Getting Traffic 108 - Pay With A Tweet Button

Social sharing is a hugely effective way to market your blog.  We've talked about this before in other posts, but it's definitely worth the mention again here.  Let me introduce you to the 'Pay With A Tweet' service.

Your first step is to create an e-book with highly valuable information, or offer something else of value to your visitors (mp3's you've created, entrance to your site, entrance to a raffle for a big prize, etc).

Next you'll go to Pay With A Tweet and make a free 'Pay' button.

Offer your free merchandise on your site, and let visitors know that all they have to do to get what you're offering is 'pay with a tweet' by pushing the button.  That's it.

Why is the 'Pay With A Tweet' button so awesome?  Well let's look at the way Google works now.

After the newest panda/penguin updates, Google doesn't give a lot of importance to low quality backlinks anymore.  What they do give a lot of importance to is social media and social sharing.  If Google sees your blog or url being shared hundreds or even thousands of times all of a sudden, then they move your site up in the search engine rankings at least temporarily, because they want to share what's hot, and they figure if a lot of people are tweeting about it, then it is.

You're basically letting other people do all the hard work for you of moving your site up in the search engines.  Lets just say ten people tweet out your site to get your free offer.  Each of those ten people has ten followers that come and get your free offer by tweeting it out... now you've got 100 tweets in just a short time.  Each of those 100 has ten people that tweet it = 1,000 tweets, etc etc.  Not only are you going to be getting organic search engine traffic because your site will move up in the SERP, but also traffic from twitter itself.

You will of course need to offer something more than just the free e-book or mp3 on your site in order to keep your visitors browsing or coming back for more, or else your traffic is just wasted.  Your goal is to offer something incredible that everybody in your niche wants just to get their attention, and then catch their eye with all of your other great content.


Social sharing sites like Twitter are important to boosting your search engine rankings, so give it a try. Do you know of other similar free Twitter Services? Have you used Pay With A Tweet on your site? Let us know in a comment below. We'd love to hear if you had success, or failure using Pay With A Tweet. Don't forget to subscribe and follow for more great blogging, page rank, and Twitter resources!

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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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