The Ideas Home

Twitter is a powerful platform to engage with your readers, connect new people and drive traffic to your site.

However, there are very few people really teaching how to take full advantage of this powerful platform.

It took me quiet sometime to drive traffic from Twitter.

1. Post in Blocks: One of the best ways to drive more traffic from Twitter to your site is by posting in blocks of 3 -4 tweets at a time.  This way your tweets show up in a row giving you more exposure.

Make sure that all your tweets are of high value, last tweet being the most important as that is the one that’s going to show up on top. If you do not know what to tweet about,
you get some really good content to tweet in the below sites.

alltop.com
tweetmeme.com
stufftotweet.com

2. Label Your Tweets: Another way to get more clicks on your tweets is to label your tweets. For example, FREE PDF: , VIDEO: etc..

“FREE Report: Grab this free report in which I revealed all my traffic secrets …….”

You also need to re-tweet your most valued content 3 -4 times a day. If you re-tweet them at different points of time in a day, your tweets will be exposed to an entirely new set of audience.

The best times to tweet your most important content in Twitter: 12am to 2pm, evening after 6pm.

From my observation, people are least active on Sunday.

3. Su.pr: This is the only URL shorterner that puts your content infront of 8 million Stumbleupon users. You can schedule to tweet your posts at any time or date in future. Thus, allowing you to retweet your posts during peak times through out the day.

4. Hash tags: Use the most popular hash tags in your tweets. Any word that starts with the sign “#” becomes a Hash tag which inturn links to all other mentions of that word.

For example, if you go to Twitter search and search for “#marketing”, you will find a long list of tweets containing “#marketing” in them.

So, including popular hash tags in your tweets can give you lot of exposure.

Few resources to find popular hash tags.

http://hashtags.org
http://twubs.com

If you want to follow people talking about Facebook, you can search using #fb hash tag and find a list of people talking about Facebook. If you have a very good content or article on Facebook which you want to tweet in Twitter, then you can use #fb in your post.

I suggest you to use one or two popular hash tags in a single tweet, without diluting their effectiveness.

Image credit: Cinefilo

If you are reading this, then you probably know about Wordpress. Wordpress is one of the best solutions for blogging. It has number of SEO benefits.

Here is a list of plugins that the A-list bloggers are using and which I think every blogger should use for maximum exposure.

Akismet : You definitely need this plugin. It comes preinstalled with Wordpress. Popular blogs get hundreds of spam comments each and every day. This plugin saves your time by deleting these spam comments. Akismet automates the entire process by running hundreds of tests on your comments, trackbacks, and pingbacks to ensure their validity.

Show Top Commentators : If you are looking to increase your comments and the interaction among your readership, this plugin is an excellent choice. This plugin encourages discussion by rewarding the commentators. The top commentators are displayed in the sidebar with the number of comments they have made and a link back to their website.

Related Posts: This plugin identifies and displays other blog posts related to the current blog post based on keyword matching. This helps to keep visitors at your site for longer periods of time. Customize this plugin to display as many or as few related posts as you desire.

Ultimate Tag Warrior : This is a very good tag system for WordPress. This plugin helps you pick up more traffic from Technorati and adds a number of SEO benefits to your blog.

Google Sitemaps: This plugin automatically creates a Google compliant sitemap of your blog to ensure that all of your pages are indexed in Google.

WP-ContactForm : If you do not wish to display your email on your blog, then this is the plugin for you. Using this plugin you can create and display forms in your blog to allow people to contact you.

Comment Redirect : Using this plugin, whenever a reader makes their first comment in your blog, you can redirect them to a page. You can redirect them to a “Thank you” page, explain about your blog and ask him to subscribe to your blog.

Referrer Detector : This plugin detects where your visitors are coming from and automatically displays the coresponding “Welcome” message.

Subscribe To Comments : This plugin allows your readers to subscribe to the comments on your blog posts. Each time there is a new comment on your post, they will get an email notification. This helps getting repeated visitors to your blog, in getting more comments and in building community around your blog posts.

WordPress Database Backup : This plugins helps you keep a database backup of your blog. You can set the plugin to make a regular backup of your blog and automatically email the data to you. This way you will never lose the articles and archives you have written and posted on your blog over the months/years.

Image Credit: Flickr

All the information in Internet is available in the form of files or otherwise called websites. Links are the pathways by which all these files are connected.

Hence links have become the life of the Internet. Search engines like Google, Yahoo, MSN evaluate links to position your website in search engine results.

However, links are not only considered as a ranking factor, but a quality link can drive a steady stream of buyers to your site.

In this article, I am going to reveal a procedure I follow to find such link building opportunities which can generate buzz.

But finding quality, PR5+ links is always tricky.

Every month I collect 100 PR4+ links. I try different ways to find these links.

I explained few of the strategies I use.

We all know that Social media sites like Stumbleupon, Twitter, Digg has millions of users. Stumbleupon alone has around 8 million users.

I explore these sites to find high profile “do follow” sites that allow to place a link to your site.

The most common way of finding links is by finding the links of your competitor using Yahoo site explorer. I think all of you know this. So I am not going to explain about it in depth.

Delicious: Find articles, related to your market that has atleast 100 bookmarks. You can find articles related to your market by searching with different tags.

For example, if you belong to web designing niche, just type in “web design” in the search bar.

Now copy the urls of the article titles that has atleast 100 diggs.

Open google.com and type in the title with quotations.

Like this.

“7 Tools You Should Be Using For Better Web Designs”

Now you find hundreds of sites that published this article. Most of the sites you find in the first 5 pages will be high profile sites. Go through these websites, choose the “dofollow” links. You have a high chance of promoting your website either by submitting an article or doing a guest post or even leaving a blog comment etc…

Now open Yahoo site explorer and find the backlinks of high profile site you found. This way you identify the sites where the the authority site is being promoted. You can visit these websites too and find out other high profile sites.

This way you can explore hundreds of websites where you can leave your link, promote your website and drive good amount of traffic at the same time.

You can follow the same procedure with Stumbleupon, Digg, Mixx and other web2.0 sites you know.

Note: You can either go for “Nofollow” or “dofollow” links. These days I don’t see a difference much. I see that even a  “nofollow” link from an authority site is contributing to search engine rankings.

Wikis: I never heard anyone talking about this. Wikis are some of the best sources for link building. Many wikis rank well in search results.

With a bit of digging, you can find plenty of wiki where you can go and leave a link back to your site.

However don’t just add content to pages that present linking opportunities. You should also be contributing good content to the wiki. Using this strategy, it is more likely that you will be able to benefit from the many wikis available online.

Remember that you shouldn’t spam wikis with hundreds of links.

To find wikis, go to Google.com and type in  “your keywords” inurl:wiki

I recently did a guest post on a site that has around 22k RSS subscribers. I received over 250 visitors as a result of a link to my blog in the “Author Bio” section. (I still get daily visitors of 10 to 20 from this blog).

I use Google Analytics to track my site and after about 100 visitors I received only 13 subscribers. The blog is a highly targeted site of what I write about.

I thought that there was something wrong with my blog and wanted to tweak and test the home page of my blog.

I immediately deleted all the links in the right section of my blog, except the opt-in form. Below the opt-in form, I listed few samples of my newsletter issues.

Surprise!

For the next 150 visitors I got 68 subscribers, in just one day.

I just submitted few guests posts in other blogs too. In the “Author Bio” section, I directly linked to my dedicated squeeze page and not to my blog. Let us see how this works. I will keep you posted on it.

Another tip to increase your subscribers:

Use “Feedvertising plugin” for WordPress.

Find a blogger who publishes content similar to yours. Work out on a deal with him where you both promote each other in your RSS feeds, using Feedvertising. Feedvertising allows you to create up to six rotating links, the smaller blog would promote the other blog continuously, while the larger blog would reserve one slot for the smaller blog.

Today I am going to share the experience I had on one of my recent projects.

I started working on this project in December 2009.

My client offers carpet cleaning services in Michigan. She was one of my subscribers and contacted me in November 2009 to help her in driving traffic to her site.

The first thing I did was, I made a list of 50 state-based keywords. Keywords like “carpet cleaning in Michigan”, “carpet cleaning services in Michigan” etc..

Every month I collect 100 – 150 fresh backlinks of PR4 , PR5, PR6 and PR7. Using this list, I started building links with the keywords as anchor text.

19 keywords got ranked in 1st page of Google within 15 days.

Meanwhile, I asked my client to provide articles and videos. I distributed these articles and videos to few article directories and video directories.

Here are few of the top article directory sites and video sites I used. The number of visitors I mentioned below is for the month of December.

Article Directories:

http://www.suite101.com/           78 visitors

http://www.ehow.com  ——-    92 visitors

http://www.associatedcontent.com  —–  87

http://www.infobarrel.com/  ——–   74

http://www.wonderhowto.com/ ——– 66

Video Sites:

http://www.mefeedia.com   —– 102

http://www.clipser.com ——-   71

http://www.mytopclip.com –83

Free Listings:

http://www.insiderpages.com

http://www.superpages.com

http://www.yellowbot.com

http://www.merchantcircle.com

http://www.kudzu.com/

http://www.americantowns.com

Organic Traffic – 1056 visitors

Other than the above sites, I listed my site in several Michigan business listings, free ad sites, Michigan maps, community sites.
We totally got 3278 visitors in the month of December.

My client told me that 267 people contacted her requesting a service. I do not know how many of them actually bought her service. I am yet to talk to her about it.

Now, go ahead, submit your articles and videos in the above sites.

If you are reading this article then you might already be owning a website or blog and looking
for different ways to drive traffic to your site.

You probably heard of SEO, article marketing, video marketing social media marketing. These are basics of Internet
marketing.

Probably every Internet marketer implements the above techniques to drive traffic.  But you need to constantly look for traffic generating websites or techniques and think “out-of-box” to stay in top crowded Internet marketing niche.

Today I want to share a list of 17 untapped websites that can drive tons of traffic to your site.

Guest posting or Article Submission: Guest posting is one of the techniques most of the successful bloggers
including leo babauta of Zen habits use to drive traffic and create a brand name.

Below is the list if websites that accept guest posts and can drive 100’s and 1000’s of traffic to your site.
You need to offer great and unique content to these sites exclusively.

http://www.dumblittleman.com/2006/08/submit-article-to-dlm.html

http://www.quickonlinetips.com/

http://www.lilengine.com/get-great-links/

http://www.clicknewz.com/tag/guest-post/

http://www.associatedcontent.com/

http://www.netprofitstoday.com/

http://www.ehow.com

http://marketinghackz.com/

Sites where you can promote:

Ning communities: Ning communities are other great resources to promote your existing articles.

http://thisis50.ning.com/forum

http://www.20sb.net/forum

http://www.myworkbutterfly.com/

http://www.linktocharlotte.com/

PDF Sites:

www.scribd.com
www.docstoc.com
http://www.yudu.com/
http://issuu.com/
http://www.calameo.com/

You might already be using Squidoo lenses to promote your content and site.

The below are few sites which are similar to Squidoo and where you can promote your articles for extra traffic.

http://www.gather.com

http://www.tumblr.com/about

http://www.pageflakes.com/Default.aspx

http://knol.google.com

http://www.wetpaint.com/

www.bebo.com

Do you know that you can promote your site using viral widget marketing? Here are the details.

You can create widgets using many widget generation solutions like Widget box, Iwidget,Widgadget , Produle etc… that can fit the look and feel of any blog, social network, and share them on your blogs, to your friends, collegues etc…

Let us analyze how these widgets work.

Widgets can be created by bloggers, agencies, companies to spred their content across different social networking sites and increase traffic.

Almost all the widget generation sites site allow you to create customizble widgets out of your RSS feeds. You can create them in Flash or Java, depending on where you want to use them.

After you create a widget, you can distribute them by submitting in the below sites.

Widgepedia

Google Widget Directory

Yahoo Widgets

WidgetBox

SpringWidgets

Widget Gallery

Snipperoo Widget Directory

RateitAll Widgets

Friendster Widget Directory

Netvibes Widget Diretory

Xanga Widget Directory

You can use “Clearspring” to track the traffic drive from your widgets.

WordPress is a popular blogging platform and content management system. There are countless plugins available to help you integrate your
social networking efforts with your Wordpress blog.

Here are 5 popular plugins that can help you spread your social media presence. I am not listing the most popular plugins like Tweetmeme.

1. FriendFeed Activity Widget – This widget lets you share your FrienFeed stream with your visitors. All you need is a FriendFeed account in order to use this sidebar widget, which is set up by simply entering in your login information and selecting the number of events to display.

2. Lifestream.fm – Lifestream.fm currently offers the largest number of social networking services that you can stream onto your site. Firstly, you need to create an account with Lifestream.fm, but once you’ve signed up, setting up the sidebar widget is a simple task. It also displays all of your Tweets, including @replies.

3. WP Twitip ID – The WP Twitip ID is a Twitter specific plugin you can include with your comment form. It doesn’t require anything from your commenters, other than an existing Twitter account. With an extra line of code in your comments template file, this plugin adds a field for users to enter their Twitter username, which is automatically linked to their Twitter URL, alongside their name and comment.

I did a guest post on “How to Knockout Wikipedia in Search Results”.

Check out the article here.

Having attractive headlines is important while writing an article or website content or composing an ad.

Its tricky too. Here is a simple headline writing formula. Your headline should contain

Whats your service/what are you selling: Include your product details in your headline.

Price of the product/service: Include the price of your product. It could be free or $10.

Explain what the customer gains by your product/service: Include the benefits of your product in short.

What if your product doesnt work: Offer a money back guarantee.

Example:

The Best seller weight reduction ebook worth $99  is available for FREE now (only for limited time)!