“Lazy Man” Traffic Building Strategy Guest Post by Brad Campbell

4. Pinging is “a Must”

After doing your comprehensive research, applying the simple on-site optimization and writing a super helpful post, you’ll want to make sure and PING that puppy upon publishing.  Refer to 6 simple SEO tips and follow the instructions for pinging your blog posts.

This tactic is killer and it’ll allow your posts to get discovered immediately by the search engines (any post I write these days will be on the first page of Google within 1-2 minutes after publishing [for my long-tailed keyword] thanks to pinging…it’s that powerful).

5. BackLink Rocks

Be sure to link back to that blog post from other blog posts, using your keyword as the anchor text to the link.  When all of these steps are followed correctly, you should be able to rank on the first page of Google for nearly ALL of the individual posts you write.

From there, the traffic compounds.  One post may bring you 20 visitors a day and the next post may bring you 15 new visitors a day, and so on.  Pretty soon you’ve got 20-30 posts that are all chipping in towards your total website traffic.  It doesn’t take long at all to reach the 1k visitors/day mark and since your content will be straight fire, there’s a good chance of new visitors telling their friends.

6. ABLB (always be list building)

Encourage visitors to opt in and don’t be afraid to go a little overboard with this.  Every page of my blog has at least 2 different opt in forms and I usually end each post by reminding new visitors to sign up.  These simple steps have drastically increased my opt in rates. It should go without saying that you want to really hook these people up when they do opt in.

If you give them crap, you’ve instantly ruined your credibility and they’ll be less likely to come back and refer friends.  But if you really go all out and give them some useful content/tools, they’re sure to stop back often and spread the word for you.  You can take this one step further and offer your subscribers an ethical bribe when they register – tell them if they get 10 friends to visit your site and opt in, you’ll give them more free gifts.  This works like a charm and it all leads to more targeted traffic for you.

That’s pretty much all there is to the “lazy man’s (or woman’s) traffic system”.

Doing exactly these steps has allowed me to quickly build my blog traffic, without having to pay a dime or spend countless hours doing traditional link building methods.  Granted, it’s always a good idea to build quality links…but it’s nice to start getting traffic and making money FIRST and then you have the option to outsource those kinds of tasks.

Seriously, if you follow these steps you’ll get awesome results for what little time you invested.  The cool thing is that this strategy pays you back for the rest of your life, because generally once you have a post ranking well…you don’t even have to touch it again and it will continue to bring traffic and sales day after day.

Brad Campbell
Traffic & “RockStar” Blogging Expert

Brad Campbell is a rising SEO and traffic generation expert. I personally witnessed him growing his blog Extreme Fat Loss Workout from less than 100 visitors/day to 2000+ visitors/day in 6 months. Fast forward 3 more months, today his blog gets 4000+ visitors/day which generates multiple, 6-figure online revenues.

Comment your questions and feedback to Brad below.

If you want to get a TON of traffic to your site… if you want to make a business out of your blog with what you love doing… then you’ll wanna check out the RockStar Traffic Formula System.

If you’re struggling to increase website traffic, I feel your pain.  Or, at least I used to feel your pain.  I remember when Shingo finished my blog and I threw up my first few posts.  My thought process went something like this:  Damn, I’ve got a killer looking blog and I’ll be adding excellent content often, so people will pretty much find me and spread the word for me…that’s how I’ll get traffic to this bad boy and soon I’ll need a rake for all the dough I’ll be making.

After about 30 days of obsessively checking my Google analytics account each morning – only to see a few dozen lonely visitors who’d magically stumbled upon my site – I realized my thought process was dead wrong.  The whole “if you build it, they will come” thing doesn’t work in the online world.

So I spent the next few weeks learning everything I possibly could about traffic generation.  I read forums, traffic-related blog posts and even bought a few products from various experts. I learned a boatload of valuable information that served me well, plus I came up with some pretty cool strategies of my own.

Fast forward several months and now my Google analytics account doesn’t look so pathetic.  On good days, I’ve gotten as many as 3k visitors from over 100 different countries…and the cool thing is that almost all of my traffic comes from organic search results.

I started with no list and absolutely suck at PPC (I learned this the hard way trying to advertise for my old in-person personal training biz), so what I’ve accomplished in terms of traffic can certainly be mimicked by anyone who’s struggling or just starting out.

Now don’t get me wrong – by no means do I think I’m da bomb and there are plenty of sites that would put mine to shame.  In fact, I won’t be satisfied until I hit my goal of 10k visitors per day and an Alexa rank of 50k or lower…so I’ve got a lot of work to do yet.  But, I wanted you to know that I did manage to drive a good amount of traffic to my blog in a short period of time…and I think you can too.

So without further rambling, here are some of my best tips to help you generate swarms of targeted traffic to your site…I call this the “lazy man’s traffic system,” since everything I’m going to talk about lets you get maximum amounts of visitors without having to do a bunch of work above and beyond your blog posts (like link building, commenting on other blogs, wasting time in forums, playing on Facebook and Twitter, etc)…

1. Don’t Be Stingy.

If you plan on building a legitimate online business through your blog (or sales page, squeeze page, etc), it needs to look dope.  Trust me, I tried the do-it-yourself website design and although I was pretty proud of my work, its freggin embarrassing when I compare it to my new blog.  No wonder the damn thing NEVER converted.

I can’t tell you how many compliments I’ve had on my new site. Remember, studies show that you have something like 3 measly seconds to grab a visitor’s attention…and if someone lands on your site and it sucks to look at, guess what?  They’re all over that ‘back button’ like white on rice.  Not cool.

Forking out a little extra cash for a professional design that is specifically themed for your niche is crucial.  This makes you look  unique and stand apart from all the other “me too” blogs out there.  I recommend using Shingo, but of course I might be a bit biased.

2. Content is king.

Study anyone who’s done big things in any niche online and you’ll hear this line come out of their mouth.  You’re probably wondering why the first two traffic tips have nothing to do with getting more visitors…or do they?

You see, there’s absolutely no reason to go out and work your butt off to drive people back to your site if:  a) it doesn’t look great and b) there isn’t anything on it worth sticking around for.

So, after getting your design tip-top, the next thing you need to do is hammer out at least 10 great posts (if we’re talking about blogs) and fill out all of your pages (example – about, services, contact, etc).  Think about it – if you only have one blog post (or a few blog posts with horrible content) and all your pages say “coming soon,” what type of impression does this give first time visitors?

If you went to a car lot that said ‘open for business,’ but only had one car in the lot and construction was being done everywhere else…would you stay?  Would you buy?  Would you come back?  Hell no, because there’s thousands of other car lots within seconds of that one that are filled with new cars, right?  No one wants to hang out on a blog that feels incomplete.  That’s just human nature…

Also, along those lines, it wouldn’t be a bad idea to encourage a few of your friends to leave a comment under these first few posts.  Same mentality here – a blog with no comments on any posts will give new visitors the feeling that your site is definitely NOT the cool place to hang out.  Even if your content rocks, remember that most people inherently want to be part of something cool and they’re going to get a bad vibe if they think they’re the only one reading your stuff.

3. Traffic comes before you start writing

Okay, now that you’re ready to actually receive traffic, let’s get into some real strategies that’ll have your website begging for a bigger server.  First and foremost (and you need to apply this tip with your first 10 posts, by the way), you need to understand the importance of keyword research.

Basically, you need to grab all the low hanging fruit by going for longer-tailed, less competitive keywords.  So, instead of going after “fat loss,” you’d want to go after something like “fat loss workout routines for men.”  There are several benefits to doing this– the post will be more targeted to your ideal visitor that is the most likely to vibe with your site, come back often and buy your products and services; also, it’s MUCH easier to land that post on the first page of Google, since there’s almost no competition for that phrase.

So this tip alone is a huge double bonus – you get MORE visitors and you get BETTER visitors.  What’s not to like?

Okay, so how do you go about selecting the perfect keywords?  I use the Google keyword tool and enter a fairly general phrase that I’m thinking about blogging on.  Then, I scroll down for new ideas that are more specific, contain more words and have less competition.

Although it’s not an exact science, I usually go after keywords that get around 500 to 5,000 monthly searches.  Then, I take a few of those keywords and do a Google search with the phrase in quotations.  For my above example, a Google search for “fat loss” shows that there are 5.6 MILLION pages competing for that phrase; but a search for “fat loss workout routines for men” only has 2,700 pages.

Pop quiz – which term are you more likely to land on the first page of Google with?  Duh…

I like to use a keyword that has less than 15,000 competing pages when you do an exact search (using quotations) in Google.  When you get better at doing this research, you can start going after phrases that have higher monthly search volumes and slightly higher competition, but to start out…I like to go with keywords that I know will get me ranked and build my traffic steadily.

After you think you’ve found a winner, the last step is to do a Google search for that term without the quotes.  Take a look at the first page results and see which sites are there.  If  you see a lot of articles that are on the first page (like Ezine, ArticleBase, Isnare, etc), that’s a great sign.  However, if you see a lot of big name authority sites like Wikipedia, eHow, etc…that’s a BAD sign, because it’s going to be hard to outrank them.

An easy way to determine which sites you can outrank is to click on each result in the top ten and look at their page rank and Alexa rank.  If you see a bunch of sites that have a page rank of 0, 1, and 2, you’ll probably be able to outrank them.  If you see sites with a page rank of 3, 4, 5 and up, you’re probably NOT going to be able to outrank them.

Hopefully, you can see that the key to getting free traffic that builds your following quickly, is to put a lot of effort into selecting your keyword.  That keyword, of course, is what you’re going to use for the title of your blog post.  Also, make sure to use that exact keyword 2-3 times throughout the post and try to bold it once and italicize it once.

Another cool strategy to use within these guidelines is to get more creative with your keywords.  I’ve done really well combining terms like “fat loss,” “lean body,” “cardio workout,” etc, with other words and phrases… to create long-tailed keywords that have high search volumes and lower competition.  An easy way to do this in the health and fitness niche is to combine a celebrity’s name with “workout” or “diet plan.”

By itself, “workout” is flippin’ impossible to rank for…but “Megan Fox workout” was extremely easy to rank for and brings me a truckload of traffic every day.  This doesn’t have to be limited to celebrities, either.  Be creative and think about events, things in the news, etc that people would be looking for and then work that into your main subject.  The sky is the limit with this tactic…

…To be continued to Part 2 (in the next few days).

Brad Campbell is a rising SEO and traffic generation expert. You can learn more about him on his blog Extreme Fat Loss Workout

An improvement to your site was by far the biggest (A whipping 221% increase in the traffic to his site from January) –What do you think separated you from the completion – could you share with us?

Dan Go is actually our very first premium customer since we started Fitness Website Formula last April. Now he’s dominating his local market with his bootcamp service on an auto-pilot, and getting a ton of business through his sites. Way to go Dan!

Without further ado, here’s Dan’s success story:

Guest Post by Dan Go

Hey there… I just want to thank Shingo and the team at FWF for awarding me the free blog.  Since this is the Oscars I feel like I should do an acceptance speech but on second thought… I’ll just give you the straight goods on the Ninja strategies I deployed to increase my traffic by 210% in the past year.

So how did I get more traffic to my website?

I’ll do a quick rundown of all the things I did since getting the site:

1. Set up my Google ad words campaigns for my main keywords using Market Annihilator.
2. Started Facebook advertising
3. Got a bunch of links back to my website using an article submitting service. (I’d recommend Chris McComb’s link building service)
4. Created a couple of mini optimized sales pages for other keywords I wanted to dominate.  I still have about 100 pages to add but the ones that FWF and I have set up have worked great.
5. Used the Market Annihilator Google local business ninja strategy to put my business to the top of the local listings.
6. Edited my sales page to further optimize and strengthen the keyword density for the cities I was targeting. I used to go after a couple of other cities but they were too far away from my area so I decided to replace those keywords with my main cities.
7. Did the blog posts 7 Secrets to Outsourcing your business and How to Duplicate yourself on KickBackLife.com blog and this generated a ton of traffic and got me a high level site linking back to mine.
8. I always used my blog post titles to optimize my blog for my main keywords.  So if I was talking about “How to Eat Like a Champ” I would put in my blog, “Markham Personal Trainer reveals how to eat like a champ”.  This makes my posts more search engine friendly.

   In addition, I’m constantly searching for ways to improve my fitness site and blog and I go through FWF for all my website and design needs.

At first I was a little hesitant to get my site done by these guys because well…the investment was high for me at the time and I come from Canada where the exchange rate at the time was not so friendly so I was actually paying more than the sticker price for the blog and sales site….sucked to be from Canada but at least we got hockey and free health care

But in the end I have gotten 10 times the amount of money back for my original investment. I get on average 2-3 prospects a day through my sales page.

FWF got me to the first page of Google when I launched my website. Now I’m ranking #2 for my keyword terms and I’m gunning for #1 very soon.

Thanks again for the blog guys and if you haven’t invested in their services… what the hell are you waiting for?  Do it before your competition does.

Dan Go

Dan Go runs Markham and Thornhill Boot Camps and is a Markham personal trainer

Feel free to leave Dan a comment below about his post and any other traffic getting strategies that worked great for you!

I’d like to announce the winner of the “Win A Blog” Contest

I mathematically recorded the before and after measurements on an excel sheet and compared everyone’s scores according to the criteria I posted.

The winner:

Dan Go’s Salescopy Site
http://www.gogirlbootcamps.com/

Dan’s site improved the most in relative to his numbers and compared to other contestant’s improvements.  His score was 146% and the runner-up was 127%, so the numbers showed the obvious winner.

So, congratulations Dan!

As a way of my appreciation to those who competed, I’ll give away to all the contestants our custom social media icons and handwritten arrows (sample below) you can use for your blogs.

I can’t give everyone a free blog at this time, but I’m always looking for opportunities in helping my clients improve your sites and business.

If you have any suggestions, please let me know in the comment section below.

Cheers,
Shingo

This post is my review of Google Buzz and a wordpress plugin for it.

I think you’ve already noticed this “Google Buzz” if you are using GMAIL.

What is it? Should you use it?

From what I’ve been observing, I’d say Google Buzz might soon become a “must have” social profile like your facebook and twitter profiles, especially for businesses.

This video shows its features:

Makes photo, video, link(website) information sharing easy

Features:

• Built into your inbox (Gmail)
• Mobile compatible
• Location oriented (geo tagged to where you are speaking from)
• Auto follow (Keeps track of who you communicate the most)
• Sharing (Flickr, Twitter, youtube….)
• Public or private sharing (Keep info only to the people you know)
• Fast real time communiation updates

Wordpress Plugin:

• Download the google buzz wordpress plugin here (It will add a button like the one on this post so people can share your post with their Google buzz)
• Or, visit this page

Could you ignore Google Buzz for your business?

You’ll be the judge

Shingo

P.S. If you want to know more about it, this video is a good one
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JuThg91-4Nw

Seriously, aside from a little annoying flickering, I think the content in the video itself is pretty good.

I recommend watching it in a full screen mode (click on the black square icon next to the volume control)

Enjoy : ) (Since it’s high resolution, it might take 20 seconds or more to load the video)

Click here to view the embedded video.

Duration: 13 min

I did a blog post about traffic conversion on 1/18/2010.  On 2/8/2010, my ranking was a 3rd place on the 1st page of Google (in about 3 weeks).

It didn’t stop there.

On 2/20/2010, despite the fast that competition got somewhat more intense, my post moved up to the No. 1 position in Google for “Web Design For Traffic Conversion” (in about 5 weeks).

This tells me that Google puts a lot of weight on a HTML title in terms of site rankings.

1. Remember, 5 steps to optimize blog post are:

1. Compelling and optimized post title
2. Permalink (post URL)
3. Internal links (Use keywords for anchor text link and a rel=”nofollow” attribute)
4. Meta Tags and HTML title
5. Use of categories or tags

2.  Once Google caches your page, I don’t recommend changing your permalink for your blog.

3. I prefer using categories over tags since its more natural way to show your keywords than tags which looks a little spammy to end users in my opinion.

Hope to see you at the top of Google. Sorry about flickers… that’s what I get for testing a free screen recording software

If you have any questions or comments, feel free to shoot them below…

Cheers,
Shingo

(It’s best to watch it in a full-screen mode)

Click here to view the embedded video.

Duration: 15 min 21 sec

Intrepid wordpress SEO theme is a free premium wordpress theme, bundled with built-in SEO, social media ready, and info marketing made-easy components – built with online marketers in mind.

He was one of the special guests for Fitness Info Summit 2009. I think he was introduced to everyone at the event as a “SEO Ninja”

Guest Post by Joe Troyer

Hey all, I wanted the post to be something that everyone would get a lot of value out of, and could get instant results with!

Below are 6 Simple but extremely effective tips to increase the money you get to keep!

3. Check cache date of referral Site

If you are going to buy a link or do a link exchange check the cached date of the page where your link will be placed. You are looking for a fresh cache date, the newer the better. I won’t consider the site if It hasn’t been cached in the last 2 weeks. You can check the cache date with the google toolbar, or you can go to google and search for cache:www.yourdomain.com.

6. Make sure your title tags, and description tags are compelling.

Imagine changing these, and getting a 25% increase in traffic, and even an increase in your conversion rate. Take a look at the example below for ideas.

Extra Tip: Sites to Ping for your blog

To update,  1) log into wordpress, 2) then click on settings > writing and 3) post the urls under update services.

http://api.feedster.com/ping
http://api.moreover.com/ping
http://api.my.yahoo.com/rss/ping
http://blogsearch.google.com/ping/RPC2
http://ping.amagle.com/
http://ping.bitacoras.com
http://ping.blo.gs/
http://ping.feedburner.com
http://ping.rootblog.com/rpc.php
http://ping.syndic8.com/xmlrpc.php
http://ping.weblogalot.com/rpc.php
http://rcs.datashed.net/RPC2/
http://rpc.blogbuzzmachine.com/RPC2
http://rpc.blogrolling.com/pinger/
http://rpc.icerocket.com:10080/
http://rpc.newsgator.com/
http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping
http://rpc.weblogs.com/RPC2
http://topicexchange.com/RPC2
http://www.blogdigger.com/RPC2
http://www.blogoole.com/ping/
http://www.blogoon.net/ping/
http://www.blogsnow.com/ping
http://www.blogstreet.com/xrbin/xmlrpc.cgi
http://www.lasermemory.com/lsrpc/
http://www.newsisfree.com/RPCCloud
http://www.popdex.com/addsite.php
http://www.snipsnap.org/RPC2
http://www.wasalive.com/ping/
http://www.weblogues.com/RPC/
http://api.moreover.com/RPC2
http://api.my.yahoo.com/RPC2
http://rpc.twingly.com/
http://www.bloglines.com/ping
http://ping.feedburner.com/
http://www.octora.com/add_rss.php

This will notify your new blog posts to all major news/info sites!

If you want to learn more about Joe Troyer and learn some of his ninja SEO and marketing techniques, then definitely check out his site

Let me know what you think about Joe’s post…

Shingo

Since people search online mainly through using keywords, a relationship between you and keywords can be best described as your sales channels.

Yet, most SEO services make YOU choose the keywords – before you spend your hard earned money on SEO and ads with some keywords you happen to guess or find (which I’ve done before…), I do recommend checking out this quick guide below:

Just a word of caution…

When you’re designing your site, usability should come first, keywords next – not the other way around. In other words, design your site for human users, not for search engines (And Google is smart enough to know the difference)!!

Since understanding how keywords and SEO work can be complex (and sometimes boring), I can best summarize the key points you should know in learning your keywords, and I can give you the best tools I know for each of these topics.

1. Monitor How People Search Online
2. Understand How to Work Your Keywords Into Your Content
3. Understand How Search Engines See Your Site
4. Checking and Analyzing Competitors

1. Monitor How People Search Online

By learning online search behavior, keyword relevancy, search trends, search volume, you can make an educated conclusion about what keywords are popular and how they can be tied into your website and marketing.

These are the free keyword tools I use on a daily basis:
https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

http://freekeywords.wordtracker.com/gtrends/

http://www.google.com/insights/search/

http://google.com/trends

2. Understand How to Work Your Keywords Into Your Content

You’d want to create a unique content that nobody has published before – never copy someone else’s content, or randomly create a content just for the sake of creating contents. Google actually penalizes duplicate contents. Most often than not, Google will eventually catch you if you use a software that generates multiple variations of an article by “spinning” words.

Make sure that your article, post, and etc are original and include your target keywords (a good rule of thumb: one KW every 3-4 paragraphs) and modifiers (modifications of your keywords – example:  business wordpress themes, free premium wordpress themes).

3. Understand How Search Engines See Your Site

A simplified way to understand is this:

Search engines read the tripped version (actual HTML codes) of the page from top to bottom. And there’s a certain way that your site should be coded in order to make your site more search engine friendly.

To be more specific, I’m talking about internal link structure, code-to-text ratio, and etc that’s a bit too technical here, but please let me know if you’d like to know about it.

4. Checking and Analyzing Competitors

Knowing which keywords you can rank high for more easily than others can save you a lot of time and money in the long run.

Your best tool for this is actually… Google.com

You can type in your target keywords in Google and see how many pages are competing and see how many sites actually have the exact phrase you typed in their title and the sentence below (those are intentionally going after the keywords).

The other tool that is actually very useful is:
http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/

A couple of important things to look for are:

1. Scale – Check how many pages are indexed because a size of the site does matter.
2. Inbound links – Check how many links the site is getting from other sites. Search engines look at each link your site get as a “vote” and they do give you a strong credit for that.  Also pay attention to where your site is getting links from.

   If you are a fitness instructor, getting a link from a popular fitness magazine site will obviously help your ranking more than getting one from a phone book directory (keyword relevancy).

3. PageRank – Install Google Toolbar and compare your PageRank with your competitors.

There you have it. If you follow the information above, you should have:

1. A list of 1 to 8 primary keywords and probably 10-30+ other 2^ndary keywords you want to focus.
2. Keyword optimized pages (URLs) paired with an anchor text link(s) you’ll use in your link building.
3. Analysis on keyword trends and use in your market as well as which keywords your competitors are after and where they are getting links from (using those keywords).

Let’s GO get your keywords! Let me know if I could answer any questions in the comment section below, as writing is not my stronger skills.

To your success,

Shingo

If your site is SEO optimized and designed well to capture your prospects, then I’d say you are ready to take advantage of the SEO techniques below.

(On a side note, if you don’t have a site yet, make sure your site is optimized in terms of keyword selection and a good link structure with higher PageRanks on your “money pages” while keeping the design strictly for traffic conversion.)

I bet most of your competitors don’t know these tactics or haven’t used them, so I’d say doing these things will definitely put your site in front of your customers more.

Here’s what you do. I’ll explain about each below.

1. Directory submission
   
2. Article submission
3. Vertical listing

1. Directory Submission

Basically, in directory submission, you’re gonna have your site listed on large directory sites. The two major sites where you should submit your site are:

• Yahoo Directory (http://dir.yahoo.com) – It costs $299/year but it’s worth it in a long run
• DMOZ.org – free

Also, if your business is local, you should get your site listed on Google Local Business Center and Yahoo Local.

Even if you don’t do anything else, doing this alone should help your site’s ranking almost right away.

2. Article submission

The key to article submission is getting unique contents (relevant to your site) written and posting them to the sites. If you are allowed to include a hyperlink in your article, here’s an example of how you’d want to do it:

Example:

If you are frustrated with your diet, Personal Training Orange County fitness program can help you get to your fitness goals with nutritional guidance, proper exercise programs, and motivation.

You see, the underline indicates the link. In a HTML view, it looks like this:

<a href=”http://www.domain.com”>Personal Trainer Orange County</a>

These are a few free content submission sites I recommend:

• ezineseeker.com
• squidoo.com
• ezinearticles.com
• hubpages.com

3. Vertical listing

Vertical directory listing is to get your site listed on a directory within the same market, and it could be effective since usually you can list multiple pages of your site.

Also, being listed in vertical directories is a plus for SEO since your site will be linked from a page/site relevant to your targeting keywords.

These sites may help you find good vertical directories in your market:

• ISEDB.com
• searchengineguide.com

The key to doing these SEO tactics well is to build a sustainable marketing process that naturally involves link building (such as writing articles monthly for partner fitness sites).

It’s called link building since you are creating links on other sites pointing back to your site.

Check other stronger authority sites (that have higher pagerank than yours) in your market by using Google Toolbar, Alexa, and Yahoo! Site Explorer. Chances are, not every single one of them is your competitor – some might be even willing to work with you.

I hope you’ll find this information useful. Let me know if you have any questions.

To your success,

Shingo