Fourth Floor Marketing » Traffic Development

Ezine Articles Submission

James Spinosa — Wed, 05 Aug 2009 21:16:52 +0000

Today I wanted to announce that I am challenging myself to write and submit at least 1 article per day to EzineArticles.com as well as the top 10 other article directories. I know that there are many people that write 10+ articles a day but I used to hate writing articles so this is a big step forward for me, it will probably also give me a kick in the pants to post here more often.

I will probably come closer to submitting around 3 articles a day because I will be submitting old blog posts as well as articles that I will purchase from some of the authors I have outsourced work to in the past. The goal of these articles are to boost the search engine rankings for Easy Online Money Making while driving direct traffic to my new mailing list the Fast Cash Blueprint.

I have done a little research on my most recent articles and I have found that I typically make $15 per article that I write in commissions from NeverBlue and ClickBank on average. This means that I will get an extra $15 a day if I continue to write these articles, all of which I will be investing into advertising when I finish working on my marketing book.

I have written a couple of test articles each of which gets a few hundred UV’s a month, and most of this is thanks to Google. I started basing my titles off the most searched terms in Google, for instance if you type in paid surveys it will display paid surveys online, so I will optimize my articles for that specific phrase.

In order to continuously pump out articles you simply need to get into a routine, for me I write my articles just before eating lunch. If you are writing about a subject that you find boring, then write about something that interests you instead. Don’t punish yourself just to make a couple extra dollars, and an interesting article will be better in the long run anyway.

Once you are finished writing your article proof read it twice, then submit it to EzineArticles and use your article submission software of choice to submit to other top directories. Rather than submitting to all the spam directories allow it to spread organically.

There are huge benefits in writing articles, read any marketing forum and you will find example after example of people taking in thousands of dollars in organically driven sales from articles. The traffic generated directly from articles is slightly higher in quality than PPC traffic while at the same time it provides a wealth of high quality links back to your website. Some of my articles have been republished over 2,000 times, this is exposure that would cost a fortune to buy. If you have a mailing list it is amazing for converting visitors as well, 60% of the people that come to my splash pages from articles end up subscribing.

Ways to Promote Your Blog

James Spinosa — Sun, 31 May 2009 02:02:00 +0000

I just spent 10 hours straight doing the design for Easyonlinemoneymaking.com (still waiting for the dns to update for my Host Gator switch, I’ll post when the results are live). I figured that since I spent such an extended period of time actually being productive I would make a post about some of the “time fillers” that you can do to promote your blog when you don’t feel like pumping out posts or articles.

When I have spare time I usually do some or all of the following, mixing them up every 5 minutes or so to keep myself interested. I love internet marketing, but I don’t always have the attention span to keep churning out the content so it is fun to do moderately effective traffic driving techniques rather than the high power but highly boring techniques such as article creation/submission.

Here’s where my spare time goes:

Adding followers on Twitter and starting conversations with some of my followers when they have interesting status updates. My twitter: James Spinosa
Adding contacts on MyBlogLog and joining communities.
Adding friends on BlogCatalog and joining groups, discussions, blogs, etc.
Posting on various forums that allow me to have a blog feed, this is mainly to build up name reputation but it doesn’t hurt to get some traffic. Don’t just spam them, post useful content.
Commenting on a bunch of related niche blog posts.
Tinkering with my advertisements to find better converting programs so I can make some more money.
Creating link bait lists, such as “Top 100 dofollow blogs” so that I can get some free links from other bloggers.
Staring at the ClickBank marketplace trying to reverse engineer the success for some of the products that I have no idea why people buy them.

While these may seem like a waste of time I actually enjoy them, and they do yield results. Most of these are designed to get a one time visitor, but about 10% of people that come to this site sign up to receive my blog posts, yielding long term traffic.

In terms of things like blog commenting and forum posting, this will yield permanent one way dofollow links, which will make me show up for more search results. The other methods like adding twitter followers, friends, contacts, etc. make it so that I have another set of people that get updates each time I post.

If you have spare time, you might as well use it for something constructive. There is always some way you can be promoting your blog even if it isn’t through the traditional methods.

Using Social Networks for Links and Traffic

James Spinosa — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 01:15:09 +0000

Social networks are a great thing for internet marketers, especially as they can be used effectively for any level of experience as an internet marketer. One of my first reactions when I made my first website was to send out a message to all my friends via FaceBook and used that as a source of traffic for the first couple days. I quickly realized that since it was simply people curious what my site looked like, that it wouldn’t actually generate revenue nor would it create lasting subscribers. This is a lesson that I still carry with me as I continue to use social networks to my advantage.

For initial traffic to this blog I utilized the sources that internet marketers and bloggers go to in order to get information, forums and marketing networks. I have x,xxx posts on DigitalPoint and quite a few also on v7n and webmaster talk, all of which are great sources of targeted traffic as long as you use them correctly. As for social networks, I mostly used MyBlogLog, MySpace, FriendFeed, Twitter, and BlogCatalog to get traffic and RSS subscribers, which has worked out quite well as I have noticed that quite a few of you are also submitting my articles to social bookmarking networks, which I appreciate.

When using these resources, simply realize that if you want to get the maximum use of your time you should research the audience that you wish to develop for your own niche. In my case, it is quite easy as I am trying to help out all internet marketers and most bloggers would also consider themselves to be marketers to some extent, as everybody would like to make a few bucks off their efforts. Obviously you won’t know thousands of people online, which is why you should search for people that have similar interests as you in public profiles, etc. and these are the people you should seek various relationships with. The purpose of these networks in their essence, is to meet people with similar interests and discuss common issues, tap into this and you will have an interested target audience developing.

The key to balancing this relationship of network friend and your personal business interests is quite simple, don’t spam them with overbearing messages, etc. because that will scare people off, and offer good content that people want to read. If you offer good content your business will expand by itself, it shouldn’t need too much of a push but social networks and social media are great ways to get some eyes on your content so that you can get a few people to stick and then let it spread from there.

Here’s a few of the sites I used:

The other thing to take into consideration with any type of social media/networking/bookmarking traffic is that it won’t be overly profitable. Don’t expect large traffic numbers to equate to conversions of any sort, as traffic typically won’t click advertisements or buy affiliate products.

One interesting thing I have been watching as a result of this web2.0 traffic is how easily I gain and lose RSS subscribers, on days that I post I average 22 new subscribers, while on days I don’t post I average 17 lost subscribers. On that note, feel free to subscribe to my RSS feed.