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Free Traffic for Your Website or Blog

By Kathy Dobson in Featured

The homework is done, your blog or website is live. You’ve chosen a hot niche/topic, ordered an awesome banner/header and chosen a theme if required…you’ve worked hard.

You add valuable content, affiliate links to high converting products, your own product links…but there is a problem. You have no traffic. Without traffic, there is no one to appreciate your hard work and awesome content.

Without traffic, you are a nobody in the cyber world. Traffic is what gets the search engine Gods to notice you. There is no one to click your affiliate links without traffic.

But, it can get expensive driving traffic to your site if you use some of the paid methods such as PPC.

There are however some very valid traffic producing methods that you can employ for free.

Let’s examine a few:

1) Forum Marketing: The worst think you can do is show up on forums and start dropping one liners with your “signature” and a link back to you blog. This is considered spam and the only thing it will do for you is to get you banned. But, forums are an excellent place to get noticed with when you add great valuable content.

Obviously you want to choose forums that focus on your particular topic or niche. Forums are a condensed concentration of the people that are interested in your niche…all located in one spot. Make sure with each post, you leave your signature with a link to your product, website and or blog.

If you establish yourself as a valued contributor then you will eventually be perceived as an expert and people will navigate to your blog or website to find out more.

2) Article marketing: There is a hungry audience waiting for excellent articles to use on their own websites or blog and article directories is where they go looking. With articles, you don’t want to fill the article with your links but use the author resource/bio box provided to leave your signature and links.

You can employ the use of article directories to get your article listed in hundreds of article directories. Additionally, many directories also submit to newsletter publishers.

It’s always a good idea to track your articles by using Google Alerts. If someone is routinely publishing your material, you may want to contact them and offer to submit your articles directly to them whenever you write a new one.

3) Sign up on sites like MyBlogLog and use their widget on your site. You can befriend other bloggers and build your own community of followers with MyBlogLog…a social community that you can tap into and get a consistent flow of traffic.

4) If you have an opt in form on your site, make sure to send an email out every time you create a new post. These people have already shown an interest by signing up to your blog…keep them informed and coming back.

5) Let’s not forget the basics…blog posting. You need to stay on top of your website or blog and keep it fresh with new content including using your keywords for SEO purposes. Ideally, your keywords should be in the title, the first paragraph and the last paragraph. But, only if it makes sense to do so.

6) Yahoo answers is an excellent way to get traffic and show off your expert knowledge. Look for questions in your area of expertise and provide valuable answers. It’s important that you add your link for reference.

7) Getting free traffic can be as easy as guest blogging on some high-ranking blogs but only if you can write intelligent, interesting, value filled posts that will benefit them. Your link will then be added to your post and can bring lots of free traffic your way.

Twitter: Let’s not forget Twitter. Twitter is here to stay and has become an invaluable source of free traffic, so if you haven’t already, it’s time you took a hard look at it. In fact, every time you submit an article to Ezine the reader can tweet the title and link to it.

Once again, don’t go on Twitter and start spamming with links, links, links. That is what you will become known for. Instead, build up a stream of targeted followers by providing interesting tweets.

9) Build a Squidoo Lense: Squidoo pages are the perfect avenue to get 1-way links to your blog. You can get direct traffic to your Squidoo lense if you use your long-tail keywords. Google loves Squidoo pages and using this method will often get you ranked in the top ten.

10) Video: Create and distribute a video that includes a link back to your blog or website. Videos have taken over the Internet as most people would rather watch a video than read a screen. People love them.

This by no means a comprehensive list as there are many more ways to drive free traffic. But, these are some of the most important ones and will get you started.

Don’t be discouraged easily. It takes time for people to discover your new blog or website. You must be patient and consistently work towards your goal and if you do, I promise that you will reap the benefits.

Combine persistent and consistent action with patience and before you know it you will have your own thriving list of subscribers hungry to learn from you.

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Kathy Dobson is a free spirited business owner and entrepreneur dedicated to helping others achieve financial and personal freedom through Internet marketing with an emphasis on membership sites.
Learn more about membership sites please visit: http://www.crazycashmembershipsites.com For further tips and resources visit: http://www.kathydobson.com

Are Your Websites Secure Or Is The Back Door Wide Open?

By Willie Crawford in Featured

One of the topics that all of us online business people are aware of but usually don’t feel totally on top of is website security.

Coming from a background of having spent over 20 years in the U.S. military, and having spent four years as a software tester, I have a greater awareness of the need for continuous vigilance in this area than your average marketer.

I also know that you can never make your websites or your computers completely secure. Instead, you can only do things that reduce the risk.

Given that you spend a lot of time, money, and energy, building your online business, it only makes sense that you set aside time periodically to review security related issues, and to look for problems that can be easily minimized.

Here are a few easy “fixes” that you can implement today that will increase the security of your online business.

1) Delete outdated scripts that you no longer use from your server. Many of “the bad guys” have studied the exact same scripts that you use to power your websites, and they know where the backdoors and vulnerabilities are. They know exactly which file will allow them to create all kinds of havoc.

If you have old programs on your server that you are not using, simply delete them.

2) Update older scripts that you are using. Often, the reason that updates are released for a script IS to patch a vulnerability that the developer has become aware of.

YES, upgrading can seem time consuming, and it can be tempting to skip an update, and just wait for the next one. When you wake up one day and can’t access your server, or all of your websites have been defaced or erased, you’ll see the wisdom in ALWAYS keeping the scripts powering your websites completely updated.

If you are as non-techie as I am, you simply hire a trusted programmer to perform this task.

3) Change the default setting when installing scripts on your servers. Many scripts have default passwords, and default locations for critical directories that make these scripts work flawlessly. Since everyone obtaining a copy of these script have these settings, you probably want to change them, and you also may want to rename certain directories.

4) Secure your web logs. Many web hosts have a standard location for the website’s logs and statistics on each hosting account. The files that allow you to access, read, download, and manipulate this data often aren’t secured. At a minimum, password protect that directory.

The danger in someone readily accessing your logs is that they can see the names and paths of the files on your server, including your download pages and the file names of files that may actually be for sale products

There are not only people who search on your product name, looking for unsecured files – there are also people who enjoy posting those links on sites where this type of information is shared.

5) Put an index page in every directory on your server. If someone surfs to the domain name of one of the directories on your server, and there is no index page in that directory, they will get a directory tree… showing them all of the files in that directory, and allowing them to simply click in a given file name to access it.

Servers can be configured to prevent this, but for many people, the quickest and simplest way to protect their directories from prying eyes is to stick an index page in each directory.

6) Give your download pages hard to guess names. Don’t use urls like YourDomain.com/ProductName/download.html Instead you want to give download pages names comprised of a random sequence of letters and numbers, perhaps stick them in directories not even associated with a given product, or use a “download guard-type” script that gives each customer a unique download link and protects your files.

There are a lots of other things that you can do to easily close common holes in your website’s security. This article barely scrapes the surface, and is intended more to make you aware of the problem, and to get your thinking about it. Make regularly reading articles and reports on the topic a part of your education in how to operate a successful online business.

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Willie Crawford has been operating an online business for 13 years and believes that too many online marketers simply pretend that problems with website security don’t exist. For a really eye-opening report on website security, get the recordings of an interview Willie did with a leading web security expert at: http://timic.org/CloseTheDoor

© Copyright 2012 All rights reserved. Jayde Online, Inc.

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