Running an online business can involve so many tasks that you should automate where appropriate. There are literally thousands of pieces of software available that make the job of growing and running your business much easier!
On the other hand, there are many pieces of software that can make your job easier in the short-term but that do more harm than good in the long-term. This is the topic that I'd like to share two recommendations on today. These recommendations are tempered by ten years of experience as an internet marketer.
One of the biggest challenges faced by most webmasters, that I've talked to, is attracting enough qualified traffic. It's a problem that has an incredibly obvious solution to me. The solution is simply to go to where the traffic is and redirect it.
As an example, sites such as Ebay (TM), MySpace (TM), and the major search engines get the majority of online traffic. That means that you should go to those places too, and get in front of that traffic, and redirect it.
There are dozens of easily implemented ways to redirect that traffic. Let's look at just two of the easiest methods.
The single easiest, free, long-term technique that I've used is article marketing. That's why I've written over 500 articles on internet marketing, and spread them throughout cyberspace.
Article marketing can be as simply as generating quality content that the search engines (and your visitors) will love and then feeding it to them.
Let's think outside the box for a second on this topic, and redefine articles as pieces of information that your ideal customers are looking for. That opens up a whole new world of possibilities for you. For example, now I can think of my recipe database as a database of articles. It would be more accurate to define it as a database of content, but I'm approaching it as many would approach articles because I want to share with you how I use this.
I use automated software to post many of my recipes online to attract my ideal customers... people online looking for recipes who will also buy my cookbooks. I simply use a piece of software that can grab hundreds of my recipes (text files on my computer ), insert them into a template, and upload them to my websites. That means that I can generate a QUALITY, very focused, useful website that the search engines and my visitors LOVE ?? in mere minutes.
The software that I use to generate hundreds of highly focused, quality web pages, in mere minutes saves me HUNDREDS of hours per month, and generates an incredible amount of traffic for me each month.
Can you see that by using this software, as I do, you can take a batch of articles (or content) on any topic and create a highly focused, traffic generation website in a fraction of the time?
The "secret" tool that I use for this is at: http://QuickQualityContent.com
I mentioned earlier that places like MySpace.com can send you major traffic. Let me briefly explain automating part of the process there.
MySpace is a social community where much of the focus is on building a "friends" list. You are allowed to invite any of the MILLION of members to become your friend, and part of your network of contacts.
A recent press release stated that there were 106 million MySpace accounts as of September 8, 2006, and that the site attracts 230,000 new members per day.
A "web metrics report" that I recently read put MySpace.com as the sixth most visited site on the internet. You really can't afford to ignore such a HUGE concentration of traffic.
You want to build a list of people interested in your topic, and then invite them to join your friends list. You can then send them messages, or post bulletins, using MySpace's internal system.
There are people who have built friends lists of over 100,000 targeted contacts. Can you imagine being able to compose a simple message and then in a few seconds send that message to your list of friends and have it magically appear in their MySpace inboxes? Assuming your list is highly targeted... perhaps a list of MySpace members interested in collecting comics, or any of thousands of other niche topics, your "bulletin" would generate a nice stream of traffic.
The key to making this a productive way to generate targeted traffic is to use software to build, manage, and contact your friends list. Without the software, you would spend an inordinate amount of time just tracking down appropriate people to invite, sending the invites, approving requests others send you asking to be added to your friends list, etc.
The software that I've tested and recommend for automating traffic generation through MySpace is at: http://TrafficGeneratingMonster.com
You do need to be very careful that you don't violate the MySpace terms of service. Also you shouldn't invite inappropriate people, or an inordinate number of people at one time. You should not abuse the system!
Just the two pieces of software that I shared with you above EASILY generate tens of thousands of website visitors for me every day. Most of that traffic is generated by my articles.
There are countless other simple, automated, and semi-automated methods of generating website traffic that do work. They work very effectively, and can work long-term... as long as they are not abused.
Take a look at these two tools today. Study the tutorials available for free that explain how to use each tool. Allow the tutorials to spark hundreds of additional ideas and angles. If I can do it with a topic as mundane as recipes, I'm sure that you can do it in your niche.
Copyright (c) 2006 Willie Crawford
Author: Willie Crawford
Author Bio:
Willie Crawford has been teaching Internet marketing for over 9 years. Take advantage of his uncanny insights and unusual candor by subscribing to his free, information-packed newsletter. Also visit his top-rated blog. Do both at: WillieCrawford.com/blog/
