8 Steps To Achieve Top Rankings For Your E-commerce Business

Recently I had a question from a member in a forum asking me about how to market their e-commerce business using search engines. In light of this question, I thought it was be good to share this with everyone. Getting your e-commerce business listed on search engines can be very rewarding and will drive more “free”  traffic to your e-commerce business. I have personally used this strategy many times and it has helped me gain higher rankings for my own e-commerce websites. Not to brag or anything, I want to give you some examples of my success with achieving top rankings in Google: (click on image for larger version)

Keywords: Dragonboat Paddles:

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Free Traffic To Your Internet Business While You Surf

There are many ways to go about getting traffic to your website and some do take more time than others. Ideally the best source of traffic is from search engines which are organic and free. We know it does take time and requires a strategy to build great traffic to your website, but what if there was another way to generate free traffic while you are surfing the web? I recently decided to explore a method called traffic exchanges.

What Are Traffic Exchanges?

Traffic exchanges are another alternative to get traffic to your website. They can provide a cheap source of traffic and continually deliver it when used properly. In essence, it is a cooperative form of advertising and generates free traffic to your website. You view a members website for credit for a set amount of time in exchange for getting a view on your website for credit for a set amount of time. In other words, you get a visitor for a visitor.

However, the timed limit of these views means that viewing the entire inventory of a store or reading a long sales letter is not going to happen often or even likely. Because of this many people do not use traffic exchanges effectively to advertise their sites. They promote a generic affiliate page or sales page hoping that someone will stop and look long enough to buy their product or purchase from their affiliate link. This is wrong on many different levels and is why 95% of “online marketers” fail to use traffic exchanges properly.

How To Effectively Use Traffic Exchanges?

Traffic exchanges are best used as list-building tools using either splash pages or squeeze pages. The reason is people who are using traffic exchanges are also doing the same thing as you, trying to drive more traffic to their website and earning more credits. Therefore, they will not spend too much time reading through a long sales page or see the front page of your website. The best way is to set up a short squeeze or splash page to capture a first name and an email address. That way you can effectively market them your products or services using your back end systems.

My Top 10 Free Traffic Exchanges

Simply visit their websites and register and follow their instructions and you will be on your way to getting free targeted traffic to your website.

1. Hit 2 Hit
2. Easy Hits 4 U
3. Hits Booster Pro
4. Traffic Swarm
5. Traffic Splash
6. Easy Surf Exchange
7. Instant Buzz
8. Webmaster Quest
9. Traffic G
10. Traffic Syndicate 25

Tip: Why not use all of the top 10 programs all at once? It will leverage your traffic exchanges much faster than going one at a time. Work smarter, not harder!

Tyrone Shum
Traffic Exchanging

Internet Business DoFollow Forums To Help Build Traffic

Building links to your Internet business is a crucial aspect of your marketing campaign. It helps improve your search engine ranking and increases traffic to your website. If you are interested in other traffic generating strategies, I suggest reading my series on: Spreading The Word: Turbocharge Your Traffic.

The main focus of this article is to provide you with a list of DoFollow forums that you can participate and share information with. If you spend two to three hours a day browsing through DoFollow forums, write at least 10-15 posts in at least two DoFollow forums,  you will start to see more traffic flow to your website. Here are the top three reasons why you should implement this:

1. It will generate FREE traffic to your website. If forum members see value in your information, they will click on your link to find out more.
2. Helps create a backlink to your website, which will increase your search engine ranking and site popularity much quicker.
3. You contribute to others and learn from experts within your industry.

Let me address what DoFollow means. Otherwise if you already understand the concept, scroll down to the list below and take action today by contributing your resources to others that will drive more traffic to your website.

What Is DoFollow?
The easiest way to understand what DoFollow is, I will explain what NoFollow is first. NoFollow was an attribute created in 2005 to help bloggers and webmasters manage comments and control the number of inserted links. It was to stop spammers placing unwanted links on blog posts. By adding the Nofollow attribute automatically to your links it tells search engines to not follow them, thus stopping spam.

Now, DoFollow is the opposite of NoFollow, isn’t that simple? The main difference is, DoFollow is only available on limited websites restricting comments and links that are relevant to the topic. This stops spamming and is beneficial to websites who are actually contributing to the community. By submitting comments on DoFollow blogs or websites you get free quality backlinks.

“DoFollow links are links which help you improve your search engine ranking results.”

List of DoFollow Forums

1. 5Star Affiliate Forum – An affiliate marketing forum
2. Abestweb – An affiliate marketing forum for both beginner and experienced affiliates
3. Abundance – A forum that allows you to post advertisements for free
4. Blogger Talk – A forum for bloggers
5. Blog Mastermind Forum – An excellent forum with like minded bloggers who share strategies on how to make money with blogs
6. Business Forum – Business related topics discussed in this forum
7. Capital Theory – An online money making forum
8. Clickbank Success – A forum dedicated to people making money from Clickbank
9. Clicks Forum – Internet marketing business forum
10. Digitalppoint – A large forum about internet marketing and search engine (over 10 million members)
11. Dreamteam Money Forum – One of the hottest money making forums
12. Entrepreneur Forum – A forum started up by Evan Carmichael about entrepreneurship
13. Ewealth.com – Internet marketing and webmaster forum
14. Free Advertising Forum – Unlimited advertising posting
15. Internet Marketing for Business – Internet marketing and business forum
16. SEOForum – Dedicated for SEO discussions
17. Small Business Forum – A business forum for small entrepreneurs and online moneymakers
18. Startups – A business start-up and innovation forum
19. Warrior Forum – One of the most helpful and highly recommended forum to discuss business on. People are always ready to help and assist with your enquiries
20. Work-at-Home Moms – An Internet marketing message boards for mums

Please comment below about any of the forums you have tried and let me know how helpful they have been for you.

Tyrone Shum
Forum DoFollower

Social Bookmarking Will Help Grow Your Internet Business

Social bookmarking is a very powerful strategy to help drive free traffic to your website, particularly when your Internet business is brand new or has been laying dormant for quite sometime. Combine this strategy with other traffic generation tactic discussed about at Spreading The Word: Turbocharge Your Traffic and this will definitely boost your website on search engines.

What Is Social Bookmarking?
Rather than redefine this term, here is a definition taken directly from Wikipedia:

“Social bookmarking is a way for Internet users to store, organize, share and search bookmarks of web pages. In a social bookmarking system, users save links to web pages that they want to remember and/or share.

These bookmarks are usually public, but depending on the service’s features, may be saved privately, shared only with specific people or groups, shared only inside certain networks, or another combination of public and private. The allowed people can usually view these bookmarks chronologically, by category or tags, via a search engine, or even randomly.”

How You Can Use Social Bookmarking To Get More Free Traffic?
For your website to rank top positions on search engines you need a high amount of incoming links with the combination of keywords. Social bookmarking can help you achieve more incoming links very easily. When you submit to multiple social bookmarking sites it will automatically create incoming links to your website. This give you more results of your website on search engines.

Let’s take for example, I submit the following post Farming Your Crop Of Clients to 20 social bookmarking sites. This post can show up as 20 “unique” results on the search engines. Therefore, instead ranking only once on a search engine, it can be ranked 20 times. As you can see, it is 20 times more effective and gives you a higher chance for your website to be found.

I previously mentioned for social bookmarking to work properly, the combination of incoming links and keywords are needed. It boils down to selecting the proper keywords that are targeted to your article or product. The more targeted your keyword phrases are the higher chances that your website will be ranked higher. For example, if you have a highly competitive product like the “Apple iPod”, then you will need choose more specific keywords including model numbers and specifications like the “iPod Nano 4GB Black”. This way it will help you capture those keywords and help you rank higher.

Use SocialMarker.com To Leverage Your Social Bookmarking Promotions
So how do submit to 20+ social bookmarking sites as I mentioned above? It’s easier than you think, and you won’t have to sit there clicking through hundreds of social bookmarking sites as well. There is a website called SocialMarker.com which will help you submit to over 20 social bookmarking sites. When you visit this site, you will see a list of the top Social Bookmarking sites available such as propeller.com, technorati.com, twitter.com, and so forth.

The idea is to submit an article or blog post you wish to rank high in the search engines to as many of the social bookmarking sites as possible. If you want your whole website to rank well then you will need to submit as many articles or posts to the social bookmarking sites.

Social Bookmarking “How To Tips”
Search engines are very intelligent to pick up on automated promotions and we need to make our social bookmarking promotions seem natural. Here are some handy tips to help you:

1. Run your social bookmarking promotions slowly over time. Send a few today, a few next week and a few next month.
2. Register multiple accounts for each of the social bookmarking sites. Start out with at least 10 unique accounts
   • use different usernames within one social bookmarking site
   • use free email accounts from Yahoo, Gmail, MSN to open up your accounts
   • repeat the process with the 20+ social bookmarking sites (should take no more than 15 minutes for each registration)
   • use roboform.com to remember all your passwords.
3. Rotate the accounts you use with social bookmarking sites for each post you submit.
4. Add new social bookmarking accounts to your promotions on a regular basis.
5. Include other people’s articles and post within your social bookmarking promotion. This shows randomness within your promotions.
6. Do not social bookmark every single post you write as it will be considered spam, so please social bookmark wisely.

Just like any type of traffic generation strategy, you will need to allocate time to work the process. Focus on a few strategies, test them and monitor the process. Give it at least a month to see the results and continue the process if it works for you. Remember don’t spend all day on this one process as social bookmarking should only be used to help “jumpstart” your traffic from search engines.

Tyrone Shum
Social Bookmarker

7 Creative Traffic Generation Techniques

1. Write and Distribute Articles, Reports and Ebooks.
   Internet users are all interested in one thing – information. Use this to promote your business by creating high quality content and allowing others to reprint it for you. One great way to do this is to distribute a brandable ebook or special report. This is one that a website or list owner can change to include a reference to their website. This doesn’t mean that it looks like they are the publisher, it’s just a way for them to include information on where the ebook was downloaded from and (if applicable) to include their affiliate link for your products and services.
2. Participate in Newsgroups, Forums, and Mailing Lists.
   There are hundreds of forums online and you can find one for almost any topic imaginable. Most allow you to include a signature line that will be attached to every message. This is a chance for you to advertise your site. Visiting these forums to post thoughtful questions and offer your expertise will mean your signature is viewed by others and will bring you free, targeted traffic. Of course how much traffic you get depends on how often you post and whether your signature makes people want to visit your site. A good approach is to use an ad you’ve had success with elsewhere as your signature.
3. Join Networking Sites to Build your Personal Network.
   Networking sites are designed to make it easy for people to meet others in their industry and to advertise their products and service. Similar to offline networking events where lots of people come together for the sole purpose of meeting people, online networking sites work the same way.
4. Use Classified Sites and Traffic Exchanges.
   Classified ad sites and traffic exchanges have gotten a bad reputation, but they really do work if you know how to use them. If you’re promoting a product or service that advertisers can benefit from then they’re a great place to get traffic. Although not very many consumers visit this type of advertising sites, lots of website owners do in order to make sure their ad appears on the site. While there they can’t help but notice other ads and if one catches their attention you’re likely to get a visitor.
5. Run a Contest.
   People love the prospect of winning something – that’s why a contest can be a great traffic generator. The key is to choose a prize that will attract people from your target audience. If you make the grand prize a new laptop you’ll get entries from everyone who would like to win a new laptop (which is basically every computer user in the world!). Get more targeted traffic by choosing something that your target audience is interested in but wouldn’t mean much to other people. To start promoting your contest do a search in Google for “Contest Directories” and you’ll find lots of places to list your contest for free.
6. Include a Powerful Signature on all Outgoing Email.
   Every time you send a piece of mail you have the potential to get a visitor to your site. Simply create a “signature” that is automatically added to every outgoing message. Use the signature to briefly explain what you do, give your USP or slogan and add a hyperlink to your site. Once it’s set up you don’t have to think about it again!
7. Try Newsletter Classified Ads.
   There are lots of newsletter publishers who give classified ads to new subscribers. Although these don’t typically bring a huge response, they can generate some traffic if you offer something with a high perceived value but low price tag. They’re also a great way to test new ads to see which ones get the best response. Once you’ve found a winner use it in a PPC campaign, make it your new email signature, run it as a top sponsor newsletter ad or use it as your forum signature.

Tyrone Shum
Aspiring For More Traffic