Hello and welcome to the January 2004 issue
of Trafficology.

This issue we have some really good traffic ideas
for you, 6 of them in fact. Our personal favorite 
is tip #4. We have actually used this one with 
some great results.

Always remember, we welcome your feedback anytime. 
We want you to view this as YOUR newsletter, so
email us with comments, critique, suggestions,
feedback anytime at:
feedback@trafficology.com

And if you have a traffic tip and would like to
share it with the rest of the Trafficology
Community feel free to submit it at:
http://www.trafficology.com/ideas.html

We have some good news for you.

We have brought on a full-time editor for
Trafficology.... well actually two editors 
who work together as a team.

We will tell you more about them in next
month's issue. In the meantime, just know that
they are diligently working behind the scenes to
create a Trafficology Community just for Trafficology 
subscribers who want to get together, interact and 
get more traffic tips. It will be really exciting.

Some free training for you.

We have hardly talked at all about the other 
things we are involved in at Nitro Marketing...
well, because you subscribed to trafficology 
so we want to keep this focused on *all things 
traffic*

We figure if you want to know what else is cooking
over at Nitro Marketing, you'll mosy over and see
for yourself whenever you feel like it at 
http://www.NitroMarketing.com

However, with that being said, there are certain
results that directly pertain to the traffic topic
that we'd be remiss not to share with you, and it 
just wouldn't be right if we didn't tell you about 
some of our valuable free resources we offer.

They don't cost you a thing and we put a lot
of time, effort and resources to make them top
notch training for you.

One of them is a free monthly training that we 
do where 1000's of people around the world listen 
in to.

We still have the recording from January's 
webcast posted online and you can listen to 
it at the special access page:

http://www.NitroWebCasts.com

It is called "The Hypnotic Marketing Formula 
Revealed" and we have gotten a ton of positive 
feedback on it the past couple of weeks. The first 
20 minutes specially gives you some good tips to 
get free traffic. Plus a bunch of other usable 
information throughout.

We are going to be taking the recording down 
at the end of the month so check it out soon because
we know you will get a bunch of great ideas from 
the webcast recording.


Best Regards,
Matt and Kevin
Trafficology.com
and Co-Founders of Nitro Marketing
http://www.NitroMarketing.com 

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1. BECOME A "LOCAL" SELLER USING GEOBUTTONS

We received this VERY interesting concept from 
a nice lady in Utah:

"We market satellite TV systems and accessories in 
48 states. As you know, many customers visit the 
internet just to shop around and then visit a local 
retailer to actually make the purchase. We found a 
great way to BECOME the local retailer, as far 
as the customer is concerned."

There's a company that has "mapped" IP address blocks
to specific cities, so if your visitors live in or 
near any Top 50 US city, you can dynamically determine 
their geographical location and use that to your advantage.

In other words, if someone were to visit your website, 
and her IP address (or her ISP's IP address) 
was 216.147.23.70, you would know that she was 
physically located in Baltimore, Maryland.

With that knowledge, you could place a dynamically
generated headline on your website that said, 
"Baltimore's One-Stop Widget Store" or 
"Serving Baltimore and Surrounding Areas".

The city is inserted dynamically based on the visitor's 
IP address. If done properly, this will make you become 
a "local retailer" in the minds of many customers. 
The submitter of this idea said, "We suspect that you 
will find, as we have, that many more customers will 
buy from once they consider you a local retailer."

Here's how to add it to your site:

Go to the website below and customize a FREE 
"geophrase" to insert on your website.

http://www.geobutton.com/

(Note that the code you are given will put a blue 
hyperlink to the geocode website in the geophrase 
you create. For maximum effectiveness, you may 
want to hide the fact that it's a hyperlink.)


Next, be prepared for your site visitors to talk to 
you like you're a "local." They will expect you to at 
least know their state. The submitter said, "We use 
Caller ID or quickly ask the customer their phone if 
they call from Out-Of-Area. We also keep the website 
http://www.freeality.com/finde.htm  open so we can 
quickly establish the state the customer is calling 
from by their area code."

The submitter continued, "We started this in August 
and enjoyed over double the number of sales this August 
compared to August in any of the last 5 years. (Our 
traffic has increased only 8% compared to last August). 
While this won't necessarily get you more traffic, it 
will get you more sales from the traffic you get. 
We believe that this technique works extremely well 
because it isn't known - so don't overdo it!"

----------------------------------------------------------

2. OFFER AN AFFILIATE PROGRAM GUARANTEE...
Go Above and Beyond What Everybody Else is Doing.

If you've got a successful website that consistently 
converts x% of visitors into customers, AND you've got 
an affiliate program, you've got a scalable business 
that you can approach other webmasters with. 
You already knew that.

But human nature being what it is, whether it's sloth, 
indolence or skepticism, you will not be able to convince 
every webmaster that he can make money by promoting your 
program, even when you've got the historical figures 
to back it up.

But you might convince a lot more of them if you 
give them a guarantee. Something like this...

"If you promote this to your list and don't make at 
least $3,000 within (a certain time frame), we'll
pay you $3,000 out of our own pockets."

The idea that they're guaranteed to earn (in this case) 
$3,000 - no matter what - will get a lot of people off 
their lazy you-know-whats. And since you've got the data 
that allows you to confidently predict the outcome, 
it's not that big of a risk to you.

Nevertheless, you might want to add a clause in the 
agreement that says the guarantees is contingent on 
the list responsiveness being within 3% of average. 
That way, if the guy has a hugely inflated membership 
or a list that's sick and tired of hearing from 
him, you don't get hurt.

One thing we have had good success with is rewarding
our affiliates for doing desired actions. 

For example, last week we launched a new promotion 
method for affiliates to use - actually its one of our 
most successful techniques we use as affiliates for 
other people's programs - and are giving affiliates $100 
for taking 6 minutes and implementing it at their sites.

You can see exactly how we did that here:
http://www.nitroaffiliates.com/tools/nk.html

We could have said, "just do this and you will
make a lot more in commissions." By doing a 
little extra and rewarding our affiliates for 
taking the desired action more of them did it, 
which means more traffic for our sites.

The lesson to be learned here is to ALWAYS do
more than your competition when it comes to
working with affiliates. Just offering a good
program is not enough anymore. You have to go
above and beyond what affiliates would normally
expect if you want to get above average results.

----------------------------------------------------------

3. Legitimate Way to Add Keywords To Your Site

This is yet another way to get a few more relevant 
keywords into your pages without cheating the search 
engines, it's called the link title tag. 

In IE, if you format a text web link this way, 
a small pop-up will appear when you hover over 
the it, in much the way "alt text" will show up 
when you hover over an image. 

To use, just format a textual link the way you 
normally would, then add the following before the 
"href": title="whatever text you'd like, in quotes". 
Here's an example. 

< a title="Find out how I got every site I've ever 
promoted in the top 100,000 in Alexa and/or in a 
top 10 semi-popular keyword spot in under a month, 
spending less than $3 a day." 
href="http://www.freetrafficdirectory.com/ftd/index.php?trafficology" >
Must we pay for ALL Our Traffic?< /a > 

I've used spaces after I open and close tags so 
you can follow along- delete those spaces when 
you use it on your site! 

I find the best place to use this is in the 
navigation section of your website and as a 
bonus it can be helpful to your visitors as 
well by giving them a more detailed explanation 
of that link. 

You can read more about its technical implementation here. 

http://www3.bc.sympatico.ca/educatedweb/ge-dec28-99.htm

Submitted by: Tinu
http://www.freetrafficdirectory.com 
Subscribe at ftd-subscribe@topica.com 
Find out why free traffic ISN'T a dead concept.

----------------------------------------------------------

4. INVENT A WORD

This is a powerful twist to "branding" that really
taps into the power of the internet. This has a 
lot of potential... if you can make it work.

Come up with a word or phrase that describes a certain 
new thing that hasn't been properly articulated. Then, 
buy the domain (or several domains) or even the trademark 
related to that word or phrase.

Here's what I mean:

It is so much easier to discuss things when they've 
got a name. Can you imagine how difficult it would 
be to talk about peer-to-peer, pay-per-click or 
2-tier affiliate programs if those phrases didn't exist?

In the early days of "scumware", people tried to 
describe it in various ways: "software that puts 
other people's links on your site" or "a PPC program 
that converts your text into outbound links without 
your knowledge or control", etc. But as soon as the 
word "scumware" started being used, that became the 
"de facto" term.

A Real Life Example:

A hot topic awhile back, and one we pushed to the
fore-front several years ago was "stolen affiliate
commissions". You can read more about this at:
http://www.NameStick.com/protect.html

Well, here at Nitro Marketing one of our first 
ventures into the "Internet Marketing" world 
(previously we mainly focused on other niche markets) 
was a site called www.NameStick.com

It allows you to register a benefit focused
domain name to forward to your affiliate links.

One of the benefits is when you recommend something
you use your domain (that secretly forwards to your
affiliate link). Since the actual affiliate link 
is hidden you end up with more sales because they
are not "stolen" by other affiliates as well as
a general increase in sales.

Many people now say "NameStick It" when referring
to hiding an affiliate link via domain forwarding.

We have done very little promotion of that site
the past year, yet traffic and sales keep coming 
in day after day by creating that "brand awareness".

----------------------------------------------------------

5. LEASED ACCESS ON LOCAL CABLE

One of the biggest secrets in the marketing business 
is "leased access" on local cable television. You've 
probably heard of "public access", where cable companies 
are required to give the public a forum for various 
purposes, as long as they are not commercial purposes.

There's also "Government Access" and "Educational Access". 
These are not provided by your cable company because 
they're such nice, generous people. They are mandated 
by Federal Law.

And under Federal Law, local cable companies also 
have to set aside a channel for "leased access", 
which allows anyone to come in and "rent" a cable 
channel for anywhere from 1/2 hour to 24 hours a day. 

You can do anything you want with this leased access 
time. You can re-sell it, you can run commercials, do 
your own talk show, etc. As long as its not obscene, 
you legally have complete control over the content.

Here's the amazing part - leased access is CHEAP! 
The rate is federally mandated, based on number of 
subscribers. Half-hour blocks can be purchased for 
as little as $25 in some markets, and even in huge 
markets like New York and Chicago, you can buy a 
half-hour for $200 or so.

But almost NOBODY knows about leased access. 
Even television marketing pros.

If you're just starting out, the best thing to do 
would be to sell off half of your time to some 
advertisers to recoup your expenses. Most advertisers 
are used to paying $100 for 30 seconds. They'll be 
happy to pay you $100 for 15 minutes! (Or you can 
get 10 advertisers to pay you $10 and they each 
get 90 seconds.) The rest of the time is yours 
to market yourself in any way you like.

When you approach your local cable company about 
leased access, they're going to try to sell you 
advertising at their regular rates. They HATE leased 
access because they don't make much money on it. 
But they are required by law to offer it, so don't 
let them bully you.

They try to get around their legal obligation by 
pretending they don't know what you're talking about, 
or by requiring you to provide a unnecessarily complex 
insurance policy. But if you're willing to follow 
through, you'll be amazed at how much television 
air time you can buy for virtually nothing!

----------------------------------------------------------

6. APPROACH WEBSITES THAT LINK TO COMPETITORS

Here's a tip for improving the link popularity of your 
site while getting targeted traffic from web sites that 
are closely related to your business.

As you know, link popularity is getting to be THE 
determining factor for high rankings on search engines. 
The more high-quality links that point to your site, 
the better your ranking on Google, Inktomi, Altavista 
and other major search engines.

The problem with building good link popularity for your 
website is the time and trouble of finding partner sites 
that are willing to place your link. Fortunately, there's 
a way to quickly find good sites for linking.

Websites that link to your competitors are the perfect 
sites for linking to you too! They have shown that 
they're willing to link to other sites and they have 
shown that they are willing to link to sites like 
yours (i.e. your competitors). 

Not only do you get the boost from this additional 
link popularity, but you also get good, targeted 
traffic directly from the site.

To find web sites that link to your competitors, 
do the following:

a) Go to http://www.Google.com 
b) Enter "link:www.competitor.com (the URL of your competitor)
c) Press the search button
d) Contact these web sites

You can do the same thing faster if you use a 
linking tool like Arelis or Link Spider... 

http://www.Axandra.com 
or
http://www.scamfreezone.com/spider/

Enter the URL of your competitor and the software
program will present you a list of all pages that 
link to that competitor. You can also email these 
web sites directly from Arelis.

This is not a short term traffic idea but it will 
certainly increase the traffic and the search engine 
rankings of a site in the long term.


-----------------------------------------------

That's all for this month - next month we'll introduce
you to the new Trafficology editor's and new site
design, among other cool things - also, don't forget 
to check out the free training at:

http://www.NitroWebCasts.com/

Best Regards,
Matt and Kevin
Trafficology.com
and Co-Founders of Nitro Marketing
http://www.NitroMarketing.com

We welcome your feedback - just send it to:
feedback@trafficology.com

If you have some traffic ideas of your own, you 
are welcome to submit them at the site and get 
some free exposure in a future issue of Trafficology.
http://www.trafficology.com/ideas.html

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