Top 10 Ways to Get Awesome Web Traffic Using Blogs

Like many important people before you - perhaps you've underestimated the power of blogging. Blogs can be used, not only as the single easiest way to get a listing in the search engine for your desired keywords, but also serve the fantastic purpose if building a relationship with your quickly growing list of readers, listeners and viewers.

After a light lunch today, I was left in the greatest mood. So I figured I would sit down and share with you 10 ways you can share my success and popularity using blogs.

1. Use a keyword specific blog title and description. When creating your blog, I just used the free service www.blogger.com you're asked to title or name your blog and give a short description. Take this chance to think a little.

Ask yourself:

a) Who do you want to read your blog?
b) What is your interest or topic - what will you enjoy writing about?

If you have a poetry blog for example - use the word poet or poetry in your title and description. You can research the popularity of your keywords use Overture's free tool here: http://inventory.overture.com

2. Try to update often (short daily entries work great) using hand written or bot generated keyword rich informative content. Give your visitors something they want to read. I love to write so I create all my original posts, but if you have a site that needs traffic or a topic that you don't know much about you can set up an automatically updating feed using other people's blog posts, or articles. Each entry is seen as its own html page, so the engines see your blog as a multi-paged site, that is updated regularly and rich in links and keywords.

3. Create an interesting profile. Searchers and fellow bloggers love the fact you're a real person, this helps to build personal relationships. Again, put a little time and effort into this one. Tons of people peek at your profile, and Blogger.com keeps track of all your views, so open up and share a little. Everything on your profile page is taken as a searchable keyword. Things like: what you like to do, your favorite movies and music, etc. Each one will get you listed under that topic in the blogger.com directory.

4. One way to jump right in and get visitors and feedback immediately is by posting to similar blogs and linking back to your blog. Say you have a poetry blog: you can use Blogger's search tool and your keyword - in this case "poetry" or "poet." (Another way to get a quick high listing is to search Google for example "poetry blog.")

You can post a comment on their blog, just a short personal remark will do. Keep it polite, no one wants to hear negative criticism. Blogs are more personal than chartrooms or forums, and often contain personal views and opinions of the author, so don't go stepping on toes. The point is to make contact, build relationships, and exchange links. More links to your blog equals more free targeted traffic for you.

5. RSS is your friend! Create an RSS feed, by hand or using Feedburner. This gives your readers the option to subscribe to your blog with just a click. What this means to you is 100% deliverability of all the content you write by the readers request - your posts are sent directly to your subscribers via their RSS reader otherwise known as an aggregator. They are personally notified every time you post to your blog. And best of all, no spam complaints ever, and they get every update you make - no blockers or filters. Total word freedom!

6. Spread your feed by submitting to RSS directories. This is a one time deal, and you can either search and do it manually or use the tool I used: RSS Automator (it finds and submits to tons of different directories for you).

Only submit each blog once. This is a lasting deal that could mess up your good standing if you do it multiple times. So to be sure you get a listing, only submit to directories once. (This is not the same thing as pinging; you can ping every time you update your blog.)

7. Ping your blog every time you update using pinging services like pingomatic.com and pingoat.com. This lets the directories know you have updated and added a new post to your blog.

8. Create a personalized or branded RSS reader/aggregator. Talk about top of mind awareness. You don't have to be a programming genius for this one (though it helps.) There are a couple services that for a small one time fee will customize a reader for you, with your logo, header and graphics, and preload it with any media you want. So with this you're sure to be seen and remembered every day. Check out one of the best services here: http://www.tristana.org/publishers/specs

9. People love to read you, but hearing you is even better. Give Podcasting a try - there are tons of ways to get started here. I would personally recommend http://www.Libsyn.com for all your Podcasting needs. It uploads, stores, hosts, and sets up the RSS and pings for you. Like Podcasting for dummies. Then just submit your podcast to different directories and readers like Apple iTunes, and ipodder.org.

10. Radio is great but now you can create a following by imitating the idiot box. Give your subscribers another way to obsess using Video-meets-Blogging or "The Vlog." This is a medium that is far from saturated. The possibilities are endless, and you're only limited to what you limit yourself. Though it has not been promoted too widely, the new Apple iTunes Podcasting feature supports Vlog subscriptions as well.

How To Build A Traffic Highway To Your Website

Every internet business needs traffic and lots of it. Traffic is the lifeblood of online businesses, therefore, any program you under-take to build a successful company or business online must incorporate numerous traffic generating strategies.

Assuming that you now have excellent products or service to market and all other internal plans well in place, now is the time to get down to real business of directing targeted traffic to your website.

The following tips are designed with you in mind to help creating the website traffic that is so essential to sales and profits online. Advertising is the key to internet marketing and search engine traffic will be the backbone or the main source for that continuous flow.

Yahoo/Overture and Google Adwords are excellent paid advertising to build traffic. It is unlikely that you will get the required website traffic without utilizing some of these paid advertising services, Overture and Yahoo, being so popular, it is futile not to avail yourself of their services.

Search engine advertising has brought real success to thousands of online businesses, why not yours? PPC or (Pay Per Click) is the term given to this way of advertising. With proper keyword selection related to your products or services this advertising method could be just what you need.

Another traffic building tool is to exchange website links with other businesses, this is called reciprocal linking and both parties normally benefit from this exchange of links related in some way to the business. When sites link to each other, they both share in the traffic generated by the efforts of each other. The more reciprocal links exchanged the more traffic that could be generated.

Viral Marketing:

This is a free or inexpensive way to spread the word on the internet about your company, business, product or service. This could be perceived as a sneaky way to advertise, by attaching your company name, product or link to certain media such as a funny video, entertaining games, interesting articles or gossip. People who are attracted to this kind of creative entertainment will pass it on to friends, relatives and acquaintances thus spreading the word wide and far.

Optimizing your website content for high ranking

Search engines rank your site based on well placed keywords and keyword phrases in your site content. Therefore the content on your site should be well optimized to take advantage of this requirement to rank high in search engine results. So, be warned when you write the content for your site.

Write and publish Articles about your business.

Submit your articles to article directories and publishers since they will have a large circulation of sites that will read and distribute the articles, giving you the exposure needed to generate much traffic. Write about special features of your business, product or service. Also include a resource box with your sites description and services plus a link to your website at the end of the article.

Become members of forums and online communities:
As members of these communities, you can write and post helpful articles along with a signature file with links to your business. This builds your credibility online, while creating much needed one way links to your site. This could boost your website ranking and traffic substantially.

Finally, publish a newsletter, as a credible and trusted net marketer, your readers will share this with many others thus creating loyal repeat visitors to your site and you will be able to market to this list forever. This list of traffic building tools is by no means final, with some imagination and creativity more ways can be found to add to these marketing strategies on and off line.

Dave Ramsey’s Plan to Fix the Credit Crisis

Jesse over at You Need a Budget sent me an email this evening asking my opinion of Dave Ramsey's 3-step plan for fixing the credit crisis. Here's the plan (which you can also download as a PDF here):

Years of bad decisions and stupid mistakes have created an economic nightmare in this country, but $700 billion in new debt is not the answer. As a tax-paying American citizen, I will not support any congressperson who votes to implement such a policy. Instead, I submit the following three steps:

Common Sense Plan.

I. INSURANCE

A. Insure the subprime bonds/mortgages with an underlying FHA-type insurance. Government-insured and backed loans would have an instant market all over the world, creating immediate and needed liquidity.

B. In order for a company to accept the government-backed insurance, they must do two things:

1. Rewrite any mortgage that is more than three months delinquent to a 6% fixed-rate mortgage.

a. Roll all back payments with no late fees or legal costs into the balance. This brings homeowners current and allows them a chance to keep their homes.

b. Cancel all prepayment penalties to encourage refinancing or the sale of the property to pay off the bad loan. In the event of foreclosure or short sale, the borrower will not be held liable for any deficit balance. FHA does this now, and that encourages mortgage companies to go the extra mile while working with the borrower—again limiting foreclosures and ruined lives.

2. Cancel ALL golden parachutes of EXISTING and FUTURE CEOs and executive team members as long as the company holds these government-insured bonds/mortgages. This keeps underperforming executives from being paid when they don't do their jobs.

C. This backstop will cost less than $50 billion—a small fraction of the current proposal.

II. MARK TO MARKET

A. Remove mark to market accounting rules for two years on only subprime Tier III bonds/mortgages. This keeps companies from being forced to artificially mark down bonds/mortgages below the value of the underlying mortgages and real estate.

B. This move creates patience in the market and has an immediate stabilizing effect on failing and ailing banks—and it costs the taxpayer nothing.

III. CAPITAL GAINS TAX

A. Remove the capital gains tax completely. Investors will flood the real estate and stock market in search of tax-free profits, creating tremendous—and immediate—liquidity in the markets. Again, this costs the taxpayer nothing.

B. This move will be seen as a lightning rod politically because many will say it is helping the rich. The truth is the rich will benefit, but it will be their money that stimulates the economy. This will enable all Americans to have more stable jobs and retirement investments that go up instead of down. This is not a time for envy, and it's not a time for politics. It's time for all of us, as Americans, to
stand up, speak out, and fix this mess.

I think think this plan makes sense. Still, even under this plan we're still going to see a lot of foreclosures. Those who purchased homes using interest-only mortgages and then only paid the interest-portion of the payment will never be able to afford a regular mortgage payment.

Dave's also not quite clear on how we pay for the insurance program. Is this something paid for with tax dollars or is it something charged to the homeowner? I'm assuming it is taxpayer-funded. Regardless, I think this is a lot more tolerable than the massive $700 billion bailout that's being discussed. What do you think?

 

The Genius That Is Warren Buffett (and a GIVEAWAY to boot!)

I picked up a copy of Alice Schroeder's The Snowball - Warren Buffett and the Business of Life* yesterday. I had just barely begun reading the book when I came across a section that I wanted to share with you. It's a talk that Mr. Buffett gave at the Sun Valley '99 conference, which was attended by LOTS of techies and the newly-rich from the internet bubble. Here's some tidbits from his talk:

Buffett speaking:

"…I would like to talk today about the stock market," he said. "I will be talking about pricing stocks, but I will not be talking about predicting their course of action next month or next year. Valuing is not he same as predicting.

"In the short run, the market is a voting machine. In the long run, it's a weighing machine.

"Weight counts eventually. But votes count in the short term. And it's a very undemocratic way of voting. Unfortunately, they have no literacy tests in terms of voting qualifications, as you've all learned."

Continuing…

"…What you're doing when you invest is deferring consumption and laying money out now to get more money back at a later time. And there are really only two questions. One is how much you're going to get back, and the other is when.

"Now, Aesop was not much of a finance major, because he said something like, 'A bird in hand is worth two in the bush.' But he doesn't say when." Interest rates—the cost of borrowing—Buffett explained, are the price of "when." They are to finance as gravity is to physics. As interest rates vary, the value of all financial assets—houses, stocks, bonds—changes, as if the price of birds had fluctuated. "And that's why sometimes a bird in the hand is better than two birds in the bush and sometimes two in the bush are better than one in the hand."

The talk goes on for several more pages in the book. The author mentions that the techies didn't much care for Warren's speech because they represented something new and exciting. In other words, they were smarter than everyone else. We all know what happened in 2000! Those pages alone are worth the price of the book!

Anyway, to celebrate the release of the book, I thought it would be cool to give away a copy. If you're interested in winning a copy, leave a comment below. All I ask is that you remember my two rules:

1. You must be a resident of the U.S. or Canada, and…

2. You can only enter ONE TIME!

 

Highlights From the Barron’s Interview with Jeremy Grantham

I don't know if you're familiar with Jeremy Grantham or not, but I like him. Barron's published an interview with Grantham ($) in this week's issue. Of course the topic was the credit crisis and market turmoil. Here's just a couple of highlights from the interview.

This first one would be funny if it weren't so true:

Barron's: Do you think we will learn anything from all of this turmoil?

Grantham: We will learn an enormous amount in a very short time, quite a bit in the medium term and absolutely nothing in the long term. That would be the historical precedent.

I thought this one was also interesting:

Barron's: Do you have any closing thoughts about how we got into this financial state?

Grantham: I ask myself, "Why is it that several dozen people saw this crisis coming for years?" I described it as being like watching a train wreck in very slow motion. It seemed so inevitable and so merciless, and yet the bosses of Merrill Lynch and Citi and even [U.S. Treasury Secretary] Hank Paulson and [Fed Chairman Ben] Bernanke — none of them seemed to see it coming.

I have a theory that people who find themselves running major-league companies are real organization-management types who focus on what they are doing this quarter or this annual budget. They are somewhat impatient, and focused on the present. Seeing these things requires more people with a historical perspective who are more thoughtful and more right-brained — but we end up with an army of left-brained immediate doers.

So it's more or less guaranteed that every time we get an outlying, obscure event that has never happened before in history, they are always going to miss it. And the three or four-dozen-odd characters screaming about it are always going to be ignored.

If you look at the people who have been screaming about impending doom, and you added all of those several dozen people together, I don't suppose that collectively they could run a single firm without dragging it into bankruptcy in two weeks. They are just a different kind of person.

So we kept putting organization people — people who can influence and persuade and cajole — into top jobs that once-in-a-blue-moon take great creativity and historical insight. But they don't have those skills.

He may be right on that one but I also think a lot of it had to do with a sort of "to-hell-with-it" attitude that went on in the financial industry. The industry was primarily concerned with making money NOW—to hell with the consequences. I remember reading that mortgage brokers supposedly wrote bad business because they knew that if they declined, the borrower would just go down the street and get the loan from a competitor. It seems sound principles flew out the window.

 

Lessons From Hell

I'm getting crisis fatigue. I'm tired of hearing about it and I'm tired of watching the market react negatively. It's funny to me that all the people who were FOR the bailout basically promised us that the market was going to fall IF we didn't approve the bailout. Well, guess what: we did get the bailout and look at what the market is doing. You guys are smart!

So, what can we learn from this credit crisis? I have a few lessons I can think of off the top of my head. There may be more. If I missed something, please leave a comment and let me know.

I present to you JLP's Lessons From Hell:

1. You can only live outside of your means for so long. Eventually, you have to reign in your expenses and bring them in-line with your income.

2. A bunch of crap bundled up together and sold off in chunks is still CRAP! Seriously, who's bright idea was it to bundle up subprime mortgages—the riskiest of all mortgages—and sell them off as "safe" investments?

3. Housing prices don't always go up!

4. There's a difference between what you can actually afford and what you are approved for.

5. READ the fine print—that's where all the nasty stuff is going to be found.

6. Don't trust ANYONE who profits off your business! Sure, there are ethical sales people out there but you can't trust that they have YOUR best interests at heart. Remember too that mortgage brokers make a percentage of the amount they write. The more they write, the more they make.

7. Greed is a deadly motivator.

8. People need a basic education in money management.

9. Don't use home equity to buy stuff or take a vacation.

10. Your home is not a bank.

11. Banks and brokerage houses are managed by people just like you and me. Although they may act superior to us, they really aren't—as evidenced by how stupid their actions were in helping create this crisis.

I'm sure there are more lessons but this was all I could come up with. What do you think of this list? What did I miss? Leave a comment and let me know.

 

A Conversation With a Friend About His 401(k)

This morning I got a call from my friend. Our conversation went something like this (I'm pulling a 15 minute conversation from memory so bear with me):

Friend: I was looking at my 401(k) statement last night. One month ago I had $23,000. This month it's down to $17,000. I lost $6,000. What should I do?

Me: Forget about it.

Friend: But if it keeps this up, I won't have anything left.

Me: What do you mean?

Friend: If I keep losing $6,000 a month I'll be out of money in three months.

Me: No. You have to look at it as percentages. You had $23,000, now you have $17,000 so you lost about 40% [I was estimating]. If you were to lose another 40%, you would be losing it off a smaller amount of money.

Friend: Oh, I see what you're saying. How much farther down do you think it's going to go?

Me: I don't know but it's possible your account could go down to $12,000 or so. I really don't know. All I know is that we are closer to a bottom than we were before.

Friend: So what do you recommend I do?

Me: Keep doing what your doing and forget about your balance for now. It's not going to do you any good to worry about it. I will say that cashing out now would be a mistake.

Friend: Okay, thanks.

I want to zero-in on something he said at the beginning of the conversation about losing $6,000 each month. That's not how it works. The dollar-amount of the loss is based on the amount you have invested. If you have $100,000 in your 401(k) and it goes down 20%, you have lost $20,000. If you have $20,000 in your account and the market drops 20%, you have lost $4,000. See, the dollar amount isn't a constant but the percentage is.

In other words, it's highly unlikely your account would go to $0.00 as a result of a down market (unless you are using lots of leverage or you close out your account). I know it's not exactly comforting but it's better than nothing.