Traffic Generation 102 - Article and Search Engine Marketing

From:
The Desk of Damien Dupont

Because of the pivotal importance of an ongoing, steady flow of fresh website visitors to the profitability of your business, Russell Brunson devoted two of the six modules in his Public Domain How To course entirely to traffic creation.

The article on this page is the third of three preview articles on traffic creation, and the second previewing the strategies covered in Module 4 of the course. If you have just arrived at this page and wish to start with the first article for Module 4, it can be found here: Driving Traffic To Your Public Domain Derivative Products.

In Traffic Generation 102, Russell teaches the "how to" for the following five strategies for driving visitors to your website:

 
Article Marketing

Article marketing refers to the practice of syndicating articles to major article directories such as EzineArticles.com, ArticlesBase.com, and SearchWarp.com amongst many others. This can be done manually or with the assistance of software such as Article Announcer or Web2Mayhem. Your articles will not only appear on the article directories themselves, but they will also be picked up by other website owners looking for content who will host these articles on their own websites.

So Article Marketing brings multiple benefits:

Now... if the thought of writing intimidates you, you can relax in the knowledge that it really doesn't take a lot. As you will likely be promoting a public domain derived product, you can simply lift and adapt sections of the source public domain book you have based your product upon, or make use of entire articles copied & pasted from public domain magazines.

Each article need only tell a brief story about a single beneficial aspect of your product, or provide a review or preview of it, which is precisely what I am doing here, albeit that this article is much longer than what you would write for syndication (typically 600 to 800 words).

The beauty of article marketing is that you do it once, and your article can generate passive results for you many years down the track. I started working online in 2003, and today, as I write this, it is May 2010. I've just gone back to check my stats on one of the first articles I published online in 2003, and it's coming up as $844 in AdSense and $421 in affiliate earnings from that one article for the past two years. If I average that out it comes to $630 p/yr, and it's been going strong for six years now, so that single article has probably earned me around $3,800 and it's still going strong.

Now this is an article hosted on one of my own content sites (hence the AdSense earnings), plus it's on a topic that doesn't date too much, but I use it to illustrate the point about the long-term benefits of online article publishing. Russell provides some examples of his own in module 4 of the course.

When writing articles for syndication, as stated, you should aim for 600-800 words. Your article shouldn't be so long that it puts people off bothering to read it. And it shouldn't be so short that it fails to deliver value. It should be in between, but a syndicated article should never be fully complete. It should provide value but not answer all the reader's questions, but rather lead them back to your website at the end with a resource box or tagline such as "for more information, go to..." or "to read the rest of this article or this report, click here". The aim is to get the reader from the article onto your web site.

Each article you submit should ideally be unique, although you can produce unique re-writes of the same article, and again there are tools to assist in doing this such as the Content Composer software which I use for this purpose, or Jonathan Leger's Best Spinner.

The high quality article directories such as EzineArticles.com (which is really the top one) will insist on each article being unique, although many of the other directories won't do a duplicate content check, so you can submit the same article (even unchanged) more than once, although unique articles will give you greater benefit.

Search Engine Marketing

Whilst Russell has named this last section of Traffic Generation 102 "Search Engine Marketing" ('SEM'), in reality, SEM also encompasses activities such as pay-per-click and power-linking covered earlier.

What Russell covers in this section is in fact a single strategy, and four different methods that one can employ to implement that strategy. The strategy is that of creating "feeder pages" on multiple feeder websites in order to drive search engine traffic back to your main product website.

Unlike the strategies discussed in the Power-Linking and Article Marketing sections, these feeder websites would all be owned and created by you, and hosted on different servers, or more specifically, IP addresses.

The strategy starts by researching keywords relevant to your topic and/or target market. Your keyword research might identify a hundred keywords, for example, which you would then split into ten groups of ten related keywords.

These keywords and keyword groupings will form the basis for ten different feeder websites, each with ten pages (this is just for example sake - you could well do five websites with twenty pages each, or you may have more or less keywords, etc..).

The aim for these pages on these websites is to capture search engine traffic, and within their content, to link back to your primary website and therefore for them to act as a conduit to send visitors to your product website.

The concept is sound and valid. However, I only personally use one of the four implementation methods which Russell covers, as I consider the other three too risky and short term (in search engine optimization parlance, they are often referred to a "black hat" techniques).

Briefly, the four methods which Russell covers are:

The last three methods in the above list used to work well in years past, but not so well anymore as the search engines have become more advanced at detecting them. Whilst some people may still use them and get good results, it's really only a matter of time before the search engines catch on to the latest techniques and put an end their effectiveness. So the problem is they are not long-term traffic solutions because you're always trying to stay ahead of the search engines, plus they do not provide any value to the end user.

So my personal preference is to only spend my time on techniques that will deliver ongoing, long-term benefits, and that in turn provide value to the visitor. The two go hand in hand.

As stated at the top of this page, the article above is the second preview article of the content covered in Module 4 of the Public Domain How To course: Traffic Generation 102.

There are a further five modules covering the remainder of Russell Brunson's Public Domain How To system, more than 11 hours of audio content in all, accompanied by transcripts and a workbook. For a preview of the content contained within all six modules of Public Domain How To, subscribe to our e-course below.

Warmly,

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