By the time this is published, it will indeed be my birthday on the East coast, where I’m currently located.

And I definitely wanted to take some time out to celebrate that, so I’m planning on not working at all tomorrow. Yay me!

What does that have to do with you? At some point in one of these videos I tell you exactly what you can do on my birthday to make me smile.  

Okay, seriously though, what this has to do with you is that every year, on my birthday, I’ve sent out a special newsletter, blog post, birthday gift to all my pals, something.

This year I’ve decided to be naked. 

Yeah, that’s drama, and kinda hype-y. But I bet you want to know what it means, doncha? 

If you don’t, you can always just leave.

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Still there, huh? Thought so.

What it means this year is that I’m going to, right now, for the first time, give a video peek into the stats of my site. Not  a picture of last year’s stats.

Not a screenshot of last week’s stats. 

My web site stats for 2009, from the first three months of the year that I wasn’t promoting… and a look at the dramatic difference it made when I am actually well enough to promote this year. 

Where does nakedness come in? That’s how it makes me feel, totally exposed. But I’m comfortable being this open with you.

Of course, I can’t give it all up – I’m not THAT easy, LOL!

The one thing I didn’t share, that I’m only telling folks signed up to Traffic Reality is what links send me traffic. It’s surprising information that I also keep close to my chest.

But I show

• what keyword phrases send me traffic, and how much,
• what kind of traffic Google has sent me this month, 
• exactly how many unique visitors I’ve had this month, and,
• how my traffic tripled about two days into turning my promotion machine up from low to medium.

I’ll also point out how you can tell that this isn’t Bot traffic – at least 89% of my traffic is from real human people looking at my site.

I’m sure most of you remember this time last year that I was physically unable to work and couldn’t promote my site…  But the traffic kept coming, because of the way I have set up my sites.

That was shocking to some people, that you could keep having traffic for months or up to a year without manually promoting your site every day, with no spammy software, and no virtual assistants.

But if you think that was a shocker, wait until you see what it looks like after a day or so of me just doing a BIT of promotion. This is not full strength, now. 

Meaning none of this traffic is from JVs or affiliates, StumbleUpon, Digg, press releases, podcasting, video sites, link campaigns or any offline promotion .

This is just from search, blogging an average of twice a week, RSS traffic, one article published, a few Tweets, two newsletters sent, and very light auto-pilot promotion on Facebook.

Here’s the first video where I do a quick overview – look in the upper right corner at the time – this video was recorded live and just published a few minutes ago. You can see the time changing in my taskbar in the upper right – it matches up with the video, this video is unedited.

You may want to view it full screen for the full effect. Or you can see the first stats video here if you’re reading via the feed, or as this is republished on Facebook.

And here’s the continuation in the second video. Again, notice the time. The only reason there’s even a break is due to Jing Pro’s 5 minute limit per video.

Again, you may want to view this full screen for the full effect. Or you can see the second stats video here if you’re reading via the feed, or as this is republished on Facebook and other sites.

Now, why am I showing you how much traffic I get to this site?

1. Because it’s the one thing web site promotion professionals and marketers Will Not do whether they know what they’re doing or not, because the results are so often taken out of context. 

   For example, the amount of visitors I got to this site this month pales in comparison to traffic I’ve generated for clients and for some of my other sites.

   However, given that the majority of people online have absolutely no interest in a site about web site traffic? It’s pretty darn good.For the average online business person or marketer, it would be phenomenal.
    

2. To show you that those results are possible for everyone.

   You’ve heard my story, most likely. If not, go to the Evergreen Traffic sales page and read it. The bottom line is, yeah I’m an expert at this, but the methods I use are easily boiled down from rocket science into steps anyone can follow.
    

3. For me. To give myself a much needed pat on the back for still having “it”, 11 years after my very first website went online. 
    
4. To get you to give Traffic Reality a try.

Traffic Reality is my new membership site. Well, it’s my new, old membership site. I set it up to show people how to get better traffic results to their site back in 2006 and had to take it down. 

This year, with help from friends, I put it back up. If you’ve heard of Evergreen Traffic, in which I showed three simple traffic techniques and showed you how to combine them to multiply their effects, then you’re familiar with my concept of blending different traffic methods into a system in order to magnify their effect. 

For example, search marketing and article marketing can go well together if implemented properly. Try shortcuts or mis-judge how to blend them, and you’re courting disaster. 

In Traffic Reality, I

1. start you off with one traffic method, and teach it to you in bite-sized pieces,
2. show you how to put it on auto-pilot or semi-auto-pilot, then,
3. add another traffic stream. 

By the end of the second week of implementing the steps you see your first incremental traffic increase. The next month I teach you how to maintain those resuls while simultaneously increasing your traffic with another method, broken down into about a dozen of lessons, sharing literally hundreds of traffic tips, methods, techniques and sources.

So essentially, it’s Evergreen on steroids, split down into pill size. 

These are the exact same tactics I use to promote my sites. And a site like this one is in a difficult spot – almost every business is at least twice as easy to generate traffic for than mine is.

Until my birthday ends, the price special that expired last week is on. So, if you want to get into Traffic Reality at a 20% discount price that you’ll be locked into forever, you want to join today.

Oh yeah, all members can also sign up for the affiliate program. It’ll be a while before we introduce it to Clickbank – they have to approve the site and everything, it’s not like with a product. 

Current members, look for an incredible bonus at the end of each week of lessons for the next 9 weeks. One hint: if you’ve seen all the main pages of the site, you already know what it is.

I’ll be back with more birthday madness later on in the day.

Continued from the last post which you can read here.

A Blizzard happens with relative frequency if you live on a mountain or in a snowy region. It’s a fact of life. You don’t spend the whole year under the influence of blizzards, but when you do, the new snow lands on top of the current snowstorm. In this way, a series of blizzards means a whole lot of snow.

And remember, snow represents traffic in our analogy.

After, or ideally during, an avalanche of traffic, you should be building a system to sustain you through both lean times and times of plenty. Blizzards of traffic are traffic systems. And there are all types of traffic systems, from article marketing to pay per click advertising to list building.

Done correctly, all the separate systems work in tandem to form a big huge system – the momentum builds on top of the last system until you have traffic that perpetuates itself.

That’s right, it turns viral by its very nature.

The trouble with building ONLY with blizzards is that it can take up to 90 days for a system you’re building daily to show signs of forward momentum. The more complex the system, the longer it will take to show the kind of results that can support a business.

The good news is, once you start the system, it can’t be stopped. It will keep going until you stop it. For example, I can safely say it’s been months since I wrote a new article. And yet I’m still getting traffic from articles I wrote in 2005, because I make an effort to write evergreen content.

A traffic system may take three or four months to kick in fully, though you may see traffic from the first day. But unlike a traffic blast, or avalanche, a blizzard is not just snow that moved from one part of the mountain to your part of the mountain.

It’s part of the natural cycle of things, so it’s infinite. This is natural snowfall, it’s going to keep coming and coming, in great amounts. And when the new snow falls upon the old snow, the ground will stay covered until it stops snowing for a while, and there’s enough sun to melt it all.

If you’re at a site that has gotten a million visitors in a month, or is getting a million visitors a day, at some point, they came up with a system. They may have done it accidentally, or without knowing it, but you just can’t keep getting that level of traffic any other way.

So how do you put together the blizzard and the avalanche to have traffic that never ends? We’ll talk about that later.

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I need your help in thanking someone. All it’s going to cost you is a link, and maybe an email. If you want, you can even make money from it.

You might have checked your email yesterday and seen a message from me about Evergreen Traffic, and read about my story. Some people I know had never heard about that part of my background, and if you’re one of those folks, it probably explains a lot. If for no other reason than to satisfy your curiousity about me, go by and skim the page on Marlon Sander’s site.

And yes, that’s what I want you to link to, talk about, etc, but let me tell you why first.

What I really want to talk about first is how this whole thing happened – how I ended up suddenly having one of the people I admired first and most online decide that I needed to revive my product line, and how he dragged me, kicking and screaming, into creating another product that explains the core of the traffic system I use on my own sites.

You might know Marlon Sanders from The Amazing Formula, a product that’s been on the market as long as I’ve been in online marketing. It’s one of those things that, if you lost it, you’d buy it again.

For me, having him suddenly come into my life as a customer is kind of like being on American Idol and having Stevie Wonder ask you to sing at his birthday party. Yeah, I have a rep of my own that I’ve earned through my talent — but he’s the Real Deal, you know? If I was to stay in this business that’s the kind of success I’d be shooting for.

Think of the person you look up to like that in your profession, coming up to you and saying, “hey, we’ve got to get your product line back up and cranking- you’re talented!”

Can you imagine?

I was really… resigned to retirement status.

I still have some lose ends to tie up and was hoping to get some of my friends together to help me with a fundraiser to get that going and maybe some residual income. But it’s been hard to coordinate, and with me not knowing until I wake up in the morning whether or not I can conduct life semi-normally, it’s been tough to commit to interview times.

Cindy, Violet, and Morgan are a HUGE help, but it’s gonna take five people to take over what I was dong at my peak. That’s not to brag, it’s just the long and the short of the issue. So I’d just about given up hope of ever doing the part of my life that I love the most, which is sharing the details of the information about traffic, search and marketing that you find on this site.

I would think to myself: At least I have my consulting clients – for the most part, if I can talk and coordinate research with other folks, I’ll always have that. But there’s something about being able to reach masses of people with good information.

Anyway, not even a week ago, I get a Facebook message and a friend request from Marlon. I thought, this has to be THE Marlon Sanders, because most of the folks who would spoof him aren’t old-school enough to remember him.

And it was.

And he was writing to tell me that he thought I was talented, and why was all my stuff down?

So I told him.

And long story short (or at least less long), he convinced me that I needed to keep on sharing what I know, starting with a new product. And that’s how Evergreen Traffic came about, through the kindness of Marlon Sander’s heart.

I hemmed and hawed and made excuses but he cut through my BS and got me working. I know some people who would have modified what I told them and sold it as their own. But the successful people are Never like that.

Isn’t that funny?

Marlon has resurrected my dream. I’m still going to have to retire for health reasons, but because of him I’m going out with a bang instead of quietly fading away. But until that day, I can create my best work and not have to worry about certain nutty details. I won’t bore you with them, but suffice it to say that without flexibility on those points, it made it hard for me to be able to make products as I’d like.

He has also helped me to remember what I needed to keep in mind the most.

You.

In all these issues I’ve been having, I can’t say I forgot about you… I always think about you. What I forgot was how much you guys … love me, to put it in Marlon’s words.

In return for Marlon’s generosity to me, i want him to make a mint off this. Yes, i get a cut, so you’ll be supporting me too.

Here’s what I’d like you to do, if you would.

1- Go to Marlon’s special site for affiliates, where currently instructions for promoting Evergreen Traffic appear on the front page. If you want to make money, create an affiliate link. If not, you can use the same information to link directly there.

2- Make a blog post about it. If you link here or send a trackback, of course I’ll link back.

3- If there’s anyone within the sound of your blog/voice/del.icio.us that you think would be helped by learning about the Evergreen Traffic System, send them a note, whether it’s your list, a friend, or someone you know who just started their internet business.

4- If you think that more than 50 of the people you know could pick it up, contact Marlon directly. He can make you a special partner or create a special page for you.

That’s it. Just four steps and you’ll be helping me show my appreciation for Marlon and all he’s been willing to do to help me.

If you do, make sure you send me the link in Facebook or make a comment here because I want to send you something special for helping out. In any case I appreciate you perusing my rambly thought for the day.

Okay, I just appreciate you, period.

I already have an update planned for the Facebook (Un)marketing release that came out on Thursday (you still have about an hour to act before I start cleaning up the sales page and raising the price to retail.)

From earlier tonight to the next 36 hours or so, if you’ve been a client of mine in the past, you’ll be getting a notice telling you what list to join for free updates of my products and special client freebies.

They’re for clients only and I’m emailing you the initial notices out one at a time. After tonight if you want an update, you’ll have to be on one of the lists – manual updates are just too time consuming. We’re talking several thousand emails here.

This includes PDF, audio and video updates to The Blog Optimization Package, Free Traffic Tips, the book, the 2007 versions of any of the guides from the 2006 version of the Get Them All Special, Blogs that Sell, The Art of Speed Blogging and Hidden Google traffic tactics.

High Profile Article Marketing and Marketing Success with RSS are legacy products that will only be available as part of larger packages.

If you have resale rights to any of my products, make sure you’ve joined the list from the original package — this gives you a good reason to contact former clients to say hello and remind them that you can help them!

Thanks for all the nice messages, and for your patience. I’ll write back when/if I can, as there are still many many weeks of recovery ahead for me. But, in lighter news I’m getting the hang of posting with Dragon, so if I can say it, I’ll post it, although I’m making my sister do all the linking, poor girl.

See you soon,

 Tinu

Before you even start reading this post, if you want a mega-list of lists, check out the list of top 5 lists over at ProBlogger (the result of a group writing project), and for on-going top list kind of fun, the Thursday Thirteen (be sure and check the FAQ first) Blog Carnival.

The list below is a list of lists, mostly top ten, and mostly from blogs, mostly related to marketing, small or online business and/or technology. No particular order. And I’m not necessarily agreeing with the lists or their logics, but the ones I didn’t love definitely made me think.

Enjoy.

10 Reasons Why Your Search Strategy Could Get You Dropped or Banned
The Top Ten Habits of Highly Annoying Bloggers
2006 Top Searches
SEO Mistakes: Not Checking Your Site
Top 10 Web 2.0 Losers
10 Remarkably Effective Strategies for Driving Traffic
10 Effective Ways to Get More Blog Subscribers
My Top 7 Blog Monetization Methods
10 Business Podcast Marketing Ideas for Your Corporation
The Ups and Downs of Socializing Your Content
Top 10 Ways to Peeve Your Website Visitors
Top Ten RSS Hacks
Top Ten Things You Can Do To Get Blogged
Top 10 features you didn’t know about in Live Maps
Top 5 Video Sharing Sites
Top Ten Web Analytics Blogs
Top Ten Secrets to Saving Big Money in the Airline Flights
10 Totally Stupid Online Business Ideas That Made Someone Rich
Top 10 Mac utilities
Top Ten Tips for Getting backlinks to Your Website
Top 10 Internet Crimes of 2006
The Top 10 GTD & Productivity Sites/Blogs
Top 10 Risks for Corporate Blogs
Top 10 Tweaks, Tips, and Tricks for Windows Vista
The Top 10 Ways to Blog the Easy Way
How To Write A Successful Blog: Top Ten Tips
Top 10 Twitter Things
Top 10 Niche Search Engines
100 Web Apps for Everything You Will Possibly Need
Lists to Build Authority, Traffic and Links to your Website
Five Top 5 Lists That You Should Read
Lists of Top 5 Priorities on Bloggers’ Minds Today
Cool lists you might have missed
Lists of Your Favorite WordPress Plugins
Top Ten Rules for a Top Ten List
Increase Your Web Traffic with these 7 Article Writing Tools

… of the Year, is now online.

You have no idea how close it came to being the last one ever…

Whew!

In this Christmas Issue:

Five Seasons Freebies
Four Traffic Weapons
Three Blogger’s Resources
Two On-Going Contest
and a Funny Chirstmas Video of Me!

Can’t wait to see you there!

Is it me or is Technorati working especially well lately? I have blogs in all different kinds of format, and on all of them, they’ve really been on time these past few weeks, even with Blogger. I mean, I hope I’m not jinxing it or anything, but it seems like they’re doing a great job right now.

Okay. I have to stop and do the rest of this later. The video for Sade’s Cherish the Day is on. Life must come to a screeching halt for four minutes.

*Edit* Okay, I’m back. I was wondering how everyone else is finding Technorati. The next video I’m going to add to the Blog Optimization Package is about tricks to getting more traffic out of Technorati. There’s so much about the site that people don’t notice, or don’t know because it’s not on the FAQ. I think I just have traffic-colored glasses on half the time – stuff that seems obvious to me, cats tell me is some amazing discovery.

I’ll do an abridged version of the video for Traffic Reality too.

So, again, tell me what YOU think – how is Technorati doin’ right now? Are they picking up your blog? Do they always? Please be a dear and give us a link.

I JUST turned the page back on for more Traffic Reality memberships, with immediate access to the site and the last two newsletters. And some people must have those notifiers turned on that tell them when a page has changed, because the first 12 are already gone! I was preparing to announce it in the newsletter in a few hours, but okay – go get ‘em if you want ‘em!

(And if, by chance you really don’t know what I’m babbling about, you can click the link. )

I haven’t been around for a while, and I’ll probably post an update on that later. I’ll be flying back to Vegas on May 2nd, and by the 7th, I’ll officially be around full time again. While I have a few minutes, I thought I’d talk a little about business blogging, since I have a press release out about it today.

One of the reasons I talk about blogging so much is that I know a lot of webmasters who are absolutely desperate for traffic to their sites. They often have a budget of less than one hundred and fifty dollars, a few hours a week of free time for marketing, and desire search engine traffic above all else.

If this sounds like you, let me ask you this.

What’s wrong with a method to increase your search engine traffic in the time it takes to write a medium-length email every weekday for 30 – 90 days? Especially if, after 90 days, you can maintain those results with one update a week?

This time three years ago, if someone had told me that I could get hundreds of first page rankings in the search engines that I got to keep, month after month, and I didn’t have to spend $100 – $1000 a month on AdWords or Overture, I would have done backflips.

And apparently, I’d be a millionaire today as well. All from learning the right way to blog to rank for 200 search terms instead of two.

It absolutely confounds me why anyone who could write an email wouldn’t find the time to try this method of generating additional traffic to their site – free, high quality, targeted search engine traffic.

Of course, some people believe that all the answers to how to do this are available for free online. And for sure there are some great resources, like Wayne’s excellent Blog Business World.

But if all the information for how to increase your traffic from search engines with a blog was available online – wouldn’t everyone have great traffic right now?

And yet they don’t. Because it’s not just about how to pick a good keyword, or getting links from submitting to blog directories, or knowing where to ping when you blog.

It’s about building relationships – document relationships, the relationship between you and your reader so your traffic will stick.

I talk about some of that in the podcast I did with PRWeb today. It should be out in a few hours. In the meantime, open up the attached PDF file and look at some of the sample resources and ask yourself – are you really happy with how much traffic you have? If there’s an ethical, step-by-step way to learn to do it better, that other people are getting great results with, what’s your reason for not trying it?

How valuable are sales and leads to your business anyway? Are they worth spending a couple of hundred dollars? A couple of thousand? A few hours a week?

You can download the attachment in PDF format. In an upcoming post I’m going to talk about the first case study I have for Adsense and Blogging using my method, which got my personal coaching student 300 visitors a day in three weeks, who are helping him earn over $500 a month in AdSense.

What if he had ten blogs? What if he sees the plan through to the 90 day mark and has ten times the traffic?

What if he were YOU? We’ll talk about that soon, maybe in a few hours, maybe tomorrow.

Which is my birthday, incidentally….

It comes as a surprise to many, but there are many sites out there that are willing to send traffic your way, and you don’t have to trick them or threaten them with the stink eye to get their help.

We’re not talking about search engines and specialized directories yet – we’ll soon come back to that.

First, let’s talk about what I call blog helper sites, for easy reference.

There are all kinds of resources out there for bloggers, you just have to know where to look, and figure out what works.

I tend to shy away from regular blog link exchanges, because despite all the free information, I’m running a commercial site. If you’re running one as well, you may find that regular blog exchanges don’t necessarily work to bring you buying traffic any better than link exchanges bring traffic to your site.

That’s not to say they don’t send traffic– they do. But do they send the right traffic, action-taking traffic at acceptable conversion rates? Not really.

So what other blog resources are out there to help you?

There are sites like Technorati, that bring blog readers and bloggers together. One of the ways they do this is through tagging. it might not appear like such a hot idea at first, inviting your audience to leave by posting links to tags.

But tagging also brings traffic into your site. And if you’re doing your best to capture traffic that subscribes, helping them find more material on the subject you’re writing about will still work in your favor.

People don’t like to constantly hunt for information – be the resource that tells them where they can get it, and they’ll come back.

There are also sites like Blog Top Sites and Blog Carnival that exist just to help you get more traffic, but in a way that serves both you and your readers.

What are Blog Carnivals? I first learned about them when Wayne Hulbert of Blog Business World invited me to one called Carnival of the Captialists. The basic idea is that a community of bloggers organizes efforts to blog on a topic they agree upon, taking the format of a blog-based mini-mag.

You can read the full definition in the Blog Carnival FAQ.

Tags: free traffic :: website promotion :: Blogging :: blog :: blog readership :: traffic :: blog traffic

Resources :: Wayne also talks about Blog Roundtable Discussions :: Learn more about increasing your Blog Traffic.