Getting Traffic 201 - Advertising With Videos

You might not think you can afford to have a smooth, professional looking video advertisement for your website or blog like big companies do.  I mean, having a professional video made just for you can cost tens of thousands of dollars, right?  Well yes, they can actually.  Companies like CocaCola and Intel spend so much money every year on video advertising that it makes my head spin.  The truth is though, that you can have your very own video ad for the price of a Burger King meal.

Head over to Fiverr and check out their video introductions.  For a five dollar bill you can have your own video to upload to YouTube, your blog, or other video sharing sites.

Ok, ok, I know what you're thinking.  How is having a video going to bring me more traffic if it's not on TV in front of millions of viewers?  Well here's the thing: if you upload it to YouTube, then it will be in front of millions of viewers.

In the past I've used my YouTube channel to advertise other blogs of mine like CBSB and Photoshop Helps.  By checking the analytics on my sites I've been able to determine that YouTube has generated huge amounts of traffic for me.  Check out the newest promo video I got on Fiverr for Hot Shot Blogger below:

Granted, you're not going to generate huge amounts of traffic at first, especially if you don't have any YouTube followers.  If  however you upload helpful tutorials about your niche along with your promo videos, use high traffic keywords as tags and a title, and put a link to your site at the top of every description, you will start to see an increase in traffic to your blog.  In time as you add more and more YouTube videos, the traffic will continue to grow.  As a side effect, if you've effectively researched and used your keywords in the video title, descriptions, and tags, then you may one day find your video on page one of Google.

You don't have to purchase every video you upload to YouTube, although, having a professionally made intro and outro in each of your videos will help to gain some popularity.  I mostly use Windows Movie Maker, which is a free software that comes with Windows.  When you do order a video intro or the like on Fiverr, be sure to ask the seller to send you the video in a format that your video editing software can handle.  As an example: often Fiverr sellers want to send me a video in .mp4 format, which just doesn't work with Windows Movie Maker.

What I want you to take away from this post is two things:

1) You can have a stylish, professional advertisement made just for you for the price of a hamburger.

2) Uploading video promos and tutorials to sites like YouTube has the potential to drive large amounts of traffic to your site.

Just because your blog is small right now doesn't mean you have to settle with being mediocre.  So go ahead, go get your video promo and show it off to the masses, and feel like you, are a blogging rock star.

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Getting Traffic 106 - How To Scare Away All Your Visitors

So I'll bet you're wondering why you'd want to scare away all of your visitors, right?  Well, no, you probably aren't, and there's no good reason to want to.  You want them to come in, relax, and stay a while.  Let's have a gander at some things we shouldn't do then if we want to keep our readers.

1) Pop-ups

Pop up ads are like shoving a blood-sucking vampire into the face of someone who's just walked in your door.  Even if the pop-up is just asking visitors to subscribe, they are an irritation that will make visitors not want to come back.  Who wants to close out a popup every time they visit your blog?

2) Ad Viruses

For this one lets think back to websites like surfthechannel (if you ever went there).  Surfthechannel was a website that let you watch TV and movies for free.  The issue: they sold advertising space to people who were lacing their ads with viruses.  So every time a visitor went into the site and the advertisement loaded, a virus was downloaded to the user's computer.  Lesson for bloggers: Be careful of who your ad space goes to.  Google Adsense and Chikita are two good advertising companies you can trust, but you will need to be wary if you sell ad space to individuals.

3) Linking to Questionable Sites

This is almost the same as point number two.  Be sure that if you link to another website or article in a post that you thoroughly check the site out to make sure that a) they aren't fraudulent, b) their site doesn't have any viruses c) the ads on their site don't have any viruses.  If you send people to sites that are fraudulent or give them viruses, they're not going to come back to see where else you might send them.

4) Lack of Content

We've talked about what a lack of content can do to your site before... it can kill it, and let's face it, who wants to walk in on a murder scene?  People are visiting your site looking for good content, and probably lots of it.  If they come in and see only a few posts, they're going to hit the back button.

5) Trying to Sell Something That Looks Fraudulent

How many of you have stumbled across a site that looks crisp and clean, but the only thing on the site is an attempt to sell you somebody's secret way to make millions of dollars?  People are generally very quick to back away from anything that looks too good to be true.  Lesson:  If you're selling something legitimate, then don't oversell your product, and sell it through a legitimate selling platform like Amazon or Zazzle.

6) Websites That Aren't User-Friendly

The basic concept of web design is that your website needs to be user friendly and be easy to navigate.  People should be able to find what they need in just a few clicks.  If you frustrate your visitors by writing information they can't even navigate to, then they won't be coming back.

7) Music

Back in the early days of the internet, somebody somewhere thought it would be a cute idea to put music on their website so that people could listen to that cute little song that made you think of kittens while you browsed their page.  And then someone thought that they should put heavy metal on their goth site, and another person wanted music on their site too.  But what if your visitors don't want to hear the type of music you stuck on your site?  What if they're sitting in bed in the middle of the night next to a sleeping spouse, and your page starts blaring death metal at top volume unexpectedly?  Music on your site: don't do it!

8) Profane Content

Ok, so maybe you have a site dedicated to obscene photos or language.  If so, then ignore this point.  But if you're a regular blogger like most of us are, then keep in mind that the average user doesn't want to see obscene pictures or bad language (and neither do most advertising companies like Adsense or Chikita).  Be careful, you may not be cursing or posting bad pictures, but what about your advertisers?  This is the same as advertisers putting viruses in their ads.  You have to be wary of what ads are going on your site, or you may come in one day to see a naked pic of some guy or girl there in your sidebar or between your posts.

9) Loud Advertisements

It seems that somehow we keep coming back around to advertisements on your blog.  Some of the ads I hate the most are the ones that are a video that starts playing a few seconds after you enter a site.  This goes right with point 7.  If visitors don't want automatic music on a site, they don't want noisy ads either.

While I'm sure there are a lot more things that webmasters can do to scare away all of their visitors, these are some of the top ways to get the job done.  What do you think?  What are some things that chase you away from a website?  Let us know in a comment below, and don't forget to subscribe for more great tips on building your blog!

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Getting Traffic 105 - Forums And Backlinks

As you've seen, you can get traffic to your blog in a number of different ways: Search engines like Google, ping-o-matic, stumble upon, social networks, word of mouth in the form of other sites sending traffic your way via backlinks...  Today we're going to talk about you doing some footwork (or typing work as the case may be) by using forums to send traffic to your site.

We know that the more backlinks you have out there to your site, the higher up your site goes in the search engine rankings.  Forums can help you push your site up in the rankings as well as send you some direct traffic, and here's how:

1) Find a forum that matches whatever topic you blog about.  For example, let's say you blog about cats.  Go out into the internet world and find a lively forum about cats.

2) Sign up on the forum, and customize your profile.  Many forums allow you to have a link and maybe even a banner or a few words in your forum 'signature'.  The signature shows up below every single post or reply you make in a forum.  Let's imagine the potential of this here for just a moment:

You sign up on the cat forum, and in your signature put:  
Visit my cat health site at www.cathealth.blogger.com.  (Yes, you want it in bold, and in a different color than black if you can.  Sometimes you can even make the signature a larger size).

Now you go onto that cat forum once a day and make one valuable, insightful post or reply to someone else's forum post, every day for a year.  (Don't reply with, 'wow that's cool...' or something else meaningless.  Try to be an active part of their forum community).

After a year you have made 365 posts on this cat forum, and below each post is the link to your site.  Odds are you're going to get at least a little direct traffic from people clicking on your link in your signature.  But even better than that is that the Google bots are out there crawling the web, and finding all of those backlinks you've made in your forum signature.  You slowly climb the search engine page ranks.

Let's imagine now that you've actually signed up to two different cat forums, and you make one post in each, every day for a year.  That's 730 of your links out there on the web
after only a year.

This is the first way you should use forums to get traffic to your site.

The second way you have to be careful with, as you don't want to be considered a 'spammer'.

1) Sign up for a few forums in your niche (topic), again we'll say they're cat forums because you're writing the best cat blog around.

2) Post insightful, meaningful content on the forums in posts and replies to other people's posts.

3) Every once in a while you'll get the opportunity to post a link to one of your posts in a reply.  Let's say you've written a post about what to do when your cat is sick, and you've just come across a person on the forum asking about what to do when your cat gets sick.  Simple, you give a little information and then give a link to your post and say, "I've already written a great post about this on my blog if you want to check it out!"  And there you have it, yet another link to your site on the web, and more chances for people to click on the link and give you some traffic from the forums.

I say to be careful because if you do this too often, they will call you a spammer and you might get removed from the forums.  But if you're giving them a link with valid information to a specific problem every once in a while, odds are they'll appreciate the help.

If you're using the forums in this way, then you should really be signed up to three or more forums in your niche area so that you get more chances to do this.  You can also do this with Yahoo Answers, where they love for you to give links to valuable information that relates to the question.

Check out our other great tutorials and articles by clicking on the category tabs at the top of the page!

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