Created by: MBAOnline.com

The five issues mentioned in David’s article are:

1. Guarantee of #1 placement
2. Volume discounts (PPC)
3. Submissions to thousands of Search Engines
4. Promis of hundreds of links back to your website
5. You are dealing with an Inside Man

My concerns here are related to the fact that this is such a great way for someone to cause a blog owner problems for reasons other than terrorist acts. A competitor doesn’t like another business – flag ‘em as a terrorist. Once things settle down, the situation will probably sort itself out – but at the expense of the flagged business. Cheap retaliation for those with a lack of conscience.

And why just Blogger? There are lots of other public places one can express themselves. There are so many blogging outlets, the proposed button would have to be placed at the browser level to give the viewers a quick and easy way of talking to the government about inappropriate content.

Do we want the government policing blogs through out readers like Senator Lieberman suggests? Do we want to worry about being mistaken for a terrorist because our last boyfriend is really pissed off? Or because a disgruntled employee is taking out her revenge?

I am someone who believes in the best of everyone. I think that people do the best they can with what they have even though sometimes they might look less than stellar in their actions. And I believe that I have the right to express an opinion without the fear of reprisal from those who may not agree. Granted, I’m not planning to overthrow my government. I’m no threat to anyone. But I do work with clients who are suffering from reputation damage online because someone is posting negativity online about them.

It is an awful experience when you are being attacked for no other reason that unfair competition. One of my clients finally gave up and closed down their business to restart under another name with a different business model.

I support free speech in almost every situation. I do draw the line at overtly harmful material posted online, anywhere by anyone. I don’t feel that an opinion is off-limits, but when the comments arouse the audience to harm to others, not acceptable.

When all is said and done, I think Senator Lieberman is being naive to think that a button to flag terrorist content on Blogger will do much to help stop terrorism. We stop terrorism at levels way higher than Blogger.

But, first…

Before you begin trying to get traffic to your site, you need to do your keyword research first. The reason this is so important is that you are going to be building content and traffic sources for specific keywords. This means it’s critical to select your keywords properly.

A couple things to keep in mind when doing keyword research:

• Are the keywords you’re interested in attainable? Take a look at the “strength” of others websites (and how many) are already targeting these keywords.
• Are these “buying” keywords? Certain keywords are good for generating a lot of visitors who don’t buy anything. You want to generate visitors ready to buy.
• Another thing to think about is affiliates. Generating your own customers is great – having other people do it for you is even better. So, it’s important to also target affiliates in the keywords you go after.

This is critical to your business, but it takes a lot of time and effort. Experts are expensive and don’t guarantee results. Which is why practically none of your competitors will do this! The smartest marketers use a website traffic software to automate this and other aspects of their business. This way you get this critical step done fast and done well.

Once you know your keywords…

Once you’ve done your properly keyword research, you’re now ready to start targeting these keywords to draw in visitors.

Powerful Traffic Tactics:

• Something you may not have ever considered is Surveys
• “Traffic Traps”
• Video

Surveys

People love filling in surveys. You can use this fact to provide “sticky” content for other website owners. It’s a win-win. They get a great perk on their site and you get a link back to yours. This allows you to get a free website traffic from other people’s sites! This is a sneaky little idea that most people never even think of. Just make the question interesting enough that people will want to share it with their own visitors.

“Traffic Traps”

Sites like Yahoo! Answers allow users to ask and answer each others’ questions. Once again, the main reason for this site is not the reason you’re interested. You are going to generate traffic, leads and sales from them. Of course, the process of digging through these sites and pulling out the content info of leads for your business is very time consuming. So, if you’re smart, you’ll use website traffic software to do it all for you. This allows you to do the things in your business that can’t be automated and let the software just give you the leads.

Video Websites

No doubt you’re aware of YouTube and other video websites. These sites generate massive traffic and people watch over 2 billion videos a day on YouTube alone . If you’re not taking advantage of this rich source of website traffic, then you are really missing out.

And don’t worry if you don’t have any idea of how to make a video. It’s really easy to just start with an article or something you’ve already written. Then simply record yourself reading the text and you video the screen with a simple screen capture program. I’ve even seen software that will automatically convert an article to a video!

Summary

Getting traffic is not that difficult. Just be a creative and think outside the box a bit. Plus, there’s lots of great software out there to help you.

Get started right away:

• Step 1 is researching your keywords
• Set up some viral surveys
• Take advantage of the “help” sites
• Capitalize on video!

More info on website traffic…

Yep.  At TAO Consultants, we believe that if you aren’t marketing online with all the tools available to you, you’ll be out of business in 5 years.  If you aren’t online at all, your business may be closing in 3 years. This is our prediction.  And in the world of technology, who knows how quickly the future changes will become critical.

In a recent report, 90% of businesses responding to a survey say that social media is both important to their business and that the real payoff is in creating more business exposure. In fact, 58% of the responders state that they spend more than six hours per week in social media activities with 34% “investing” more than 11 hours per week on such activity.

Here’s another interesting fact:  Social Media has overtaken porn as the #1 online activity. I remember the early days of the Internet when you could see the spamming of “sex sex sex sex sex…” over and over in text the same color as the background.  I never understood how someone searching for “sex” online was going to be satisfied with the latest product offering by this site.  Google didn’t like it either.

The video in our earlier posting has been banned, so check out this one:

Business insider has several good articles on the impact of social media on today’s business. Just search “social media” and you have a lot of reading to do.

Chesa Keane
www.computergoddess.com
www.ormgoddess.com