1. The course is now available online – No more signups – everyone deserves free info
2. The course, as well as the site, is now fully interactive. This means
   1. You can post your questions online
   2. Either myself or a visitor can respond!

So have a look around, post your comments, opinions, suggestions – I’d love to hear them…

1. Pay per click advertising. Google Adwords continues to dominate this advertising strategy. However Yahoo Marketing, 7Search, Bidvertiser, and many other paid search engines offer affordable alternatives.

2. Blogging. A well-written blog article can bring search engine traffic. It can also increase the number of subscribers to your RSS feed which can lead to repeat visitors and more traffic.

3. Social bookmarking. To bookmark your blog URL into some of the top social directories use a bookmarking sites such as Social Marker. This helps the search engines to find you and can lead to more website visitors.

4. Article marketing. This is still a great long term strategy for promoting a website. Include a link to your website in your resource box so the reader can easily find you.

5. Article videos. There are services such as Article Video Robot that will convert articles into videos. You then submit it to the top shared video sites such as You Tube and Yahoo.

6. Video marketing. Google owns You Tube which gets 85% of all video traffic. Doing video marketing is a good way to show up in the search engines and create website visitors.

7. Email marketing. Anytime you send a mailing out your list you can include a link back to your website. This should include announcing new products and blog updates.

8. Publish a newsletter. These are known as Ezines and have been around now for almost 15 years online. This is a good way to provide useful information to people as well as promote products in your online newsletter.

9. Viral marketing. It is a good thing anytime you can get somebody to tell somebody else about your Internet business. Ways to create viral marketing include reports, articles, ebooks, and so on. This could also include posting the video on You Tube that goes viral all over the Internet.

10. Go offline. You can still drive traffic to your website the old fashion way including flyers, business cards, newspaper advertising, and radio. Many times this is dependent upon what your actual budget is as off-line marketing can be expensive.

These are 10 ways to get more website traffic. Rather than concentrating on one specific way if you spread your advertising tactics around your traffic will increase

Suzanne Morrison is the owner of the Improve Search Engine Ranking website – a site that teaches you how to optimize your website content so that you receive high search engine ranking in the search engines.

Fortunately I’ve found a solution to this problem, and it’s called Backlink Booster. It’s really simple and easy to use. All you have to do is upload a list of your backlinks, and it weaves its magic to ensure that they get indexed.

How it does this is by creating RSS feeds, as well as backlinks to your backlinks, and a few other more complicated tactics (you can read all about it on their website), but the bottom line is this:

It Works – Really Well!

Plus its 100% Hands Free

I started using it a few weeks ago and Google Webmasters has already recognized a thousand odd more links! My rankings have also increased, so I’m 100% confident in recommending it.

For more info, and a free trial - Backlink Booster.

Analyze:

Find out how many subscribers you have, where they came from and what feed reader they use. Why do you want to know? Well it will help you get to know your readers better and keep track of how many more you get every day.

Optimize:

The short of it is, you can push your feed to search engines, blog aggregators and your podcasts to itunes as soon as you’ve published a new post. Activate features to automatically shorten URL’s and splice your blog feed with your photo feed.

Publicize:

Get the word out! Use the socialize features to publish updates to your social networks about your new posts. Let your subscribers get your feed by email, Creative Commons your feed, create a graphic for your feed and much more to really make your blog feed pop and dazzle anyone who may stumble across it.

Monetize:

Yup, you can use Google Adsense in your blog feed. Who knew? Troubleshootize: Having problems? Questions? Not enough info? Find all of your answers and more in this section and if you still don’t know how to fix your problem…Just Google It!

Okay so on a last, side note…If you decide one day that you don’t want to blog anymore and keeping your feed is just too much trouble. Or perhaps you burned your feed one too many times…just delete it. And if you just want to transfer your wonderful feed to another Feedburner owner simple enter their email address to transfer it and make sure they authorize this transfer.

That pretty much covers it. If you are a web developer or really interested in making your blog feed shine (which you should be) log in to your Feedburner account to discover all of the wonderful things you can do. Start activating some of these awesome features today to get the most out of your blogging.

Essential WordPress Plugins

* Akismet

This is the great spam filter plugin which identifies likely spam comments, compares them with the information on its data base and classifies them into “pending” and “spam”. The webmaster now has the option of checking the spam comments and trashing those he considers truly spam and approving those he considers were erroneously classified as spam.

* SI Captcha Anti-Spam

This plugin specifies certain letters and or numbers that the site visitor is asked to insert in a space/box with a view to filtering out spam bots. It works wonderfully well in combination with Akismet.

* FD Feedburner Plugin

This plugin redirects all feeds to the feedburner feed. Of course you first have to “burn” your feed with feedburner. You can read up on the many advantages of redirecting your feed to feedburner and also of “burning” your feed with feedburner.

* WP-Table Reloaded

This is a great plugin i use for data analysis and presentation. You can view it in use on my blog where i have used it in a post to present the two tables featuring the Top Article Directories

* All In One SEO

This plugin is a top plugin for SEO. It enables the webmaster to optimize on-page for the search engines by prominently specifying his keyword rich title, post description as well as tags. It also captures these same features for the entire site/blog.

* Cbnet Ping Optimizer

This plugin ensures your blog posts are only pinged to the various pinging services e.g pingomatic when a new post is published and not each time an update to the post is carried out. This protects you from being banned by these services as it often happens due to excessive and uneccesary pinging.

* Easy Privacy Policy

This plugin presents a standard privacy policy in line with google requirements, which you can modify or customize.

* Comment Luv

This plugin allows a display of your last blog post title on sites (that are also using this plugin) that you visit and leave a comment. This gives another backlink to your website and can be a source of traffic from such sites to yours.

* Keyword Luv

This plugin enables you to have your keyword featured in the name field for blog comments while at the same time satisfying webmasters by simultaneously inserting your name. It takes this format “Your Name @Your Keyword”. This is a plus for your search engine optimization efforts as you have your keyword anchor text pointing back to your website. This plugin requires a dofollow plugin to be effective.

* Exit Rescue

This allows the creation of a very simple and easy exit popup on your blogs and web sites, which can then be used for list building etc.

* Google XML Sitemaps

This plugin generates a special XML sitemap which helps search engines like Google, Yahoo, Bing and Ask.com to better index your blog.

* Ultimate Google Analytics

This plugin enables Google analytics on your blog such that you do not have to manually insert the generated code into your site’s html. This is automatically done for you by this plugin which ensures full integration between your blog and google analytics.

* Thank Me Later

Allows you to automatically send a ‘thank you’ e-mail to those who comment on your blog. This plugin message is customizable and can engage your site visitors by reminding them to check back for responses or new blog posts. The plugin is highly configurable with multiple messages, variable delay and restrictions.

My only concern with this plugin is whether it cannot be categorized as spamming your visitors as I do not think there is an explicit authority given, to communicate with them. I do not think that visiting your site, making comments on your blog and leaving their e-mails constitutes such authority.

The above are the most essential wordpress plugins i will recommend you use on your blog. Enjoy!

Respond promptly to all questions in your blog comments. If one of your readers is brave enough to ask a question there are likely many others who have the same question. By answering the question to that person you are sending the message that you are accessible. You are also cultivating further conversation about the topic not only with the individual questioner but also with others who have further questions about your answer to the original question. Every time I read a blog and find that my questions have already been answered via the comments section I am appreciative of both the questioner and the blogger who has responded. As a result, I am much more inclined to read that particular blog in the future.

You may also want to get some technical information about your readers by accessing analytic information. Through Google Analytics you can find out where your readers are coming from whether it be direct traffic, email links or links from other website. Once you know where they are coming from you can cater to those platforms in order to create a greater convenience for them. This is important because the less effort they have to exert to find you the more inclined they will be to actually read your blog.

It is important to better understand your reader and adjust your information accordingly because they want to know that the relationship you are creating is beneficial to them. Ultimately they need to know that the time they are investing in reading your blog is time well spent. Keep in mind that your readers are people who have needs and wants. If they aren’t getting what they are looking for in your blog they will go elsewhere to find it. Share your examples of inviting interaction and learning about your readers in the comments below.

The original post can be found at http://www.mymark.com/blog/blog/2010/07/08/get-to-know-your-readers/

1. Twitter Search: Use twitter search to find people who are active in your industry. Click on their list of twitter followers and start following each of their followers. As you probably know, when you start following a twitter user, they will receive a notification telling them that you are now following. If they find that you are someone they would like to follow in return, they will follow you. This is a great way to let more people know about you who might not have found the opportunity to otherwise. The point of building a twitter following isn’t just to have more followers but the main purpose is to find people who would be interested in what you have to offer.
2. Twellow: http://www.twellow.com is a great resource to track your twitter followers and those you are following. When you are completing step 1 of this process you need to keep in mind that there is a ratio of follower to following cap. You must have a certain ratio of people who are following you in order to continue following others. Twellow can help you manage this.
   1. The “friends” feature on Twellow can show you who you are following and how many of them are mutually following you. After a day or two of following someone who is not a power tweeter, you can un-follow them in order to make room for others you would like to follow. For instance, I follow Peter Cashmore of Mashable who will probably never follow me but I want to keep following him so I wont’ remove him from my list. On the other hand, when I follow someone who only has 29 followers and they don’t follow me back I will probably stop following them.
   2. The “Followers” feature on Twellow allows you to see who is following you in Twitter. You can go through this list and start following any one of your followers who you are not currently following already.
3. Repeat the process. Once you have completed these steps and have built a substantial twitter following you can be more selective about who you follow. Continually repeat the process to find fascinating people to follow and to encourage others to find your excellent content.

The original post can be found at http://www.mymark.com/blog/blog/2010/08/10/get-more-twitter-followers-today-in-3-easy-steps/

I loved math and science in high school and my early college years. Then I discovered computers and software. My passion shifted to computers and software when the Computer Science program was introduced at my University. My passion has not changed since, although the technologies continue to change. The most recent revolution in technology is Social Media. Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter are the big three with YouTube as a close fourth. Of course Google is now a staple in everyone’s lives as well.

Just last week I overheard someone explaining social media to a colleague and they said it is “as easy as changing a light bulb”. The other thing they mentioned is how fast everything goes viral. Perhaps the simplicity of communication between Internet friends using the big three has cast an illusion that all forms of social media are easy and fast. However, if you were to ask someone how much money social media has brought in for their business, you may get a puzzled look. Not because they don’t understand the question, but because they have no idea how to do it. Mention personal branding, article marketing, professional networking, blog marketing and ecommerce on the Internet and most people’s eyes will gloss over.

Using social media for business is not like changing a light bulb nor does it happen overnight. However, it does work.

A few days ago I took my niece and her baby of 3 months to the airport in her car. She had driven five hours to spend a day with us and then was flying to see her mom for a few days. I noticed her headlight was out so I thought while she was gone I would change it for her. The night before she returned I stopped by an auto parts store and bought a new head lamp. When I got home I looked up how to change it on the Internet. I couldn’t find a YouTube video so I had to settle for written instructions. About an hour later I claimed victory and jumped into the car to test it out. The head lamp was still out. I figured it must be an electrical problem so I took the car to the shop the next morning. A few hours later the mechanic called me and I could tell he was struggling to hold back his laughter. He explained there was nothing wrong with the electrical wiring. The problem was that I had changed out the high-beam lamp and it was the low-beam lamp that needed swapped. I’ll stick to computers!

When discussing social media and your business, don’t change the wrong lamp. Seek expert advice and even expert services. This allows you to stay focused on your business and benefit from the social media revolution.

The original post can be found at http://www.mymark.com/blog/blog/2010/09/21/does-twitter-really-matter-in-your-personal-branding-campaign/