Traffic Do vs. DoNot

Once upon a time, actually it was 2006, I still had a Website I was working on for years.
It was a big love affair as that one was my first Website I designed and even though I created many others, I loved my first one.
As I learn more about designing Websites, I redesign that one 3-4 times, I SEO optimized, I created more fancy graphics from one edition to another and my Website was ranked very well on Google and produced good money with Affiliate programs.
But my purpose in life wasn't to be ranked, it was to learn more, to kept abreast with what was new. It is funny, I started to learn Java language in 1997 just to create some special effects on my site, and later was a blessing for my IT Consulting practice that I know same Java as well.

In one night of July 2006, Google changed the algorithm of ranking and over the night thousands of websites lost their ranking. I was one of them.

No prior announcement of change, no post training about the new rules, not even enough details about the new rules, no excuses just a press release that this was done on purpose to clean Internet of junk sites.

First of all, like everything else on life:

• If you do small changes you can target one specific wrong doing group, but
• With drastic changes you increase the chance to create victims even if you don't want to do this.

I considered myself a victim in that process, my site wasn't a junk. The single facts against me was that being so old, it wasn't a small niche oriented site, and with a cumulative effect in time my site had a lot of links which in years produced me a lot of money.

I felt offended and unhappy but I reacted my way:

• I deleted my website as I recognized that was and old dinosaur, and I cannot add forever to it
• I also recognized that working per niche was a must in 2006
• I decided that I didn't want to happen again, I didn't want to be a Yo-Yo in somebody else hands
• I concluded that I wanted a method to produce traffic to be in my own hands
• I started to read and learn Web 2.0, and I discovered that was a free way to produce traffic depending on just my hard work.

Since those events I noticed a pattern of changing SEO techniques over the night. As soon as we learned some rules and the majority applied them, they changed the rules again. I don't like this, it is like - they punish the knowledge.
This is the reason why I said that the ranking is volatile.

Here we are in 2008, if you look at my sites you notice that I don't have AdSense ads, I don't do AdWord advertising, if I wanted to spend money on PPC traffic I use Miva, I produce my traffic using Web 2.0 Applications, and I create my Blogs with WordPress in my domains to get free hands.
With other words, I am in charge, but this is me, and I just try to explaining my point of view.

Note: About Google, when they do things I like I cheer them when they do things I consider unfair I speak out but in a very civilized way as I consider that intelligent people must agree to disagree from time to time. This is how the progress is made, YES, YES people don't go to far in life!

I want to make an important point:

I am not against of what Google people are doing,
I am unhappy with How They Are Doing.

Let's say we have 4 elements: A, B, C, and D. They can be 2 websites and 2 Blogs, or one Blog, 2 sites and a lens, or any combination of just 4.

Usually we make:

• A to point to B
• B to point to C
• C to point to D and
• D to point back to A.
  
  This is a very simple concept called "Close the Circle Technique". and usually the missing part is D to point back to A

If the elements are as I described, a combination of outside Squidoo elements, you never point each element to the other 3.
This is called a "cluster" but is a bad cluster which is interpreted by Google as spam, in 90% of the cases.

I do this only between elements of Squidoo. I created 4 lenses about Gothic Architecture and in each lens I said I have other 3 lenses and they are...

If instead to have 4 elements, we have a combination with close the circle between a lot of elements and clusters they are not interpreted as spam, by the contrary, as good communication skills.

As you know, SEO algorithms, Google ranking as well are volatile, they have short life, they can change when they fill like it.

That being said, I'll tell you what I tested, and what I know that is working NOW, and I have no clue when the machiavellic mind of SEOs is going to change again:

• Single backlinks are good, single backlink from high PR with Google are better, more powerful but:
  • It is not easy to convince big PRs and request a favor
  • In my view doesn't make sense to do this, as their rank is volatile as my rank, and I refuse to spend my energy in "volatile techniques"
• Reciprocal backlinks are better
• Just one or two reciprocal backlinks are helpful but not impressive traffic wise
• The best combination is to have a lot of high PR reciprocal Backlinks. I don't want to discourage people but it is not easy to obtain them, usually the gurus are making favors to each others but avoid to spend their precious time to create favors for beginners. Sorry to say, until you became a guru, or just a big name, you are on your own. When this happened they will adopt you immediately and JV with you and offer affiliations, and so on.
• If we can create clusters of backlinks then we are in the driver seat, and this is powerful but be careful in some cases they are interpreted as spam, in other they don't.

This is an example created by Joan and myself for JJJ.
We have 4 big elements, they are:

1. Joan's JJJ lens
2. Michey'sJJJ Blog
3. Joan's Ning
4. Twitter.

We also have all JJJ lense.

We created a special cluster between our 4 elements, and our lenses. Each element is pointing to our lenses using simple backlinks.

If some of you want to transform the simple backlink in a reciprocal backlink, you can say somewhere in your lens " to see all our team lenses look at Joan's lens and/or Michey's blog (and create links for those two), or something similar.

We also created 3 major "close the circle" links:

• Joan's JJJ lens to Joan's Ning
• Joan's JJJ lens to Michey's Blog
• Michey's blog to Twitter

Can we create more "close the circle" links, YES we can!

I summary: I suggest to:

• Create a chart of links for your work
• Look always to your squidoo lens stats, you will be amaze how much you can learn from them, you find out from where the majority of your links are coming from, and you can try to transform them in reciprocal.
• Always link lenses with elements outside of Squidoo and vice versa when it is possible.
• For long time traffic, always engage Social Bookmarking and Social Networking

Social Bookmarking and Social Networking are part of Web 2.0 Applications, even if I repeat myself, I start clarifying those terms.

Web 2.0 is the new generation of Websites and we can use them to replace PPC with FREE Traffic:

• They are interactive sites with its members
• Allow its members to dynamically change the sites
• Add content to them, and
• Interact with other members of the site .... like never before.

We can divide The Web 2.0 sites as folowing:

• Social Bookmarking. Examples: Backflip, Blinklist, Bloglines, Blue Dot, delirio.us, del.icio.no, Digg, Fark, Furl, Yahoo's My Web 2.0, Flicker, Linkroll, Magnolia, Markaboo, Mywebtop, reddit, Simply, Spurl, Squidoo, Stumple Upon, Technorati, Twitter, Tagfoot, Wink, Yammer and so on.
• Social Networking. Examples: MSpace, FriendFinder, Yahoo 360, Facebook, Orkut, FriendWise, Friendster, SecondLife and so on
• Video Sites. Examples: YouTube, Google videos, BlipTV, Flurt, SelfCastTV, Bott, ZippyVideo
• Pod Casting
• Blogs

If you want to know more, I have a lens BasicsAffiliateMarketing in which I dedicated 2 chapters to this subject.

Why we should care about Social Media?
Do you know that:

• Facebook has over 60 millions active members
• Twitter has over 200,000 active members per day, personally I get an average of 10-12 followers per day
• Technorati is tracking more then 100 millions English speaking Blogs and so on

Let's come back to traffic now.
The major difference between obtaining Traffic with Paid methods (PPC) vs. Web 2.0. Applications is that PAID ones cost you money (or a lot of money) but you can get relatively quick results, and Web 2.0 produces FREE traffic but takes time to see the results.
And don't forget that the paid methods don't guarantee positive results, you must know all the trick to create effective AdWords ads.

All that being said, I prefer Web 2.0 Applications free traffic, we also called them Social Media free traffic.
I told you from the beginning, I chose this path as depends just on my hard work.
I want to show you the benefit of Social Media as suggestive as I can.

In the first picture of this module, I presume that we are working only with 3 Social Media sites and we make each one to point to just a couple of lenses.

In the second picture, people start to notice our lenses and for the lenses they like, they start to react, interact with them: comment, add staff to them, vote for them, point to their sites and so on.
Just creating a comment somebody create a simple backlink, and based of the rules of one particular Social Media Site we can obtain endless types of interactions.

And the time goes by.


Now the level of interactions grow. People discover lenses, lensmasters discover people that commented, go to their websites and start commenting back if they find value, this means that some single backlinks are now reciprocal backlinks.

Wow! What we created is a traffic monster which is out of our hands now, has a life on his own and produces recurring traffic and income with very little intervention on our part.

How long it takes to get to this level, I honestly don't know because it depends on so many factors:

• The niche in which you are working, it is a profitable one or not
• You access a few or a lot Social Media Sites to interact with
• You are working with the most prolific Social Media sites or you arbitrarily chose them
• You keep inform yourself with the new ones which are better as they learn from the experience of the old ones
• How much effort you put in to the initial phase.
• How much you respond back, this is equal with creating a targeted community for your niche and build the trust on you.

For the sake of explaining the mechanism of driving traffic with Social Media I use 3 Social Media sites. Close your eyes and imagine that you are able to be active in 10, 50, or 100 social media sites, in time you will get so many arrows in all directions that your chart, open your eyes now, will look like this:


Of course it is a joke, but this is your purpose, you have to have o chart as close as possible to my left picture.

More black arrows in all directions vs. white space.

At this point you are doing well with your effort of creating traffic with Social Media.

To use Social Media correctly you create content, and you create "conversations", and conversations create "communities". This is the beauty of Social Media.

I say the sky is the limit but nothing is falling from the sky, it is depending on 2 major factors:

• How much "unique, useful, update" content you provide for your readers
• How much effort you put working with Web 2.0 Applications

I don't invent the wheel, I try to summarize what I know is working:

1. Content must be unique, useful, up-to-date, but not only - avoid to be boring, be inventive. My example for this is Seth Godin's Purple Cow book, clicking on the link, you definitely expect to get a typical squeeze page, please click now to see what you get. It is a squeeze page but it has a brilliant idea on it. Am I right?

2. Always talk about your lenses, hubs, websites on Blogs which:
--- must be Do-Follow, it is easy, you have to upload a do-follow plug-in ( do follow means people will be more interested to comment on your work because their links count, with no-follow parm the URLs are ignored)
--- because of do-follow being ON, you will get more traffic but you will get junk as well. To avoid the junk part, you have to activate AKISMET plug-in which is coming with WorldPress. Askimet is so powefull, some time is doing more then is necessary. I go once per month and look at the spam list provided for me and I select 2-3 comments which look spamy but they aren't.
--- create Blogs with WorldPress but in your own domain, I have a lens about this: blogging-do-donot
--- publish your Blog in do-follow directories - this is working very well for me
--- comment on other do-follow blogs and the URLs counts

3. Using the example of a chart I posted in this lens, create similar charts for your own work, and this will help you to see what is missing or what else you can do

4. I know that is impossible to post in all Social Media Sites, there are hundred of them, but chose carefully:
--- which ones are more prolific
--- which ones have less regulations, and produce more interaction
--- just in top of my head now: squidoo, twitter, flickr, stumble-upon, dig, tagfoot, reddit, facebook, youTube, SecondLife (be careful is very new, very powerful, and very addicted, but you can do all you want with it)

5. For lenses use SquidUtils is very powerful and saves a lot of time for you

6. Ping for lenses, what you have in SquidUtil is enough, for Websites, blogs use ping-o-matic

7. For publishing in forums I suggest: WarriorForum, and Digitalpoint

8. Create an account at Technorati, you post blogs at Technorati, but you must have an account with them. The advantage of Technorati and Google is that they follow any change on your blogs.

9. Monetize your blogs, Website as much as you want, and if you want.

10. Don't give up! This is a Ross Perot quote:
"Most people give up just when they're about to achieve success. They quit on the one yard line. They give up at the last minute of the game one foot from a winning touchdown."

Be a doer not a dreamer - this is my call for action!

I close with a quote from Johann Von Goethe:
"Knowing is not enough; we must apply. Willing is not enough; we must do."

Twitter Power:
How to Dominate Your Market One Tweet at a Time

Twitter API:
Up and Running:
Learn How to Build Applications with the Twitter API

Do You Squidoo? The Power of Web 2.0 for Generating Floods of New Traffic

Squidoo Basics:
How to Market and Promote Your Sites Using Squidoo.com

Traffic means you get visitors, but also means your visitors are coming back to visit you.

A lot of successful websites, blogs, lenses as well, depend on returning visitors, they are a major part of their traffic. It is more, returning visitors are easier to convert into paying customers because the more often they return to your site, the more trust they have in that site. If they come back you don't have a credibility issue.

Hence, keep your visitors coming back to your site with the following methods:

• Start a forum, chatroom or shoutbox
  When you start a forum, chatroom or shoutbox, you are providing your visitors a place to voice their opinions and interact with their peers -- all of them are visitors of your site. As conversations build up, a sense of community will also follow and your visitors will come back to your site almost religiously every day.
• Start a blog (web log)
  Keep an online journal, or more commonly known as a blog, on your site and keep it updated with latest news about yourself. Human beings are curious creatures and they will keep their eyes glued to the monitor if you post fresh news frequently. You will also build up your credibility as you are proving to them that there is also a real life person behind the website. Carry out polls or surveys
  Polls and surveys are other forms of interaction that you should definitely consider adding to your site. They provide a quick way for visitors to voice their opinions and to get involved in your website. Be sure to publish polls or surveys that are strongly relevant to the target market of your website to keep them interested to find out about the results.
• Hold puzzles, quizzes and games
  Just imagine how many office workers procrastinate at work every day, and you will be able to gauge how many people will keep visiting your site if you provide a very interesting or addicting way of entertainment. You can also hold competitions to award the high score winner to keep people trying continuously to earn the prize.
• Update frequently with fresh content
  Update your site frequently with fresh content so that every time your visitors come back, they will have something to read on your site. This is the most widely known and most effective method of attracting returning visitors, but this is also the least carried out one because of the laziness of webmasters. No one will want to browse a site that looks the same over ten years, so keep your site updated with fresh bites!

Those 5 methods to create coming back visitors are valid for any kind of sites, lenses included. You can use them on Membership Sites, Blogs, lenses, hubs.

For lenses we have a lot of modules which have the potential to bring back visitors, and using Social Bookmarking and Networking for traffic we can increase this potential as well