Tool Time Friday| Update Scanner 6

Filed in free traffic tips and tools Posted by Morgan @ March 12th, 2010

We’ve all had this same thing happen to us. We’ve heard about a new site or stumbled across one that the wish to visit from time to time – and guess what – we either didn’t make note of it, forgot the name, blah, blah blah.

Well here’s an add on that will help.

Monitors web pages for updates. Useful for websites that don’t provide Atom or RSS feeds.

upscanner 1

Features:
* Select how often each site will be scanned
* Changes to pages are highlighted automatically
* Minor changes can be ignored
* Full international support

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Tool Time Friday | Chinese Popup Translater 7

Filed in free traffic tips and tools Posted by Morgan @ March 12th, 2010

Here’s another Popup Translater – this time it’s in Chinese!

Chinese Popup Study Tool: Mouse over on words you dont know and it will give you the pronunciation and meaning. Supports Chinese to English and German. Browse websites and add words to a wordlist in the sidebar and export them later for studying.

chinese

Yes, she is.

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Tool Time Friday | Japanese Popup Translater 10

Filed in free traffic tips and tools Posted by Morgan @ March 12th, 2010

Having lived in Japan during the early ’60’s this Add-on caught my eye.

I had a wonderful time there, learned the language and wish I could have stayed forever. The Yen to Dollar ration was 360 Yen to $1.00 dollar!

japan

Japanese Popup Study Tool: Mouse over on words you dont know and it will give you the pronunciation and meaning. Supports Japanese to English, French, German, and Russian. Browse websites and add words to a wordlist in the sidebar to export later.

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8 Blog Traffic Tips 15

Filed in free traffic tips and tools, traffic method Posted by Tinu Abayomi-Paul @ March 10th, 2010

This post is part of our 68 Traffic Tips day. To find the complete list when we’re done, see the original post. Be sure to subscribe to get a weekly round-up of our daily traffic tips.

  1. Before you write your first blog post, make a list of topics that speak directly to what people in your industry are most asking about. If you don’t know, consult WordTracker Questions.
  2. Do keyword research on your topic to use as tags and as subjects to write about. Run them through an online thesaurus as well.
  3. Optimize your blog for search engines. Properly configured blogs can get a continuous flow of traffic from search engines that is easy to maintain.
  4. Already have a blog? Double your blog posting for a week. Look at your traffic stats – this can bring 25 – 200% more traffic.
  5. Comment on more blogs by people in compatible markets. If  you’re an interior decorator, it’s all well and good to comment on other interior decorator’s blogs, but you have more of an exclusive market among, say, local realtor blogs
  6. Submit to as many blogs taking guest blog posts as you can.
  7. Get some guest blogging happening on your site – it’ll give you a break and help you form partnerships.
  8. Don’t discount blog carnivals, or think that they’re beneath you. They tend to drive a lot of targeted traffic that’s actively interested in the topic.

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8 RSS Traffic Tips 15

Filed in rss, traffic method Posted by Tinu Abayomi-Paul @ March 10th, 2010

This post is part of our 68 Traffic Tips day. To find the complete list when we’re done, see the original post. Be sure to subscribe to get a weekly round-up of our daily traffic tips.

  1. If you have a blog, you have an RSS feed. Its job is to talk to other machines about your site on your behalf. Those bot to bot conversations increase your traffic and help more people see your site, either directly through listings, or indirectly by helping your search rankings. Do at least the basics to take care of your feed.
  2. No one loves RSS, okay? I never actually liked it much, but I always understood that it was necessary to grow. Stop trying to hug it, and start having a basic understanding of how it helps your business.
  3. If you don’t have a site newsletter, use RSS to make your blog posts into email newsletters, then put the email subscription box at the top right of your site, as a fade-in after entering or as a slide-up from the bottom of the site. Aweber will do this for you automatically.
  4. About once a week, make sure your feed is validating. Sometimes all it takes is a rarely used character in the title to break your feed.
  5. Submit your feed to the top RSS search engines. There aren’t hundreds of them as there once were, but for the good ones remaining, like Syndic8, the links can’t hurt you.
  6. RSS is what helps your site speak to social media sites automatically, but what if you aren’t sure what is helping and how often? Try FeedBurner. It’s my opinion that the service has been on the decline since Google took it over a year ago, but that take into account the height it was at when the fall began. It’s still does a decent job of tracking your traffic, (< vent > even if I can’t log into my account after asking for a whole YEAR what happened during my feed transfer (< /vent >)
  7. Google Reader. Yes, that’s the whole tip. Of the minority of people who use a Feed Reader, Google Reader is the top choice. Stick the button on your site, glance over your headlines in Google Reader now and again. Wouldn’t hurt you to share some items over there too.
  8. In the full-feed vs excerpt feed debate, it depends. You get more RSS readers with full feed, and more comments. You get more page views with excerpts, and less theft of your intellectual property. My solution with new sites is to offer both, and allow the short feed to be syndicated by anyone, with a link at the bottom of each short feed post letting readers know we offer full text as well.

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9 Social Media Traffic Tips 8

Filed in free traffic tips and tools Posted by Tinu Abayomi-Paul @ March 10th, 2010

This post is part of our 68 Traffic Tips day. To find the complete list when we’re done, see the original post. Be sure to subscribe to get a weekly round-up of our daily traffic tips.

  1. If in a crunch, you can’t get your social media activities done in an hour a week, you’re doing it wrong, if you’re doing it for business. There’s no reason you have to be on Twitter for hours to see results. There is a much better way.
  2. While you can pick two to five major channels to concentrate on and echo content into the lesser channels of that type, it’s not the best strategy to do that with all of them. In other words, if you like Twitter the best of all the status update type sites, and you want to echo posts into identi.ca, it may not be Best, but it’s… okay. However, it’s not smart to implement a status update strategy on a site like LinkedIn. Professional networking is a lot more than status updates, and if that’s all you’re going to do on LinkedIn, why are you using it?
  3. Numbers matter. They shouldn’t but they do. That doesn’t mean pursuing higher numbers at all costs will help you though. 5000 followers looks better than 100, but it’s not helping your steak restaurant if they’re all vegetarians.
  4. Quality matters. It should. That doesn’t mean you should stop at 10 painters for your gallery’s account. You need to develop relationships with people who love art, people who talk or write about art, people who hang out with artists, and the people who sponsor them. Get a good mix.
  5. Facebook now drives more traffic than Google in many instances, and is a top source of traffic even in the exceptions. Even if you don’t want to use your Facebook profile for networking, get serious about your Facebook page. You don’t have to love Facebook to use it for business.
  6. Don’t be afraid to use social media as part of marketing – just don’t confuse social media participation as  marketing activity by default. Although social media itself is not a campaign, there IS such a thing as a social media campaign – case in point, if you organize bloggers to talk about your event at the same time, that’s a social media campaign. It has a beginning a middle and an end.
  7. All media is social. Keep that in mind when you create web content. I can tweet, blog, podcast about anything I want. Social media as terminology is defunct, and only still used as a frame of differentiation between the old way and the new way.
  8. Remember why you’re using social media. If you can’t leverage ANY of the social media relationships you’re forming to help you in your business, in some way, you have to ask yourself what the purpose of your participation is.
  9. Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Digg and Delicious aren’t the only social media sites in the world. There are other top sites like BusinessWeek’s Business Exchange, StumbleUpon, PlugIM, Sphinn, and Ecademy that can help you just as much or more than the current favorites. Test the ones in your niche, and get promoted there, too.

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