Traffic Generation Tips (1)

When I started this blog, I stated that my mission was to form a team of beginners to Internet/online marketing. I started by telling you experiences I’ve had in the past and the lessons I have learnt from those experiences. I also put up posts from time to time relating to developments in Internet technology to encourage people about the ever growing prospects of Internet marketing.

I am going to start today, a series on how to attract traffic to your blog. Someone once likened writing a blog, which attracts no visitors to winking in the dark, you are the only one who knows what you are doing.

The tips I’m going to give are in no particular order.

LEAVING COMMENTS ON OTHER BLOGS:
This is probably the simplest advice that could be given to a beginner blogger. A friend of mine, who is also an Internet newbie set up a blog talking about events relating to his home country. He had been in the United Kingdom for over ten years and had not returned to his native country for a long time. My friend was hoping to clinch the blogging pole position as regard blogs relating to that country so he was disappointed to find out that there were quite a number of people blogging from that country but he started communicating with them by leaving comments on their blogs. Sometime he would leave comments on six-ten different blogs on a single day. Less than two weeks after he started writing this blog, he was pleasantly surprised to discover that his profile had been viewed almost one hundred times. He then explained to me that it’s almost automatic to want to visit a blog if the owner had left a comment on your blog. In some cases, being a newbie and out of excitement he would visit the commentator’s blog just to say, ‘thank you for leaving a comment on my blog’.
Another tip beginner bloggers receive is to visit blogs written by the leading bloggers in your chosen niche and leave comments on their blogs. That is probably good for trackbacks. If you leave comments on such blogs however in order to attract the blogger’s attention you might be disappointed as very few of them are able to visit blogs written by everybody who leaves a comment on their blogs. The reason is that everybody wants their attention just like you do. A strategy I have devised is to visit blogs written by bloggers leaving comments on such blogs. I don’t go after the main blogger, I go after bloggers seeking his attention. For these bloggers, this saying becomes true, ‘if you reach for the moon and fail you might be able to catch some stars’. Never mind the astrological inaccuracy of that statement.
So you can leave a comment on a blog written by the leading blogger in your niche but leave comments also on a few other blogs written by other people who have also left comments. These other bloggers tend to appreciate your comments better than the leading blogger and the likelihood that they will visit your blog is higher.

Big Encouragement For Internet Newbies

Are you one of those Internet marketing beginners who beat themselves up over the fact that you are just geting involved with Internet marketing now? This could get worse if you read testimonies of those who started an online business fairly recently and have made amazing progress within the last one year or even six months. Don't worry, it's not too late to start an Internet marketing business becuase it has been discovered that with the introduction of broadband connection facilities the use of the Internet in homes has greatly increased. Also, more people are shopping online than ever.

In a recent Newspaper report, it was said that more people are doing their shopping on the Internet now, apparently as a means of beating the credit crunch. The report went on to say that Britons spent a whooping £14.7billion making purchases over the web last year alone. That is almost $30billion in Britain alone. This amount is also said to be nearly ten times the growth rate of the total retail market.
The report went on further to state that the number of people who bought goods online also increased by 24.7 per cent to 22.6million. The Research also showed that people are spending over the Internet more regularly. People spent over the Internet an average of 16.9 times last year, up from 14.2 times in 2006. This research was carried out by www.verdict.co.uk. and published in various newspapers.

In another recent report, published in The Guardian of May 22 2008, it was said that in the United Kingdom, 59% percent of rural households have Internet broadband connections while the percentage of urban households with Internet broadband connection is slightly lower at 52%. The reason given for this slight discrepancy is that people living in urban areas have shops and other facilities nearby unlike those living in rural areas who would probably have to travel long distances to get to the nearest departmental store, which makes it more convenient for them to shop online.
The objective of the report is to show that people living in rural areas use the Internet more than those living in urban areas but I am citing these reports to encourage those who are still contemplating setting up an online shop. The market is growing rapidly and it will definitely grow bigger.

Small business owners who do not have an online presence now will most definitely lose a lot of business to their competitors who have set up websites to promote their businesses. A website has been described as a virtual landed property, which, under normal circumstances, should increase in value with time.

There has never been a better time to start an online business than now. A number of big businesses now have affiliate programmes, which any webmaster can take advantage of.

Online shopping is expected to reach about £50billion by the year 2012. Would you not like to have a slice of that cake?

My Internet Marketing Mission

I wasn’t a little shocked when I asked a friend to read my blog and he came back to tell me that he didn’t understand what I was all about. A little intro to my friend, he makes money on the Internet and he is too busy to blog. End of intro.

I had to explain to him that my blog was not exactly for people like him, he already makes money on the Internet. I am writing for people who would love to start making some money on the Internet but don’t even know how to look for the necessary information to begin with. It’s a jungle out there and a lot of people are afraid of suffering from ‘information-overload.’ There’s so much information out there and you don’t even know where to start from. Here is where to start.

If you are an experienced Internet entrepreneur like my friend and you find the information on my blog too elementary please don’t walk away. Drop a line, let’s know where we can find you and possibly learn a few things from you.

I’m writing in these days of ‘credit-crunch’ when a lot of people are losing their jobs just as fuel and other basic utilities are getting more and more expensive. Some families are facing foreclosures, known as repossession in the United Kingdom. A lot of people would like to know what to do to earn a little extra income.

If you consider other businesses that people do on the side to supplement their incomes, making money online has a lot of advantages over these other businesses.

Property for instance, to invest in property you need to have a good credit rating and some money for deposit before you can buy a property. Please don’t even talk about those so called ‘no money down deals’. I used to be a conveyancer and I know all about them. This blog is not the forum to talk about them.
On the other hand, setting up an Internet business requires very little capital and has nothing to do with your credit score. Besides, it’s a lot of fun. I could go on and on about other businesses.

Internet business is it and this is the place to start because I’m assuming everybody who’s reading this blog knows nothing about Internet marketing. I have read other blogs written on ‘Internet marketing, affiliate marketing and stuff. Really nice blogs and well written too. The problem however, is that the writers assume the readers already have an ongoing Internet marketing business.

I’m assuming you don’t have an Internet business going, you’re looking for how to start one and you’ve come to read my blog, Welcome. I’ll source for the information you need and bring it here for you.

When I explained all that to my friend he nodded in agreement. Did I really have to go into all that explanation? No wonder he sometimes comes across as thick.

My First Big Idea

Back in ’99 I had this big idea and here’s how it started, when I was younger I used to be very imaginative and sometimes these imaginations would become short stories, which I would sometimes write down. I went to a supermarket one day and saw this girl whom I really fancied driving away in a very expensive car, my imagination started running riot and a short story developed from there.
The summary of the short story was that the lead character in the story also fancied a girl who was driving a nice car. This character knew where the girl shopped regularly and stalked her for a few days until he devised a plan to get her attention. The plan was to deflate one of her tyres then hang around until she showed up. As soon as she noticed that she had a flat tyre this character would appear from his hiding place and help her change her tyres. Wicked!
Unfortunately for my character, while deflating the tyre on the day he chose some other shoppers noticed him, called the Police and he was arrested. Yeah, you can imagine what the girl he fancied thought of him as he was being led away by the Police.
No, the moral of the story is not important but an Internet business idea developed from it and I promptly registered a domain name, which I never used until it expired. The idea was really simple, invite people to submit true life stories about their unusual dating experiences, the disastrous ones and the ones that were not so disastrous. The object would have been to create fun. Humour would have been the primary focus.
I think I went about it the wrong way however, I was looking for celebrity endorsement. I was hoping to get a celebrity to submit a story and boost the popularity of the site. Needless to say I did not get any celebrity endorsement and I thought that without that I couldn’t get a head start.
Like I mentioned in my earlier post, Google was still at its infancy then and I didn’t know that all I had to do was submit the site to the search engines. I had never heard about Search Engine Optimization and PPC campaigns.
I’m not saying that my idea would have been the next big thing on the Internet but that I never even went beyond registering the domain name. I was banking on getting a celebrity to endorse the site. I was looking for instant traffic the wrong way. If you are lucky enough to get a celebrity endorse your site, please go for it but if not there are so may other ways of marketing your site. Besides, the fact that a celebrity endorses your site is no guarantee that you will receive constant and consistent traffic.
I will tell you about my next big idea in my next blog and why that failed too.

Let's Get Serious

I guess I made it through the night. LOL

Have you ever wanted to work from the comfort of your home or move closer to a relative but cannot do so because of your work? How about the school runs? How more inconvenient could it be when you have to juggle between so many things at once simply because of that monster of a job you’ve got? A lot of you dream about being able to work from your homes or the ability to take your work wherever you go. This is your opportunity, join my team and it’s free to do that. I don’t want to over-emphasise the fact that there is no application form to complete or joining fee to pay. I guess that’s obvious. The word ‘free’ is being abused on the Internet everyday. Pardon me, did I say, ‘my team’ the other time? I prefer to see it as ‘the team’. This is not a ‘One man show’.

Let me whet your appetite with some facts about making money on the Internet. The writers of the One Minute Millionaire, Mark Victor Hansen and Robert Allen believe that there are only four major ways of becoming a millionaire. The four areas are, Investments, Real Estate, business and yes, Internet. To buttress their point, in the Sunday Times Rich List of 2008, twenty five Internet (Multi) Millionaires made the list. The minimum requirement to make the list is a net worth of at least £80 Million.
Two of the richest fifty people in the whole world made their money from the Internet. I’m sure you know who the two are, the google brothers. (They are not biological brothers but that’s what I like to call them).

Out of the four listed in their book would you agree with me that the one that requires the least start-up capital is the Internet? I read of so many people who have spent so much money buying books and attending seminars and courses that have yielded no results. If you are one of these people and you want to share your experiences because you don’t want others to go through what you have gone through then join the team.

Even if all you want is to be able to pay your mortgage and other bills from a little income earned from the Internet, believe me, this is very possible.

I’m also going to tell you some of the mistakes I’ve made in the past so that you can avoid them and I’ll be letting you into every secret I have discovered in my research into making money on the Internet. You will not believe how much free stuff is available on the Internet and where you can get them from.

I have developed a genuine off-line marketing technique and I’m going to try it out if it doesn’t work you’ll be the first to know.

How to join the team? Read my blogs, drop your comments and if you’re really interested I will invite you to write on my blog space.

The Snap!

I have been fiddling with making money on the Internet since 1999. To that I’m sure some people will say, ‘only that recently?’ I need to add however, that I’m yet to make a considerable amount not because there’s no money to be made on the Internet but because that thing just never ‘snapped’ in me until now. I once went for an Internet Marketing seminar featuring the likes of Ewan Chia and Patrick Chan, (know them?) Anyway, I met a gentleman at the seminar who told me that he had also been fiddling around the Internet for years without making any money until something ‘snapped’ in him and he made about £24,000:00 (Twenty four thousand Pounds) in about a week or something of that sort. That was December 2006. I didn’t experience that snap until this morning on my way to the Post Office.

My name is Kunle, pronounced as spelt. Okay, let me see if I can help you further although I’m no linguist. I believe for English speakers, its pronounced KOON – LAY, or QUN-LAY and this is going to be my first blog on how to make money on the Internet.

Sorry, did I make that sound like I was an expert Internet entrepreneur? Please don’t get me wrong. Like most bloggers, I’m just an ordinary fellow who is documenting his foray into the rather cumbersome and sometime frustrating, but, I must add, interesting, endeavour of making money Online.

Back in 1999 when Google was just about a year old and not publicly quoted, long before video became a standard feature on the Internet I had an idea for a website that would have generated content by itself and probably, note that I said probably, earned me truckloads of money by now. So why did I not pursue this idea? It had not snapped. Yes, that’s it. Whatever snapped in me this morning had not snapped and I abandoned the idea.

Is there a similar website on the Internet today doing what I could have started about nine years ago? Not to my knowledge.

In my next blog, I will probably, note again that I said probably, share with you the idea I had back then. It’s impossible to register the copyright to a business idea so you are more than welcome to run with it. On the contrary, you might immediately dismiss the possibility of the idea ever catching on. So maybe I was only following my instincts by not wasting my time pursuing the idea.

It snapped this morning and the interesting idea of forming a team hit me. If it really hasn’t and this is just a passing phase you probably will not see any further postings from me but as long as I continue posting blogs it probably has.

Finally, does your computer underline the word blogs as well? I think it’s time we included the words, blogs, bloggers, blogging and all other associated words into the English dictionary.

See ya!