Thank you so much for reading this. It isn’t the normal blog post that comes out of this site, not by far.

Here’s the gist.

I put together a new package featuring new way to find your most targeted audience on Facebook worth $200, on sale for $7.77 at this writing.

I priced it at less than $9 until I go to Africa this coming week for two reasons.

1- I want you to buy it now not later, because
2- I want to stay longer and not have to work during my first real vacation in 12 years, therefore,
3- Rather than beg for money, as always I’d like to trade value for value. And I like to overdo it on my end.

You probably already have a Facebook Profile, and if you’re a part of my audience, you’ve probably already picked up my guide Fast Facebook Traffic.

(A guide to getting more traffic and leads with your Facebook Profile without violating Facebook’s rules. Or acting in a way that lead people to think you’re a jerk.

Also less than $10 if you don’t have it!)

There are many effective ways to grow your audience through Facebook without doing that used salesman kind of pitch – which we all know doesn’t work anymore.

But you know all that, so why wouldn’t you have a Facebook Profile? Of course you do.

Facebook is an incredible resource for connecting to people who become customers. They drive more traffic than Google now, and with 600 million people using it, not being on Facebook isn’t the best idea a person has ever had.

It’s a shame that, with a personal profile, there are so many extra steps to get people to engage with you. I believe in engagement before lead capture, but Facebook is really making it harder than it has to be.

And yes, my new guide overcomes that, so you can get access to more new people in a way that has them to connect to your page And your newsletter within minutes of first encountering you. But let’s talk about how involved the Facebook profile engagement process is.

First you have to set up your profile so that people know where to go to learn more about you, and hopefully, one day, visit your site and sign up for your products and services.

The solution to that used to be easy – just use a Facebook plug in to put a sign up box in your sidebar. Of course, Facebook put an end to that.

But you can still push news and updates from your profile that will encourage people to get into your sales funnel. If you know how to set up an engaging blog that converts visitors to newsletter sign ups, the cycle will be longer, but there’s still a chance that you’ll get it done.

If only the work were over then. And granted, the process isn’t dull. It’s fun even. But parts of it are inefficient.

For example, let’s say you’ve set up your profile to talk about business to fellow business people, and have a filter for stuff that is directed to family and friends.

Now, you have to go and find out where people are and draw them to you. One common place is a Facebook group. If you know which ones to go to and where to post to get the best results, and how to figure out which ones are active, again,  super.

Of course, Facebook went and changed Groups too. Except they didn’t change the old groups over to the new format. Not that you always want it to, but now you don’t have a choice. (The hell?)

So, okay, you’ve set up your profile properly, you’ve gone and found people to interact with, they click on your profile and join… great, some of the new people are coming. But what happened to the old people?

Aw, nuts! Facebook made yet Another change, and if you haven’t directly interacted with people lately, you aren’t showing up in their stream. Unless they do a series of funky adjustments that most people can’t and won’t be bothered with. So the people you worked so hard to recruit aren’t getting your updates any more, unless you knew the secret to getting in that group in the first page.

So what now?

Well, what if you could set up a page on Facebook with an irresistible feature that made people want to connect to you?

What if having them sign up with you let you contact them through their news feed, through their Facebook messages, and through your newsletter?

How would you like it if you were exempt from the rule that if you haven’t directly interacted with someone in the past few weeks, they couldn’t see you? What if your special status made you visible to them?

What if that didn’t even matter because they were on your email list?

Suppose that through this special page, you could contact people several times a day, or outsource the job to someone who could send out messages on your behalf several times a day?

And wouldn’t it be fantastic if you also got a whole new place to browse and connect to new people in order to find your audience?

I have great news for you.

Facebook just made an update that allows you to do all of the above.

The catch is, it only works this way under specific conditions, with a technique I’ve just put together. At this writing, I’ve only been using it a week.

In that week, on the days I do it, I get 10 new fans in 12 hours, or up to 20 in a day.

In the first five day period I had a spike of 100 new fans.

They aren’t the kind of passive fans that you can buy from various services (some of them spammy, none of them worth $200!) . They are people who are leaving more wall posts, sharing more links, and just overall interacting more than ever.

Even people who had already joined my group are coming back to talk!

My technique exploits a new Facebook feature, in combination with some existing tweaks that allow you to

- turn your Facebook Page into a landing page
- set it up so that people in your target audience have a reason to like/join your Page
- gives them an immediate reward for doing so
- can be set up so they follow up that action with joining your newsletter (Facebook can’t ever affect Those leads)
- bypasses the “you haven’t contacted me lately” filter
- allows you to publish frequent updates to their news feed, including notices of sales, blog posts, helpful tips, or questions
- lets you build a community, complete with discussion board, video, link and photo sharing, for free, and,
- gives you a whole new way to find new prospects and draw them to you.

That’s what my new resource “Fast Traffic from Facebook Pages” tells you about. In it I teach the technique that in 15 minutes of work brought me 20 new subscribers to my Facebook Page and newseltter over the next day.

It works best under certain circumstances, but a fellow entrepreneur just showed me how to make it work for Any type of page, though arguably not as well as my current preferred page.

It’s less than ten dollars, and you can pick it up here:

Here’s what Jim Zaccharia had to say about it:

“WT_? Ok, I Shouldn’t Tell Anyone, BUT, Tinu Abayomi-Paul has come up with a Facebook Traffic plan ‘offer’ for < $10 That’s Too Good To Pass up – IF you Want LOTS of Facebook Traffic, that is. You’ll be Blown Away by the Bonuses. Really.”

When I thanked him for the comment in Facebook, he said:

“I could hardly Believe my Eyes_when I Saw How Much You Provided ! Glad I took you up on your offer Before you came to your senses and raised the price! It’s Easily Worth 10X what you’re asking.”

The price has gone up a buck, but is still under $9 because I’m looking to raise cash for a trip to Africa in a few days. I just learned that I may not be able to work steadily while I’m there, and that I might be able to extend my trip.

(I was prepared for frequent power outages, with backup generators, but not for the potential shortage of the fuel that powers the generators.)

It won’t stay under $9 forever – I’m leaving in a few days. Get your copy now.

Just in case Facebook Pages, or Facebook marketing is new to you, I’ve set up the following bonuses, available until I leave for my trip:

1. FanPage Dollars
2. Fanpage Dollars 2
3. Facebook Profits
4. Facebook Fanpage Warchest
5. 27 Facebook Fan Page Templates
6. Viral Fan Page Script
7. Facebook Ad Explosion
8. Facebook Fanpage Blueprint
9. Facebook Ad Miracle
10. Facebook Social Ads Exposed
11. FB Profit Secrets
12. FB Viral Script Pro 2.0
13. Facebook Marketing Uncovered
14. Facebook Rockstar System

This is over $200 in additional help with Facebook, yours free for investing less than $10 in Fast Traffic from Facebook Traffic.

Get your copy of Fast Traffic from Facebook Pages today. And thanks as always for your support.

Someone once told me you can’t ever get something that is

• cheap
• and good
• and fast.

You simply cannot have all three things in one product or service.

If it’s a good product, either you bear the cost in real currency, or you lose speed by investing your own time to make it work – hence allowing it to be cheap.

If you can get it or its results fast, the quality of the product suffers or you bear the expense in real currency- cash.

If you can find it cheap, either it’s sub-par quality, or you bear the cost of speed.

Ten years on the web has taught me that this is true, and those are the consequences of getting something cheap and fast, good and cheap or fast and good.

(Okay, you caught me trying to look young. The real number is 12 years on the internet – I built my first business site in 1998.

Goodness. It’s actually 17 years if you count newsgroups and such.

I am so old. Anyway.)

In my newsletter, from time to time I’ll suggest an inexpensive resource. I will only do this if

1. I own the product

(which means I went through the entire delivery process- including customer service if something went wrong)

2. I found the strategy sound

having used a similar enough tactic myself, or actually implemented the exact one I was reading, and,

3. It can benefit a variety of businesses, not just internet marketing.

There are lots of things that work only in the bubble of the internet marketing niche, because that’s a special type of consumer, as is the business opportunity niche or the business to business niche. Not saying it’s better or worse. Just different.

Having said that, I have to apply that logic to cheap traffic guides, including my own, so that you can understand why some of my prices are quite low, and others are so expensive, only the truly well-insulated or managed firm can afford both me, and the time it takes to see the first signs of my high end advice sticking.

There are people out there whose entire careers are based on information I share in this blog, to put that into perspective for you.

(I’d say “not to brag” but then you’d have to say “yeah, right.” And then I’d have to say “you can only successfully brag about things that are true.” and… well it would turn into a whole “thing.”.)

Some of those people make free or cheap guides to get their businesses started. Some with my permission, some without. All of us, myself included, sometimes forget the problem with cheap traffic guides before we go further.

Or we at least forget to explain them in our salesletters or within the guide itself. That’s what brings me to look at the cheap traffic guide issue from many angles, to see their potential problems.

The first problem is that whole cheap, fast and good thing. Myself? I try to err on the side of cheap and good.

I believe in hard work. The fact is that most really good traffic techniques are often inexpensive, but take a lot of hard work to build.

But not everyone makes cheap traffic guides with that in mind. Some people write them about traffic tactics they used a year ago, not knowing that they are worthless now.

I don’t think they do this maliciously, I think they just don’t often see that the reason any loophole they may have found still works for them because they got in really early. They don’t realize the promise they are making to a newcomer won’t be kept. It’s a classic problem for people new to selling traffic products or services.

So you get a product that is cheap, that you can put to work fast, but is ultimately worthless…

And as such is no good.

You also occasionally happen upon someone who shares a loophole early. So you get a fast and cheap technique, but since they made it available to so many people, it draws too much attention and the loophole is closed.

To me? Good just for a short term is still bad if I’m trying to run a reputable business. (If you’re running a triple X site, or gambling or any other venture that you can afford to have banned or can quickly rebuild, feel free to put your black hat on. I won’t judge.) A true traffic technique is good for the long run….

And as such is no good.

Everything else will fall under the heading of fast and good. You’ll pay for someone to do it for you, or you’ll pay to learn about it. Yes, you have to make an investment, but boy, it’s worth it.

They are few in number but when they come along, it’s great.

Which brings us to the second problem with cheap traffic guides.

They are general knowledge, even when the implementation steps are given in great detail. Allow me to explain.

Let’s say I go bananas about an expertise marketing course. I get it, it’s fantastic, it even works.

But I own a video game site. Expertise marketing may not be the best choice for an entertainment product. I probably would have been better off business blogging, advertising within other games, being on sites gamers go to, doing a social media campaign supported by light ads on social media sites.

The seller of a cheap traffic guide doesn’t know that.

Either they don’t have the expertise, or they do and can’t share it because you aren’t playing at that level – you’re doing the entry level cheap guides when you should be getting traffic makeover from a someone with a Traffic PHD.

(Yep, I’m linking to a bunch of my products. I appreciate it if you do purchase something, but feel free to just soak up this knowledge for future reference instead. I’m linking to other stuff too, but just in case you’re looking for something of mine, hit the bold links.)

You may not even need a bunch of cheap guides, or even an expensive consultant. What you may need is to pay more attention to your site and apply some good common sense.

Things like – if your site sold better before the redesign, redesign again based on the old design with stylistic updates only.

Or things like, if a high percentage of people are leaving your site, and it’s not to go purchase through a third-party processor, maybe you need to figure out what’s driving them off – and if it’s a good thing.

Or things like, if you make more money when your newsletter comes out, ask your audience if they’d like more newsletters. Then increase your mailings to however many they say per week.

Anyway, the point is, a traffic guide can build on your knowledge but it can’t advise you whether choosing to use the tactics in it are best used on your site or business.

On the other hand, sometimes you don’t need specialized knowledge, or you want to focus in on one small area, or you want to own everything that person ever created, or or you’re beginning and you want to see what’s in the water before you jump in.

That’s cool, because that’s what is great about cheap traffic guides.

With a minuscule investment, you can skip today’s latte, small pizza, or cheeseburger meal, and find out if you can use Twitter effectively for your business, even though you hate Twitter.

You can find out whether there is any potential for you to get traffic from Facebook.

So I hope this makes things clear – I know there are some issues with using cheap traffic methods. That’s part of why I give you the same information you might find in a cheap guide for free on my site, then put $97 into $8 products, and collections worth $25,000 into $600 reports or $100 video packages.

I want you to be wildly successful so that you can afford me, and come back for some more of that good stuff your business is now addicted to – ain’t I a cad?

For the record, these are the cheap and good ones I currently, openly, and proudly endorse. The
ones I created are in bold. If you own others, share them. Affiliate links are OK. For our purposes, cheap means less than $15, and good means the technique still works.

Remember also that “fast” like cheap and good, are relative. I can generate 10,000 even 100,000 or a million visitors overnight given the right budget, tools and team. So if I say I’m teaching you how to get 1000 visitors overnight, realize, that’s slow to me.

• Fast Facebook Traffic
• The Twitter Lists Secret
• Twitter Traffic
• Google Social Search Secrets
• fast blog traffic
• how to maximize mbl traffic (My Blog Log)
• list explodes
• 1 month – 1000 members
• Video Traffic Guide
• Video Traffic Power
• Video Traffic sales letter
• 2 bucks an ad

There are several basic low-budget and no-budget ways that websites and web publications can get reasonably expect to more exposure in 2010.

While the objective remains the same – get in your prospects email, search, news or related favorite online hangouts – the methods by which you’ll be achieving those objectives shift from year to year.

1. Leverage Business Relationships
2. Create Affiliate-Powered or Referral-Powered Promotions with Incentives
3. Get Ranked Well in Google and Yahoo/Bing
4. Leverage Other minor Google/Yahoo properties for better search and direct traffic
5. Get Regular Exposure in Google News
6. Build Great Blogger Relationships (whether or not you’re presently a blogger)
7. Get Click Traffic from Twitter, Ping.Fm, and other more topical status update tools, or more audience-focused  micro-blogging applications
8. Get Click Traffic, Article Views and Build Relationships Both Within and Around Facebook and other Social Networking Applications
9. Get Publicity in Other Major Publications and Mid-Level Industry Publications
10. Create a Video Following
11. Create a Podcast Following
12. Shift Towards Bizstreaming (without dropping Blogging)
13. Integrate document sharing, slidecasting, and other multi-media social sharing tools
14. Find or Found Appropriate Community Networks that integrate online tools with offline life
15. Tighten-up In-house interest lists, follow-up, intro offers and backend sale
16. Value-exchanges for attention, based in social currency on the social media sites that are built for content exposure, such as StumbleUpon
17. Economically-sound Advertising

Throughout January we’ll be dedicating anywhere from a couple of days to an  entire week on all of these topics, then we’ll come back and re-cap with a round-up and links to more resources.

Until then, the one thing you need to remember about traffic is the same thing as before: the game hasn’t changed – the tools are just getting better.

Maybe you’re not an “online person”.

Perhaps the only time you use your computer is to read your email, search for something on the Web, read the news, or see pictures and other updates from friends and family.

It would make sense then, if you don’t really “get” how the web is supposed to help you sell more of your products and services.

The truth is, it doesn’t matter if you are a vitamin wholesaler, provide language translation services, sell timeshare resales, or write books, your clients and customers are online. If you can intercept them while they’re there, in a way that adds to the quality of their lives, rather than intruding upon it, you’ll be light years ahead of your competition.

Because there’s another truth. Most companies either go from quick fix to quick fix, never really getting anywhere or find leads and customers haphazardly, with no real system, hoping for the best. And it’s sad because the resolution is pretty simple.

Pinpoint what your target market is doing online. Then get in their path. Instead of fighting the uphill battle of getting visitors to come to you in some kind of vacuum, go to them.

You’re probably thinking, well whoop-de-doo for you, Ms. Has-it-figured-out. How exactly do I do that?

Of course I can’t provide all the answers to that in one day, but let’s think about it for a minute. Where are your customers online? Better yet, how do I get to them, or get them to come to me? We’re going to come back and answer that more specifically momentarily.

First, let’s look at the question in general terms.

According to the US Census Bureau, three out of five households are online, now that’s just in the United States, and translates to 110 million households. About half of those have high speed internet access. Think about how your business would suffer if you turned away business from 60% of your clients. If you’re not making your presence felt online, that may be what you’re doing.

Or think of it this way – what if 60% of your customers referred you one more paying customer this month? What is the math on that for you?

If you count wireless, the market is even bigger than that. Half of Americans have accessed the web using a wireless device such as their cell phone. And if you’re talking about awareness and occasional use, 77% of US Adults have used the internet. There’s no way you can say your customers aren’t online anymore. Somewhere in that 77% is someone who would like to do business with you.

Let’s go beyond that a little. What are people doing online, and how often are they doing this? This is important because this will illuminate how exactly we can come across your specific customers and clients.

If you think that most people are not “online people” get ready to be shocked. 73% of Americans use the internet on a daily basis. The same study tell us:

* 58% of internet users are reading or sending email,
* 50% are using search,
* 38% are getting news,
* 38% are online just to pass the time or for fun, and,
* 27% are using social networking sites.

(Of course some people are doing more than one of those things, so the numbers aren’t going to add up to 100%)

Those first four activities are the top four actions people take online, email, search, news and leisure. And although social networking is fairly new as a mainstream activity online, more than one in four people are using them. Now, if 73% of Americans use the internet, and most of them do one of the top three activities, then obviously, you need to be where that’s happening.

Your customers should be getting periodic emails from you. Your site should be showing up in search. Your company should be making news, online and off. And if your newsletter or website can help them pass the time when they are bored, in a way that’s related to your products and services all the better. If it can’t, it can certainly contribute content to the social networking sites where they might be spending those idle moments.

Let’s get back to your specific site now. How do you narrow those people down to folks who are interested in what you specifically have to offer?

The initial step here would be making sure there’s a market for what you have to offer. Search for the problem your product is the solution to, and find out if people care enough to pay for that solution, then that they can afford to do so. There’s a lot of people who are looking for jobs at any given time, recession or not.

All of those people aren’t willing or able to pay for resume services or for job seeking advice. If your solution has a price tag on it, target the people who see the value in paying for information they may find freely online. Make sure you remind them what that benefit is.

Can an expert give them more precise advice? Do you have a track record of matching jobs to people? Would the time wasted looking for the information possibly cost them the open position?

Now, once you find where the pain in your market is, even if you aren’t planning on relying on search engine traffic, the insight you can gain from doing simple keyword research is invaluable. keyword research can tell you who is searching, what context people are discussing products like yours in, who your top competitors are, and most importantly, give you an intelligent estimate of how large the market is for your solution.

Many is the entrepreneur who is shocked to find that upon discovering the perfect solution, and marketing to the perfect market, that there just aren’t enough of those people in the niche they’ve chosen to make a living from month to month. Armed with this information, it’s easy enough to expand a product line into nearby niches, but if you don’t know this, you might spend months attempting to gain traffic that just isn’t available.

Once this research is over, it’s time to attack on all fronts. Make sure you are reaching them in all the ways discussed. Start with one primary way to gain customers, like advertising, then add ways to make money from existing customers, like a new product. It’s simple enough to find your customers online if you know what they’re doing and where you need to be to be connected to them. Then all you need is a system for keeping the visitors coming to you consistently.

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.

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.

I’m sure you remember our last traffic tip, where we learned how to use slideshows to attract visitors to your site. If you’re stopping by for the first time, it may help to read that tip first.

What we’re doing now is taking that tip and with a few slightly more technical tweaks, take it to the next level. That next level is slidecasting. 

What’s Slidecasting? 

If you want to be technical, it’s podcasting but with a slideshow instead of a regular video. Since a podcast is an RSS feed with enclosures or attachments (most commonly audio), technically a slide with audio doesn’t qualify. But we’re going to go with the general use of the term, which is an audio-enabled slideshow. 

So how do you create a slidecast?
 

It’s surprisingly much easier than it seems with the tools we have available. All you need is a slideshow (have a look at our last slideshow article if you don’t know where to start), and an audio to go with it. Then you can create the slidecast by synching the audio to your presentation with free online resources, or you can invest in programs to help make a slidecast that’s ready for even wider marketing.

Getting Your Slidecast On (As Talking Slideshows)

The first option is the easiest: record an audio to go with your slideshow separately, and sync it to the existing slideshow using online tools. Few mouse clicks and – Bob’s your uncle. 

(Your uncle, not mine – have you SEEN my name? I have no uncles named Bob, trust me.)

SlideShare can help you do this, MyPlick supposedly has a similar feature, and Slideboom even supports your efforts to do this within PowerPoint before you upload. I hear their plug-in is neat, too.

Getting Your Slidecast Out (As Video Presentations)

Okay, now we’re getting a little more crazy with it. You can also make the Slidecast into a video. 

Why would you want to do that? 

Because it’s an easy way for the camera-shy to get in on that whole video marketing thing. For all we know in ten years, the web will be mostly video. If you think I’m crazy, remember that the internet started out as as ARPANET, just a bunch of shared text files on a handful of computers, then NSFnet in 1986. 23 Years later? 

YouTube.

God, I’m old. 

Anyway.

Now is the time to start producing videos (well, two years ago was the time but you’re still good). And this is the easiest way to get your foot in the door if you either don’t want to be on camera yet, or feel that your information is best conveyed in pictures. You can either use a program to do this, or record your synched audio slideshow made at one of the sites above with screencasting tools or screencast software.

Adding audio to Keynote isn’t as easy as Apple makes it sound, but it’s not like it’s harder than doing it in Powerpoint. However, if you can afford it, Camtasia works with Powerpoint to create a video version of your slideshow. (there’s a free trial), a PowerPoint plug-in will help you, or if you’re on a Mac, use a program called ProfCast, which will let you record Keynote while it’s playing, as you narrate in real time. It exports the result as an MOV file, which makes it perfect for uploading to any video site, or creating a video podcast to promote.

Or, you could just do it the easy way and use Amit Agarwal’s tutorial on using AuthorStream to create your slidecast video. It’s called How to Convert PowerPoint Presentations to Video Files (with Sound).

Yeah, yeah, I know, why didn’t I tell you the easy way first? 

Well, what fun would that be?

In the previous article, we talked about how you can use the model of incentivized following in social media to create a contest that can help you gain publicity and leads for your business. Here are a few tips specific to running the contest.

1. Set up clear, easy rules for entry and giving away the prize. Keep it as simple as you can – the more rules there are, the fewer entries you’ll get. Do just enough to prevent someone from cheating.

2. Dedicate a page to describing the prize in as tempting a way as you can, almost like an information/sales letter. Then at the end let your readers know they could win this item and how to enter. Publicize that page when promoting the contest.

3. Eliminate as many negative experiences as possible – as we mentioned in the contest traffic tip, some may not enter because they think talking about this in their status updates may be spam, or at least irritating. 

Of course, some people have the kind of audience that won’t care, but give the others an alternative way to respond. Perhaps they can send you a link to where they saved your contest page in Delicious via DM for you to verify.

4. Give reasonable odds to win. If you have an audience of 20,000, limiting the contest to the first 100 entries can condition your group to respond fast, pay more attention, and see more value in participating the next time around. Fewer people enter contests that they see as a shot in the dark. Think about what you did with your last Publisher’s Clearinghouse Sweepstakes letter.

5. Give a second prize to everyone who doesn’t win. Sometimes I don’t even announce that there’s a second prize until after they’ve entered, or even after the contest is over, in the interest of under-promising and over-delivering.

6. Publicize the contest on Twitter, Facebook, your blog, or whatever venue you chose, while it’s happening, but don’t make it the ONLY thing you ever talk about. Try adding it to your bio, or mentioning it just twice a day, when you sign on and off.

7. Announce and congratulate the winner in public and make sure they have no problem getting their prize.

Update: The video is now in the feed, you can see the link to it if you’re subscribed.

Upon my official “retirement” I announced where you could get a free, early stage copy of a product I’m developing. Apparently the window was too short to collect, so I’m opening the update up for 100 downloads/online views. If you have some feedback for me on it, please leave it as a comment to this blog post.

Known issues not yet fixed:

• Volume too low, feedback
• Quality of video varies when re-sized
• You want a longer (?!) product in several smaller parts.

How to Get It

Subscribe to the Blog. Yes, this blog. Even if this is your home page, you’re missing out if you aren’t subscribed. Not all the material in the feed actually shows up ON the blog.

If you already know how to subscribe to the feed, do that, in which case you can stop reading.

If you don’t know how to subscribe to the blog, you’ll be happy to know that you can use RSS, iGoogle, My Yahoo! or My AOL! if you’d like, or you can subscribe via email.

UPDATE: As long as you can verify that you’re a subscriber, if you can’t find the link in the feed (it’s there now), I will reserve you a copy if you comment. Be sure 1- you subscribe by email if you’re confused, 2- be sure that your email address in the comment is the same as the one you’re leaving AND the one you’re using to subscribe.

Thanks,

Tinu

How to Subscribe – Quick & Easy

To subscribe by email, go to the Free Traffic Tips Email Subscribe page.

Fill out the form, click the “subscribe me!” button and you’re done.

If you’d rather subscribe by RSS, Google, Yahoo or AOL, go to the Free Traffic Tips Feed.

Click on the button in the upper right corner that goes with your favorite way to subscribe. In some browsers, it will default to the format you normally pick.

Here’s a screen shot of what you should be seeing:

Click for (MUCH) Larger Image

And if you know all the cool reasons that you should be subscribed or are just tired of reading you can stop reading here. For good or just come on back and finish tomorrow.

Because guess what? Now that you’re subscribed you’ll have this information handy forever and ever.

And ever.

Seriously, if you didn’t read this right when you got the newsletter, you might want to make sure you’re all subscribed before finishing this. There’s only 100 downloads, remember. So if you want a free copy, hurry up.

But If I Already Get the Newsletter, Why Subscribe to the Blog?

I’ll admit up front that’s it’s partly an ethical bribe. I’m hoping when you try subscribing to the blog you’ll say to yourself — why wasn’t I doing this before?

And then you’ll stay subscribed.

But the main reason for having you jump through this particular hoop is tracking. This is going to be part of a product really soon. I want to track everything possible. Feedburner helps me do that.

Now at first, it may not make sense, subscribing to the blog as well as the newsletter. However, there are things in the newsletter that won’t be in the blog and vice versa. The frequency isn’t the same either. Sometimes the blog is only updated one day a week, with long, step by step instructions or background information on a traffic technique. The Zero Gridlock newsletter is a short, daily tip and freebie.

The blog serves the function of sharing tips that aren’t affected by how many people are aware of it. Some people reserve their list for sales pitches, but my team isn’t like that. We’re just as likely to have links to our premium offerings in the blog as we are in our newsletters.

We use our newsletter to give more focused information, much of which is a bit more sensitive to share. These are the types of things a spammer could easily find a way to manipulate, for example, and so I wouldn’t broadcast them on my blog. (Already made that mistake talking about RSS, blogging, and pinging.)

You also get:

• Related links that I save to Delicious.com that are related to traffic, including search engine and blogging news, before it hits the blog (if ever).
• Links from other marketing-related blogs that I own or am affiliated with,
• First notice of special downloads, and,
• A heads-up on special offers

Some of those special offers include chances for free 15 minute coaching sessions with me, free product giveaways in exchange for testimonials, as well as time-sensitive rebates and coupons for items sold on the site.

So you see, it’s really not enough to read the blog, even if you do every day. You have to be subscribed to get the extra links.

How Will I Know When It’s Download Time?

Download time is now. Once subscribed, click through to the link in the feed about “Precursors”, then instructions and click whichever you prefer. Again, if you can’t find it, subscribe and then reply to this blog post. I’ll reserve you a copy up until the first 100 are gone.

The link will stay live until it has been downloaded 100 times, and the video will stay live until it’s been viewed 100 times, after which both will be taken down. A future, more expanded version, will become one part of the membership site that’s pre-launching in the next seven days.

We Hope You’ll Stay Subscribed

You might be tempted to subscribe, get the download, and be on your way. And that’s fine with me, I don’t want to trap you — getting you subscribed is more about tracking downloads and views than anything else.

Give it a week though – you’d be surprised just how much great information comes out of both the blog and the feed, and how it integrates seamlessly into the new, daily version of the newsletter.

Thanks so much for being a subscriber. (And of course, if you didn’t come here from the newsletter, you’re welcome to sign up.)

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.