The popular website UpWorthy.com is one of the best examples of focused lead capture that I’ve come across in a long time. If your primary goal is to capture leads from your own website – either via email, or by encouraging social media followers, it’s worth spending some time checking out their website and how well it’s structured towards this end goal.

And with 1.5 million Facebook followers at the time of this writing (and a compete.com estimate of 2.25 million monthly unique visitors) it’s hard to say they’re not doing something right.

It’s almost entirely focused on capturing leads and driving social media engagement.

(Keep in mind this is all based on the time of this writing. Things can and do change, so I’ve taken screen shots and present them below to ensure what I’m explaining here makes sense now and in the future).

Let’s take a look at what they’re doing and see how you might be able to integrate some of these components into your own design structure to build bigger mailing lists and social media followings…

The Home Page ->

The first thing you’ll notice on the home page is the big lead capture unit at the top of the page…

It’s the first thing visitors see and it presents them with three options to keep in touch.

Liking them on FaceBook, joining their email list, or following them on Twitter. You just can’t miss it, and it does a good job of allowing the visitor to keep in touch via their most preferred medium too (or multiple mediums should they wish).

This is followed by the primary website content (the featured content of the day), and assuming the visitor makes it to the bottom of the page (without even checking out any content), they are again presented with an email lead capture form at the bottom…

“I want more stuff like this!”…

Now let’s look what happens when you visit one of their content pages (the first click a visitor is likely to make after arriving at their website and selecting a story that interests them)…

Content Page Popup ->

The first thing that happens is a light box popup window.

Now this is a very interesting popup.

It’s not an email lead capture popup in the sense that most people incorporate one – simply asking people to subscribe to an email list. It’s an interactive question – more like a quick survey, that requires the user to select “I Agree” or “I Disagree” with the following statement…

“I Support Equality For All”

This statement in itself is very interesting as it really encourages a one sided response (agreement with the statement) from most people anyway. After all, you’d have to be a pretty sad person to disagree with such a statement…

If a visitor doesn’t actually agree with the statement (they click the “I disagree” button), then the light box closes and the user is simply shown the content page they’ve initially expressed interest in (more on that soon).

However, if they do agree with the statement (and most people would) they are then presented with an actual optin email form…

…you’ll see above how they integrate this in with their optin process…

“I Support Equality For All” –

…a nice affirmation to put the person in a good mood followed by the hook…

“We’ve got tons of great content that we think you’ll love. Check out our daily email, The Upworthiest, and find out!”

…if they close the window at this point OR enter their email address and optin in, then the light box closes and the user is shown the content page they’ve initially expressed interest in.

Very nice process indeed.

Now let’s take a look at their actual content pages and see how focused they are…

Actual Content Page ->

Here’s what a content page actually looks like and keep in mind how focused this is.

It presents the visitor with very few options after viewing the content, other than to help drive their social media campaigns and spread that content socially (and at the same time capturing that visitor as a social media follower)…

…you’ll notice there is a headline, followed by a brief explanation of the content. Short and sweet and this is the format they’re using right throughout all their content pages.

Right above the primary content, there are two sharing buttons, one for FaceBook and one for Twitter. You don’t see a share bar with 100 different social media sharing options (I mean who really uses those “other” social media sharing sites anyway).

It’s Facebook, Twitter, or nothing.

Now here’s something even cooler, if you mouse over the content (which in this screenshot happens to be a video) you’ll notice that Facebook and Twitter Share buttons appear floating on the left hand side of the video.

These appear and disappear depending on whether the visitor is interacting with the content…

…and now look directly below the actual content.

You’ll see the FaceBook and Twitter sharing optins yet again, followed by the email optin box that was also found on the bottom of the home page (and is carried right throughout the entire site in this position). This is a prime position for a call to action because it’s a critical stop point for a visitor, so it makes sense to use this for lead capture if you can.

Other than a few other minor links (read that as pathways leading visitors away from their main goal of lead capture), there are not many other options a visitor can do on this page.

There are not a ton of links to other content.

There are not a ton of outbound links to ads.

Ultimately, they want the visitor to either optin via email, and/or share the content on Facebook (in which case they also get the optin and a follower) or twitter.

Extremely focused stuff to build a massive following and drive home more viral social media activity too.

There are also a few other things going on here as well, so it would pay to check out their website and investigate it more thoroughly for yourself.

For example, also on a content page, there is another time delayed popup which appears that asks the visitor if they like the content, and if so to share it on Facebook.

Now and then you might also see an alert message show up bottom right hand side of the page that also does the same thing (although sometimes it also shows other content within the website).

All in all however, this website is designed to do two things and two things alone, capture leads building an audience, and encourage social media sharing on the two most popular social media websites.

And boy, it certainly does a very focused bang up job of that. Very cool stuff.

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Article By Duncan Carver: Brought to you in association with Submit Edge – Giving comprehensive information on how Social Media Marketing can be used to maintain a good online reputation - Click Here Now For More Details
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One of the most important things that you can do for your business is to understand your “Conversion Funnel” and spend time analyzing and optimizing it.

Once you have a web site online and selling your products, promoting your services, or getting the word out about your cause, the easiest way to improve the performance of your online business is to figure out where people are getting stuck in your conversion funnel.

Before we go into detail, I’m going to give you my definition of a “Conversion Funnel”.  If you’ve used Google Analytics goal tracking feature (or any number of other CRM, Analytics, and Testing packages) you will be familiar with the concept of Funnels.  For those of you that may not know, here it is:

A Conversion Funnel is the path that a visitor takes from point A to Point B in your marketing process. Simple. It is called a funnel because, much like a physical funnel, it takes large numbers of people and hones them into a targeted stream by the end of the process.

For the sake of this document, I’ll define funnels using  “>” as in:

Step 1 > Step 2 > Step 3 > Conversion Achieved!

Conversations = Conversions

One thing that is certain is that engaging your target audience in a conversation is a guaranteed way to boost your overall conversions.  Although conversion metrics can be optimized at every step of the process, from the apparently insignificant color of your sign up button to the larger question of whether your copy is professionally written and targeted to your market, one of the easiest places to start is to simply ask the question:

Am I having a conversation with my customers, clients, or audience?

If the answer is no, you are almost certainly not optimizing your conversions.  An example of a conversion funnel that doesn’t include conversation would be:

• People see a search result for your site >
• People click on the link in the result >
• They land on your page, which is a product page of a shopping cart >
• They either choose to buy your product, or they leave your site.

This can work, especially if you have good results in the search engines and are indexed for exactly what a user is looking for (i.e. they search “Cheap iPod” and you present them with a discounted iPod page.)  However, in most cases, a huge number of sales are lost in a simple process like this.

A more optimized sales process for the same product might look like this:

• People see a search result for your site >
• People click on the link in the result >
• They land on your page, which is a product page of a shopping cart >
• They either choose to buy your product, or they leave your site >
• As they are leaving, you present an exit-popup with a relevant free report >
• They give you a name and email in exchange for information they want >
• You send out weekly emails with product specials >
• After three weeks, they see what they want and make a purchase.

However, before you can start thinking about optimizing your conversion funnel, you need to know where you are right now.  If you haven’t done this simple exercise for your business recently, here is a great way to quickly boost your sales.

Step 1 : Define Your Traffic Sources

Hopefully, you use many different techniques to generate traffic and visitors to your site.  Maybe you are listed in organic search results, pay for Pay Per Click results in some of the bigger engines, purchase ads on other people’s sites and newsletters, do joint venture mailing promotions with targeted partners, have physical flyers that you put up on community bulletin boards, have business cards that you hand out potential clients.

These are your first communications with your target audience, and are the very top of the funnel.  So, grab a blank piece of paper, and quickly list your web site’s traffic sources top to bottom in order of amount of traffic generated.  Don’t worry too much about accuracy.  As an interesting exercise you can always go to your site’s traffic logs and compare your notes to the actual top traffic referrers you have.

Step 2: Define Your Primary Funnels

Depending on your business model, you may just have one primary funnel or you may actually have quite a few.  Let’s assume that you run a spa, and that all of your advertising simply points to the home page of your web site, and your goal is to get people to fill out a contact form to request an appointment.  You also have a “Products & Services” page, an “About Us” page, and you run a health newsletter and have an opt-in page.

You actually have two goals here – one is to gain newsletter subscribers, the other is to get people to request an appointment.

Theoretically, your ideal funnel would be:

Traffic Source > Home Page > Request an Appointment Page > Appointment Requested!

However, this is sometimes not the case.  It is possible that once people have seen the list of services you offer they are more likely to request an appointment, in which case your ideal funnel would be:

Traffic Source > Home Page > Products & Services > Request an Appointment > Appointment Requested!

Or, it may be that almost no one requests an appointment the first time they visit your site, but if they sign up for your newsletter it is common for them at some point to return to your site and request an appointment.

In this case you have two funnels (one per goal).

Traffic Source > Home Page > Newsletter Signup Page > Signed Up!

And then…

Newsletter Received In Email > Request an Appointment > Appointment Requested!

If you are already using web analytics and tracking software on your site, you should be able to easily find out what the most common paths are that visitors take while visiting your site.

One of the keys to successfully optimizing your conversion funnel is knowing how many people make it through each step of the process, so that you can find the points where you are losing the most people and test different ways to improve them. Without proper tracking data you are flying blind – if you don’t yet have some sort of tracking installed on your site it is very easy, and free, to get set up with Google Analytics.

So – take a minute now and write down the most common conversion funnels that visitors use on your site. If you don’t know and don’t have tracking software installed, take your best guess – go to your site and navigate through it and notice how you move. Ask a couple of friends to do the same and let you watch over their shoulders. Or, in a worst case scenario, just write down every page on your site and you can analyze each page individually in terms of its ability to drive visitors to your conversion page.

If you use autoresponders you may also want to make a list of each autoresponder message that you send out to your customer list. Unfortunately there is no significant way to optimize one time newsletters other than split testing and collecting data to a small group of customers before sending it on to your entire list, but you can treat each autoresponder you send out as a piece in your conversion process.

Step 3: Ask Yourself Some Questions

Now you should have a list of the main places that your site gets it’s traffic from as well as the main paths people take through your site to reach your conversion page (or conversion pages if you have more than one goal with your site). It’s time to take a look at these lists and ask some key questions.

Questions To Ask About Each Of Your Traffic Sources:

• Is the message relevant to the context?

In PPC advertising, does your ad copy make sense with every single keyword you are bidding on? If not, break your keywords into relevant groups and write ads specific to each one. In email promotions, whether paid or JVs, is the email message you are sending out to the list targeted, relevant, and formatted in the same way that people on the list are used to? Don’t send out one stock email to every list you advertise on – customize based on what they normally receive, and if you can, join in a conversation that has been ongoing on that list. If you are flyering for a rave you don’t go to Wall Street and hand out flyers to business executives – make sure all of your advertising is in context and relevant.

• Am I respecting my potential client’s intelligence?

This may not seem relevant to you, but you should never underestimate how smart your audience is. This is primarily a warning against spam – if you use forum posts as a traffic source, make sure that they are relevant to the topic being discussed and not just flat out promotions. If you are riding the social media wave, don’t set up a Facebook profile just to advertise – people see right through it.

• Is there a logical connection between my ads and traffic generating posts and the first page I am directing them to on my web site?

If you are using syndicated articles to get traffic to your site, does each article link to a relevant page on your web site? For example, if I was using this article to generate traffic for my business, I wouldn’t link to a page about web design, I would link to a page about tracking and analytics consulting. If you have successful ads that have very different messages, consider creating different landing pages for each of them to keep your reader’s attention engaged start to finish in your sales process.

Questions To Ask About Each Step In Your Funnel:

• Am I continuing the conversation?

Once you have engaged readers online, you’ve entered a conversation in their head. Once they’ve read your first ad – their first point of contact with your company – and have clicked through to your web site, their mind is moving on a track that was triggered by that ad. You need to make sure that as they go through your site, that conversation continues. For each step in your funnel, make sure that it is logical, and that it adds to the knowledge and information that people have already seen in previous steps. If every part of your funnel rehashes the same information, consider cutting down the number of steps and condensing into fewer, more relevant pages.

• Does this step add value? Is it necessary?

On a similar note, make sure all of your communication is necessary, and that you don’t have any steps in the process that are pure fluff. One of the key metrics people often use when analyzing site usability is the number of clicks it takes to reach any given page. Make sure every part of your funnel is on target and to the point, and that you don’t have extra, unnecessary steps in people’s way of getting to your conversion page.

• Is it obvious?

I’ve made it to your site, I’ve clicked on products and services and read about a product I really want. Do you have a prominent clear way for me to click through and buy that product? As time progresses on the web buttons have gotten bigger and bigger – often with good reason – big buttons get clicked on more often. Make sure people can see very clearly how to move to the next step in your process. Don’t hide and opt in box or an order link – make sure that people can clearly and immediately see how to take action if they want to. If they want to read more first, they can, but at least they know where to go when they are ready to move forward.

Take Action

Once you’ve listed your key traffic sources and conversion funnel steps and answered the key questions for every step of the process, take action! Based on your answers, identify key actions you can take to improve your conversion funnel, and get to it. If you don’t have site tracking that allows you to at least see the number of visitors to each page (or ideally, let’s you track goal funnels), get it in place. Google Analytics is free and easy to set up – it’s not a perfect solution, but it does give you some powerful information. When you make changes to your site, you want to make sure what you did actually does increase sales!

You may read my list, decide your order button needs to be bigger, and put a huge red button on your pages that says “Order Now!”. Depending on the market, that might work like anything, or it might turn people off because they feel it is too pushy. If you don’t test, you won’t know!

Make it your goal to take at least one action today that will improve the conversion rate of your funnel. Commit to doing that at least once a week and you will watch your sales grow exponentially over the course of the next year.

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Guest Post - Justin Handley has been working in web design and online marketing since 1999 and is mad about tracking, conversions, and testing. He is the founder of Narasopa Media LLC, a full service internet marketing agency.
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The effectiveness of increasing your conversion rate depends heavily on the data you collect when customers browse and interact with your site. The most direct way of increasing conversions is by tracking order baskets that don’t make it to check out and following that up with an email a few days later with a ‘still interested?’ type email, linking directly to that basket check out page.

This is very targeted and relevant to each user so in theory you should see conversions increasing drastically. However, people like privacy and this sort of email can seem very intrusive with people reacting by running a mile. A good idea is to surround the products they nearly ordered with ‘similar’ ones so it doesn’t seem so targeted and stalker-like!

Converting browsers to customers goes beyond the above. Interaction and engagement in between visits helps to build your brand recognition as well as product awareness that will take away some of the barriers at checkout.

To do this, you need to encourage browsers and customers to give you their email address and permission to send marketing communication to them. You can do this through data capture forms on your site but an incentive is often needed so how about running a competition so that someone on the email list will win a free item from your ecommerce store?

Make sure the communication you send to your customers is targeted if you want to achieve higher conversion rates. Segmentation of the email marketing database in to demographic and product category interest alongside information such as when they last purchased an item will help you to better serve the needs of these customers.

An example of this is that if you send content relevant to a customer based on the profile data you have collected for them then they are more likely to click through from the email to the site with a purpose of purchase. So not only do you get click through traffic but the chances of them converting are so much higher.

This is why email marketing has the potential to be very effective, particularly in the run-up to Christmas. Email marketing during the holidays gives businesses perfect opportunities to make their customers aware of products that are upcoming and popular for the holiday period.

To test what works for your specific customer base, you need to try it out and make sure you track results. Email marketing software will help you to track conversions; what content works for you? What’s the maximum frequency threshold without annoying the recipient? Take close notice of the conversion rates both on your site as well as from email to checkout. Optimize all your campaigns based on the experimental results and you are on to a winner!

Jack Harding is a keen writer about online marketing, looking at all aspects of how it can improve one’s online profile. He’s particularly interested in giving a good insight into email marketing as it is an affordable as well as effective way to attract clientele.

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Guest Post - Jack Harding is a keen writer about online marketing, looking at all aspects of how it can improve one’s online profile. He’s particularly interested in giving a good insight into email marketing as it is an affordable as well as effective way to attract clientele.
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Now that Google’s had its way with the SEO industry, it seems that everyone and their mother has hopped aboard the guest posting train. And of course, when a online marketing tactic becomes the “go-to” method for getting the results you want, what happens?

You guessed it. Market saturation – in its purest form.

It doesn’t matter what niche you’re in – if you are attempting to rank for any keywords that are even the slightest bit competitive, then I’ve got some news for you. The website and blog owners you’re emailing with that great guest post you wrote, are already getting overrun with offers everyday.

Structure you’re approach incorrectly and it’s entirely possible they won’t read your article at all, but if they do, they’d sure better like what they see. Otherwise, your message will be deleted into email oblivion faster than you can shake a stick at it.

Fortunately, there are a few techniques to stack the odds in your favor and increase the chances of getting your guest posts published on the even the highest quality, high-profile blogs and websites in your industry.

Let’s look at six methods that will help you get published more often…

Tip #1 – Read The Guidelines

Sounds simple enough and a bit silly to make the top “undercover” rule, right?

Well not really. It’s a school boy error that a lot of people make.

You’d be surprised how many writers fall into the trap of failing to thoroughly read guest posting guidelines on the blogs and websites they intend to query. This is guest-posting suicide, and it conveys an utter lack of respect for any webmasters you contact. They’ll notice your lack of research right off the bat and delete your email without so much as a second glance.

Here’s the undercover part: if you’re thinking of attempting to penetrate a niche by sending a rapid-fire succession of emails to all the top site owners without reading any directions – well, just don’t. Often, webmasters in the same niche are friends – and friends talk.

There’s no better way to earn a bad reputation than engaging in this behavior, and you don’t want to be pegged as an opportunist or a spammer before you’ve even had the chance to get to know your peers.

Tip #2 – It’s All About The Email

Remember, the email that you send to a webmaster is your first point of contact – and it’s often your only chance to seal the deal. You need to have superb selling skills and a unique selling proposition (USP) to win the attention of a harried site owner with too much to do and an overflowing inbox. You have to make it count.

I posted about this before, and I used examples from people who have queried this blog to illustrate what I mean about salesmanship. Here’s the example I gave of a dynamite query:

“Hi Duncan, hope you are doing well!

Please find enclosed a piece for your blog. I hope you like it.

As soon as you publish it, please send me its URL so that I can send that to our social media team to share your blog on XXXXXX’s Facebook, Twitter and Google+ networks, having over 100,000+ follower / fans.

Looking forward to hear from you.

If you have any questions, please let me know…”

…and here’s the illustration that I provided of another that was a bit, well, lackluster:

 “Hi – I’m a freelance writer for XXXXXX and I’d like to write an article for your blog about (topic X or topic X or topic X). It will be unique and written exclusively for you. All THAT I REQUIRE is that you include a link back to X website in return…”

See the difference?

The second example asked for something in return for furnishing the guest post and used demanding language. It seemed almost like a ransom or a setup for some kind of seedy exchange.

On the other hand, the first request didn’t ask anything of us or our blog (a backlink is an “understood” way to reciprocate for a guest post in the SEO world). The first requester even went the extra mile by offering increased exposure on top of providing the free guest post.

Pretty good salesmanship and USP!

How could a blogger refuse such an offer if the guest post is great in addition to all the perks?

Tip #3 – Write To Your Blogger

Don’t just send out guest posts cold – you’ll gain a serious competitive edge if you do a little investigative analysis first. Compile a “short list” of bloggers that you plan to target and spend some real time getting to know their blogs.

Then, custom craft a blog post for each blogger you plan to query.

Ensure the style of each post matches the tone, voice, and subject matter of its corresponding blog. Highlight the fact that you’ve researched the blog in your email and that you’ve created the post to match the site’s style.

Bloggers will have a harder time saying “no” to you when you’ve crafted something just for them.

Another excellent tip here is to reference existing articles already on the website you’re working with. If you touch on a subject within your guest post, and there’s an existing article that already talks about the subject material in greater depth, link to it.

It will show the blog owner you really know their blog and are truly there to help their audience. Not many people will go this extra mile – if you do – you’ll really stand out and that’s important.

Tip #4 – Do The “Triple Edit Tango”

When you’re editing an article, do you ever notice how everything looks great that first whirl around? Then, when you come back to it later and run through it a second time, sometimes you find some pretty gnarly grammar mistakes glaring up at you from the page.

Then, if you are super conscientious, you give it a third scan. That’s when you find the little – but obvious – mistakes hidden throughout your piece. Things like a missing apostrophe or the wrong use of a particular word can hide out in headings or lurk in conclusions.

Fix them ahead of time. You won’t have the option to clean up careless errors later, and by then your poorly-edited content maybe working its way all over the ‘net.

Tip #5 – Don’t Discount Community Outreach

A great article about guest blogging published on KISS Metrics sheds some insight into exactly what it takes to build your community presence in order to create a network of bloggers willing to publish your content:

If you want to increase exposure for your business (beyond optimizing your website for search and growing your social media audience), then guest blogging and blogger outreach are avenues you may wish to explore. When you connect with bloggers in your industry, you are given platforms for communicating with your potential customers like never before *.

While we’re on the subject of community, head on over to this post and give it a read. You’ll be surprised – you may even begin to get invited to guest post on a regular basis once you’ve locked in with your crowd.

Tip #6 – Just Freakin’ Ask!

Many a lower level blogger belittles himself into thinking it’s never the right time to approach the big fish in his pond. What I mean is this: yes, as a brand-spanking-new-blogger, you’d be silly to query all the top names in the biz and expect immediate acknowledgement… much less a response.

It’s certainly worth the effort to try, but don’t give up if you’re struggling to get noticed.

There will come a time when you will have finally carved out a little space for yourself in your area of expertise. That’s precisely when you don’t want to undervalue yourself. Don’t be afraid to reach out to bloggers and website owners you thought were once previously unreachable – even if they may have ignored or declined you in the past.

You may be surprised how far you can get by just asking.

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Article By Duncan Carver: Brought to you in association with Office Autopilot - Automate your entire online office with these amazing business automation tools – including follow up email autoresponders, newsletter broadcasting with integrated offline postcard delivery, full lead & customer relationship management and more - Click Here Now For More Details
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GetResponse released an interesting info graphic that highlights the best times of day to send email to improve open rates and click throughs. The data comes from having analyzed 21 million emails sent from US accounts during the first quarter of this year.

Depending on how your list is segmented (ideally segmented by geo-location) it could very well be the best idea to send separate mailings throughout the day to match up with your readers respective time zones – rather than just scheduling your a broadcast to your entire list at 2am EST (a common time many marketers suggest as being ideal).

Check it out below, it’s very interesting…

Share your thoughts below…

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Article By Duncan Carver: Brought to you in association with Office Autopilot - Automate your entire online office with these amazing business automation tools – including follow up email autoresponders, newsletter broadcasting with integrated offline postcard delivery, full lead & customer relationship management and more - Click Here Now For More Details
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“Hi Duncan, This one has always confused me a bit: Anchor text and keyword selection for the anchor text link. Do you use the URL for internal pages or what?” ~ Danielle

Hi Danielle,

This is a great question because if you structure this correctly in all of your link building techniques you’re going to see the biggest overall impact on your search engine rankings.

I’ll have to use a hypothetical example here but let’s just say you have 10 primary keyword phrases that you’re working to improve search engine rankings for. Let’s also assume you have 10 pages on your website that are specifically related to each of those respective terms.

What you want to do is link to the exact page (the most relevant for the term) using the exact phrase (or broad match phrase) as anchor text from the website linking to you – when possible.

For example your website is about “Dog Training”. You have a page on “Dog Training Advice” and you want to get high search engine rankings for that term.

You want the anchor text of your link to say “Dog Training Advice”, and you want to link directly to the most relevant page on your website related to that i.e. /dog-training-advice.htm

The same goes if you were targeting the term “Dog Training Techniques”. You would get the website linking to you to use that exact term “Dog Training Techniques” as the anchor text and link to the most relevant page on your website i.e. /dog-training-techniques.htm

If it’s not possible to have the exact terms as anchor text (for whatever reason) then a broad match is the next best thing. For example “Free Dog Training Advice” or “Dogs – Free Training Information and Advice” as you still have all the target keyword terms contained within the anchor text.

You should try to do this often (but with the recent Google updates i.e. Panda / Penguin make sure you don’t over do it – see below) because this does two things…

1. It increases the relevancy of the individual pages within your website for their respective strategic keyword terms. This will help increase each pages individual search engine rankings.
2. It increases the overall “theme relevancy” of your entire website – strengthening the entire website as an “authority” on the subject of “Dog Training”.

What I mean by the later is that whilst one link passes relevancy for the term “Dog Training Advice”, the other is doing the same for the term “Dog Training Techniques”. Combined (and via the internal linking structure of your website / blog) this is going to pass relevancy for the main term “Dog Training” as a whole, back to your website’s home page.

Similarly, if you’re going to link to your home page directly as part of your incoming link building campaign (and you should), then you’d be best to use the anchor text “Dog Training” because the reverse happens.

You’ll then be passing that relevancy down into your internal pages via your internal linking structure – further helping all of those individual pages related to “Dog Training ANYTHING”.

Obviously it’s not always possible to be so specific – sometimes you don’t have the flexibility depending on where your incoming links are coming from – and the truth is now you don’t need to be 100% of the time.

With the recent Google updates (part of which included a major over optimization penalty based on your incoming linking patterns) you don’t want to stay entirely ridged with this structure. Those that had a very rigid structure – i.e. every anchor text linking to the same page was exactly the same – saw the negative ranking implications recently.

So you should certainly mix things up, and keep the specific anchor text ratio pointing to the respective page at around 20-30%. What I mean by that is if you’re going to build 10 links to the page /dog-training-techniques.htm then you now only want about 2-3 of those links to include the anchor text “dog training techniques” and the rest to be varied.

Even plain links pointing to this page without any anchor text play an important part here now too. Google has started to pay a heck of a lot more attention to the quality of the page the link is coming from now (rather than the anchor text), and how relevant this is to your own website – the more relevant the better.

But it still can’t hurt to throw a few strategic keyword specific anchor text links into the mix. Just don’t over do it.

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Article By Duncan Carver: Brought to you in association with Office Autopilot - Automate your entire online office with these amazing business automation tools – including follow up email autoresponders, newsletter broadcasting with integrated offline postcard delivery, full lead & customer relationship management and more - Click Here Now For More Details
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By Duncan Carver – In Association With The Social Networking Academy -

Do you have the vague notion that social is increasingly important to securing a top spot in the search engines? Are you scratching your head in a vain attempt to make it work for you, with little to show for your efforts?

Then don’t fret, there’s good news for your social marketing campaign – but like anything it is going to take some real work from you.

Google, Facebook, Twitter, and other social networking giants are in the midst of a cutthroat war for Internet turf. That’s actually good news for the SEO industry and Internet marketers. The fierce competition means that each company is doing their darndest to woo us with their free services and programs in exchange for our precious patronage.

Facebook blocks Google from crawling much of its internal database, and there’s also a back-and-forth struggle between Twitter and Google when it comes to indexing database information. These massive social media networks have marketing advantages all their own, but when it comes to ranking in the search engines, it’s best not to bank entirely on social platforms outside of Google to get your site to the top.

Google+ is fast becoming an important component to consider if you’re serious about ranking these days. Google designed it for a reason. On the surface, it appears to be about user experience, but at the end of the day, it’s all about the bottom line.

Google has recently coupled authorship with its social networking platform, and using both is a smart way to increase your chances of ranking and being recognized all over your niche.

Social And Search: Shrouded In Mystery

Assuming you know exactly how Google’s algorithm for ranking websites works is pretty much akin to shooting yourself in the foot. No one really knows the exact truth, all we can do is reverse engineer, carry out strategic tests by isolating various components, and make educated best guesses based on how those results impact your rankings. Often times this produces tangible real world data for us, sometimes it’s hard to tell.

With not too much hard data to rely on, it’s next to impossible to say for a fact that an active Facebook Fan Page will help you get ahead in the search engine rankings  – or for that matter, that a vibrant Twitter stream will place you on page one of Google for your chosen keyword.

However there certainly are strong indications that these social factors will have a positive impact on your rankings, and as such should become an integral part of your overall SEO campaign (and online marketing strategy in general for that matter).

Here’s what a great Search Engine Watch article had to say about the matter recently:

To rank based on tweets, Likes and +1s may not make a whole lot of sense. Does one count a share or a like? What if those change? Anyone remember that before +1s there was Buzz? How about the Twitter firehose getting turned off? Oh look, a new site called Pinterest! See where I’m headed?

It makes more sense to look at the users (entities) in the social graph instead of the actual sites where they’re active. Search needs to be scalable and one would have to imagine that reliance on any third party site, metric or specific instance (tweet, +1, like etc) seems a bad choice.

Should you stop all your SEO endeavors and just spam social and links? Probably not a good idea. Ultimately there are many reasons to embrace social media in your marketing endeavors. Most of them have little to do with SEO. Embrace it because it makes sense to your business, not because it has magical ranking powers, and you’ll make out fine *.

So as we said, social media does have a big place in your overall marketing strategy. Take that to the bank. As for your search engine optimization strategy?

The indications are certainly there, but to initiate a social media campaign purely for SEO benefits could prove to be the wrong approach.

But wait – there is one major caveat to this assertion. Enter Google Author Rank.

Google+ And Author Rank – The Social Loophole

Google+ is fast becoming the most important social network to use if you’re serious about securing a place in the Google’s search engine rankings. The reason is not the social media network alone – it’s the powerful way it’s tied to Google’s authorship database.

It’s speculated that soon (if not already) Author Rank will work in conjunction with PageRank to determine how much Google will trust your site. The higher the rank, the more Google trusts your little home on the ‘net.

Although this is all “new” information, the idea of Author Rank is actually one that Google’s been kicking around for quite some time now. In fact, Google filed a patent back in 2005 with language that essentially defined authorship and Google+! Only back then, it was called “agent rank”, and Google didn’t have a reliable identification system big enough to implement the methodology.

Well, it does now.

Google+ is attempting to become much more than a social network – don’t let the smoke and mirrors fool you. It’s a massive-scale user identification system and personal information powerhouse, and it’s gaining some serious momentum.

When you join Google+ and create your authorship credentials, odds are you have a greater chance of ranking your content than the anonymous site owners in your niche. The assumption here is that this is because Google knows who you are and thus, how to rank your content. It weeds out spammers and allows Google to provide more reliable, relevant content to its users.

It’s a win-win situation in that respect.

Some think Google+ data may play into future algorithms as well. For example, the more circles you’re in, the higher you may have a chance to rank. This metric could help Google figure out how much G+ users are sharing your content across its network, which can thereby be used to measure its popularity.

At this point, however, this is merely speculation. But it would certainly make more sense for Google to weight their own social media data more heavily than that of say Twitter or Facebook.

Your Plan of Attack

I’d suggest that ranking is going to hinge more on Page Rank coupled with Author Rank going forward. If you haven’t already, set up a Google+ account. Make sure to include a clear, easily recognizable headshot you’d feel comfortable showing up in search results. Use this picture as your avatar and fill out information about yourself.

Then, you should activate your authorship status. This involves linking your content published across the web to Google+, and you can do it one of two ways. First, you can use your email address to link the content by entering it on Google’s Authorship page.

If you don’t have an email address on the website that hosts your content (think guest posting or staff writing situations, for example), then you can use the second option. Here’s Google’s official instructions about how you can get that done:

Whether you’re looking to secure new joint venture partners or affiliates to promote your products, get your articles published on third party websites, or secure linking partnerships with others in your niche, many people seem to really struggle to just get a response from people, let alone get them to actually take action if they do.

So how do you get people to stand up and pay attention to your proposals and more importantly take action?

No matter what you’re trying to achieve, it’s all about adding value and stacking the dice in your favor. Put your best foot forward and make it easy.

Here’s a pretty good example to chew over. An interesting email hit my inbox the other week. It was a submission for a guest post contribution to Online Marketing Today. We get a lot of those every week and only a very small proportion of those get published.

This one really stood out above all others during that week however.

The email was short and sweet…

“Hi Duncan, hope you are doing well!

Please find enclosed a piece for your blog. I hope you like it.

As soon as you publish it, please send me its URL so that I can send that to our social media team to share your blog on XXXXXX’s Facebook, Twitter and Google+ networks, having over 100,000+ follower / fans.

Looking forward to hear from you.

If you have any questions, please let me know…”

Anything stand out to you?

The added value this person was offering should – they would promote the article to their own (quite large) social media networks should we choose to publish it.

What’s more they included the article as an attachment to the email and it met all of our minimum requirements and publishing guidelines. This means that it could be reviewed then and there and it would be EASY to actually publish.

Now the social media promotion aspect of that is fantastic added value.

Who wouldn’t pay closer attention to it and give it reviewing priority over a stock standard “same old” submission?

It also implies a certain degree of quality before the article has been reviewed. If they’re prepared to promote the article to their social media networks, clearly they see it as valuable enough to promote to their own audiences.

Now compare that with the standard approach most people use when trying to get articles published on other people’s blogs. It generally goes along the lines of something like this…

“Hi – I’m a freelance writer for XXXXXX and I’d like to write an article for your blog about (topic X or topic X or topic X). It will be unique and written exclusively for you. All THAT I REQUIRE is that you include a link back to X website in return…”

I’ve highlighted an pretty *negative* aspect to that approach – “All THAT I REQUIRE”

Where as the first person made it extremely easy for us to review and publish the article, AND added tremendous value which gave it reviewing priority, this second person actually requires something of us to get exposure to OUR audience.

That mindset is backwards.

Its common knowledge and industry standard that you attribute the author of any content submission you might decide to publish. In fact, if this person had read our guidelines they would’ve seen exactly how we do this.

So not only is it redundant to even mention it in the email, it’s also a negative approach to make a “conditional offer” on first contact. That’s not really a good thing when you’re competing with 100+ other submissions that most popular websites receive on a weekly basis.

SIDENOTE: At least this person included links to articles they’d had published elsewhere. It’s bad when people don’t include anything to review. You have absolutely no idea about the quality of their writing, or what qualifies them to write about said topic in the first place. If you’re into guest blogging, you want to make it as easy as possible to get published. If you including the ready to publish actual with your submission it makes it easy for the publisher to review and publish it. The easier you make things, the more likely they are to happen.

But this isn’t about guest blogging.

It’s about adding value to make people pay stand up and pay attention no matter what you’re trying to achieve. That was just a fantastic recent example and I’m sure that person gets published a heck of a lot.

So how else do you add value?

Let’s say you’re looking to secure high level joint venture partners for product promotions.

Depending on how competitive your niche is, and how unique your product is, you might struggle if you simply offer 50% commissions.

Like websites that get hundreds of guest blogging submissions each week, industry leaders get inundated with stock standard JV offers on a daily basis as well.

In fact it gets more difficult to secure deals with JV partners if you don’t add real value.

Not only are you competing with a bunch of other people trying to get access to their resources, you’re also competing for proven revenue generation methods that the potential partner already has in place.

If they already have conversion & earning data for a product they’re promoting, it’s a big leap of faith to simply promote something blind and hope it converts, based on not much more than the assumptions of the person putting the offer to them.

Many people think that by increasing the commission percentages they’re increasing the added value. That’s true to an extent – but is that enough?

Higher commissions are becoming the industry standard.

For example 50%-75% is basically a standard “affiliate commission” these days in the digital product (information / software etc) industry. If you don’t differentiate yourself, you’re basically approaching these joint venture partners and asking them to become a standard affiliate.

So how else can we add value in this case?

Here are a few ideas (keeping in mind, where appropriate, these should always be backed up with proper numbers, statistics and conversion data)…

If the partner has their own product or service you can offer to do a cross promotion to your own mailing lists. Many people twist this around and promote for the partner first to get them results up front. They then get in touch and start a dialogue – although do keep in mind this doesn’t mean they owe you anything – go in with the right attitude.

If you have a lead generation sequence setup, you can offer to plug their product into your autoresponder sequence.

You could offer to plug their product onto the backend of your own sales funnel.

If your business model allows (i.e. a recurring payment product and therefore commission) you could offer 100% commissions on the first month of all referrals, reducing to a standard JV rate on the recurring payments.

If you have a decent social media network you can offer to push the partner’s product or blog content out to that audience for them. Much like the guest blogging example already discussed.

Although you’d want to be sure of your numbers before you attempt this one, you could put some cold hard cash up front. For example, offering the partner money for their advertising space to guarantee they’ll get at least some return when testing your partnership offer. When they see it converts as well as you’ve said, and they’d make more money actually promoting it as a partner, then it becomes a no brainer for them.

…the list goes on and is really only limited by your imagination and what you can provide to add value. You can also enhance that further by combining a number of value adding techniques.

The whole idea is to put your best foot forward and stand out from the masses.

Stack the odds in your favor.

Often times you just want to get a response from people so at least you can get a dialogue going and start to build a real relationship from there.

And this mindset applies no matter what you’re trying to accomplish.

Even a simple linking partnership with another website can be enhanced with added value.

If you have a mailing list or newsletter you could offer to mention the website you’re trying to secure a link from to your readers. Depending on how badly you want that link partnership you might do that long term – i.e. include a permanent link in every newsletter you send.

Right away that would make your linking proposals stand above 99% of all other proposals that just about every webmaster out there receives on a daily basis.

Do you think that would make them pay more attention to your offer?

Sure it would.

Once you get into the mindset of “how can I add more value?” doors will open.

So, tell me, do you really add value to your proposals and if so how?

Leave your comments below…

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Article By Duncan Carver: Brought to you in association with HostPapa. Since launching in 2006, HostPapa has offered reliable, budget-friendly, easy-to-use web hosting solutions for small to medium-sized businesses. Powered by 100% green renewable energy.
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If you want to improve your return on investment when advertising with Google Adwords, it pays to know exactly how “Quality Score” impacts your Adwords campaigns.

Google Adwords relevancy is carefully gauged through internal metrics which are used to determine whether or not said advertisement will give the end user enough satisfaction when keywords which trigger your advertisement are searched.

Wisely named Quality Score, ecommerce webmasters and business owners, in general, have spent more than they care to over the life of Google AdWords – by no fault of Google.

Instead of plotting to take our business elsewhere, we simply need some validity behind the quality score semantics and whether they’ll really affect our overall advertisement spend, our advertisement position, and proper targeting of customers genuinely interested in the products or services contained within 25 words of ad space.

How Google Arrives At Quality Score For Your Adwords Ads

Since the general idea of search engines revolves around bringing quality results to the researcher, advertisers are graded heavily on numerous factors which directly contribute to your final 0-10 score.  The basics which Google uses as mitigating factors in Quality Score include:

• PreviousCTR(click-thru rate) of keywords and displayed URL’s;
• Relevance of bid keyword in reference to ad copy and website;
• Quality, ease of navigation and load time of landing page;
• Success in geographically targeted advertisements and device targeting;
• How well you’ve done on Display Network and Google site in general.

These decisive factors are jumbled into another algorithm to spit out your 1-10 keyword score.  Once this score is assigned, you can tweak the varied parameters above to raise your score, or lower it, and literally perpetuate your advertisement position and total cost spent.

Professional AdWords specialists have an excellent feel for quality score in relevance to website being displayed and can reduce unwanted clicks simply by tweaking the little things your advertisement does.

Understanding Your Worth In Clicks

An obvious goal of advertisement-wise professionals is spending the least while getting the most return possible, and rightfully so.  Through several processes webmasters can propagate using test ads and other analytical devices, your advertisement budget can be stretched beyond reason.

By setting realistic Returns on Ad Spend (ROAS), one can achieve higher quality scores while increasing click value.  To gauge our progress, dig up a current campaign to see how much you’ve spent in relation to what you could be spending if advertisement goals are previously defined.

It may look something like this:

If you notice, we took an advertisement budget of $5000 and disseminated how we spent it, arriving at much higher CPC’s than we’d hoped for.  By properly adjusting content, keyword selection and using the suggested CPC model pre-planned, we tripled our clicks while increasing the quality score without driving past our ROAS.

Taking your current advertisement campaign apart and viewing these metrics could stretch your click worth beyond previously engaged campaigns.  Although your suggested bid is sometimes below this target, and you’ll perhaps sway up and down in quality score, this table indicates how prior budget setting,CPC and ROAS can be maintained through Quality Score increases.

How Quality Score Manipulates Ad Positioning

Much like an auction, certain keywords require certain bids to remain within the top ten of advertisement rank – and Google requires your bid to meet or exceed first page standards.

Quality scores affect your CPC, and the veracity of your keywords and website content will dictate your CPC through overall quality score; in other words, they both feed into each other’s prime directives.  So, we will paint two more scenarios to see how Quality Scores adjudicate what keyword auction entry price to expect to be paying in two separate instances.

• Scenario A: Johnny operates a bike shop, and wants to offer customers 15% off Schwinn bicycles through December.  He grabs his advertising budget and heads to AdWords.  After an excellent ad and Google’s discovery of website relevancy in relation to chosen keywords, he is assigned quality scores of 7 for each keyword.  Current first page bid is $.47.  Multiplying QS x $.47, we see his position will be 3.
• Scenario B: Kim runs an exotic jewelry shop in which an advertisement should put new customers into her storefront immediately.  She heads to Google AdWords with an unstable load of keywords and verbose advertisement, costing her Quality Scores to dip to 3 for her keyword selections.  Since she wants to be number 3, she will have to either meet or outbid $.38 for that position.  So, we multiplied her ugly QS of 3 by the current cost of that position, arriving at $1.14 as her expected CPC for Ad Rank #3.

As you can see, your Quality Score manipulates your cost per click and advertisement position, gauging whether your desired position placement will be short-lived, or well-spent.

The whole process started when each advertiser either took the time to prepare all of their eggs before leaving the market with broken baskets, as  the saying goes.  You can either wastefully use AdWords and get nowhere, or take the time to raise quality scores before putting advertisements live.

In the above scenarios, this is how much 100 Clicks costs based on $1000 of ad revenues:

Given the same advertisement budget, two different businesses can head into opposite directions with improperly raised Quality Scores, the main reason start ups lose their tails on advertisement budgets before their doors ever open.

Common Quality Score Errors And Remedies

If you’ve ever contemplated, shown angst for or even gave up on Quality Scores, you maybe committing errors you didn’t know affected those scores.  We’ll disseminate common errors when beginning AdWords campaigns and proper remedies one can expect to fix these intricate yet vitally problematic areas:

Quality score low because of geographical selections of advertisement - Keywords for a selected area are historically ranked by search. Make sure the area chosen has a wide range of popularity in searching for your product or service which can be discovered through Google Trends or Keyword Tool.

Quality Score low due to on-page optimization -  Before you advertisement and ensuing keywords are ranked, Google deciphers you website’s load times, keywords, meta data and excessive JavaScript. Make sure your pages load fast, have no errors and contain accurate keywords reflective of content, images or products offered.

Quality Score low because of other ads being ran - Google grades past and present advertisements to gauge current keyword quality scores.  If previous ads carried weak overall scores, your current advertisements could pay the price.  You should either delete older ads or, if still running, tweak those ads to perform better so future ads aren’t affected.

Quality Score low due to low keyword search volume in selected region - Properly researching keywords using the Google Keyword Tool will render phrases, or singular words, which historically receive heavy monthly search volume.  Make sure you’ve chosen top searched keywords with LOW competition for best results and lower CPC’s.

Google has an intricate tool if you hover over your Quality Score which will suggest methods of increasing the score and lowering your overall CPC.

The Bottom Line

Google’s AdWords system perpetuates the ‘double-edged sword’ personification through penalties and praises.  Should your Quality Score plummet and advertisements continue to run, expect returns to disappear along with overall received clicks.

Ecommerce professionals, who spend the time to improve website errors, research their regions for keyword popularity and work on their quality scores before bidding, will receive excellent first page placement for pennies, amplifying both their bottom line return on investment and their business wholly.

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Guest Post - Tim Wilson works as content manager at HostPapa, a website hosting company serving over 100,000 customers around the world. Since launching in 2006, HostPapa has offered reliable, budget-friendly, easy-to-use web hosting solutions for small to medium-sized businesses.
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If you’re a webmaster or SEO specialist, then you’re likely aware of the massive sea change happening in the search engines right now. Google recently ushered in a wave of radical algorithm changes, and engineers have designed the updates to destroy websites that dare to manipulate the rankings in any way.

Fair? No.

Necessary? Yes.

Like it or not Google needs to constantly stay a step ahead of blackhat spammers and marketers who attempt to climb the SERPs artificially. Most have ranked by way of cheap and risky parlor tricks such as keyword stuffing, content spinning, and really low quality link blasting for years now.

Google’s changes – and promises of more to come in rapid-fire succession – have effectively killed these techniques deader than Build My Rank (low blow, I know). This is why Internet marketers have gone back to the drawing board en masse to update their strategies following the recent updates.

Many innocent website owners with perfectly acceptable content and above-board SEO practices have fallen through the cracks alongside the black hat guys. No doubt they’re victims of Google’s “shoot first, ask questions later never” approach to algorithm changes.

You can read every SEO tutorial you can dig up online and knock yourself out analyzing traffic patterns and bounce rates, but one truth remains. Google is changing. Dramatically. And the trend won’t be stopping any time soon.

Not one SEO guru has all the answers that will guarantee you a top spot in the SERPs for life, and even if they did – the info would be outdated as soon as Google announces the next big “surprise” update. That’s why it’s time to seriously consider switching gears or at they very least, not keeping all your traffic generating eggs in one basket.

If you’re really serious about marketing your website and scoring a never-ending flow of targeted traffic, then community-building is the name of the game.

Disclaimer: This is a serious technique, and you can accomplish it best with one website at a time. Yes, the process is scalable and you can outsource some tasks, but – at the outset – you must do most of the heavy lifting on your own.

Choose A Passion Niche, Not A Keyword

One big thing Google’s trying to force webmasters to move away from – choosing entire mini niches based entirely upon search volume and cost per click (CPC). Think exact match domain names for really specific keyword terms.

Don’t think for one second that the passionless website you created about “Nursing Careers In Arizona” will continue to stand the test of time. If you search for keywords and base everything on a topic in which you have no interest, outsource the content creation to sub-standard $5 article writers, and start a heartless marketing campaign, you won’t last long.

Two reasons this kind of website will tank.

First, Google’s ranking signals are increasingly social, and without a community to lift your website up, there’s no way Googlebot can adequately judge how others feel about your site. Moreover, you’ll be hard-pressed to garner shares, likes, and +1’s if your website features five content spun versions of “Requirements For A Nursing License In Arizona.”

It’s just not going to happen.

Make sense?

Good, stay with me.

Second reason:  Google’s Penguin update made website backlink profiles uuber important. Like worth-their-weight-in-gold important.

That’s why you’re seeing many marketers doing whatever they can to get the almighty guest post from relevant websites in their niche (it’s not surprising – you can find out why guest blog making makes financial sense for your online marketing strategy here – it’s well worth the read).

However, when you’re relatively unknown and your website elicits a chorus of “meh” from your visitors, you’ll have a hard time convincing fellow webmasters to accept your guest posts on their sites and blogs.

Bottom line: push all the noise to the side and think about your biggest passion.

Doesn’t matter what it is – everyone has something. Make that your website. Position yourself around your passion.

Find Your People

Something awfully curious happens when you create a website with true passion behind it. Even if you’re not the greatest writer, your love for the subject and deep knowledge of the technical aspects will shine through every single piece you create.

Even better, other site owners in your niche will see the love too, and that will cause them to bond with you instantly over a common shared interest.

Make sure your blog posts, content, tutorials and articles are in-depth.

Ensure they’re feature-length (somewhere around 800 – 1000+ words apiece) and include lots of great mixed content (think screenshots, stock photos, bite-sized chunks of text, and videos). Don’t pull information from other sources and merely present it as your own, however. Include your own organization and add your analysis to the article.

Here’s what you’ll need to do in order to get proactive with it.

After you’ve created your website and posted some great content, you need to find your people. Blogger Nikki Parkinson is a frequent keynote speaker at social media conferences and the winner of Australia’s Best Blog 2011.

Listen to what she has to say about interacting with others in your niche:

Nikki recommends that you use your content to engage, and not just broadcast. In between posting on your own blog, and promoting those blog posts on social media channels, you should be engaging with your readers, responding to their comments, and posting on other blogs.

You should also aim to post consistently on your blog – starting with once per week and building it up to more regular posts. Nikki uses a blogging calendar to record her ideas for content, draft posts and schedule her posts, and she now posts daily *.

Before you can do this, however, you need to find your people.

To do it from scratch, build a small list of keywords that people would be most likely to search for in your niche. Don’t worry, we’re not doing SEO here – we’re investigating the niche. Run the keywords through Google’s Keyword Tool and make a note of the ones with the largest search volume.

Once you have your keywords nailed down, enter them one by one into Google’s search bar followed by the word “blog” (or “powered by wordpress”) and carefully sift through the results.

You’re looking for the most popular blogs in your niche. Create a list of the blogs that occupy the top spots and visit each one. Look for those that allow for commenting. Record them in a spreadsheet. You’re making your very own GPS for your niche; a way to fast-track your networking efforts to expedite results.

This next part takes the most time.

Scan the comments of recent posts on the blogs from your list and keep an eye out for repeat commenters with links back to their own blogs. If they’re in a complementary niche, add these blogs to your list as well. At first, twenty or so blogs in your niche should be sufficient. Target blogs with an Alexa score under 200,000 and a PageRank of at least 2 (preferably higher).

Create a spreadsheet and list each blog one by one.

If you comment on five blogs per day, you can rotate through the list and keep track of which blogs you need to leave comments on each day. This is not primarily for link building – it’s for exposure. Make sure to leave thoughtful, small paragraph-sized comments each time. Something thought provoking enough to catch the attention of the website owner & adds value to the discussion.

Repeat the process for at least a month. After a week or so, you’ll notice a trend.

People from other sites and blogs in your niche will read your comments and begin to reciprocate your interest by visiting your website and commenting in kind.

Others will join in and your traffic will pick up.

After a while, you’ll open the door to a flood of opportunities to write free guest posts on your contacts’ blogs. Other blogs in your niche will begin to link to your stuff organically.

Opportunities will land in your inbox with alarming frequency.

Once you get a reputation in your niche, the sky’s the limit.

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Article By Duncan Carver: Brought to you in association with The Social Networking Academy - A Comprehensive Training Program Showing You How To Drive More Traffic To Your Website Using The Power Of Facebook And Social Media - Click Here Now For More Details
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