Update: You can now find links to the entire series of tips below.

I’m sure you’ve noticed some of the changes I’ve made to the site lately – design changes, topic changes… it’s all about course correction.

By that I mean that the things that this site has become known for aren’t necessarily the things that are helping you the most. At the same time, I don’t want to completely scrap all the other things you’ve grown to enjoy.

So I’m in the process of diverting some of my thought leadership discussions to other sites, but still finding a way to incorporate those headlines into the stream of information that comes from here. That way, each of the four major groups and the four major reasons for loving the site can all still converge in one location.

It’s the 68th day of the year. So to kick things off, today I’m going to do  68 traffic tips (or link to some of the tips I’ve given so far this year). After today, we’ll see how long I can keep up a daily traffic tip – or at least provide you with seven tips a week. No promises this time – you know about my schedule, health issues, and other extenuating circumstances – but I’ll do my best.

We’ll start shortly and the list will include:

• 8 Blog Traffic Tips
• 12 General Traffic Tips
• 21 Search Traffic Tips
• 8 RSS Traffic Tips
• 9 Social Media Traffic Tips
• 10 Article Marketing Traffic Tips

First, let’s define the term Explosive Results for our usage.

When you visualize something exploding, you think about a burst of energy, often associated with fire for some reason – probably the fault of our favorite action pictures.

I love to see things blow up as long as I know no one really got hurt – not just in movies but in website promotion. And an intelligent social media strategy won’t just get you several thousand links from various social sites. It can bring you premium web visibility, more targeted visitors, and bring you closer to your existing audience.

An standard social media campaign helps spread the word about you and encourages other people to as well.

An explosive social media campaign has inherent viral exposure, inspires community driven communication, helps make the web a better place, and even brings joy to people, however fleeting.

When you share in social media, if your goal is just to get more people to see your links, you’re on the right track, but at the same time, you’re limiting your potential. You may think that getting explosive results from social media will take more time, energy and money, but this doesn’t have to be the case.

If you’re a business owner, you know that working harder doesn’t necessarily mean better results – what if you’re working hard on the wrong thing?

Sometimes the remedy is working smarter. Here are a few small changes you can make to your social media approach that can propel your social media results from lukewarm to smoking hot.

Explosive Social Media Tactic #1 – Hot Content

The cornerstone to any social media campaign is the content. If you get this component wrong, it doesn’t matter if all other elements are perfect. Study what’s going hot in your targeted topic and find a unique angle to fit your content into what people already like, without stealing their ideas.

Explosive Social Media Tactic #2 – Niched Network Nuances

The more tightly focused your submissions to social media sites are, the more likely they are to go viral, whether they are links you share by other people or your own. Here’s the logic.

People follow other people with similar interests. They’re on sites like Google, Yahoo, StumbleUpon, Delicious and Digg actively looking for new content. Put those two things together and you have a whirlwind of clicks happening. The only question is, will it be your link that gets clicked or passed over?

Having 5000 connections on Twitter or Facebook is useless if you are connected to people who don’t want your broadcasts, and you’re just as useless to them if you don’t want theirs. If my interest is in improving my existing business and you’re trying to get me to sell your network marketing products, it doesn’t matter how many times you ask me. If I’m not interested, your continued broadcasts will be ignored, or worse yet, blocked completely.

It’s about the perfect balance of quality AND quantity.

And if I’m not paying attention to you, I can’t and won’t spread your message. If you are in network marketing, why not go after people who love the network marketing concept but can’t seem to find the right company? That’s a perfect match, and can dramatically cut down your search for the right partners and prospects.

Explosive Social Media Tactic #3 – Simplify Sharing

It amazes me how many people miss this one.

You’ve got great content. You’ve got a massive, niched network.

Why feed them content that’s hard to share? Does that report have to be in PDF format? If so, does it have to be behind an opt-in wall if you’re spreading it among people who have Already opted in? Anyone connected to your business through its Facebook page, or your Twitter stream is also part of your opt-in list. Yes, it would be best if they were on your email newsletter list, but what faster way to get them there than to show them you don’t need to hold them prisoner there?

If your whitepaper is of such high value that you don’t Want it to spread, well, that’s something different. But if you’re sharing it so other people will spread it, make it easy for others to share.

Send your su.pr link so all they have to do is click the Thumbs-Up button.

Put a few sharing links on your page.

Make it easy for them to Retweet.

The easier it is for them to share, the more likely they are to do it.

Explosive Social Media Tactic #4 – Consistency

And now we come to the area I fail at the most. It’s one of the things I know I need to do, but I haven’t quite gotten the hang of how to brainstorm, create and distribute quality content consistency, and still give them best possible service and support to my customers and clients. I always err on serving people who have bought from me, figuring that next blog post can wait until tomorrow.

Then at some point, I noticed a decline in return traffic – people weren’t coming back because they’d already heard everything I had to say. The solution? I got help for my content creation process. The ideas are still mine, but I was able to barter help for research, transcribing, and editing. I am also able to get audio and video polished much less expensively than I thought, though I don’t always use this option due to time constraints.

The other thing that helped a lot was getting over my perfectionism complex. Release your content as soon as you can. I can’t tell you how much money I’ve left on the table from my old fear of the typo and grammar police. Not to mention the fact that I felt like I was leaving my audience hanging.

You subscribe to something because you want to get regular updates. If your favorite daily news show started coming on once a week, you’d probably switch channels. If you’re inconsistent without explanation, your audience numbers will drop and your network will fade.

Explosive Social Media Tactic #5 – Think Engagement

Measuring your results by page view alone is a thing of the past. When the web was mostly text and images, it made some sense that how many pages a visitor viewed at your site was a true measure of engagement.

Nowadays this isn’t the case. You want to look instead at how long people are at your site. The exception, of course, is when customers are coming to your site to buy, and the order processing system takes them off your page. But if people aren’t leaving your site because they’re ready to buy or subscribe, you truly must look at why they aren’t paying more attention to your content, and what changes you can make to get them to stay.

This is critically important in understanding which content will go viral naturally. What posts are people staying on your site to comment on? When do they take a few extra seconds to retweet? Are they watching your videos all the way through?

Once you know the content your audience is most connected to, and why, you can make more of it.

Explosive Social Media Tactic #6 – Three-Way Connection and Communication

That’s not a typo. Three-way communication is when the way you conduct yourself online is observed to a third party, who is also indirectly being addressed by your manner or statement. I wish I could credit the proper author of this, but I just don’t remember who it was who first observed that three people are positively affected by an act of kindness – the person giving, the person receiving, and the person observing.

One example of this in action is having a conversation with a peer about their new product on a social media site. Your friend is probably Dying to tell someone about the testimonial they just got, but don’t want to be rude or are too humble to brag. Ask them in front of your audience, and the conversation is exposed to your connections and re-exposed to theirs.

Connection is just as important – if communication is the conveyance of information, connection is doing so in a way that bonds. A several hundred closely bonded contacts will spread your message faster and farther than several thousand distant aquaintances.

Explosive Social Media Tactic #7 – What’s In It for All?

In the 80s, we all thought about what was in it for ourselves. In the 90s we decided to focus on others, hence, what’s in it for them. Today, we’re in the age of the win-win-win situation. Tell them how you benefit and tie it to their benefit.

Want someone to help you spread your stories? Make sure they know how important it is to you, why you came to them for help, and how they’ll be perceived for being the bearer of your good news.

You may look at the list above and feel that it’s intimidating, but it doesn’t have to be. Focus on doing just one of these things better each day for a few weeks, and before you know it, you’ll be doing them habitually. The results you’ll get will help these new habits stick.

Here’s a link to the su.pr traffic video if you are viewing this post via a syndication channel and can’t see the video above.

The video above is some of  StumbleUpon traffic, specifically the traffic I drove using su.pr. In the example above, the numbers average to about 5000 Stumbles a week, and I’m not a Power Stumbler by any stretch.

That’s not even traffic I got for myself, it’s for other people.

My personal record is 27,000 visitors. I had a product up about it on Tuesday at a sale price for  24 hours, for my newsletter subscribers only.

Everyone who signed up for the 27,000 visitors before I took it off the bonus list for the Social Media Success Package has probably noticed by now that Devon Brown has a new product up at http://27kvisitors.com/ – and if you’re saying to yourself… “hmmm…” you’ve got great instincts.

But no, he didn’t rip me off (bad paranoia! bad! lol)You’d be making a mistake in thinking anything Devon has done or is involved with isn’t above board. Which is why I’m always honored when he works with me or gives my products positive reviews.

Devon got a copy of the update, as he’s one of the ones who got the original package (that’s his testimonial at the top of the Social Media Secrets page that used to have this as a bonus).

And he let me know exactly how insane it was to sell it for less than $97 for more than a day. I agreed and it’s off the server and onto the http://27kvisitors.com/ site. All that’s on the page is a quick 14 minute video explaining how it helped him, and at the end, an order button.

If you pick it up. let me know. I have a special surprise upcoming for people who buy from that site.

photo credit: laurenatclemson

Here’s a short story for those of you who are procrastinating on putting together some kind of free teaser content to get someone to subscribe to your site.

Me, just now?

I subscribed to a good-looking but outdated site about free traffic, just to get possibly the world’s stupidest and most out-dated traffic tip, bar none that I’ve seen in the last 4 years. The site it came from actually has the occasional really good tip, so I’m not going to out them.

At least not here.

But the moral of the story?

Is the curiosity factor. I know just about everything there is to know about generating traffic.

I got that way by researching even the remotest possibility of someone having a website promotion strategy that I didn’t know about. 99% of the time I’m told about the dumbest possible trick that won’t work for 100s of reasons.

You know how I decide whether or not to sign up though? It’s not the tip – how do I know what that is until I subscribe and get the freebie?

It’s the site’s other content. Even if I get a hint that the freebie might be useless, I’m not actually signing up FOR the freebie. I’m signing up to be reminded periodically that the site exists and may help me.

POSSIBLY getting a good tip in the process is gravy.

The point is: a LOT of people think the same way I do. Most people who are any type of online-savvy are already hip to the “free gift with sign-up” tactic. It’s something those of us who are on the fence use to talk ourselves into giving that site our time of day.

Bottom line?

Do it. Find a freebie, and dangle the “ooo shiny” to get me to sign up.

But.

Find a GREAT freebie. In fact, find a COLLECTION of great freebies related to your topic and dangle THAT, not some useless drivel that insults my intelligence. Even the most web-shy newbie appreciates being treated like they have half a brain.

And if this site had presented me with something that actually lived up to the hype? I was a sale waiting to happen. I’m sitting here with my fiance’s credit card spending up all his money, $97 more wouldn’t have hurt either of us.

So, go do it. NOW before you forget. It can be 1- 5 pages long – who has time for a 100 page ebook anymore anyway – unless they paid for it?

It can be a video, an audio, a transcript of an older teleseminar product you’ve decommissioned.

Because?

If your site is halfway decent and your prospect is interested anyway, a good freebie upon sign-up can get them down off the fence, and turn them into a subscriber, then a sale.

Extra piece for affiliates: Are you marketing your own squeeze page, or turning over that traffic directly to another site. There’s no surer way to make sure your affiliate link is the one that’s clicked than to send them there from your OWN site, where you give away your OWN freebie, to sign up to, yes, your OWN newsletter, so you can help business people find different ways to meet their needs.

Oh, and on the what’s happening next front, I’m going to reveal the new tip-a-day newsletter sometime this week, the new membership sometime in the next 14 days and some articles on How to Create Unstoppable Traffic, as well as another free guide.

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.

There are two types of traffic campaigns. One brings you a huge burst of short term traffic. The down side to it is that it’s hard to maintain that pace of traffic, marketing and publicity, even if you have a whole department dedicated to just that. You run out of resources of some type eventually.

The other may or may not bring you short term gains, but it builds on its own momentum, and thus, will last forever once it’s started. You would have to abandon it entirely for a year or more to shut it down. The downside to it is that it takes 60 to 90 days for it to fully kick in, and if you don’t know how to attack it a little at a time each day, you won’t have the patience to see it through.

Tactic One: A Single Avalanche 

Avalanches are isolated incidents, relatively rare when compared with blizzards. They happen only once in a while, and can be fairly unpredictable. But what you know for sure – there’s gonna be a LOT of snow, and it’s gonna fall right on top of you, in a short amount of time.

Now, let’s pretend snow represents traffic. Now you can understand the name “Avalanche”. You can build one huge ramp-up campaign that’s a huge blast of traffic that dumps hoards of people in one direction in a short amount of time with a traffic avalanche.

The trouble is, while that’s great for a quick injection of traffic, it is NOT sustainable.

Eventually you run out of resources. That could mean sources of JV partners that are willing to mail for you.

Or in the case of advertising, you run out of inventory.

Or in the case of time, you’re so busy filling orders that you don’t have time to keep up with your traffic method, yet haven’t made enough to constantly pay someone else to do it.

Avalanches are finite. You get a big dump of snow on top of you, and you are under it until the snow melts or you decide to dig your way out. It accumulates on top of existing snow, but it’s not going to constantly build on top of new snow because by nature, it’s a once in a while event.

If someone is talking about how they got 20K new membership subscribers in a month, chances are, they had an avalanche. It’s a good place to start for traffic, but what happens next month? What if you want membership to increase to 200K, then what?

You can’t just do avalanches over and over again. You can’t just start a new blog every time you want traffic to your main product. Once it is built, what sustains that momentum.

A Blizzard. That’s what. Which we’ll talk about next.

Twice upon a time, a very recent time ago, I was making a big mistake with my consulting business. It was such a big mistake that when I discovered it, I decided to never take on new clients, and when the time was right, to drop the two I had.

I’ll tell you what the mistake was in a minute, and why it was so huge that I totally changed my business and as far as how most people know me, retired. First you need to know a little background about me.

You see, I have a reputation as a bit of a rainmaker. I put the proverbial butts in the proverbial seats, and I can do so in droves.

I’m not saying that to brag – I love to brag, but if I was going to I’d be way more specific with graphs and charts and links to proof and stuff. But you can Google that on your own if you like, or look on the site or on my various sales page.

The reason I’m bringing it up is because when you get a reputation for being the go-to person, you get a lot of business related to your expertise or because someone heard about you. And when they hear about you, they want you to do what you did for the other person.

The problem is, what you may be able to do for one type of site, is not necessarily duplicatable for another. Or, in what has been happening to me, I have been hired on to build traffic systems, when most people actually want me to do a marketing blitz or traffic blast.

Once I realized that most folks want a traffic blast I decided to hang up my spurs permanently. Not only do I not have the staff or the time to do hectic traffic blasts each month for the same set of businesses, I hate doing them! The hectic intensity is too much for my lazy nature — and most importantly is 100% wrong for most businesses to do more than once a year.

It was a HUGE mistake to believe that people know the difference between building a traffic system and doing a quick, short blast of traffic.

So I came to an epiphany. Why don’t I show people how to do both? Which came with the issue that first you’d have to know what I was talking about. So here goes.

Stay Tuned.

… 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!

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. )

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.