This week on Adventures in Internet Marketing, I want to cover something that might just give you another edge in this game we call internet marketing – Channels.

Channels, being different traffic methods to bring traffic to your landing page, and/or have such traffic convert and make a sale or lead.

Being in the internet marketing game seriously about 7 months now, I have been looking at different ways of generating traffic throughout the internet. Believe it or not, there are some affiliates who stick to one form of traffic building, and actually eat pretty good off of the “Digital Traffic.”

And then there is some, who happen to split their campaign into different channels to get the neccessary traffic. For example, the vertical that is being marketed, probably benefits from not only adwords or other PPC marketing strategy, but also a Viral market strategy such as You Tube Videos.

I am going to cover five different ideas for you to build traffic. Hopefully some of the self professed “gurus” will not hang me for this one! lol!

1. Bum Marketing/Article Marketing. Simply, writing 300-500 word articles indirectly and directly promoting products. From what alot of so called gurus state on their sales pages, they make it sound like this is easy and that within a month, you can make $200 a day.

Not to let you in for a Rude Awakening, but there is alot that has to go into bum marketing. Believe it or not, there are internet and affiliate marketers who are extremely successful doing this, but it is just not about writing an article with affiliate link and throwing it up to see if it sticks.

What is going to make the difference between making no sales, getting discouraged, and potentially making sales? First of all, a strong level of SEO is needed to take into consideration. For a while, you would think, just throwing an article, with the product’s name and some silly phrase would be good enough to attract traffic.

If the product is new, it will not catch the grasp for customers at first. When you write an article, you must have a consideration of a general topic that this product fits into, and use that keyword. Usually for higher competition products, pick a longer tail keyword that gets at least 20 searches and has a phrase match (search term with quotes on google, i.e. “Forex Systems”). That would help a bit with traffic, and also help increase the conversion too!

300-500 words tops. Just enough wordage to engage the reader to click on your link and sell them on the product’s purpose. Let’s cover the next traffic method, twitter.

2. Twitter. A social microblogging website, which I have been a member for some time, and I have seen some benefits with using this service. Twitter is a free service, and allows you to type to your “followers” (kinda like myspace friends) and send them not only public directly messages, but also private messages to your friends directly, or to everybody on your list!

The beauty of Twitter, is that it hooks up to an SMS service, which lets you receive and even send tweets (twitter messages) away from the computer. The rise of Adobe Air backed apps, such as Spaz and Twhirl are now bringing social media to a software level, and even the iPhone has a twitter application to send tweets. How convenient.

Marketing with twitter is probably going to have the same feel as marketing with email. Now considering the fact that you can only have 140 characters per message, you need to have an intriguing, “fast to hit the gut” type message, and also contain a link to the landing page. As time grows and Twitter goes to more stable ground with advances in their site development, I believe Twitter will be the next frontier in marketing.

3. Email. List marketing is a long standing, highly profitable, highly coverting, and highly successful form of internet marketing. Being used for many, many years before bum marketing, and viral marketing even took their first breath, List marketers have been making some serious bread.

Lists are great for when product vendors, publishers, or service providers are about to launch a product, and are a potential goldmine. Alex Goad’s “Four Tier Annihilation Method” had earned him on clickbank, close to a quarter million on launch week, then the sales kinda dipped afterwards, but was sustainable! List marketing is what is usually responsible for a huge part of the launch success.

To have a successful list, you need to make sure your list members are laser targeted to the niche/vertical that you are promoting. Do not try to push a Forex product on a list that is geared for the Making Money Online niche.

How do you build the list? not easy but then again not difficult either.
A successful method, is called a giveaway. Getting ebooks and other goodies to giveaway could be acquired by finding PLR or Private Label Rights material geared in the targeted niche. Just change the names on the PLR ebooks to your name (which is perfectly legal for PLR), which will help you become more credible and gain authority, and even increase conversions!

To get the email addresses to build lists, Just place a landing page on a domain geared for your product or niche. Next, get a form from an email subscription service such as Aweber or GetResponse, and place right on your landing page.

I would suggest joining a service such as aweber or getresponse, because these are email list marketing services, and can be configured for giveaways, multi-day courses, and now blog broadcasts! They also make sure that the email message can be delivered and bypass spam filters as well! the cost might be around $20-$50 a month, but look at how fast you can get that back through sales!!!!

Also another way to gain people to your list, is doing mutliple day courses. For example, “Free course on how to gain 5 pips in 5 days by learning a new way to Forex Trade” will attract list subscribers, because you are basically giving them information to help better themselves in one way or another. This will not only create authority to your list message, but when you place a launch ad for a new product in your niche, the conversion factor increases!

4. Adwords. PPC marketing is great, and if you know some of the major players in CPA network marketing, such as Shoemoney, John Chow, and Uberaffiliate to name a few, these guys are BIG on cpa networks.

All of them are hardcore on the aspect of using PPC networks such as Adcenter, YSM, and Adwords. Of course there are plenty more networks, but those are the big three, and everybody is the most successful with those. With a properly targeted campaign and a landing page to boot, the conversions could be very profitable.

The PPC market is great for any vertical, and any type of product, rather it is a $2.00 CPA for a zip code submit, or a $97 Clickbank Forex Expert Advisor. You can convert only in a few conditions though.

One is, where you take the PPC traffic to a landing page. No more is it acceptable to direct link to a sales or submit page, because Google will not allow more than one advertiser to direct link, plus, the conversions happen to be way better with the use of a landing page.

Two, Do not worry about being ad numero uno when it comes to bids. Sometimes, the first bid might cost $5.00 and it may price you way out of your Projected EPC (Earnings Per Click) budget. But, the second bid, might cost dramatically less. As long as you can keep yourself within the top two of three ads on a certain keyword, you will have clickthroughs, and conversions if your landing page is in sync with the message of the ad and the product in particular.

Three, Just like with Bum/Article Marketing, do not shoot right for the product name as a primary keyword. Shoot for a more general term, as brand awareness might not be wide enough by recognizing a product’s name.

If you were, for example to market the “Forex Profit Bomb”, instead of using the product’s name, look into using a more generic, long tail word i.e. “Forex Expert Advisor” or “Forex Automated Trade Software.” You can get some clicks, and be surprised when someone purchases said product.

Also get familiar with the google conversion tracking software. You will be able to find out more about tracking conversions, and knowing when to hold campaigns and when to fold them and go somewhere else!

5. YouTube. Awesome way to get traffic to your landing page. Viral video is the way to go, especially with doing raw and candid product reviews, making the appeal to purchase personal, and giving exposure to a newer, previously unobtainable audience.

Now, you don’t just have to do personal webcam shots and plead people to buy or sign up with your product or service, but you can also use a montage video of stills, stock videos, and do voiceovers with product reviews or boardwalk pitches to get people to click on the links or type in a certain website url.

Usually tell the viewers about the product, and point them to the affiliate link or landing page link, which is usually put in the description on the right hand side of the video.

Now that is only for You Tube. There are tons of different video networks out there. Google has one, Vimeo, Veoh, DailyMotion, Blip, MyspaceTV, are a few prime examples of websites to upload videos and gain exposure, and traffic. Not to mention the links to your site add to your backlinks count! Great for SEO!!!

Well, there is my piece for this week’s installment of Adventures In Internet Marketing!

Good luck and make the money!
Tom Howell
GoForexTrade.com

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No matter how you promote products on the web or in offline formats, you have to realize that content is king, and that it is the words and actions that your content has, is what is going to determine if you are going to have a better chance of converting more eyes to a sale.

For the longest time, Content was only an issue for bringing in the masses and having them read the content to pre-sell them into a certain product or service. Now, the content question has extended another variable, Google.

Now how did Google get into the mess with content? Google and now other search engines have coded and configured their search algorithms to now give higher kudos to sites that have more content. Either in the form of more wordage, more pages, more relevant keywordage to a certain extent, search engines are taking that extra step to filter simple landing pages, that offer only a few bulleted points and a call to action.

Now do not only take into account what the SERPS have in store, but also look into the Search Engines that also sell advertising services, such as Adwords, Yahoo Search Marketing, and other similar services. Using such advertising services used to list clicks on certain keyword terms depending on the highest click bidder. Now that is not much the case anymore, as now not only the bid price for each keyword comes into play, but also the content in your page.

I decided to look into some offers on a certain CPA network and look into some landing pages for “chris brown ringtones” and do content, and keyword research. I have noticed, the top sponsored links on google, not only had a landing page, but also a “web” of content links on the bottom of the page.

I decided to click on some of the links on the bottom of the page, and the links led to something I have never seen on a landing page before: pages of content, not selling the product, but listing pages that were relevant in content, and maybe had a link or two to point back to the main landing page.

Why are the big players doing this? Because simply, content is king. If you want an advantage over the competition, you need to write some articles, not for ezine, or squidoo, but maybe for your own site instead.

Now how can you build content for your site? I will leave that one to you, being the successful internet marketer, you could conjure an idea up and not break a sweat, hopefully!

Have an awesome week! and keep rolling in that cash!

Tom Howell

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