List Building Strategies Series!

Welcome to the Free list building strategies for YOU!

Here is the first of the bi-weekly mini-series on List Building Strategies. Strategy #1

 

Internet Traffic Now

This is how to get the traffic you need fast! 

 

Traffic is the most important part of marketing online. Traffic is what creates a successful online business. Without it, you're going to be starving in the world of Internet marketing.

Internet marketers are always learning new tricks to build traffic. Many people have been doing this sort of thing for years now and can quickly generate interest by posting videos or other content on the web. Those are the people who are usually competing with you for eyeballs, especially if they are in your market niche. So, first you want to get a good idea of who is ranking at the top of Google using the keywords you've targeted, and then you want to find ways to copy them so that people searching for their content find yours instead.

 

This can be done with articles, videos, & any type of social media. It doesn't take a brain surgeon to figure out, and it can be very effective because much of the work of attracting attention is already done for you. You just have to redirect that attention back to your site instead.

 

The first thing you do is go to the Google search engine and insert the keyword(s) you are targeting. Then browse the first five pages of the search results to see who has gotten top ranking. These are the people who you are competing against for those keywords. 

 

Knowing that, you can start visiting their sites to see if you can find a way to use their popularity to increase your own. The simple way to do that is to go each site and see if they have a blog you can comment on, a discussion forum you can add to, or any other way to get your name in their site, with an appropriate link back to your website, if possible.

 

The next thing you want to do is create copy that is very similar to what they are using to be successful. You want to use similar keywords and similar topics. You don't want to plagiarize, but you do want to paraphrase and re-market the same type of content that worked for them.

 

Next, you want to find out who linked to these sites and content which made them go up in the Google ranking. Again, you use the Google search engine and look at these 5 free tools for competitor keyword research. Click here

  

This will give you an idea of who has linked to them. Here you are interested in seeing which social marketing sites are helping them to rank better. And then, you go into those sites and add your own bookmark or link there to direct people into going to your site and also to bring up the ranking on your content. If you happen to be looking at a YouTube video, you would find the links at the Statistics & Data section given in YouTube for each video, instead of Google. Either way, you want to know who is linking and then try to get yourself listed there too.

 

You will also want to know who the people are that showed interest in these competitors. That's your target demographic too. You can do this for your competitor and for the links they go to. All you have to do is visit Alexa.com to get a good insight into the demographics of any site online.

 

Alexa.com

 

At Alexa.com you can insert the URL of any site on the Internet and search the traffic rankings by selecting that option. It will come up with the site and a brief description of what that site is about. That already tells you something about what kind of people your competitors and their links are attracting. Maybe it is a technology site or a business site, whichever, you now have that little piece of information stored away as one of the types of people who frequent your competitors' sites.

 

Under that you will see a breakdown of the traffic by country. This gives you an idea of the national demographic you may be targeting. You may think all sites are geared towards the US market, but that's not so. Once you understood who is coming to visit your competitors' sites, you will have a better understanding of how to build and market your own sites.

 

One last way to find places that can help you drive traffic to your site with Alexa.com is to use their Top 500 Sites list. It gives you a breakdown of which sites have the most traffic, separated by country of origin. This will allow you to target these sites to add comments, contribute content, and generally try to elbow your way into the limelight. It is located here: http://www.alexa.com/tools

  

Quantacast.com

 

To further your understanding, you will want to visit quantacast.com for more market research on your competitors and their links. This site gives you a much better breakdown of the demographics in very minute detail. So, once you have some good candidates to research further, you add them to market research list you will do on Quantacast.com. All you have to do is type in the URL of the link you are interested in researching, and Quantacast can let you know what the gender, age, ethnicity, income, and college education is for all the people visiting that site. It will also give you the monthly traffic frequency too.

 

If you are looking for demographics, Quantacast.com is a goldmine of information!

 

Quantacast also has a very nice feature that allows you to see the other sites your audience is investigating online. This gives you a handy-dandy way to find even more sites to research to see how they are attracting their visitors. Not only that, but you can visit these sites like you did the original site and see if there is any way you can add a comment, a link, or any other interaction that can drive traffic back to your site. And, don't limit your contributions to these sites to small things, if the return might be high. Think about submitting videos and podcasts too if that's allowed.

 

Strategies Research

 

The best way to do market research is to stalk your competitors and see what they're doing. There are a number of different ways you can get that information and then use it to your advantage. It does take work and persistence. However, think how quickly your traffic can grow if you manage to find a site that is quickly building their audience and your content, along with backlinks to your site, is plastered all over their pages. You will quickly zoom up the ladder of visibility and you will see the results for your efforts.

 

Here is a step-by-step way to approach your market research in a methodical manner so as to use your time to the best advantage:  

1. Understand your market niche and keywords you are targeting,
2. Go to Google and type in the keyword to find your competitors on the first five search result pages,
3. Visit each of these to see if you can add content and backlinks to the site to increase your traffic,
4. Take note of the most popular topics/content on these sites so you can later copy them,
5. Target a few of these for copycat efforts,
6. Check out those few for their target market by visiting Alexa.com,
7. Use Quantacast.com to find out more about the demographics of these sites and what other sites might have an interest in that content,
8. Build content that is very similar to the sites you've targeted,
9. Submit it to the same people who linked to those sites, using similar keywords, titles, etc,
10. Reply to comments and build a buzz around your content.

Time to get started with this strategy!

Click here for the list building strategies worksheet. (printable PDF format) 

 

If you have any questions, feel free to call or email.

 

Thanks, Gary Sorrell

Sorrell Associates, LLC

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Next Up - List Building Strategy #2

Getting Out Of The Traffic Getting Circle

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