By Fabian Tan

Want to get some serious viral traffic to your blog? Everyone these days is talking about podcasting and how cool it is. The secrets of podcasting are out there, but you have to know where to look. You may have thought that this medium isn’t for your niche, but really you can do a viral podcast for anything from Gardening to Marketing!

Here are 3 secrets of podcasting that will get you on the road to more traffic and notoriety in your niche:

1. Don’t Spend Money On Expensive Software

You don’t have to drop a lot of money (or any at all) to put together a super podcast. Download Audacity, a free audio editor and recorder, and it will cover all the software you’ll need. There are plenty of web tutorials on creating podcasts with Audacity, just Google it.

2. Record Something You’re Passionate About

You may be able to fake interest in purple widgets through your writing, but it’s much harder in your voice. If you’re going to break into podcasting, start off talking about something you are really into. Then, once you get the hang of it, you can start to consider those purple widgets.

3. Advertise, Advertise, Advertise

Of the many secrets of podcasting, this one tip may be your most valuable: it’s all about letting people know your podcast exists. People love to HEAR knew things and will come to your blog just to listen to what you have to SAY. So hit those relevant forums and blogs and make sure to Stumble and Digg your podcasts.

4. Directories, Directories, Directories

Also, don’t forget to submit your podcast to the many directories out there that only contain podcast material!

There are many secrets of podcasting that would fill pages, but this should get you started and drive fresh new traffic to your site!

By Kenton Newby

An increasing number of people are now using the Internet to search for local businesses that provide the products and services they need.  However, most local business owners easily find themselves confused and frustrated when trying to figure out how to tap into the growing number of searches for that represent hot prospects for their business.  Here are a few tips to help you cut through the noise and start getting real results from your local SEO efforts.

1. Use the Right Tools to Choose Your Keywords

The first thing to consider is what keywords your prospects are using to search for your type of products or services. Specifically, is anyone searching for those types of products and how many searches are being done per month.

Google recently started offering more of their search volume data and their free keyword tool is an excellent resource for finding out how many people are searching for terms related to your business. You might also get some ideas for misspellings or synonyms that people use in addition to the words you come up with on your own. These can be pleasantly surprising and profitable.

2. Focus on Local Keywords

If you’re primarily a local business, you’ll probably only want to focus on local search terms anyway. But this is great because, at least for now, local search terms for many businesses are easier to get higher rankings for compared to broader terms targeting customers nationwide. For instance, it’s probably easier to obtain high rankings for “Maryland carpet cleaner” than “carpet cleaner”. And if you’re only serving a particular geographic area, you probably don’t want website visitors from outside that area anyway. The good news is that the keyword tool mentioned above also allows you to see how many people are searching for local terms like these. You may be surprised at how many people search for local terms…a trend that is likely to increase over the coming years.

3. Spy on the Competition (Both Local and National Players)

I’m sure you’ve heard the quote from Sun Tzu’s “The Art of War” which states, “Know your enemy and know yourself and you need not fear the result of a hundred battles…“. That same type of thinking applies to business too and finding out what your competition is doing online can be extremely valuable. Again, the keyword tool that Google offers can be a great way to do this by simply entering a competitor’s website address instead of a list of keywords. Google will scan the competing site and show you a list of keywords that Google thinks that site is about. This can be a goldmine of info since your competitors might be focusing on keywords (and aspects of your target market) that you’ve mistakenly neglected.

4. Create Good Content (And Consider Using in Offline Marketing Too)

Once you have an idea of what keywords you want to target, it’s time to start creating content. This content can be (and should be) in multiple formats including text articles, PDF reports, audio and video. In fact, one of the best strategies is to take one article idea and develop content around that idea in a number of formats. So you could write an article, record it as an audio, create a quick video and revamp it as a blog post. This is a great way to get the most out of a great content idea.

5. Syndicate your content

Once you have your content created, you should syndicate it. That simply means distributing your content throughout the web. So you can submit your article to high-quality article directories like EZineArticles.com, post your video to YouTube, add your audio to iTunes as a podcast and put a blog post on your own website. Imagine someone searching for a keyword related to your market and the first results that come back are (1) your YouTube video, (2) your EzineArticles article, (3) the post on your blog and (4) someone else who has used your video on their high-ranking website. No matter where that visitor goes, all roads lead back to your site!

6. Don’t submit to 1000’s of search engines

One thing you’ll find many search engine marketing companies offering is to submit your site to some ridiculous amount of search engines. Quick question - How many search engines do YOU use? Probably only one or two, and most likely, either Google, Yahoo or MSN. So there’s no need to submit to 1000’s of search engines. In fact, the three just listed account for probably 95% of all search traffic and most of the others are complete junk or useless directories. Targeted directory submissions are okay, but don’t pay for some mass submission pitch that’s doomed to fail from the start.

7. Submit press releases

Submitting press releases is a great way to generate buzz online about your business. Not only that, it can be a great way to get links from high-quality news sites and other sites related to your business. Keep it professional and not too sales-ey.

By Adam Maxwell

For those marketers wanting more website traffic, and let’s face it who wouldn’t, the joint venture or JV sounds appealing.

JVs do indeed work to bring traffic, but it’s worth noting the difference between an affiliate and a joint venture partner…

Many people who have not done a joint venture before think that it involves you striking a deal with someone that has a large customer base, them emailing those customers about your product, which brings loads of traffic to your website, and you splitting the sales figures.

Wrong.

That isn’t how it works, and approaching potential partners with that kind of proposition will put people off as it shows you have not understood the concept.

Many people just fire off a few emails to big names in the marketing industry, and then simply give up when they get the inevitable lack of response.

Some people may well mail their list about your product, and take commission from any sales, but that makes them an affiliate.

Anyone can do this with your product if it is available via affiliate marketplaces like clickbank. 
They haven’t actually done a deal with you, or acted jointly with you.

Offering someone an increased commission just for them is a good way to increase your affiliate traffic and sales, yes, but that does not make it a joint venture either!

It simply means you are using the sound technique of searching out so called ’super affiliates’ who have big lists of prospects that may be interested in your product.

So that’s what affiliate selling is as opposed to a JV, so what does constitute a JV?

A joint venture is when two or more people agree to be involved together on a project from start to finish. 
They may create the product together, they may divide the product creation and marketing, maybe someone has detailed knowledge about a narrow niche, and the other partner can generate traffic in that niche.

This is the real value of joint ventures, combining peoples’ talents to create a project that benefits each member of the JV, plus of course the customers.

The person with the knowledge gets to make money from that knowledge just by passing it on with others doing the leg work.

The marketer get to tap into a profitable niche and make handsome sales.

The customer gets to learn new knowledge, which they happily pay for

Now *that’s* a joint venture!

If you are looking at JVs, then you will probably either have to create a new product with your partner, or redo your existing one to make them fully involved.

Proposing a JV can be as simple as sending an email, but it should never be approached that simply. You need to research the potential partner, to understand why they would want to JV with you, so you can tailor your proposal to appeal to them.

Not quite as easy as it may first seem, but not necessarily that hard either, a properly done JV can indeed bring a whole lot more website traffic for you.

By Mosiekk Conley

So your traffic is slow or even worse… non-existent.

You may be asking yourself “How can I get FREE targeted traffic to my site?”

It is a question that a lot of people ask. You are definitely not alone in your quest to generate traffic without going broke in the process.

There are many different ways to generate traffic to your website. One of the fastest and easiest ways is through the use of viral email marketing. Viral email marketing, also known as opt-in list marketing, is simply the use of email to virally spread your marketing message. It is one of the fastest ways to get your marketing message in front of as many people as possible.

One of the more popular examples of viral email marketing campaigns would be Hotmail(R) who started by offering free email accounts to anyone who wanted them. The way it spread was at the bottom of each email sent from Hotmail (R) there was a little tagline that offered a free email account to anyone that wanted one.

The more emails that were sent the more Hotmail’s message was being seen. It was simply ingenious.

You can use this same principle in your own business. If you write articles or product reviews you can send them out to your opt-in lists with a short paragraph encouraging your readers to pass it along.

The more people spread your article or product review the more your marketing message is seen.

Viral email marketing is a simple and very inexpensive form of internet marketing. Knowing the subtle ways to get your message out there to be seen is a skill that every aspiring Internet marketer should know. Once you learn how to effectively get more people to view your marketing message, you will increase your chances of success. Viral email marketing is only one type of viral marketing available, but when combined with several other types of viral marketing methods you can increase the rate at which your message spreads.

By Denise Wakeman and Patsi Krakoff

You’ve got your blog set up and you’ve started posting pithy, useful information that your niche market would benefit from and enjoy. Days go by, you keep publishing, but no one comments and your traffic stats are barely registering. What do you do?

Like any website you own, you must do some blog promotion to start driving traffic to your site. Here are 16 steps, in no particular order of importance, that you can start doing now to get traffic moving to your blog.

1. Set up a Bloglet subscription form on your blog and invite everyone in your network to subscribe: family, friends, colleagues, clients, associates.

Http://www.bloglet.com

2. Set up a feed on MyYahoo.com so your site gets regularly spidered by the Yahoo search engine (see tutorial on http://www.biztipsblog.com)

http://www.my.yahoo.com

3. Read and comment on other blogs that are in your target niche. Don’t write things like “nice blog” or “great post.” Write intelligent, useful comments with a link to your blog.

4. Use Ping-0-matic to ping blog directories. Do this every time you publish.

http://www.pingomatic.com

5. Submit your blog to traditional search engines: 
http://www.submitfire.com

6. Submit your blog to blog directories. The most comprehensive list of directories is on this site:

http://www.masternewmedia.org/rss/top55/

Tip: Create a form to track your submissions; this can take several hours when you first start so schedule an hour a day for submitting or hire a VA to do it for you.

7. Add a link to your blog in your email signature file.

8. Put a link to your blog on every page of your website.

9. If you publish a newsletter, make sure you have a link to your blog in every issue.

10. Include a link to your blog as a standard part of all outgoing correspondence such as autoresponder sequences, sales letters, reports, white papers, etc.

11. Print your blog URL on your business cards, brochures and flyers.

12. Make sure you have an RSS feed URL that people can subscribe to. 
The acronym RSS means Rich Site Summary, or some may consider its meaning as Really Simple Syndication. It is a document type that lists updates of websites or blogs available for syndication. These RSS documents (also known as ‘feeds’) may be read using aggregators (news readers). RSS feeds may show headlines only or both headlines and summaries.

To learn how news aggregators/RSS readers work, see this site: http://www.rss-specifications.com/rss-readers.htm

13. Post often to keep attracting your subscribers to come back and refer you to others in their networks; include links to other blogs, articles and websites in your posts

14. Use Trackback links when you quote or refer to other blog posts. What is TrackBack? Essentially what this does is send a message from one server to another server letting it know you have posted a reference to their post. The beauty is that a link to your blog is now included on their site.

15. Write articles to post around the web in article directories. Include a link to your blog in the author info box (See example in our signature below).

16. Make a commitment to blog everyday. 10 minutes a day can help increase your traffic as new content attracts search engine spiders. Put it on your calendar as a task every day at the same time.

Tip: Use a hit counter to track your visitor stats: how many unique visitors, how many page views, average length of visit. You can get a free hit counter at http://www.sitemeter.com