When you are looking for a website, where do you type in the URL?

In the address bar of your browser, right...
well apparently not everyone got that memo :-)

An interesting fact is that right now there are many people typing the URL into...a search engine! I could not believe it, but it is true. What is even more mind boggling is that people type in the URL of the search engine, into the search engine. Therefore, every month you find that the top search terms are always google.com, yahoo.com, ebay.com.... and so on.

Because of people's tendency to search for URL's, there was an old SEO trick that used the URL of popular search engines to draw traffic to your website - but it is no longer effective.

But then along comes 'The PPC King' to the rescue with a fresh twist on the dead tactic.

Jon Keel, a long-time Trafficology Subscriber (and Pay-Per-Click King), explains how to use this same concept to effectively find people who are looking for a competitor's website.

He says that instead of using it as a trick, set up a legitimate comparison table between you and your competitors. Now, you can legally use their name & URL on your site. Plus, this is the perfect tool for convincing visitors to purchase from you instead of the competitor that they were originally searching for.

Jon reports no problems getting these pages approved by the Overture & Google editors. He also finds that even your biggest competitors are completely unaware of the fact that people are searching for their URL - so there is very little competition for these terms.

This week we drove by a house for sale. Instead of the familiar "For Sale" sign with a phone number, they had a sign for a radio station. It read, "For Sale, Learn more at 98.9 FM". We were not looking to buy a house, but this was so intriguing that we just had to tune in.

I have actually seen this same technology used in several places - Movie Theaters, Park Safari, Museums, even at a special Christmas light display in the city.

The basic idea is that you set up a small radio transmitter and broadcast your own message. Then everyone passing by can tune into your station and learn more about what you are doing.

You could use this concept to promote your website. Just set up a small radio transmitter that talks about your website, and then on the sign for your business (or on your front lawn) tell people to tune into your station to learn more. This will be especially effective if you are near a busy street.

Here is a twist on that concept.

Every local electronics store sells personal radio transmitters. They are designed to plug into your MP3 player and allow you to listen to MP3's in your car.

No one ever said that your MP3's have to be music. Instead set up a quick 15 second commercial for your website and set your player on loop. Then get a bumper-sticker or one of those car window or door signs instructing people to...
"Tune in to hear Trafficology.com at 88.1 FM".

The standard transmitter has a range of only 50-100 feet, which would work fine for stop 'n go traffic, but you could probably even find a "suped-up" one online. Although, 50 feet should be plenty of range for the guy sitting behind you in traffic to hear all about your website.

Also, election season is coming up. I'm sure everyone has seen that group of people standing near every major intersection in town. You know, those people holding up red & blue signs for one candidate or another. Well, put your MP3 player and your personal radio transmitter in your pocket and stand next to them. Everyone is already looking in that direction; just make yourself stick out with a bright yellow sign that says "Tune in to hear Trafficology.com at 88.1 FM".

Now, everyone driving by will be so curious that they will have to listen to a message about your website.

One of the best ways to drive traffic to your website is to publish quality free content. The principle behind this traffic creation technique idea is simple - people search online for information.

So if you provide high quality information, then people will come to your site. That’s the "If you build it, they will come" theory... And as we all found out, it only works for Kevin Costner.

The problem is that the Internet is huge, and for people to read your great content, they first have to find it. If you do your keyword research (part2 of the Trafficology Mini Course covers Keyword Research) and develop a quality site, then you will generate a good amount of search engine traffic.

But, what you really need is links on related websites. They not only help your search engine ranking, but they also expose you to a large group of traffic that someone else has worked hard to create.

The problem with links is that they do a very poor job of selling your site; they are small, plain and not extremely effective. Sure, you could create a big banner, but most webmasters will not place it on their website (unless you pay them).

Another problem with links is that most of the time they are placed in a "link directory" or are sent to the bottom of some obscure page. In both cases, no real person will ever see your link (never mind click on it and visit your site).

What you really need to do is post an article on someone else's site with a link back to your site for more information. This way the other webmaster gets free content for their site, and you are able to grab a large section of their most valuable real estate. This is also good for the visitors because they are looking for quality content and you are able to pre-sell or influence them with your article.

Sounds great, but...

Wouldn't it be better if you could get a spot at the very top of a website? Or even better yet, provide timely updated content to every site linking to you without all the logistical hassles?

Seriously, who has the time to update 100+ articles every month, and it is not very likely that the other webmasters will go through all the effort of changing your article. What if you could automate this process?

Now you can with RSS.

RSS stands for Real Simple Syndication
(sometimes called Rich Site Summary or RDF Site Summary).

It provides an easy mechanism for webmasters to share their content with other websites. You can quickly syndicate a headline, an article or even your whole blog on someone else's site. Therefore, you can send your updated content to hundreds or thousands of sites around the globe, just as easily as sharing an image. Since your information is fresh and can be in headline format, it will usually be near the top of the other website, and since it is timely it is more likely to be read and clicked thru by readers.

The process of getting someone to place your RSS feed on their site is very similar to getting a link. You can use online research tools such as Alexa & Google to find a matching site, then contact them.

Also, you will need to set up your RSS XML page and you may have to explain RSS to the other webmaster.

That all sounds like a fun way to spend your Saturday afternoon, but there is an easier and more efficient way to use RSS. Instead of contacting individual websites, you can submit your RSS page to aggregators - or central websites that collect and distributes your RSS Feed.

Think of it as one-stop-shopping for website content. Aggregators allow you to quickly gain exposure to a large pool of websites actively searching for an
RSS feed.

There is another even more powerful way to draw traffic to your site using RSS.

Another group of aggregators have created desktop programs to distribute your news directly to users without the need of a web browser. It's like an email client for syndicated news content from any website you wish. This is great for users because they get convenient access to the content they want, and this is great for webmasters because you get to "push" your content out to the readers.

That last point is subtle, but extremely important. Now, with RSS you have an efficient way of sending your message directly to the members who have asked to read your newsletter. This provides all the power and benefits of email marketing, with out any of the hassles of email marketing (spam, spam filters, viruses or over flowing inboxes).

All the experts say that the best way to draw consistent amounts of quality traffic is to create a large list of opt-in email addresses. I think that RSS has the potential to be just as useful, and even more effective as email marketing.

Stay tuned, because next month I will chronicle our attempts to use RSS with Trafficology. We will show you exactly how we set up our RSS Feed and we will rate the top aggregators and desktop programs. That should give you everything you need to know to get started with RSS. We will also investigate how to use RSS with an affiliate program.

One last note, you don't need to use RSS to take advantage of the power of articles. All you have to do is have a good idea and submit it to a site on that topic (with a link back to your site).

For example, if you have some great traffic creation & conversion information, submit it to us. We will review it and possibly include it in our next newsletter. Don't worry about the writing. Just explain the idea; we will research and write it for you. Then we will place a link and a couple lines of information about you next to your idea.

To demonstrate how effective this technique is in driving traffic to your site, think about this; in January a Trafficology member who submitted an idea reported a doubling of their opt-in list within 24 hours of publication.

If you are serious about traffic and you have some good ideas, then get involved with Trafficology. Submit your idea at http://www.trafficology.com/ideas.html

This idea has been submitted several times. The basic idea is to change the homepage of all the computers at a cyber-cafe, library, or college computer lab to your site.

Where I live, there are not many cyber-cafes and I am not sure if people using a library or college computer lab will pull out their credit card and make a purchase - but maybe you can find a way to make this work.

Here is the idea as it was submitted:

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Llewellin says:

Any city has many Internet cafes/icafes/cybercafes. One I know in Cape Town South Africa has 500-600 people passing through per day. Some icafes have their own home page others do not have any.

One way of generating free traffic is to ask the owner (after you have become a regular customer of course ;-) if you may make your website the default home page on a few or all computers. This is a wonderful branding opportunity.

One of the new icafes that has opened up recently near my work has agreed to put a link to my page with a short description on their homepage which has links to the most popular sites visited by browsers like hotmail and yahoo.

This particular icafe will give me 500 x 30 computers = 15 000 page views for FREE per month.

If they are not willing to do it for free, you can negotiate a monthly fee that both parties find acceptable. Now imagine doing it at every icafe in any city.

That could be 500 x 30 x # of icafes
(say 10) = 150 000 per month x 12 = 1!
800 000 page views per year!

Admittedly some views are repeat views but the repeat view creates BRANDING because of constant exposure. With a CTR of 2% and a CVR of 3% that means 1080 unique sales of whatever it is that you sell

Submitted by: Llewellin RG Jegels
The Amazingly Simple Cutting Edge Internet
Marketing Formula that guarantees online success

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Again, I am not sure that a CVR of 3% is realistic - but only testing will tell for sure.

Now, here is a twist on that same theme. This week, we went into a mobile phone store. We were amazed to find several phones on display that you can actually use to make a call, surf the web and take pictures. I am not saying that the phone had the capability, I mean I could actually pick up the phone that was sitting on the shelf and make a call, surf the web or take a picture.

Think about this, everyone who is using these display phones are people already looking to make a purchase. Unlike library or computer lab users, they are ready, willing and able to spend money.

What if you could get in touch with them, or bring them to your website.

You can. Take advantage of these demo phones by programming your phone number, email address and URL into all these phones.

Now when someone picks up the phone and looks in the address book, they will see your address with a little blurb about your company. When they try to use the phone to access the Internet, your website will appear. When they go to make a call your phone number will be programmed into auto-dial and they will call you or your answering machine.

Also, for the phones that have built in cameras, take a picture of your logo, URL or business card. Then when a mobile phone customer wants to checkout the phone's image gallery feature, they will be exposed to your marketing message.

Also, people don't try just 1 phone. They try several of the different phone models. If you program your information into every phone on display, the shear repetitiveness of seeing your website over and over again is bound to build curiosity and create traffic.

If you took our course on the 7 Most Effective Traffic Creation & Conversion Techniques, then you already know about our preference for "Targeted Traffic". Quite simply, there are two types of web traffic: Random & Targeted.

Random Traffic consists of people who have reached your website and are not ready to make a purchase. They usually have been tricked into visiting your website, or reached your site without knowing anything about what you sell.

Examples of random traffic are the visitors from hit swappers or traffic created from a contest.

These people are not visiting your site because they want what you have to sell, they are only there to win a prize or were blindly taken to your site. It is very hard to convince these visitors to make a purchase.

Targeted Traffic is people who have come to your site with the sole purpose of learning more about your product service or content or to purchase your product online. Obviously, these visitors are significantly more valuable than random traffic - because they already want what you have.

Here is an interesting idea of how to convert random traffic into targeted traffic:

-----------

Mark says:

Use traffic exchange programs in conjunction with banner exchanges.

We all know the quality of traffic exchange traffic is very poor, to say the least. But, if you set your TE (traffic exchange) homepage to one of your pages that has 1 or 2 banner exchange banners, you can increase your traffic from the banner exchanges.

TE's send real visitors, so all of the traffic will count, and it will go towards raising your impressions on the banner exchange pages, which will send you better quality visitors."

Submitted by: Mark Johnson
http://kickme.to/career
Get paid $25 - $90 just for completing surveys.
Scam-free. Earn an extra $500+ per week.

-----------

This idea sounds like it has potential. Although, I would recommend that you test the conversion rate of the banner ad before spending too much time & effort creating the random TE traffic.

To take it one step further, you could also add one of the email "co-op" services to
this page and earn targeted email subscribers as well. One example we use is
http://www.subscription-rocket.com

If you find that the banners do produce paying customers, then you could easily use them with many of our other random traffic ideas.

For example, above in tip #4 we discussed changing the homepage computers at a cyber-cafe, computer lab or library. I argued that these people are not purchasers - but you could use this method to create banner exchange credits and then receive quality traffic in return.

Although, this only works if the banner exchange traffic does convert.

Have you ever seen an abandoned farm or a closed factory and thought to yourself that someone should put that land to good use? You could use that land to make something and give people good paying jobs.

I see the same thing online all the time. Everywhere I look, there are vast amounts of "unused online real estate". I know that if people just put up a link
to www.Trafficology.com or www.NitroAffiliates.com/g.o/traffic then they could make some easy cash - without doing anything else.

Sound too good to be true? Nope -- just simple "no payment down, no interest, no cost" online real estate.

For example...

When people started signing up for our 7 Part eCourse on Traffic Creation & Conversion, my inbox was filled with messages from people using the spam blocking software.

If you are not familiar with this technology here is how it works: It's like a Cyber-Sentry. Every time a message is sent to your inbox from someone who is not in your address book, the spam-blocker stops the message. Then they send an email back to the sender, and the sender has to confirm that they sent the message. Once they confirm the message, the original email is let thru and all future emails from that recipient are also sent straight to your inbox.

The point of all this is that a spammer will not go through all the trouble of confirming the messages, but real people will - so you only get messages from real people.

I think this is a great idea and it's amazingly affective for cutting down on spam. Even though it filled my inbox with confirmation requests, I was happy to spend the hour or so confirming the messages because I knew that they would get through to people who are winning the battle against spam.

Back to the traffic creation idea. Remember I said that the Cyber-Sentry would send me a message informing me to confirm that I am a real person....

Well, most people leave this page blank. This is a huge tract of unused online real estate. You could use this to promote your website or if you don't sell anything, just place an affiliate link and a blurb about some product that you really like.

Here are some more examples.
There is plenty of unused land on most websites.

* Thank You Pages or Confirmation Pages

Do you have a contact form on your website? You know, one of those fill-in-the-box forms where people leave their comments or ask you a question. After visitors
click on the "submit" button, they are usually taken to a "Thank You" page. And this page usually just says "Thank you...".

Foreclose on this piece of property and post some useful information. You could ask people to sign up for your newsletter, you could post links to your other sites that people may be interested in, or you could inform them of a product that you have "on sale".

What about the "Order Confirmation Page", the page that people see after they have placed and order?

It is a fact that people who have just ordered are the hottest prospect you can get. Use that space on the order confirmation page to promote a related product - either yours or an affiliate link for someone else's.

Here is another huge one - what about those "404 Page Not Found" Errors. These are a bonanza of traffic that you would have otherwise lost. It is very easy to set up a custom error page.

Just create a page called "custom_page.html"

And insert the following line of code into your server's .htaccess file:

ErrorDocument 404 http://www.yoursite.com/custom_page.html

Then on" custom_page.html" provide a way for people to find what they were originally looking for. You can just place a site map, or get a little more sophisticated and take the information from the error and search your site for related terms.

If the search finds no matches on your site - then place some affiliate links to related products or have link to a contact form where they can ask you for help.

If that is not enough unused real estate, then you can take a look at every out going email that you send. Do you send an email confirming an order? Do you send people their UPS tracking number when the order was shipped? What about a message saying that your contact form message was received?

In all of these cases, it is extremely easy to place a couple links to "this months special" or have a link where people could join your newsletter.

Almost every website has some form of unused real estate. Do a quick search of your site, and I am sure you will find a couple ways that you could be generating more traffic and more sales without any more effort than adding a simple link.

From this jumping off point, the online participants would click around on various member sites, looking for whatever clue they're supposed to find. Once they find a clue, they would also be given information about where to go and what to look for next.