Sorry for the lack of posts
I know I talk about how you must constantly post new articles to keep up with your reader base. However, my flight to London has been delayed until January 5th so I have been trying to finalize everything.
It’s ridiculous, stuff has been so hectic over here.
Daily posting will return shortly.
Regards,
Eric
Methods I use to promote my sites
How to successfully promote your website
It is a known fact that promotion and advertising is one of the most time consuming and major areas of website development. Well today I’m going to show you a few methods that I have found to be very effective in generating traffic and interest to your website.
1. Social bookmarks
EVERYONE has started using this method now and rightfully so. Social bookmarking is a surefire way to get a rapid burst of exposure to your site and increase the interest level of your viewers. I have spoken about social bookmarking and social sites before so make sure to check out the related posts at the bottom of this page for some more detail regarding the topic.
Currently I have placed most of my efforts into three main social networking sites, those being Digg, StumbleUpon and Twitter. You may notice that all three sites are quite different in what they offer and this is why I use all three.
Digg has been around for ages and is more of a “share your favorites with your friends” type of site, which is great if you actually have friends. The key thing to remember when using Digg is that you will only benefit from it if you have a large following of mutual friends. A highly effective method I have found to work is to add 1001 friends using a bot or otherwise and only keep all the ones that become mutual, then rinse and repeat. After that all you have to do is shout your submissions to all your friends.
StumbleUpon is a site I mainly use for traffic generation and views. Similar to Digg, it is much easier to prosper from SU when you have a larger friend base. Something you should do is interlink ALL your social accounts. I have discovered that SU is great for “gossip sharing” and by this I mean people posting your articles, pictures on forums, blogs and to their friends. The “send to a friend” option in the SU toolbar makes it easy for users to send your articles around.
Twitter has been said to do wonders in the selling and traffic generation circles. However, that is not what I use it for. Twitter’s main purpose in my eyes is to create a “following” of people who are actually interested in what you or your website offers. These people are then likely to click through the links to your site and become future subscribers. If you have enough people who like what you say you can get the same amount of free targeted traffic to your site within a few seconds that you would pay a hundred if not more dollars on PPC.
2. Niche related mini sites with auto blogging software
I don’t think many people have utilized the potential of this yet, so I’m going to let you guys in on a little secret. I’ve been doing this for about 3 months and the results have been unbelievable. Basically what you do is set up a little mini site using wordpress on a related niche to your main site. You then install an auto blogging software which in turn pulls interesting articles related to your niche from all over the web, it also includes a trackback to the other persons site and leaves it in the comments section.
If the article/picture/video is popular and that website is getting a lot of hits you will see that trackback link get clicked quite a lot of times, ergo bringing users back to your RELATED mini site.
So how does this help in promoting my ACTUAL site?
Well, I have seen some of these “niche related mini sites” get upwards of 200 visitors per day after the first few days of being active. What you do is leave the sites up for about a month and let them increase in traffic then all you need to do is redirect the site to your ACTUAL site and get all those TARGETED visitors to YOUR site. And if you have a few of these sites running at a time, that’s anywhere from another 500-1000  targeted  visitors per day that will be landing on your site.
3. Forum signatures
This one is pretty obvious but should be said nonetheless, you need to join up on as many related forums and include a link to your site in the signature of your account. Try to get a few posts per day done in popular topics on each forum. Some forums will be dofollow and others will not, it doesn’t really matter because you are not doing this for SEO purposes but promotion and advertising purposes.
4. Blog commenting
When commenting on blogs you should keep two things in mind to maximize your efforts. First make sure that the blog is actually popular and has a decent following, there is no point in commenting on a low traffic blog just because it is “dofollow”. The second thing to keep in mind is that you should always try to comment on related blogs and articles, I realize that sometimes this is not possible, so in that case target VERY popular blogs and leave related comments with a link back to your site.
I find this comment template to work best.
[greeting]
[body, comment on the post]
[Regards,
Eric from [yourwebsitehere.com]
The main thing to take note of is the ending, a subtle way to mention your site in a comment is by  making your regards section formal. To do this you can write [Your name] FROM [Your website], this doesn’t scream “promotion” but still lets readers know of your site.
5. Pinging
If you are running a blog you should set up a list of sites to “ping” everytime you publish new content. Pinging is simply defined as notifying  a specific site whenever there is something new on your blog. Pinging spreads the word around quite quickly and ultimately gets your posts indexed much quicker.
You can update your ping settings from your wordpress settings > writing page. Â I decided to be generous and generate a list of sites you can ping, you can view this list here at List of Pinging Sites
6. BitTorrent
The basic idea of this is to upload popular torrents to torrent websites and leave a link to your site in the title, description and embedded .txt file. Â I wrote a much more detailed post on the subject which you can see here.
7. PPC Advertising
Even the best of the best sometimes refer to Pay Per Click advertising through services such as Yahoo Search Marketing or Google Adwords. The important thing to note when using PPC is to know your budget because otherwise you may find yourself losing quite a bit of money and not receiving any visible results. There are a lot of free books circling the internet with guides on how to succeed with PPC.
The following methods have benefited me greatly with my internet marketing and promotion endeavors and I guarantee if you take them into consideration you will see a drastic change in results.
Fastest Growing Social Networking Site in the Philippines
Great Pinoy; One of the first of its kind
I talk about many money making strategies on this site and recently I mentioned how a “following” is one of the key factors in whether you will sell or not sell your products. I must admit when I think about creating a following and selling your products, I imagine two different websites, one for the social side and one for the business side.
Well greatpinoy.com have now made it easier than ever to sell things and make friends at the same time. With the aid of a great website backbone greatpinoy.com is one of the most intriguing sites I have stumbled upon.
Did I mention it was free? You are not required to pay a dime to get your classified ad listed and with a group of friends tracking your every move it practically takes no effort to sell your merchandise/services etc.
The website is predominantly based in the Philippines, however that does not mean that outside members aren’t welcome. With a clean and simplistic design greatpinoy.com has upped the bar for FREE online networking, advertising and product distribution, ergo becoming one of the fastest growing social networking sites in the Philippines.
As a final word I would like to say that greatpinoy.com is actually THE BEST too; a marketer can possess. And if you are not convinced yet, then you should definitely take a peep at the site, after all it’s free!
Find what you are looking for with Longhorn
Browse your favorites with Longhorn
We all know that eBay is a great place to find the perfect gifts, house appliances and even luxurious automobiles. However, as I mentioned earlier people find it very difficult to decide on something when there are a lot of factors surrounding them, in this case a lot of different items.
Well my friends over at longhorn.com have established a website which is dedicated to the selling of thousands of longhorn products. With a handful of categories ranging from Longhorn antiques to bedding and books longhorn.com have the lot.
Although the site is predominantly based around auctions, longhorn also offers a variety of other recreational activities. Providing things such as entertaining games, videos and a great gallery section Longhorn.com have proven to be the leaders of “quality” sites for the whole family.
There is good news to come for all you webmasters out there, if you are like myself and own a website or ten, Longhorn.com offers great advertising opportunities. Promising high quality and inexpensive targeted traffic Longhorn is the perfect place to get a new or existing business off the ground.
To conclude I would like to say that if you are in need of a premium categorical website or are just a fan of bulls then Longhorn.com is the place for you.
How to keep your member base active
Create a loyal following and keep them!
I mentioned in an earlier post about how a “following” can greatly benefit you in your online activities. A following is defined as an act of “pursuit”. On the internet however, a following is a group of people who are subscribed to you, via means of RSS, newsletters etc.
The hard part isn’t in acquiring a group of followers but in keeping them. Anybody can create a website and write a few decent pages of content and post it all of the internet. This in turn may get you a “temporary” following of a few people, but you will find they will be unsubscribed shortly there after.
The key is in maintaining that list of people and getting them to appreciate day after day, week after week. The central aspect that you must understand in order to achieve this is that people like UPDATES, whether it be some news or a few new posts, this is a must in order to keep your group of followers.
Update your content daily! (yes, daily)
Search engines and humans alike benefit from receiving new content. The one thing I despise is when I subscribe to a blog and don’t see anything new for weeks at a time. What’s the point? Not only will you see a jump in traffic but a jump in subscribers as well. I have to admit that with my current relocation to London and the management of several of my other side projects, it’s becoming harder to continue publishing quality content on a daily basis.
Create a newsletter and send out weekly updates updates
This is quite important if you are managing a forum/messageboard or social network account. With forums you should try to send out newsletter once or twice a week, anymore than that and people start to see them as spam. With my latest forum (http://wheelsandwood.com) I manage to send out weekly statistics emails to all my members. This makes them feel part of the “community” and lets them know that the site is progressing and moving forwards.
Create a “community” feel
I can’t stress this enough, people like familiarity or in this case a “community” that is why you should aim to always include your members/subscribers into your site. Make sure that no one feels left out or alienated from everybody else, this is a sure fire way to lose a loyal follower. If you are a managing a blog or forum, hosting contests and providing little incentives will help you succeed in creating a “community feel”.
Provide incentives
This is pretty self explanatory, so I’m just going to touch on it. It is always good to provide your followers with some sort of incentive that will make them WANT to stay a subscriber. You can offer them a featured interview or get their site on the front page of yours. Little things like this go a long way in keeping your followers content.
To wrap up, if you are seeing your visitors hitting the back button after 10 seconds or if your RSS readers are depreciating faster than current interest rates I highly recommend you take some of these things into consideration.
iPhone News and Reviews
Which is the best iPhone app for you?
It is evident that iPhones have hit it big in the 3g network, the product has become so popular that statistics show almost 1 in every 15th person in the US owns an iPhone. The primary contributor to the Apple iPhone hype has been the “app store”, which allowed users to download different types of software directly from their cell phone. This became SO popular that a multi million market has been established around the creation and distribution of iPhone apps by external parties. A study depicted that hackers as young as 18 were making upwards of $20,000 per month from the advertising alone revolving around their created applications.
Although this all sounds like a great breakthrough, it gives consumers the hassle of figuring out which application they would want to have installed on their iPhone. We all know that one finds it VERY difficult to make a decision when presented with too many choices.
Well the guys at ifones.com have dedicated their webspace to the running of a website which is centered around iPhone news and application reviews. The site is regularly updated with the latest content regarding the iPhone and its corresponding apps. So, if you are unable to decide on which iPhone app to purchase (or not purchase) then make sure to stop by ifones.com for one of my most highly recommended iPhone review sites.
St Louis Travel and Tourism
St Louis is more than just the home of the St. Louis Cardinals
Skyline of St Louis
Continuing on from my previous post regarding the state of MIssouri. I would like to say that if you have decided to head down to Missouri which I hope you have,:) then you should definitely stop by St Louis which is said to be one the most popular cities and tourism destinations in Missouri. I talked about a website that specialized in providing relevant and helpful information regarding the state, but I didn’t mention any places that one could go to find specific information relating to its cities.
Well, apparently the people who run “missouri.me” also run “stlouis.me”, nifty huh?. With a similar template to it’s parent site StLouis.me is based around one of the most diverse and economically prospering destinations in Missouri, the site provides one with a range of quality news, weather and sport updates delivered on a frequent basis.
I have personally booked a flight out there for Christmas to spend with my friends and relatives and I hope you do the same. If you are looking for a premium source of info regarding your future home or just want to research the potential business opportunities present in St Louis then look no further than StLouis.me
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