don’t plagiarize, but get ideas from articles that have been written.
• Your competition’s websites! Check the content on your competition’s site. If they have great content, recreate it in your own words and distribute it.
• Blogs! Use your main keywords and the term “blog” and take a look at what people are talking about in your area of expertise. Check the comments on posts and the ones with the most comments are the common questions that need to be answered. Thinking outside of the box is what will separate you from the others competing with you. Here are a few things I do that most of my competitors don’t:
• E-zines – Look for popular e-zines and check their index page for a “submit article” link. You could have your article distributed to thousands for free. Normally they will also publish your article on their website, providing you with a powerful link.
• Forums – Most forums include an area for articles. This is another great way to get your possible customers to find your information and realize that you are a genius and they need to spend money at your website.

Distributing your articles is a necessity to gain the best exposure. My favorite 4 article sites are:

• www.ezinearticles.com
• www.goarticles.com
• www.articlecity.com
• www.articledashboard.com

Your articles must be written to pull in the reader if you want the most traffic from your efforts. You can write a series of articles and only include the last one on your site. Link to the last article in your resource box. There are hundreds of ways to motivate a reader to visit your site. Be creative and you’ll have more visitors.

I have a secret recommendation regarding these sites to truly set apart your results. Test different resource boxes! To do this you must submit the same article to all 4 sites with varied resource boxes. Track which resource box gets clicked on most. Once you have those results, use the one that gets the most clicks for full distribution.

Secret Tip #2 – If you hate writing articles, I’ve found a software that does 90% of the work for you. While it isn’t free, it helps with becoming an expert in a niche you know nothing about. Check out Instant Article Wizard and you’ll thank me for it when you do.

Writing articles and submitting them is old school. Don’t get me wrong, it still works extremely well. What can we do with an article now that couldn’t be done before?

Turn your article into a video! Take your article and break it down into bullet points. You can do this by taking the most important points and making them as simple as possible. Grab some images from whatever stock image service you like to use. Go into any graphics program and make all of the images the same size. Next, type your bullet points right on the images. Find some decent background music or use a microphone to narrate your video yourself. You now have a video article that you can distribute to all of the video services. Be sure to include a watermark with your website address!

An article that is well written can be turned into any number of different things. The first question to ask yourself is what you want your article to achieve for you. Do you want it up for some extra links for SEO purposes? Are you looking to get more traffic? Would it be OK if it went viral?

Once you figure out what you need your article to accomplish, think about what else you could do with the ideas presented in your article. Here are some options for you:

• Could you turn it into a viral style Ebook to promote your products?
• Is the content good enough to become a blog post (the answer to this should almost always be yes)?
• Would this work well as a spoken podcast?

Do you have a bunch of articles on one topic? If not, you will soon. When you do, think about what it would take for you to combine those articles and create a book.

Your book can be one that is found in bookstores or something digital. It depends on what your content says to you when you put it together. Keep an open mind and be prepared to put in a little effort. Apply your ideas and watch your content spread across the web.

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All of the top major search engines are currently battling for market share. As social websites become more and more popular, it is becoming less common that someone will find your site through a search engine. This is exactly why you have to branch out and ensure that your content is on far more than just your own websites.

Watch what the major search engines are adding to their sites for enhanced functionality. You could just catch the next great method of finding your customers simply by watching what Google releases next as a feature. Yahoo has some great features, too. Watch what they are doing as the competition gets more fierce.

Google Tip: When looking for who is linking to a site, Google only gives a small sample of links when using this command:

link:http://www.url.com
Instead try this:
“www.url.com”

This will give you every time that specific url is listed in their results. Yahoo’s site explorer also gives a very comprehensive listing of the links pointing to a site.

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Paying for traffic is great when you have no time or a brand new site, but wouldn’t it be nice to find your customers without paying for them? Outside of small ads on forums, I haven’t paid for any advertising in 18 months. I simply don’t need to. I have mastered the free methods so completely that I personally don’t need to pay for traffic at all.

Obviously, the free methods are the main focus in this course.

Understand that you don’t necessarily have to do all of the work with many of these methods. Outsourcing tedious work is the first step to having a serious and profitable business.

Let’s say you love to write articles, but hate to do any graphics or web work. Take a look at the communities that you’re a part of right now and find someone that likes to do those things. Trade work with them and you’ve now found someone that you can outsource the things you hate to do. You also have a new relationship that can help you expand your business even further.

Search Engine Optimization

Free rankings in search engines show a much higher likelihood of click-throughs than PPC ads. Obtaining those rankings isn’t always easy though. Search engine optimization is a changing craft at all times. What works today may not work tomorrow. This is why you should focus on ethical methods of proving to search engines that you are a site worth visiting. Trying to cheat the system will do nothing but make your job more difficult the next time the engines decide to update their systems.

Use multiple sites on different hosting plans from different companies (feel free to trade with friends) to set up a silo structure for your sites. What this does is allow you to raise your own search engine rankings by linking to your sites from each other.

By having multiple sites linking back and forth, you are funneling traffic from one of your sites to the next. Focus on using links that will make you money if they point to sites you don’t own!

On-Page SEO – html coding, Meta tags (title, keywords, description), header tags, inner-site linking structure, and site content. Formatting these tags right can make or break your rankings. The focus on onpage factors of SEO has changed due to spam and cheaters.

Use this example for your Meta Tags:

<title>Your Company Keyword 1 | Keyword Phrase 2</title> <META NAME="description" CONTENT="Add 2 to 3 sentences here and be sure to use your main keywords and keyword phrases."> <META NAME="keywords" CONTENT="Keep this keyword tag simple, only use 10 to 20 keywords and keyword phrases separated by commas">

You MUST utilize these tags: Alt tags for images using keywords, h1 to h6 (header) tags for important keywords, and tags for keywords on every page.

Add a robots.txt file even if you don’t need one, the search engines look for it.

?Add at least one content page of between 300 and 600 words based around your main keywords every week. Before you know it you’ll have a huge site with a ton of great information, which the search engines love!

Use text links at the bottom of every page and insert at least one text link inside the content of every page utilizing your targeted keywords.

?Keep your site clean and simple whenever possible. If your site is hard to navigate, you won’t get business whether you get zero traffic or thousands of visitors.

?Google has developed their methods to a point of recognizing when someone is writing for people. This is called Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI). What this means is that they look for related terms in your content. If you are writing about office chairs, they expect to see terms like desk, computer, and bookshelf. Simply write for people and don’t worry too much about this.

Add a sitemap and submit it to Google (sitemap.xml) and Yahoo. The big 3 search engines have agreed to use the sitemap.xml format. For more info on this go to sitemaps.org.

Off-Page SEO – This is completely link development. There are many ways of obtaining links for SEO and most of them are discussed here. Every link that points to your website is considered a vote by the engines. Does this mean you need to generate millions of inbound links? Not really. Focus on quality over quantity and your SEO picture will come together.

Search engines put a high weight on the words you use to link to your sites. This is called anchor text. Here is how a html link is formatted:

<a href="url.com">Anchor Text to be displayed</a>

You must use a multi-tiered approach in your link building. By using the methods contained here, you will have tons of links pointing to your sites in no time. Just be sure to use as many as you can.

Firefox Add-ons give you some amazing abilities when it comes to seeing what your competition is doing. This specific SEO plugin from Aaron Wall’s SEO Book site allows you to see which sites are using the “no-follow” attribute on outbound links. This allows you to save time when looking to build links to your website. You can find it here.

Universal Search

Google has made the wise decision to incorporate images, videos, news, maps, and products into their regular search results. Understand that Google can’t read images or video.

News Optimization

Getting into Google News is as simple as submitting a press release to the right press release directories. See the press release section for more information on this.

Maps Optimization

Check your address and make sure that it is listed as your business. If not, modify the address! If someone looks for your exact business name, this will normally be the first result.

Image Optimization – Images are actually searched quite a bit. Your affiliates will search for images they can use in promotions and you can definitely get visitors through image optimization.

To optimize images do these simple, but very specific things:

Name your images with your keywords

Over 83,000 results with the name “image001”. These people should be embarrassed!

Your “alt tag” should use your keywords. This tag was created for the blind so they can understand what they would be looking at if they could see. Don’t be spammy and keep it focused. Also, don’t name all of your images with the same keywords, change it up!

The words near your image should also be your main keywords. Nobody is doing proper image optimization and you can dominate the image results for nearly any keyword imaginable. Video Optimization – Videos are searched every day, all day long. Did you know that the average YouTube user spends over 43 minutes watching videos every day? Be sure to check out the video marketing section for detailed instructions on dominating video sites.

Your title should start with the term you want to rank for. Your description should include your keyword terms in different, logical, and readable sentences. Your tags need to include your keywords. Join terms with a dash if needed. Attract viewers to your video by putting it everywhere!

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