Two posts ago we spoke about “The Four Horsemen of Web Traffic,” namely Paid Advertising, Organic Search, Social Networking, and Viral Marketing. In that post we hinted at a “Hidden Source of Web Traffic“. So what could this source possibly be, and what benefit could it be to your online business?  Let’s start with the benefits.

Imagine for a moment that you have just invested serious time and money developing a first class ebook. Regardless of your chosen niche, you face an enormous problem when it comes to monetizing your product. In this day and age of file sharing services, websites, bit-torrent, and so forth, ebooks are especially susceptible to being copied illicitly. Given the nature of this technological disadvantage inherent to ebooks it would be extremely valuable to drive large amounts of targeted web-traffic to a specific conversion piece, the moment your product is released. If you assume that eventually your work will be pirated, it makes sense to sell as many copies “out of the gate” as possible.

Let’s say that you have just invented the world’s greatest course for making money with Blogs, AdSense, Mini-Sites, Affiliate Marketing, whatever. It would help to be able to make some sort of outrageous claim as a hook for the Sales Letter. For example “Discover how I made $10,000, in one Month with [Fill in the Blank].”  Of course people will be skeptical of your claim so you will want screen shots to prove your earnings over a one month period. If you are the type that has no reservations about glossing over some the inherent advantages you had in accomplishing this feet, you may want to drive some instant traffic to your money making site in order to increase sales.

Business is of a time sensitive nature and a product that is a hit today, may well have turned out as a flop if brought to market a year later. If you have a product to bring to market and you just don’t have time to wait for traffic to trickle in order to test various versions of your sales letter, what should you do? Once again it would be great to be able to send a thousand or so unique visitors to each version of your letter to drastically increase the speed of your testing process. 
                                                                                                                                                                         The “Hidden Source of Web Traffic” that might allow you to duplicate the above mentioned feats of marketing magic, is a well crafted email list. We mentioned in our post “Lead Me to It” about the incredible value of a list of pre-qualified physical addresses. Building an email list of targeted leads is yet another way to fabricate your own gold mine. Indeed a large and well built list can mean instant traffic, however building such a list is not an overnight assignment. In some cases it could take years to build such a list, and even after the list is built, constant maintenance is required to keep your leads from dropping out or losing interest in your promotions.                                                                                                                                                             
                                                                                                                                                                        Email lists are not a cure-all for your online business, they have there own pitfalls and dangers like any other online business technique. So I wouldn’t swear by them, but I would suggest you check them out.

If you liked this post, chances are that you’ll enjoy our post on monetizing web traffic.

If you are a plumbing expert and you have just created the latest and greatest plumbing tool since the lead pipe, you may decide that a sales letter is the best vehicle to get your product to market. So let’s say you write ten pages explaining what’s wrong with plumbing tools today, you remind them of all the frustrations and time wasted using conventional tools, and most importantly… you offer them a way out!

Imagine for a moment that you have crafted a compelling sales letter for your plumbing panacea that is worth it wait in GOLD. If you handed it to me, my reaction would probably take a quick glance at it and then throw it in the trash, because I am not in any way-shape-or-form interested in plumbing. But that does not matter! What matters is only the reaction of those who are interested in plumbing.

If your letter causes them to stop what they are doing, call a 1-800 number and BUY, BUY, BUY… then you have yourself a winner. Of course even with a great hook and a knock-em dead finish you are not going to sell them all… and that’s ok. Your interest lies in that portion that will hear the siren call of your prose and be compelled to act. If your conversion rate is .05% (1 out of 200) when sent to pre-qualified leads then your copy is pretty bad. If however, with the same group of leads you develop a piece that converts at 4% (8 out of 200) then you have got yourself some solid copy. Anything over 4% and your sales letter is worth its WEIGHT IN GOLD.

The process of developing your final copy usually involves a good amount of testing. If you have a list of 10,000 prequalified leads you may want to break off 1,000 of those leads at random to sacrifice for purposes of testing. This thousand can be broken up into ten groups of a hundred and used to test ten separate versions of your sales letter. Testing a version of your copy on a list of size 100 should give you a fairly accurate idea of how good a particular sales letter is. And of course lists of size 100 come with the added benefit of an easy to calculate conversion rate.

So as to the question of sales letter or junk mail, well it all depends on who’s reading.

Paid Advertising: Paid advertising includes, but is not limited to PPC advertising, which was the subject of our last post. In addition to PPC, an online marketer may choose to pay for banner ads on a specific websites. For an example of this type of add, check the TurboTax ad just below the fold of the Get Rich Slowly Blog.

Organic Search: This term applies to all unpaid search engine query results. This field of web traffic generation is what Search Engine Optimization seeks to master.  Search Engine traffic is often referred to as “free” traffic. But this of course is NONSENSE, since we know that “there is no such thing as a free lunch.”

To get any kind of sizable amount of search engine traffic serious hours of optimization work will most likely be required. SEO is an ever evolving field, so in addition applying optimization techniques; the savvy online marketer needs to keep up with his SEO research if he wants to remain competitive. It would be much better if people, instead of calling it “free” traffic simply said… It is traffic that is usually cheaper than PPC.

Social Networking: Using social networking such as MySpace, Facebook, as well as scores of other sites, for the purpose of online marketing is what I like to call “pounding the online pavement.” It’s kind of like going door to door as a sales man trying to get induce someone to buy. Only here you are going from website to website trying to generate some traffic.  Social networking sites can be used to do more than just post links to your website.

Social networking sites often allow the formation of groups to discuss specific topics. These groups can be an excellent soap box from which to market yourself. In addition to groups, profiles on social networking sites provide mountains of information which can be mined for marketing purposes. By viewing profiles you can determine which members of the general public might easily become prospects for your offering and which are probably not worth your time.

Viral Marketing: Viral Marketing is the process of creating any type of marketing campaign that will spread itself. In other words once someone comes into contact with part of a viral marketing campaign there is more then a negligible chance that that person will feel the need to tell someone else about that particular product or service. In theory just about any product, service, or content could become viral.

An interesting recent example of viral marketing is an email sent from John Hopkins University with interesting tips on preventing and fighting cancer. The email seems to have done an excellent job at spreading itself all over the internet!

The best part is, this viral campaign does not market a product, it markets a public service message! The email informative, provides information that I for one had never heard of before, and ends with this elegant yet powerful last sentence… “This is an article that should be sent to anyone important in your life.”  To see a copy of this email click here.

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Taken together the fields of online Paid Advertising and Organic Search are often lumped together by the term Search Engine Marketing (SEM). There is a fifth source of web traffic that we have intentionaly left out of this post, it is what we refer to as “the hidden source of web traffic” and will be the subject of a future post.

PCP, is a powerful narcotic which was originally developed as a tranquilizer for elephants. It has nothing, what-so-ever to do with PPC, which stands for Pay-Per-Click advertising. PPC ads are advertisements which can show up on search engine result pages and as well as webpages whose content is somehow related to whichever keyword the advertiser has chosen to market for.

PPC advertising revolves around keywords. The higher the demand for a particular keyword the more that a top position for that keyword will cost. Paying for the most expensive keyword in your niche seems to rarely be the dominant strategy for making money with PPC advertising. Instead careful analysis is required to determine which keywords might be profitable. More…

Wow…100% positive feedback with rave reviews and $100,000 worth of transactions completed! Getting a reasonable bid form an overseas outsourcing firm with those kind of credentials certainly puts the minds of most first timers, seeking to outsource programming or web development, at ease. Considering that outsourcing your programming needs overseas can cost you as little as 25 cents on the dollar compared to using a U.S. based firm, peace of mind is very important to those looking to outsource one of their first projects. I mean who wouldn’t be weary… “You get what you pay for”, right?

But with a “perfect” feedback record and so many transactions completed successfully maybe I really am getting a great deal. If seeing a reasonable bid, from a company with credentials like the above mentioned example, would cause you to have the same feelings of ease, all I can say is… let the buyer beware! More…

On-Site optimization refers to attributes which exist within the code (HTML, PHP, etc) and file structure (Image docs, Text docs, Sub-Domains) of your website. For example, including keywords in your metadata would be an example of “on-site optimization.” Keyword stuffing to achieve an ideal keyword density, say around 5%, would be another example.

Off-Site optimization on the other hand refers to both the links coming into your website (backlinks) and the attributes of the websites sending you those links. For example off-site factors which may be taken into consideration are not only the number of backlinks but also the source of those backlinks.

For example, how many of the backlinks come from related website and how many come from unrelated websites. Keep in mind that relevancy may be largely determined by keyword density (both of your site and the refering site). In addition to the source of backlinks the speed at which backlinks are created may be a factor in the algorithm’s ranking schemes. For instance a large glut of backlinks created in a short period of time may be viewed as a sign of manipulation by the algorithms. More…

If you were to build a table, would you consider building one with only one leg? How about if you were building a business model, would you build a business model with only one leg? I think that the table analogy is a good one for business models. At some point the number of supports may become too many, but one is almost certainly too few.

People ask me,” can you make good money with an eBay business?” That question makes my cringe, just a little, every time I hear it. You see anyone who has an eBay business has an online business, since eBay transactions after all take place (at least in part) online.

So a much better question, in my opinion, would be…”can you make good money with an online business?” The problem with the first question is that it can cause a kind of tunnel vision that I find limiting. If you are thinking only in terms of eBay there is a potential danger of missing the bigger picture. More…

Let’s say that your small business needs some programming work done and you have heard that outsourcing your programming needs overseas will cost you only a fraction of what it would in the U.S. So you go to one of the more popular outsourcing sites like www.elance.com or www.scriptlance.com and you start to look for the programmer of your dreams.

First off, some outsourcing sites give you the option to keep your specification requirements private as opposed to making them public for everyone to see. If the project you are working on is sensitive there is no sense announcing to your competitors and the world what you are doing. I highly recommend making your profile private and then inviting those firms that you are interested to bid on your project. More…

After a long break, Feedback Secrets is back to writing to the blog on a regular basis. We have been back at it now for less than 15 days and already we have hate mail! What makes things even stranger is that the writer seems to have been offended by the post entitled “The Advantages of Having your Own Web Page”, which is interesting because it was written on March 8th of 2007, before we took our break.

Not really sure what about that post set him off, but it did seem to get him a little hot and bothered. I take this little bit of correspondence as a sign that we are moving in the right direction. I don’t think that it is possible to openly express your beliefs without “ruffling some feathers”.

Here is a trick for getting your site indexed fast. Some of you know this trick but this post is for those of you who don’t. Before we get into the “How To” of this article let’s start be examining what it means to get indexed.

If your site is indexed with a particular search engine, it means that your site is in their database and that one or more of your site’s pages will be returned as a search result for at least one keyword. It could be a high traffic keyword, or a low traffic key word. Keep in mind, just because one of your site’s pages shows up as a search result, for a particular keyword, does not mean you will show up on the first page of search results. You may show up on the twelfth

As far as I know the trick I am going to share with you only works on one search engine, fortunately that search engine is Google and Google gets more traffic than any other search engine on the planet! So what is this secret formula you may ask? More…