Some readers have voiced that they are interested in what blogs I read. Well, I’m an internet marketer and I’m very focused when I work. I believe that if you’re in a business to succeed, you have to go at it full throttle. That’ s why all the blogs I read are on internet marketing.

Some here are my Google bookmarks of blogs I regularly read.

1. David Garfinkel

2. Michel Fortin

3. Underground Confessions Of An Internet Marketin…

4. CopyBlogger

5. Frank Kern’s Mass Control Blog

6. Michael Masterson’s Blog

7. www.thesystemblog.com

8. Perry Marshall

9. John Carlton’s Big Damn Blog

10. DTAlpha Talkback

11. Internet Marketing Company Blog

12. Internet Business Coaching by Terry Dean

13. Willie Crawford

Now don’t get me wrong. I don’t read all these blogs daily. Whenever I have spare time, I just visit one of the [tag-self]blogs[/tag-self] and spend around 15 minutes readying them. Some of them I don’t visit for 2 -3 weeks.

What does this list tell you?

1. The blogs are updated regularly. I personally want to read the latest on what they have to write about. Is your blog updated everyday?

2. Read some of the posts on each blog. Notice the quality of their posts and how they write.

3. Look at the blog themes. Ask yourself which one you particularly like and get one for yourself.

4. You can go deeper by looking at the blogs they link to. Ask yourself why are they linking to those blogs.

5. The lengths of their posts. Not all the posts are long. But if you notice they don’t put crap on their blogs.

6. Look at what plugins they have installed. These are successful marketers. Imitate them.

Now go and study from the best.

One of the most often overlooked methods for acquiring traffic to your website is through viral marketing.  This is a method that has been used for quite some time but it is often shrouded in mystery to some degree or another.

The fact of the matter is, it’s not all that difficult to understand and grasp the concepts behind viral marketing in order to drive massive amounts of traffic to your website.  All that is really needed is an idea and for you to follow through on that idea.

If it works out, you would be surprised at the avalanche of traffic you will receive.  If it doesn’t work out, you need to try again until it does.

There are several different types of viral marketing that you can use but two of the most popular are video marketing and free downloadable products.  Either of these can create quite a buzz for your particular website if they’re done properly.  Let’s take a look at each of these types of viral marketing independently and see what they can do for our business.

Video Marketing

Video marketing is a very effective way of receiving viral traffic to your website.  The most important part about this type of marketing, however, is actually coming up with the concept for your video that people would be interested in.

If they’re not interested in what you’re offering, it’ll be very difficult for you to receive traffic that is viral in nature.  By putting up something that is either humorous, controversial or thought-provoking, you’ll be encouraging people to pass the video onto their friends naturally.

Include a link back to your website that is prominently displayed in the video and you would be surprised with the amount of traffic that you’ll receive from it. Start thinking of something humorous and controversial related to your niche in the next few days and create a video of it.

Freely Downloadable Products

The freely downloadable products, such as e-books, are one of the easiest ways to start a viral marketing campaign.  As long as these e-books are very focused on exactly what your niche is about, it’ll be easy to get people to download them.

Of course, you have to offer them for free in order to experience the full value of the viral process.  Once people download these products they’ll do one of several things if the information is good enough.

They’ll either pass it on to their friends and colleagues or they’ll tell people where to come download it for themselves.

If you have links in the e-book that are pointed at your website, you will receive a lot of traffic by using this popular method. This is what I’ve done with Article Marketing Strategies.

Web traffic is the dream goal of every internet marketer. The success of any website depends on the traffic. But the one thing internet marketers forget is are they ready for the traffic?

To answer this question, you need to know what your goal is for the visitors. Only answering this question are you then ready for the avalanche of traffic you’re hoping for.

There are basically 4 reasons why you want web traffic:

1. To build a list of prospects who are interested in what you have to offer. You will sell to this list later on.

2. To purchase your products or affiliate products so that you can make a profit.

3. To test the response of a product which is not ready to launch yet

4. To test your pay per click ads such as Adsense

For points 3 and 4, you can generate web traffic using Pay Per Clicks, such as Adwords. This is a fast and easy way to generate web traffic. The visitors you get are very targeted (it depends of course on how well you’ve crafted the ad).

If your reasons for the web traffic are for points 1 and 2 then you need to check if you’re ready for the web traffic. Going through this checklist will not put your targeted traffic to waste.

Checklist For An Onslaught Of Traffic

1. Do you have the autoresponder lists setup correctly to capture the email addresses?

If you’re driving traffic from different sources such as JV partners, you’ll need to have different autoresponder lists for each individual partner. With these lists, you can see which partner has brought you the most signups, customers etc… and you can easily compensate or show your gratitude to them based on the figures.

All JV partners love to know how well they did for a promotion. Telling them how many double opted signups you got will make you look very professional.

2. Are your autoresponder messages setup correctly?

Once people sign up to your list from your website, you need to make sure that the email series you start sending to them are free of errors and are valuable enough for them to stay on your list.

Many times people make the error of only have the first autoresponder message and nothing else. They occasionally send an email broadcast, but when they are too busy, the list of new prospects turn cold. They have wasted the web traffic they so hard tried to generate.

Make sure you have enough autoresponder emails ready to warm up your list and provide good content for them. Having a month’s worth of follow up messages is ideal.

3. Your ‘Email Verification’ page

If you use double opt-in for your signups, you need to make sure that you have an ‘Email Verification’ page setup. When people sign up to your autoresponder such as Aweber from your website’s form, they should be taken to a customized screen that is hosted on your website. Do not use Aweber’s default page.

With your customized page, you need to tell the prospects that they will receive an email with a certain subject line and you also need to tell them what the content of the email will look like.

The point of this ‘Email Verification’ page is to increase the chances of them double opting to your email list. There are many times where we lose subscribers because they didn’t verify opting in as they accidentally deleted the email or thought it was spam. Again, implement this and don’t waste your web traffic.

4. Your ‘Thank You’ page

Finally, your thank you page should be hosted on your website when the person confirms the double optin email. Don’t use Aweber’s default page. You’re leaving money on the table. I’ll tell you why.

With the thank you page, you need to tell the subscriber how much you appreciate them for signing up to your list. They’ve taken the actions so giving them a response improves the relationship. You have interacted with them.

On your thank you page, tell them that you have a product that you found interesting and think it can help them. Here you will promote your own product or recommend an affiliate product.

The subscriber has read your content on the website, signed up to your list and confirmed by clicking on an email that they want to be on your list. They have taken 3 actions to receive your information. If you offer them something valuable which is related to what they have read on your website and it really complements their needs, then you are doing them a service.

Your ‘Thank You’ page is a goldmine and many people are not using this. You’re building interaction with your prospects, offering them good advice and making a profit at the same time.

Go through this checklist first before you begin driving targeted web traffic to your websites. Otherwise there’s no point in generating web traffic.

If you have a website, you’ll no doubt understand the need to have targeted traffic visit that webpage on a regular basis.

I’ve been stressing this throughout my posts. You only want targeted visitors. The rest of the visitors are there to waste your bandwidth.

Although there are many different ways that you can get this traffic that ranges from social networking to a viral marketing, one of the best ways to receive the traffic is through the search engines themselves. However the algorithm changes a lot, with search engines so I don’t suggest to spend too much time on it.

The art of getting people to your website through the search engines is a process that is known as search engine optimization, or SEO for short. There are many different factors that can help you to get to the top of the search engines but one of the most important is linking.

The first thing that you need to understand is that not all links are created equal. As a matter of fact, some types of links are not going to do you much good at all and others may actually hurt your ranking in some way or another. These are worse that untargeted visitors.

Several years ago, it was easy to get to the top of the search engines by swapping links with other websites. This form of reciprocal linking, however, has now become outdated because of many people taking advantage of the system and ramping up their rankings through massive reciprocal linking. That doesn’t mean, however, that it doesn’t have its place and it can make a difference in your rankings but it should not be the focus of where your incoming links are coming from.

One way links from other websites may be difficult to acquire in some instances but they can do a lot for your search engine ranking. There are several different ways to get these links.

In the first place, you may be able to acquire them if you have a good website and you simply ask for a link from their website to yours. I hope you’re not afraid to ask though. Many people’s online business are not getting anywhere because they don’t have the guts to ask. This includes, asking for the sale, asking for help etc… That’s another story I’ll go deeper in future.

You may also try getting natural links by posting link fodder, controversial or otherwise interesting material on your webpages that will cause people to link to it. When using this technique remember that the words “rude” and “attacking” are not used here. You can be controversial but never attack other people. You’ll only lower yourself to being a cheap character.

Another way that you can acquire back links is by writing articles and posting them to various article directories with a link back into your webpage. Which is what I’ve been talking about in my book “Article Marketing Strategies”.

Using linking in order to ramp up your rankings is not something that can be done instantly. If you are persistent and your efforts, however, you would be pleasantly surprised at how well your rankings will improve once you have these links pointing your direction.

Rome wasn’t built in 24 hours. It was built over a span of many years (I don’t know the exact years though). Same with your link building. Do it daily. Forget about the results for the time being. Just know that it will bring you good results later on.

That’s it for today. But before you go, check out the 2 recent articles I’ve written:

Pay Per Click - 5 Ways To Effectively Attract Buyers

ABCs Of Doing Keyword Research

Talk to you later.

I’ve received a lot of reviews for the book Article Marketing Strategies which you can download free at http://www.trafficbeast.com/ebook. One of the reviews which really shocked me was by Willie Crawford. Yes he embarrassed me.

You can read what Willie thought of my latest ebook at his blog here

http://www.williecrawford.com/blog/archives/001983.html

I never thought I would be called a Jedi and being compared with Claude Hopkins. I’m not worthy.

The traffic I got from Willie’s endorsement was powerful. Not to mention it was also targeted.

One of the things you can do to bring traffic to your website fast and furious is to write something that is free for everyone to download. Make sure that the content you create is the best! Put all your effort into it. All your secrets, tactics and things that you don’t want anyone to know. Just write them in the ebook.

Once people read your free content and they consider it excellent too, word will get around. This is viral traffic. It is definitely worth all the effort you put into writing the book.

Article Marketing Strategies took me a month and a half to write. It’s 50 pages long and I spent a lot of time proof reading it and asking for comments.

Next thing I did was to send Willie a copy and asked him for a review. Read the review and you can judge if my effort in writing that ebook was worth it.

http://www.williecrawford.com/blog/archives/001983.html

Here’s another traffic tip before I wrap up today’s post. Always spend time to build relationships everyday. I don’t manage to do this myself but I will try. The relationship you build over time will help you when you need it later on. When I mean building relationships, I mean speak to your other peers as friends and help them out if needed. The more relationships you have, the more traffic you will get.

Today I will put out a press release regarding Article Marketing Strategies. I’ll put the updates on this blog on how it goes. If it does well (fingers crossed), I’ll post on what I did.

Speak to you tomorrow.

Article Marketing Strategies was launched on April 18th. My first free ebook in internet marketing.

You wouldn’t believe the amount of effort put in for launching a free ebook. Imagine what the big launches are like such as Product Launch Formula, Butterfly Marketing etc…

I’m lucky that I come from an IT background. It was my full time job before I worked full time as an internet marketer. When IT systems rollout, the end users expect to use it on the day of the launch. When everything goes according to plan, everyone will go ahead and do their work. Nothing special.

But if there are bugs and hiccups, then all hell breaks loose.

People will complain, shout and scream and tell their department heads who will make a big issue out of it. This is the sort of pressure I had to go through many times as the Head of IT in several companies.

With pressure, comes planning. For roll out of IT systems or product launches, there is so much planning needed to ensure everything is smooth on the day. You have to meet the deadline.

Without going into too much detail, one of the plans I did for the launch of Article Marketing Strategies was to prepare everything by April 14th.  This will give me a 4 day buffer incase things go wrong and for me to thoroughly test the workflow. I was still working on the launch till April 18th. Everything went smoothly.

Without the few days of buffer, I would have totally cocked up. This is why I urge you for any major deadlines you have for your business, have a few days buffer. I don’t know why but things never go as they are planned. I’m telling you from experience.

If you have not yet received your free copy of Article Marketing Strategies, please sign up on the right hand side of this blog.

Some updates before I talk about An Internet Marketer’s Typical Day.

I have finished writing my ebook “Article Marketing Strategies” and it is free for download in about 8 hours time. You can download it from this blog by signing up to the newsletter.

I have also just published an article “List Building – How To Build A List From Scratch”. You can read the article here http://ezinearticles.com/?List-Building—How-to-Build-a-List-From-Scratch&id=1101123

I’ve just posted to blog about my typical day as an internet marketer. It consists of 2 parts. The first part is my typical day when I had a full time office job. The second part is my typical day as an internet marketer full time.

You can read the post here –>  http://www.thediaryofaninternetmarketer.com/a-day-in-the-life-of-a-part-time-internet-marketer-alan-cheng/

That’s it for today. Remember to download the ebook ‘Article Marketing Strategies’ in 8 hours time at http://www.trafficbeast.com

Talk to you later.

Copywriting is a skill which I think all online entrepreneurs should definitely have. Even if you outsource your writing to ghostwriters, you should alter them in some way that it’s in your voice. There is so much writing involved such as articles, emails, web content and blogs…you can’t rely 100% on your ghostwriters to get everything right.

One of the main things which you need to write by yourself are your emails. Whether you are teaching someone a new traffic model or recommending an affiliate program.

Here’s a checklist you can use before hitting that send button to your list.

1. Always write with the thought of how your product or service will BENEFIT the reader.
Eg. A fast car’s benefit is to beat others on the road and look cool.

2.Write as though you are talking to the reader. Use words such as “I’ll” instead of “We will”.

3. Always have in mind what your objective is when writing. If you’re selling an ebook on how to design websites, explain the advantages of having a good design and how it will convert visitors to buyers. Then tell the readers which book you recommend. Make sure you achieved your objective after finishing writing the email. This brings me to my next point…..

4. You need to ask for the sale. I’ve read some emails where I don’t know whether they want me to buy the product or take it as a FYI. Don’t be afraid and just ask for the sale.
eg. Click here to buy, Join my email list.

5. Never copy ads which are prepared for you and send them to your email list. A lot of affiliate programs have copies of ads which you can send to your list. Never just copy and paste. People have seen the same ads everywhere for the product. Their delete key is too convenient for them to use.

6. Always re-read your email or any copy which you have written. Take out those unprofessional grammar and spelling mistakes. You’re running a business here.

7. Make sure your copy is not boring. This is a serious mistake which happens often. People receive too many emails nowadays. Slight sense of boredom and they’ll delete you before reading to the end. Having headlines and sub-headlines make a copy less boring.

8. Limit your lines to 60 characters long. Create a new line so that the width of the copy is short. The copy is more pleasant to read in this format.

9. Never ever criticise other marketers for their style, personality or products. It’ll make yourself look unprofessional.

10. Make sure your emails get pass the email filters. No matter how good your copy is, if it gets treated as SPAM it’ll never get read.

Use this checklist before sending out your emails. You’ll benefit your subscribers and your busines.

It doesn’t matter if it’s your first website or if you already have several websites under your belt, one of the most difficult things can be waiting for the initial traffic to come in. Yes, you you’ve spent so much time on getting your blog or website ready, you don’t want it to be a ghost town.

It doesn’t matter how good you are at search engine optimization (SEO), there’s still going to be a waiting period before you really start to rank well for your optimized keywords. I do hope you’re optimizing your website with keywords by the way. It makes a hell of a difference with search engine rankings.

What can you do in the meantime in order to pull traffic into your website to get that initial burst of sales going? You can pay for the traffic through the use of pay per click advertising (PPC).

Pay per click advertising is the most widely used form of advertising on the Internet. Although there are many different places in which you can pick up these ads, the three most popular ones are Google, Yahoo and MSN. Of course, Google is at the forefront as they’re in many different areas of the search engine world.

If you really want to drive some traffic to your website in a hurry, you can get an account with Google and begin running pay per click ads within minutes after you submit your keywords and a relevant ad. Google’s pay per click advertising is called Adwords.

Of course, there are some guidelines that you’re going to need to follow in the process. This will not only help you to pay less for every time somebody clicks on one of your ads, it will also help you to have a higher conversion rate for those that visit your website.

The most important thing that you should do, however, is choose keywords that are relevant to the type of website where you will be driving the traffic. The more relevant your keywords, the higher your conversion rate will be.

You also want to make sure that the landing page for your ads is a relevant to the ads that you are running. If you are purchasing keywords for a dog training manual, for example, you wouldn’t want to have it land on a page about Viagra. Not only would you not get any sales, Google would boost the amount that you would pay for click for using irrelevant keywords (and more than likely disable the keyword altogether).

Tests have shown that landing pages containing the keywords in the browser’s title and in the headline, will increase conversion. This is because it further emphasizes to the visitor that the webpage is relevant to what they are searching for.

As long as you follow a few general guidelines, using PPC advertising can be one of the most effective ways to get to traffic in a hurry and to get the ball rolling on that particular website.

One of the ways where you would use pay per click advertising is when you want to test a product. If you want to know the response the people in your niche will have with your particular product, you can drive pay per click traffic to it. You will get results in a day by checking how many people clicked on the ad and wanting to know more information.

If the response is good, then you can go full throttle with developing that product. This will save you a tremendous amount of time by avoid creating unwanted products or services.

There are some software which I just can’t do business without. I would like to mention one here which has saved me a considerable amount of time in my online business.

The software I’m about to mention is not something new. If you’ve been visiting internet marketing forums, then I’m sure you’ve heard of it.

What this software does is saves your username and password, and also autofills forms for you.

Doesn’t sound very exciting does it? Well let me explain more in detail on how I use it in my business.

I have many websites which I host on my dedicated server. When I access cpanel for each of the websites, I only need to type in the login once (username and password).

Afterwards, if I access which ever domain’s cpanel, I can click on a button on my toolbar and it will autofill the login details and help me login to the website.

Another situation where I use this software daily is for my affiliate programs. I’m an affiliate for many products and services. Again, using this software, I just bring up the website with Google Bookmark and click on this button in my browser’s toolbar to auto login. I have around 50 affiliate programs which I need to login and check the stats for. Imagining checking these different login details in an excel file (which I did previously).

There are so many things which you can use this simple, but time saving tool for. Such as web mail acount logins, membership sites and administering blogs.

Another feature of this handy tool is an autofill form. Where you can fill out the standard fields once, and then it can memorize the fields per profile for you.

For example, if you fill out the credit card information for a certain website, you can use that same information for other websites that require your credit card details when purchasing.

For me, I use my personal credit card, my business credit card and my wife’s personal credit card. So the software will prompt me to choose one of three profiles when filling out the form. An absolute time saver! No more getting my credit card out of the wallet and filling in the address details etc…

That’s another thing I love about this software. It lets you choose different logins when using the same form. For example, for my paypal login, it will prompt me for 3 different email addresses that I have saved for Paypal.

Apart from saving login details and autofilling forms, the software also allow me to autogenrate passwords. By that I mean complex passwords. Hey, I don’t even have to remember passwords anymore.

Some people may be concerned with the security of this software. Well the software has that sorted out as well.

The software uses strong encryption and algorithms which means it is very, very difficult to hack into the program and retrieve all your password even if the software files are physically copied by hackers.

All you need for the software to work is remember a Master Password. You need to enter this password once every time you boot up your machine to start using the software.

Now what happens if your machine crashes? There is a backup feature in the software where you can backup the files into a secure place. If you do have a disaster, then you can easily restore the backup and nothing is lost.

By not needing to check your affiliate program passwords, sometimes it will save you around 10 minutes. This includes opening the excel spreadsheet and checking old emails or resetting passwords using the web forms.

Also when you fill out long registration forms which require checkout information, this in itself will save you another 5 minutes including getting the credit card out of your wallet.

If you are submitting your articles to ezine directories, then the time saved will really add up when you try to login 10 or more directories when submitting your articles.

This software on average has saved me 20 minutes of my time per day. This comes to around 140 minutes (2 hrs 20 mins) per week or 600 minutes (10 hrs) per month.

Just imagine, saving 10 hours of your time per month. Not to mention the tasks for checking your credit card number, looking for your username and passwords in your spreadsheet will take the focus off the work you are currently doing. It takes another 5 minutes to re-focus yourself on the work you were doing.

Do you understand now why I highly recommend this software?

The software is called Roboform and you can download a free working version here –> Download Roboform

However, this free version is only good for saving 10 passwords. After that it will start bugging you to upgrade. If the free version is enough for you to use, then good for you. For many marketers like myself, we need a lot more.

If you made your mind up already with this software your can click here to purchase Roboform.

I would go for the USB key version which is a bit more expensive at $39.90 But it’s really useful for me because I can use it for my laptop and for the PC at my office.

This is one of the software which I advise all my friends and peers to buy. It takes such a huge weight off your brain and saves you so much time in the long run. It’s worth every cent if you consider how much your time is worth.

Enjoy the free version by downloading Roboform here