Members. All blogs that have great longevity have got members, and you will notice more and more that people are offering free newsletters, updates on articles, extra content and more when you visit their blog. When you have a member base on your blog, you effectively have a captive audience, which you can keep updated with all your latest offers and updates. It is a very good thing to have extra content available on a weekly basis for these members, because they will follow links through to your site, and that steady stream of traffic will keep returning week after week. You must never over-market this list either. It is generally not a good idea to send out offers to them at all until you have had them as members for a long time, receiving free information and such. WordPress does not have this built in as standard, so you have to be creative and use plugins, or at least use AWeber or a similar autoresponder that can send out offers at a time you specify.

If you start by offering free information, and build their trust and respect as a blogger, you can then begin to send out paid offers or links to affiliate sites later on. Using AWeber to manage your list is much easier than using WordPress plugins, and you can send out a ‘paid’ email 28 days after the initial contact email, so your member has had free content for almost a month before you hit them with a paid ad.

Most people assume they have to create new content regularly for their members to ensure they retain them. This is not always the case. If you wrote up a synopsis of a great article you found on another marketer’s site, and linked them to your blog to read that synopsis… and THEN linked to the marketer’s blog – then this is a great way of keeping your readers entertained, as well as providing great free content as a build up to a paid ad.

One of the first places on your list of ways to market your website should be Ezine articles. Providing you with high quality do follow links for Google worth, Pagerank, and natural traffic, Ezine sits and markets you website 24 hours a day for free. Possibly the most respected among the directories, Ezine has been around for years, and will continue to grow in terms of size and quality, because it is the ultimate collaborative source of information, with articles that have often been written by professional marketers and writers.

You can easily tap into Ezine articles as a marketing tool by using little known methods of ranking your article. Ezine has a most viewed section for its articles, and this can be found at the bottom of every article page. The top articles are found here, and link to from thousands of other articles throughout the site, in each category. If you want to get to the top, simply find out how many views the top article has had, and then knock them off the top spot. To do this, there are many options, and this is one of them:-

All Ezine wants to see is a unique IP visiting that article to count as a unique view. All you need to do is get a few hundred people to view it to ensure you get the top spot. Depending on your niche, all you need to do is find a related forum by searching Google. Go to the forum, and sign up. Make a few good posts to build up your post count so you can actually have a signature, and also post links. Every forum has different rules for this.

You next step is to find a related thread on the forum, and then reply to the poster, with a very relevant and helpful link. You must not look any way spammy, and having an Ezine link will also add to the trust value (as opposed to posting your URL for your own site). If the article you wrote is about Forex, and discusses a particular topic in the niche, then you should post something like “I’ve found Ezine articles to be pretty helpful on that, like this article: link to your site. If you navigate through Ezine’s categories, you will see they have a Forex section and the articles are pretty good.”. This doesn’t sound spammy, and will be allowed by moderators. On a fast growing thread, you will get a few hundred views for free.

There’s a popular misconception that blogs (all blogs) do not allow comments, and they are so heavily moderated that you would never see one of your comments go live with a backlink intact. This is untrue, and you will find that it is the biggest blogs on the web that will give you the most link juice, and who actually encourage posting on their sites. This is all part and parcel of the internet revolution that is Web 2.0, where sites strive to become more collaborative with their readership.

When you are looking for blogs to post on, you will most probably be doing it wrong. You will be looking for blogs in your niche, which are relevant to your site. This way, a comment that you post on the blog will be relevant, and of course moderated accordingly. This is, to some extent, exactly what you should be doing. You post a comment, and your name becomes an anchor text. That anchor can point at your niche site. However, the way to REALLY do this properly, is to look for blogs that have Top Commentators. Well the main reason is that your anchor text will appear on every page of the blog –as well as the front page. You will get the link juice of whatever Pagerank the site is, and also even get traffic from people clicking your name/link – because you are a top commentator.

The way to find these sites is also very simple indeed. Simply go to Google, and search for the following:

allintext: “Top Commentators” “Powered by WordPress “

And that is all. Now all you need to do is check the Pagerank of each site you visit, and only comment on sites that you are knowledgeable about. You often only need around 5 – 10 comments to hit the top spot. This may run for days or weeks. Your backlinks will remain there for as long as you comment. As you build up more and more of these sites in your armoury, simply outsoruce the whole job to keep those backlinks intact.

When you are looking for relevant places to advertise your website, you cannot really get much better than forums. They are a minefield for some people, but if you learn how to use them properly, and within the rules of the particular forum, they can be a goldmine. If the forum allows signatures, then you can put a link to your website in there and get some traffic flowing to your site for nothing. It will only cost your time, and will pay you dividends over many years. Your link will be on the internet as long as the forum is alive, and considering some big forums have been online since 1995 and going strong – it is genuinely a good investment of time.

If you can be the guy that provides the answers to people, then you can certainly be the one who gets a lot of traffic. People respect others who help people out, and if you can be that guy – then you will get the traffic. All you need to do is look for the questions that people are asking the most, and then go and research the product/service. You can usually find answers on places like Yahoo! Answers or Wikianswers. There’s also millions of online blogs. If you are willing to do the digging, and you enjoy helping people, this could end up being your sole source of traffic. A lot of people get traffic daily by helping people like this. If you get a reputation for being the forum’s ‘go to guy’, people are more likely to take what you say as authoritative, and any link you post will be followed. This is a good place to be.

If you cannot find the answer to a question, you can still actually participate in the conversation, by doing a little research on the niche, and then posting a comment. Even this has the capability to get traffic.

There has been much concern over some of Facebook’s features being used for spamming. The best feature that has fallen into the wrong hands is Facebook’s tagging feature, which can be used very well for marketing, but unfortunately spammers use it to mass tag people, who have no interest in the link whatsoever.

Facebook tagging is another way of inviting people to look at a photo, link or page you find interesting online. You simply type the @ symbol, followed by the name of a friend in your friends list (or a page that you are connected to) and then the interesting info you have found. For the marketer, there are great ways to use this, such as posting links to new content on your site, and having THOUSANDS of people reading it.

For example, if you created a new post on your blog, which was a review of a product, with which you are affiliated, then you would be able to link to this page quite easily, on a very popular page that you are a fan of. So let’s say you are reviewing a marketing ebook that specialises in backlinking. You would make yourself a member of a fan page that is related to backlinking, and then write a short update on your wall, including the fan page name after the @ sign. E.g.: “ @Backlinking Group : This is a frank review of Backlinking Bonanza v3.0, and I’ve pulled no punches. Let me know what you think.” After the above text, click the Add Link button, and enter your URL. If you have a fan page – even better (because you will get a small icon pop up too in the update). This status update would then be posted to the fan page (which could have thousands of regular viewers), thus putting your link in front of those users – and getting traffic!

Blogging can be a pain in the butt if you do not want to spend time ensuring the site is up to standrads that search engines now demand.  They require more and more from a webmaster now, than ever before. Usually, it’s content. Content can make or break a site, and the only real longevity a site ever gets is from unique regular content being added, and Google seeing this happen over a length of time.

You can argue the point that most of the autoblogs out there are spinning content to 30% unique, and they are getting away with page one rankings with Google – but for how long? You really need to add enough content to ensure Google thinks you are an authority on your niche subject, and starts pumping traffic your way, based on this trust. That word has now become a beacon for most webmasters, because Trustrank is well and truly here. Google is now ranking sites NOT just based on their inbound links, but also on their outbound links (amongst other things under the Trustrank banner). If your site has no selfless outbound links – which can link to any site – then your site has less chance of ranking higher. The best place to observe this is on website flipping sites like Flippa.com. You can check the micro-niche blogs that advertise Amazon products. These guys rank up high in the SERPs, and all include Trustrank methods. You will see few that do not have outbound links in their sidebars…

Another big deal over at Google HQ has always been backlinks. You may have seen recently that Angela and PJ’s backlinks have been penalized by Google, and their sites have received a drop in Pagerank. This is testament to the fact that all your backlinking activities should be natural and relevant. Always be wary of purchasing backlinks – it may harm your site if you do!

It is very possible to perform arbitrage on your blog with Adwords or any pay per click (PPC) system. Arbitrage simply means that you are buying traffic that will convert well on your blog, and selling products or earning revenue that will be worth more than the expense of the PPC traffic itself. For example, if you sold ebooks for $20 and you bought traffic at $0.02 per click, you would need to sell one every 10 clicks to break even. However, if you sold 2 ebooks, then you would be in profit. The trick is to get the best possible converting traffic that you can.

Do not assume that all you need is a keyword that will cover the whole niche, and nothing more. What you need are special keywords that take some people hours to find. These are buying keywords. The keywords you need are the ones that people are typing in, and are ready to buy. In some niches, this is easy to do, because the keyword modifiers used are such as “buy shower curtain” or “purchase lawnmower”. When it comes to products like ebooks or internet marketing coaching for example, you would struggle to find the buying keywords, unless you begin to think differently about your visitor.

Instead of trying to think of a buying keyword (where there may not necessarily be one) you should concentrate on the way you handle the visitor when they arrive. If they arrived from a keyword like “seo coaching” for example, there is no need whatsoever to explain to them why they need coaching – because they have already decided they need it. Simply give them what they are looking for – details of the coaching, and a price. You can apply this to any niche where the product or service itself does not have immediately recognisable buying keywords.

Once you have decided what niche you are going to dominate, you need a solid and workable method of picking the keywords and putting together the content for your site. People’s common misconceptions are that keywords are pretty easy to find, because all they need to do is find a keyword that has tons of traffic, and then fill their blog with content about that keyword. Wrong. They are also under the impression that content can be automatically generated from other websites, and never be penalized by The Big G. Wrong.

The two most crucial aspects of blog design and developing are keywords and content. You can find keywords that have loads of searches – but what if 100 million other sites are using the same keywords? You can also buy an autoblogging plugin which add articles to your blog every hour, that other people have written. But what about Google’s policy on using unique content? The best way to get ahead, is to use a niche keyword tool and an article spinner.

Niche Keyword Tools

To find your keywords, it would be better to use a piece of software like Micro Niche Finder or even an online solution like Wordstream. These will deliver hundreds of keywords based on the niche you are interested in. For example, once you enter a niche like “dog grooming” the software will toddle off and dig up any related keywords to that niche. You then take these keywords and put them into a competition analysis tool.

Competition Analysis Tools

Market Samurai is a superb tool, and comes with free keyword research tools built-in, and you need never upgrade to the paid version. You will be able to find out the competition levels for your keywords very easily with this tool. Traffic Travis is very handy for finding out the competition for your keywords. It is also free.

In Part 3 : Content is King! Learn about Article Spinners and Content…