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Everyone who has a website knows that to have sales you must have traffic, but not just any traffic it has to be targeted traffic.

What is Targeted traffic? It is simply visitors to your website that are interested in what your website is about. For example, people interested in buying jewellery will find jewellery websites interesting.

How do I get targeted traffic I hear you ask? The following are tried and tested methods:

Forums: Subscribe to forums that discuss your topic. Answer questions and join in the debates there. Become an expert in the field. Then with each article reply you write have a discreet link to your website in the signature file. What can be placed in your signature is often determined by the forum moderators. Do not spam the forum or you will be stopped from posting. This is one of the most productive ways of getting free traffic as those who click your link have already read and liked your style.

Linking from/to other websites: Contact website owners that have similar but not competitive websites to yours, ask them for a reciprocal link from their website to yours. Be sure to select your link partner to match closely your customer profile. Software programs such as Arelis are very helpful in this process.

E-Zines: Contact e-zine owners that have your target readership and buy advertisements from them. Be sure to have a test run to see that the return on investment is sufficient to cover the costs involved. If you are buying an extended run of advertisements haggle with the e-zine owner over price. You may save a considerable amount.

Newsletters: When people visit your website offer them something of value for free if they sign up to your newsletter (like an e-Book). Your newsletter should be written tightly geared towards your topic. It should be published regularly at weekly intervals.

E-Books: Often used, these are usually free informational books for your clients and for others to give away free if they leave your links in the book itself. You can place links back to your website in the books you sell or give to your clients.

Joint Ventures: Contact online marketers looking for new products to sell. They often have large mailing lists with eager to buy customers. Normally they are willing to email their list for a cut of the sale price. This works particularly well with informational products. It has several advantages. It can give a very sizeable boost to both your sales and mailing list within a very short period.

Buy Traffic: This is probably the cheapest in terms of time and most expensive money wise. It gives a traffic boost normally within 30 days. What are you buying? You are buying traffic from expired domain names which the company selling the traffic has bought. They are domain names still registered on the search engines which get a considerable amount of traffic. The previous domain name owners have either lost interest in the name or simply forgot to renew the registration. This means that the traffic from the expired domain name is simply redirected to your website. This is usually high quality traffic as only websites with traffic such as you want is redirected to you. As always, a test run to see if this traffic is suitable should be undertaken.

When you combine these techniques and apply them consistently over time you will find a rich source of targeted traffic coming to your website. This, combined with quality products will ensure the success of your online business.

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Viral Marketing is all about giving away your own free product or service along with your ad copy (contact information, link, email, etc.). In turn, recipients of your free product are allowed to pass it along to their own clients, prospects, visitors and others as a freebie. This is a quick way to multiple your marketing at no extra expense and without extra effort on your part.

Here are some popular viral marketing techniques to follow:

1. Ebooks – Share your no cost ebook with your website visitors. Include a nice full-color ad for your most popular product line with links to your website and email. Tell recipients to share copies of the ebook with their own site visitors and other contacts.

2. Software - Share a trial or “lite” version of your software with your website visitors as a freebie. Don’t forget to include that ad for your most popular product line with links to your website and email. And tell recipients to share copies of the software with their own site visitors and other contacts. For help creating software, hire help from online bid sites like Elance.com.

3. Web Host – Offer to host small business web sites on your server at no charge. In exchange, place your own banner ad at the top of the site for viral marketing. You can setup a fold for their site and they can choose their own domain name and have it redirected to that folder.

4. Templates – Design your own website or other templates, include your own marketing information on them and give them away as free downloads or as an electronic package. Grant permission for recipients to pass them along.

5. Articles – Write articles about your industry. Include your website and contact information in the byline and grant permission for others to publish as long as they keep the byline in tact. Then people can use your contact on websites, in ezines, newsletters and other places where once again, viral marketing will speed the spread of information about your business.

6. Discussion Board - Set up a Discussion Board on your website with your banner ad attached at the top. And invite others to link to it and use it for their own sites.

In summary, by using viral marketing strategies, you can reach out all over the Internet with much less effort. See which methods work best for you and repeat them as often as needed.

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If you are like most online entrepreneurs, you’ve been struggling to grab your share of that flood of traffic that you hear about from every guru wannabe out there.

Chances are you have probably invested heavily in search engines, banner ads, classified ads or even spent a mint on so-called “safe lists” only to find yourself disappointed again and again.

There is a perfectly legal, extremely effective, traffic generation technique that, until now, has gone relatively unnoticed by the masses.

What if you could recover existing web traffic that is currently being overlooked and basically being flushed down the drain?

What if you could grab one of those prized listings in Yahoo that cost $200 with no guarantee you’ll even be included in the directory?

What if you could get that traffic for a fraction of what other advertising methods charge?

Expired domains might be an option to consider. Every day over 3 million hits of targeted traffic are lost due to abandoned web sites. Why does this happen?

Webmasters may lose interest or they don’t have the money or time to manage the site. Sometimes they just forget to renew. A large portion of these expired domain clicks come from sites that were never developed. BUT, some were once solid sites generating traffic and sales.

Expired domains is all about capturing all the effort, time and money that the previous owner developed and putting it to good use for yourself.

What if a domain name had link popularity, had a coveted dotcom (.com) extension, or was even listed in Yahoo or had Google Page Ranking?

What is Link Popularity? Simply put, Link Popularity is the number of other websites
that link to your site. Doesn’t it stand to reason that if a domain name previously had Link Popularity or was one of those coveted dotcoms or was even listed in Yahoo,
that it might have once been a thriving website?

Not only that, but with a little time and effort, you might even be able to pick up some popular domain names just for speculation or to resell on eBay! Many of the domain names that expire every day could be resold even without Link Popularity or any of the other “carrots” because they just happen to be highly regarded as a tangible asset. Short, descriptive domain names that end in a “.com” or “.net” are examples of this.

The best part is that you can get these names for the price of registering them, often for less than $10!

Even if you didn’t use the domain name to redirect traffic to your own web site, if you find a couple and sell them at auction for $25, $50 or more, that’s a pretty decent return on a very small investment.

A certain amount of caution needs to be taken when using this tool for any purpose. Make certain you do a bit of homework to make sure the previous web site was not an adult site. Sometimes the domain name may not necessarily reflect the former content. There is a tool that can be used to determine the history of the site. Best of all, it’s free! Here is the link:

http://web.archive.org

If you are looking for alternative ways to generate traffic to your site, expired domains might be a good investment.

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Traffic Exchange programs are services that online users with a common objective use, in an effort to gain more exposure for their business.

There are different types of traffic exchange programs. There are some that will let you surf the Internet as you normally would, with the only exception being that you set your browser’s start page to their default advertising page. Once your homepage’s browser loads you earn a certain number of advertising credits. You get additional credits for clicking on links of other members in the program’s network. You can then use these credits for exposing your links to the network, with a chance of potential visitors and sales.

Some other traffic exchange services will make your surfing experience a bit more complex, since you would have to wait for a timer to expire in order to be awarded credits, and while that timer counts down you are forced to view another person’s website from the network.

Some of these measures were taken by the traffic exchange programs in an effort to minimize or eliminate cheating, since some users came up with ways to cheat the system by using software programs that auto surf and earn them credits.

Typically, participants to these traffic exchanges will surf the Internet with a slight modification of how they normally would, in an effort to collect credits.

One can conclude that the less distracting from the normal surfing experience, the more the webmaster would be willing to use that traffic exchange program. Also, the less forced an ad/website on a user, the more targeted he/she will be for that product or service. For example, someone who is reads a headline in a traffic exchange and clicks on it to view the website is more targeted than someone who views it because he/she is forced to wait for a timer to expire.

Now that you have an overview of what traffic exchange programs are, and how they work, we can go over their main benefits.

First of all, they’re Free to utilize.

Almost all traffic exchange services are free, although you can upgrade your membership to get additional benefits in some. This means that someone with a low or no budget can start advertising their website fast and for no cost.

Second,  Targeted Traffic, for Internet Marketing.

If your product is Internet marketing related then the traffic you would receive to your website will be somewhat targeted because it will be people like you, who are looking for more ways to increase their online income.

Third, You can build an email list of opt in subscribers.

You can have a page designed to give out a freebie or a 5 part e-course in exchange for an email address. You can then follow up with these leads and sell them more stuff in the future.

And fourth,  You can recruit affiliates to market your product for you.

If you have your own product and affiliate program, you can recruit affiliates to sell your products for a commission. The more people selling your products, the more passive income you will make.

In conclusion, traffic exchanges offer a great free way of promoting your business. They should be included in your advertising arsenal but make sure that you leverage your time effectively, and you don’t surf for hours for those advertising credits. Try to find a traffic exchange program that will not hinder your normal surfing behavior, while advertising your business, and you will be one of the few people who maximize their time and effort with this free marketing tool.