Part three (if you missed part 1 go here increase website traffic thru forum marketing)

In the previous two pieces of this article we talked about increasing website traffic to the opt in page, sales page, blog or other product pages of your website.

We had talked about teaming up with someone and having a planned out strategy where you tell people in your forums how good their stuff is directing the readers of the thread to their landing page, and your partner does the same for your stuff.

This was based on the assumption that you had been in the market you’re in for a while and had already built up a good reputation with lots and lots of posts in the certain forums in that market.

SO what if you have never done any forum posting (or none in the market you’re currently attacking)?

When this is the case can do a slight twist on this technique.

It’s a little bit sneaky but very effective in getting Web traffic visitors to your opt in page or your main site.

What you do is go into the top eight or 10 forums in your market and sign up for accounts under a user name that represents your ideal customer. Meaning if your ideal customer is a 40 to 50-year-old woman that makes $50,000+ a year then you want to have a type of user name that woman would have.

This way she’ll identify with you more and the more she identifies with you the more likely she’ll be to take your advice, follow your suggestions, and ultimately buy your stuff. Which is the end goal anyway.

Now you never want to lie, let me make that very clear right now. Even though your operating under your stage name or an actor name whatever you call it, you still use your expertise and provide relevant, honest, and valuable answers to their questions.

And what you can do when the time comes for your product launch, or when you have something new ready to go you can start placing some links to it within your answers when that makes sense.

So when you’re answering a question that’s asking about a certain resource and your products is that type of resource then you can direct people to it. They will see this as you just finding this cool resource that someone else made.

They’ll be more likely to trust your recommendation because you’re recommending someone else’s resource. Obviously it has to be a very valuable and useful resource where they get way more value than the money they have to give up for it. When that’s true you get a very powerful conversion and the increased website traffic that comes to your page convert very well for you.

Part two (if you missed part 1 go here increase website traffic thru forum marketing)

That’s why those you see on TV are automatically given tremendous weight because the third-party credibility of being on a TV show causes people to automatically trust what they say. Because when you see it on TV it must be true right.

Of course you and I know this is all but the general public believes if it’s on TV then it must be true.

That’s a very flawed if then statement be that as it may you can take advantage of this.

We are just more apt to believe what somebody says about someone else man about what that someone else says about themselves.

That’s kind of convoluted so let me break it down for you.

When I say something good about myself you might be inclined to believe it based on the past experiences you have with me and I’ll truthful and trustworthy you believe me to be based on those experiences.

Now, when you say something good about me to your friends and they are much more inclined leave what you said about me then they would be if I had said that very same thing about myself to them.

When your marketing and forums to get more website visitors onto your page the same principle applies because it is a universal human psychology principle. This is very basic stuff but it is also very powerful stuff.

Now you probably posted in forums already and have a reputation built up. When you come out with a new product or she can include a link in your signature(most forms allow you to have a custom signature where you can advertise your products and websites) and you will definitely get some Web traffic from that.

However, when you team up with someone else and they go and answer questions in a form where they are he had credibility have done a number of posts it’s way more powerful. They direct people to your page because they say how good you are and it directs people to your website right from with in their answer.

This is very viable for you because they are a unbiased neutral third party just doing good by the other forum members recommending a great product they’ve found. Of course that product is yours and you orchestrated the whole thing by teaming up with this person.

This assumes that you are in the same market they are and you will do the same for their product in the forums where you have already made a great deal of posts and have a good reputation. That way you both get the maximum benefit from this strategy.

In part three we’ll talk about a subtle twists on this concept.

So what is this concept ‘Power Forum Tag Teaming’?

First off it does a couple of things for you to increase website traffic:

#1 — it allows you to take advantage of your pre-existing built up credibility in a forum that you’ve been posting in for a while. This way you don’t have start in a new forum from scratch.

#2 — it allows you to get over the initial hurdle people have of trusting you when you are recommending your own product. This is where the team part comes in and I’ll explain in detail later.

I’ve never heard anybody talk about this concept before even though it is part of a larger more basic concept of doing a joint venture or forming a project specific partnership with someone else.

Forum marketing has been around almost since the dawn of the Internet and is still a great source to increase your website traffic and bring more visitors to buy your stuff.

You’ve heard how you want to go into the various forums that cater to your market and answer member questions giving them your valuable expertise for free.

It’s very key to give them tremendous value because without that you’ll never build any credibility and never be viewed as an expert.

People give great authority and credibility to experts. People love to deal with and buy from experts.

When you become the expert you get all three of these outstanding factors working in your favor. This makes those people that read the forum threads and see your valuable answers exponentially more likely to buy from you. The Web traffic you get from those threads converts at a much higher rate.

Of course there is a way to supercharge this tactic.

Ask yourself right now “Who do you trust and buy from?”

As humans we’re pretty universal in that we trust our friends, our family(for the most part), and those we have known the longest to be truthful and give value to those we see as experts based on their knowledge or some third party credibility.

In part two of this three-part series will dig deeper into this third-party credibility concept.

There are many ways to increase your website traffic. Although everyone would like to use methods that are both highly successful and free…that’s just not the reality we live in. Once you have maximized the best free traffic generators..you might want to add some ppc to the mix to effectively compete with your competition.

By Jennifer Horowitz
Driving traffic to your site is one of the first requirements to a successful online business. Without website traffic, your site may as well not exist. There are numerous ways you can drive traffic, so let’s take a look at some of them and evaluate them. Keep in mind, this isn’t a comprehensive list, but it is some of the more successful ways. I invite you to share any other ideas that have worked for you.

• PPC
• Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
• Affiliate Programs
• Article Syndication
• Press Releases
• Blogging Banner ads
• Joint ventures
• Offline campaigns (that drive traffic to your site)
• Advertising (on other sites, ad networks and industry publications)

Let’s look at the pros and cons of a few of the methods, to help you
determine what methods are viable for your business. Stay tuned for
parts 2 and 3, as we work our way through the list above and determine
the pros and cons.

PPC

Pros:

You can drive traffic quickly — that’s a good thing!

Your traffic is targeted if you select the right keywords — also a good thing!

You can use PPC to test things (headlines, landing page copy) —
great way to use PPC, in addition to just driving traffic for sales. Be
willing to sacrifice some profits and use PPC to test ideas before you
fully role them out.

You control the settings and can turn it on and off any time — control is good.

Cons:

There is a lot of research and set up required (unless your
outsource it) — not necessarily a bad thing, unless you don’t have the
time to learn and implement or the budget to outsource. Your best bet
is outsourcing, if your budget allows it. You should be running your
business not becoming a PPC expert.

The cost per click can be very expensive on some words — in some
industries and on some words it is prohibitively high. In other cases
it’s just annoyingly high. You have to determine where your keywords
would fall and if you can afford it. How much is a lead worth to you?
How much is a sale worth to you? You should figure this all out before
your start.

You have to worry about click fraud — bummer! There is software out there to help.

Once you’ve reached your daily spend (the amount you are willing to
pay each day) your ads are turned off and your exposure disappears —
that’s just how it works. It means there is often a good part of the
day where your ad isn’t showing, unless you have a large budget.

SEO

Pros:

• Organic search listings have a higher click through rate than PPC
  listings. — Getting the most clicks out of any listing is a good thing.
  Major pro!
• Traffic from the organic results converts at a higher rate than PPC
  traffic. — Another major pro! Conversion is what it is all about, so
  getting traffic that is more likely to convert is your ultimate goal.
• Your traffic is targeted if you select the right keywords. — That’s a good thing.
• It is more cost effective than PPC (usually, depending on the cost
  of your keywords) — Just run the numbers and determine if that is true
  for you. In many, many cases, $300 of SEO will bring in more traffic
  than $300 of PPC.
• Your listing appears 24/7 and doesn’t turn off after you’ve reached
  a certain limit (like in PPC). — Constant exposure is definitely what
  you are striving for.
• Search engines are the prime source for finding information and
  websites, with more than 8 out of 10 people using them to find
  products, services and information. — Makes it a no-brainer. If you
  aren’t ranked in the top of the engines, you are losing out on traffic.
• You can get content, videos, images and news indexed. — Cool!

You can read more of the informative article about ways to increase website traffic by continuing to read more of the article by Jennifer Horowitz

About the author: Jennifer Horowitz is the Director of Marketing and co-owner of EcomBuffet. Since 1998, her expertise in online marketing and Search Engine Optimization (SEO) has helped clients increase revenue and achieve their business goals. Jennifer has written a downloadable book on Search Engine Optimization and has been published in many SEO and marketing publications.

By warner44 Visit his hubpage at: More Free Traffic

This is stuff I do for my blog 
I have a wordpress blog as my main site and I research keywords I want to get searched on. I find keywords that are connected to what I write about.

Whenever I can, I use these and closely related keywords in the title and in the body of the post. Posting often helps a lot because The search engines love origional content like women love shoes.

Tracking which keywords people find you with is important. Are they finding you with the words that you want, the ones that relate to your main topics? You take the keywords that work best and use them more.

Google Analytics and Google Webmaster Tools are free tools you can use for this.

I also social bookmark my posts and ask friends do this for me too. I use this free site/tool to make it easier SocialMarker . It is a little time consuming to set up because you have to create accounts in the bookmarking sites but after that it is pretty quick. I use delicious a lot and you can download all your saved links and put them in the other bookmarking accounts. Who knows some of these sites may not be there one day.

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