Traffic Floodgate

Discover the secrets to UNLEASHING head spinning quantities
of traffic with the incredible formula that you will learn inside…
Traffic Floodgate
by
Phil Lancaster
First Published May 2008 by Next Chapter Pty Ltd
A step by step guide to unleashing a flood of traffic to your website

Web: http://www.trafficfloodgate.com
Email: info@trafficfloodgate.com
Publisher: http://www.nextchapter.com.au
Traffic Floodgate: Copyright
Copyright
Copyright © 2008 by Next Chapter Pty Ltd and Phil Lancaster. All rights
reserved.
This publication is protected by copyright and all rights are reserved by the
author and publisher. It may not in whole or in part be copied, photocopied,
reproduced, translated or converted to any electronic or other medium without
prior consent in writing from Next Chapter Pty Ltd.
Legal Notice
Every effort has been made to ensure that this document is free from errors
and omissions. It is provided with the understanding that no responsibility will
be accepted by the publisher for loss or action occasioned to any person or
entity acting or refraining from action as a result of material in this document.
Because of the rapidly changing nature of the Internet, the publisher does not
warrant or represent at any time that the contents of this publication are
accurate.
While all attempts have been made to verify the information in this publication,
the publisher assumes no responsibility for errors, omissions or contrary
interpretation of the subject matter. Any perceived slights of individuals,
groups or organizations are not intentional.
This publication is not intended as a source of legal, financial or business

advice. There are no guarantees of income made. Readers are advised to
seek the advice of competent professionals where applicable.
You are encouraged to print this e-book for ease of reading.
2
Traffic Floodgate: Contents
Contents
Copyright.................................................................................................................................. 2
Legal Notice ............................................................................................................................. 2
Contents ................................................................................................................................... 3
Introduction.............................................................................................................................. 9
Don’t Be Discouraged ........................................................................................................... 9
Steps to Making Money on the Internet ................................................................................ 9
Step 1: Create or Select a Product ................................................................................. 10
Step 2: Research Your Keywords................................................................................... 10
Step 3: Get a Domain Name........................................................................................... 10
Step 4: Get a Website Host ............................................................................................ 10
Step 5: Get a Payment Gateway .................................................................................... 10
Step 6: Be Ready to Capture Your Visitors’ Details........................................................ 11
Step 7: Build the Website................................................................................................ 11
Step 8: Upload the Website ............................................................................................ 11
Step 9: Get JV/Affiliate Partners ..................................................................................... 12
Step 10: Get Traffic!........................................................................................................ 12
Stream 1: Keyword Research............................................................................................... 13
What Are Keywords?........................................................................................................... 13
Keywords and Traffic........................................................................................................... 13
Keyword Research .............................................................................................................. 13
Research Tools ................................................................................................................... 13
Free Resources................................................................................................................... 14
The Overture (Yahoo!) Free Tool ................................................................................... 14
The Google Free Keywords Tool .................................................................................... 17
Wordtracker’s Free Keyword Research Tool.................................................................. 18
HitTail .............................................................................................................................. 21
Paid Resources ................................................................................................................... 22
Wordtracker..................................................................................................................... 23
Keyword Elite .................................................................................................................. 23
Record Your Keywords ....................................................................................................... 24
Stream 2: On-Page SEO........................................................................................................ 25
What Is On-Page SEO? ...................................................................................................... 25
You Must Have a Website................................................................................................... 25
Website Structure Diagram ................................................................................................. 26
The Structure Explained...................................................................................................... 26
Your Home Page Is for Human Consumption..................................................................... 27
The Sales Page Approach. ............................................................................................. 27
The Squeeze Page Approach......................................................................................... 27
It’s Not All About Your Home Page ..................................................................................... 27
Your Blog............................................................................................................................. 28
Keyword Specific Pages...................................................................................................... 28
Free Resources................................................................................................................... 28
HyperVRE ....................................................................................................................... 28
Simple Search and Replace ........................................................................................... 29
StatCounter ..................................................................................................................... 30
Google Analytics ............................................................................................................. 31
Server Downtime ............................................................................................................ 33
Paid Resources ................................................................................................................... 34
SEO Elite......................................................................................................................... 34
Site Map and Spider Map.................................................................................................... 35
Submit Your Site Map ......................................................................................................... 36
Check Broken Links ............................................................................................................ 37
On Page Viral Marketing ..................................................................................................... 39
3
A Bit Left Field ..................................................................................................................... 40

Site Submission................................................................................................................... 42
Submit Equalizer............................................................................................................. 42
QU.I.T.............................................................................................................................. 43
Stream 3: Blogging................................................................................................................ 45
What Is Blogging? ............................................................................................................... 45
Why is a Blog Valuable? ..................................................................................................... 45
Blogger and WordPress ...................................................................................................... 45
Create a Blogger Blog ......................................................................................................... 46
Create a Google Account.................................................................................................... 47
Sign Up for Blogger ............................................................................................................. 47
Name Your Blog .................................................................................................................. 48
Choose Your Blog Template ............................................................................................... 48
Create Your Blog................................................................................................................. 49
Start Posting........................................................................................................................ 49
Set the Blog Up Properly..................................................................................................... 51
View Your New Blog............................................................................................................ 52
Tweak the Settings.............................................................................................................. 53
Add a Product Image........................................................................................................... 53
Creating Your Network ........................................................................................................ 56
WordPress Blogs................................................................................................................. 56
My Web Host....................................................................................................................... 57
Installing WordPress ........................................................................................................... 57
An Example ......................................................................................................................... 61
Changing The Default Settings ........................................................................................... 62
Change The Theme ........................................................................................................ 62
Install A New Theme....................................................................................................... 63
Login to Your WordPress Dashboard ............................................................................. 64
Delete The Default Post.................................................................................................. 65
Rename Uncategorized Category .................................................................................. 66
Delete The Blogroll ......................................................................................................... 66
Change The Permalink Structure ................................................................................... 66
Add Your Ping List .......................................................................................................... 67
Essential Plugins............................................................................................................. 69
Promoting Your Blog ........................................................................................................... 71
After Each Blog Post ........................................................................................................... 73
Blog Directories............................................................................................................... 73
Syndicate Your Posts to Web 2.0 ................................................................................... 74
The Structure of a Blog Post ............................................................................................... 74
Using Trackbacks................................................................................................................ 75
Comment Sniper ................................................................................................................. 75
Setting Up a Blog Hex ......................................................................................................... 77
Summary ............................................................................................................................. 79
Stream 4: Articles and Press Releases ............................................................................... 80
What Are Articles?............................................................................................................... 80
Why Are Articles Significant? .............................................................................................. 80
Anatomy of An Article.......................................................................................................... 80
Title ................................................................................................................................. 81
Abstract ........................................................................................................................... 81
Content............................................................................................................................ 81
Resource Box.................................................................................................................. 81
Article Power ....................................................................................................................... 82
Why So Powerful?............................................................................................................... 83
Articles as Content .............................................................................................................. 84
Tightly Focused Keyword Articles ....................................................................................... 87
Outsourcing Your Articles.................................................................................................... 88
Submitting Your Articles ...................................................................................................... 88
What Are Press Releases? ................................................................................................. 90
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Press Release Blunders...................................................................................................... 91

Write To Journalists, Not Consumers. ............................................................................ 91
Don't Be Flagrant ............................................................................................................ 91
Avoid Using UPPER CASE Characters.......................................................................... 91
Clean Up Grammatical Errors......................................................................................... 91
Use Industry Lingo Sparingly .......................................................................................... 92
Address Content Issues.................................................................................................. 92
Clear Up Non-ASCII Characters ..................................................................................... 92
Stream 5: Backlinks and Directory Submission................................................................. 94
What Are Backlinks? ........................................................................................................... 94
Blogs, Articles and Press Releases .................................................................................... 94
Direct Request..................................................................................................................... 94
Reciprocal Blog Links.......................................................................................................... 96
Link Exchanges ................................................................................................................... 97
Buying Links ........................................................................................................................ 97
Directory Submission .......................................................................................................... 99
Variety is the Spice............................................................................................................ 100
Plan Your Attack................................................................................................................ 100
Stream 6: Squidoo ............................................................................................................... 101
What Is Squidoo? .............................................................................................................. 101
Why Build a Squidoo Lens? .............................................................................................. 101
Do Lenses Still Work? ....................................................................................................... 102
How to Build a Squidoo Lens ............................................................................................ 102
Step 1............................................................................................................................ 104
Step 2............................................................................................................................ 104
Step 3............................................................................................................................ 104
Step 4............................................................................................................................ 105
Step 5............................................................................................................................ 105
Step 6............................................................................................................................ 106
Checkout Top Traffic Lenses ............................................................................................ 107
Edit Your Bio ..................................................................................................................... 108
Edit Your Tags................................................................................................................... 109
Edit Your Introduction, Contents and Discovery Tool ....................................................... 109
Introduction ................................................................................................................... 109
Contents........................................................................................................................ 109
Discovery Tool .............................................................................................................. 110
Other Modules................................................................................................................... 111
Stream 7: Hub Pages........................................................................................................... 113
What is HubPages?........................................................................................................... 113
Create Your HubPage Account......................................................................................... 113
Create Your HubPage ....................................................................................................... 115
Start Your New Hub .......................................................................................................... 116
Assemble Your Capsules .................................................................................................. 117
Your Hub’s Title ............................................................................................................ 119
Summary Text............................................................................................................... 119
Group ............................................................................................................................ 119
Your Capsules .............................................................................................................. 119
Text Capsule ................................................................................................................. 119
Photo Capsule .............................................................................................................. 119
Comments Capsule ...................................................................................................... 120
Add More Stuff .............................................................................................................. 120
Amazon ......................................................................................................................... 120
eBay .............................................................................................................................. 120
Capsule Ordering.......................................................................................................... 120
Saving Your Hub........................................................................................................... 121
Stream 8: Craigslist and US Free Ads ............................................................................... 122
What Is Craigslist? ............................................................................................................ 122
Why Is It Important? .......................................................................................................... 122
5
Connecting to Craigslist .................................................................................................... 122

Start Posting Ads............................................................................................................... 124
Multiple Ads....................................................................................................................... 126
US Free Ads...................................................................................................................... 126
Stream 9: Forums ................................................................................................................ 128
What Are Forums? ............................................................................................................ 128
Why Join a Forum? ........................................................................................................... 128
Finding Forums ................................................................................................................. 129
Edit Your Profile and Signature......................................................................................... 129
Ask and Answer Questions ............................................................................................... 130
Post Articles ...................................................................................................................... 130
Stream 10: Social Bookmarking......................................................................................... 131
What Is Social Bookmarking? ........................................................................................... 131
Digg ................................................................................................................................... 131
Register......................................................................................................................... 131
Submit ........................................................................................................................... 132
Add Digg Buttons .......................................................................................................... 133
MySpace ........................................................................................................................... 133
Facebook........................................................................................................................... 133
Others................................................................................................................................ 133
Technorati ......................................................................................................................... 133
StumbleUpon..................................................................................................................... 135
Product Reviews ............................................................................................................... 136
The Answerman Can......................................................................................................... 136
Trailfire............................................................................................................................... 138
Jumptags........................................................................................................................... 140
Stream 11: Black Hat, White Hat, Grey Hat ....................................................................... 143
It’s Not the Hat, It’s the Person Wearing It! ....................................................................... 143
Search Engine Cloaking.................................................................................................... 144
Forum Schizophrenia ........................................................................................................ 145
Black Hat Software............................................................................................................ 145
Comment Posting.............................................................................................................. 145
Automated Software.......................................................................................................... 146
Tag & Ping Traffic Machine........................................................................................... 146
Video Traffic Machine ................................................................................................... 147
"G Group" Traffic Machine ............................................................................................ 147
Forum Traffic Machine .................................................................................................. 147
"Y" Traffic Machine ....................................................................................................... 147
Banner Traffic Machine................................................................................................. 147
Directory Traffic Machine .............................................................................................. 148
"G Page" Traffic Machine.............................................................................................. 148
"WP" Traffic Machine .................................................................................................... 148
B2E Blog Traffic Machine ............................................................................................. 148
Stealth Traffic Machine ................................................................................................. 148
Shoutbox Traffic Machine ............................................................................................. 149
"SE" Traffic Machine ..................................................................................................... 149
Image Traffic Machine .................................................................................................. 149
VooDoo Traffic Machine ............................................................................................... 149
"UN" Traffic Machine..................................................................................................... 149
Ping Traffic Machine ..................................................................................................... 150
Video Pop-in Traffic Machine........................................................................................ 150
ICQ Traffic Machine ...................................................................................................... 150
"VC" Traffic Machine..................................................................................................... 150
Anonymous Traffic Machine ......................................................................................... 150
Drupal Traffic Machine.................................................................................................. 150
Classifieds Traffic Machine ........................................................................................... 150
Stealth Banner Machine................................................................................................ 150
Toolbar Traffic Machine ................................................................................................ 151
6
AQL Traffic Machine ..................................................................................................... 151

Stream 12: Joint Ventures .................................................................................................. 152
Drive Your Traffic Through the Roof! ................................................................................ 152
How to Get JV Partners..................................................................................................... 152
Those Whose Lists You’re On ...................................................................................... 152
Others in the Same Niche............................................................................................. 153
Contacting JV Partners ..................................................................................................... 153
What to Say....................................................................................................................... 153
What to Pay....................................................................................................................... 154
What About ClickBank?..................................................................................................... 154
Conclusion......................................................................................................................... 154
The 12 Step Summary ......................................................................................................... 155
1. Do Your Keyword Research … Pages 13 - 24 ............................................................. 155
Traffic is directly related to keywords............................................................................ 155
Use free resources to get your keywords ..................................................................... 155
Use paid resources when you’re further along ............................................................. 155
Record your keywords .................................................................................................. 155
2. Your Website and On-Page SEO … Pages 25 - 43 ..................................................... 155
Structure your website properly .................................................................................... 155
Create your sales page or squeeze page..................................................................... 155
Keyword specific pages ................................................................................................ 155
Consider a page generator ........................................................................................... 155
Put your analytics in place ............................................................................................ 155
Create and submit your site map .................................................................................. 155
Initiate viral marketing ................................................................................................... 155
3. Blogging … Pages 44 – 79 ........................................................................................... 155
Understand the value of blogging ................................................................................. 155
Create and refine a Blogger blog.................................................................................. 155
Create and refine a WordPress blog with plugins......................................................... 155
Link your blogs.............................................................................................................. 155
Promote your blogs....................................................................................................... 155
Set up a blog hex .......................................................................................................... 155
4. Articles and Press Releases … Pages 80 – 92 ............................................................ 155
Understand the power of article publishing................................................................... 155
Learn the anatomy of an article .................................................................................... 155
Create tightly focused keyword articles ........................................................................ 156
Outsource if necessary ................................................................................................. 156
Submit your articles ...................................................................................................... 156
Create and submit press releases ................................................................................ 156
5. Backlinks and Directory Submission … Pages 94 - 100............................................... 156
Get backlinks from blogs, articles and directory submission ........................................ 156
From direct request....................................................................................................... 156
Reciprocal links............................................................................................................. 156
Link exchanges ............................................................................................................. 156
Purchase links............................................................................................................... 156
6. Squidoo … Pages 101 - 112 ......................................................................................... 156
Learn about Squidoo..................................................................................................... 156
Build a lens.................................................................................................................... 156
Edit your details ............................................................................................................ 156
Add other modules........................................................................................................ 156
7. Hub Pages … Pages 113 – 121.................................................................................... 156
Learn about HubPages ................................................................................................. 156
Create a HubPage ........................................................................................................ 156
Assemble your capsules ............................................................................................... 156
Save your Hub .............................................................................................................. 156
8. Craigslist and US Free Ads … Pages 122 - 127........................................................... 156
The importance of Craigslist ......................................................................................... 156
Post multiple ads to Craigslist....................................................................................... 156
7
Use US Free Ads .......................................................................................................... 156

9. Forums … Pages 128 – 130 ......................................................................................... 156
Find forums ................................................................................................................... 157
Edit your profile and signature ...................................................................................... 157
Ask and answer questions ............................................................................................ 157
Post your articles .......................................................................................................... 157
10. Social Bookmarking … Pages 131 - 142 .................................................................... 157
Learn the importance of social bookmarking ................................................................ 157
Digg............................................................................................................................... 157
Technorati ..................................................................................................................... 157
StumbleUpon ................................................................................................................ 157
Trailfire .......................................................................................................................... 157
Jumptags....................................................................................................................... 157
Review products ........................................................................................................... 157
Become the answerperson ........................................................................................... 157
11. Black Hat, White Hat, Grey Hat … Pages 143 - 151 .................................................. 157
It’s a matter of attitude .................................................................................................. 157
Search engine cloaking................................................................................................. 157
Forum schizophrenia .................................................................................................... 157
Comment posting.......................................................................................................... 157
Black hat software......................................................................................................... 157
12. Joint Ventures … Pages 152 – 154 ............................................................................ 157
How to get JV partners ................................................................................................. 157
Contact your JV partners .............................................................................................. 157
What to say, what to pay............................................................................................... 157
The ClickBank conundrum............................................................................................ 157
Channel 13: The Video Stream........................................................................................... 158
Can You Buy Traffic? .......................................................................................................... 159
The Short Answer.............................................................................................................. 159
Purchased Lists................................................................................................................. 159
Google Adwords................................................................................................................ 160
The IM Blueprint................................................................................................................... 161
Gifts for Traffic Floodgate Owners .................................................................................... 162
8
Traffic Floodgate: Introduction
Introduction
Making money on the Internet is actually a fairly straightforward procedure. It
follows a series of logical steps, which I have set out in this Introduction, so
that we have a context to work with.
Each of these steps is important but the one where most budding Internet
marketers fall down is Step 10, the final one, Getting Traffic. One of the
reasons is that it’s the one thing you really have to do yourself. You can
outsource just about everything else, but you’re the only person who can take
the steps necessary to drive traffic past your product.
It doesn’t matter how well your sales letter converts if your traffic is zero or
negligible. Any conversion percentage multiplied by zero traffic gives zero
sales.
Fortunately, getting a flood of traffic is not that hard. This manual is organized
into 12 Streams. As you create each stream, it will not just add to but
compound the ones that have gone before, building up and up into an
unstoppable flood! But first …
Don’t Be Discouraged
“The journey of a thousand miles must begin with a single step” … Chinese
Proverb.
Because of the nature and the size of the Internet, getting a flood of traffic
doesn’t happen overnight.
We’ve all become conditioned to expecting the “quick fix.” Point the remote at
the TV and it comes on, instantly. Turn the key in the ignition and the car
starts, instantly.
It doesn’t happen that way on the Internet. You have to consider each of the
steps that you’ll learn in this Guide as seeds that you are planting. Don’t
expect them to grow into trees overnight. Plant the seed and move on, secure
in the knowledge that it is germinating and that you will reap the fruits of your
labor. Just not immediately.
Steps to Making Money on the Internet

These steps cover the most popular Internet Marketing model, namely selling
a downloadable electronic product, such as an e-book or software. Other
models include becoming an eBay Power Seller (not for the faint hearted) and
contextual advertising such as Adsense, which can involve a lot of work for a
small return, and is probably best treated as supplementary, rather than main
income. Especially as an overnight Google change can wipe you out!
Each of these steps is covered in more detail in my Short e-Book series: 10

Steps to Create Your Own Internet Business. Although sold on their own
9
website, these may be downloaded free of charge by owners of Traffic

Floodgate from:
http://www.trafficfloodgate.com/10steps2success/
You may get a warning message when you go to download the e-books. This
is a standard Windows warning message for .pdf files and may be safely
ignored.
Step 1: Create or Select a Product

There are many factors involved here (enough to be the subject of a separate
book - see the announcement at the end of this book!) but they involve
• Selecting the right market. You need a potentially large customer base
with some existing suppliers to provide credibility, but with either plenty
of room for more competition or a previously untapped niche within the
general market.
• Deciding whether to create your own product from scratch, acquire
resale rights to an existing product and then tweak it to make it unique or
find an existing successful product with an affiliate program.
Step 2: Research Your Keywords

Because traffic is almost always related to a specific keyword, keyword
research is closely bound up with traffic generation and so has a stream all to
itself in this book. Please refer to Stream 1 below.
Step 3: Get a Domain Name

Even if you are going to sell someone else’s product as an affiliate, you need
your own website and therefore your own domain name. Don’t let anyone tell
you otherwise! Never send traffic to someone else’s website without capturing
your visitors’ details first and always cloak your affiliate links.
Step 4: Get a Website Host

Your website exists on computers maintained by a website host. You can get
excellent hosting servers for a low cost. You cannot get excellent hosting
services, with no strings attached, for free. Don’t use them.
Step 5: Get a Payment Gateway

You want to make money from your site, right? So you must have a way of
taking payments from visitors who want to purchase your product. The two
most popular payment gateways are ClickBank and PayPal. Others include
paydotcom, 2checkout and commission junction. Or you can get your own
merchant account, but it’s a hassle.
One advantage of ClickBank is that it exposes your product to a potential

army of affiliates. The downside is that you have no control over them.
ClickBank will also give a refund to any customer who requests one within 8
weeks of the sale, without reference to you. They pay you by check every 2
weeks.
10
After going through a verification process, you can setup your PayPal account
so that you can transfer directly from your PayPal balance to your nominated
bank account.
Both ClickBank and PayPal accounts are free to setup and charge a
commission on sales. Both have excellent reputations.
Step 6: Be Ready to Capture Your Visitors’ Details

You need a form on your site to capture your visitor’s details into a database.
You need to be able to email to that database and you also need a series of
emails that are sent to your subscribers and pre-determined times.
All of this will be handled either by an Autoresponder service or by

Autoresponder software that you install, either on your desktop or web server.
A service will cost you a small monthly fee and is the only way to go if you
don’t wish to be involved in technicalities. Two of the most popular
autoresponder services are Aweber and GetResponse.
Step 7: Build the Website

Hey, there’s only two ways to build a website – do it yourself, or get someone
else to do it. If you have a technical background, and can use a program like
Dreamweaver, Front Page or one of the free html editors and can cut and
paste directly into the html code, you’re probably better off doing it yourself,
simply because you can make minor changes and see the results
immediately. We’re not talking about a lot of pages here. Your sales letter will
be your home page with a Buy Now button linked to your payment gateway, or
you’ll use a squeeze page with a subscription form linked to your
autoresponder, you’ll have a thank you page with a Download button linked to
your product, a Blog (see Stream 3) a Site Map for the Search Engine spiders
and that’s it. Oh, and a traffic counter on each page (of course.)
If you can’t do that, or don’t want to, there are plenty of website designers at
eLance who will be happy to bid for your job at reasonable rates.
Step 8: Upload the Website

If you used software such as Dreamweaver to design your site, it may have an
upload facility built in. If you used a third party designer, they will probably do
it for you. Alternatively, you can obtain an FTP transfer program such as
Ipswitch WS_FTP. These often have free trial periods.
In all cases, you will need your FTP user name and password. These will
have been given to you by your website host when you opened your account
with them in Step 4 above.
11
Step 9: Get JV/Affiliate Partners

It is almost (and some would disagree with the “almost”) impossible to be an
Internet Marketing success without some solid Joint Venture partners and an
army of affiliates.
Now ClickBank, as mentioned in Step 4 above, will automatically get you

some affiliates if you list your product with them, but you have no control over
their number, their quality or their marketing strategy.
Getting good JV partners is very important. There’s a lot to it and I’m going to
cover it elsewhere. See the announcement at the end of this book!
Step 10: Get Traffic!

Well, that’s just what this book is all about. So let’s get on with it …
12
Traffic Floodgate Stream 1: Keyword Research
Stream 1: Keyword Research

What Are Keywords?
Keywords are the words or phrases that visitors type into a search engine
such as Google to find the sort of information or products that you are
providing.
Clearly, you want your site to be found for as many relevant keywords as
possible. You particularly want to be found for the terms that most of your
prospective customers are searching on.
The trick here is to think in terms of information, not product. If someone is

searching the Internet to buy a product, chances are they’ll go straight to
somewhere like eBay or Amazon. Your customers, other than direct referrals,
will come from those searching for information to help them answer a question
or solve a problem.
Keywords and Traffic

Keywords and traffic are bound up together. Traffic is not something that just
“happens.” There is not in some mysterious fashion a flood of traffic to some
sites and barely a trickle to others. Traffic doesn’t happen in a vacuum.
In other words, traffic is always for a particular keyword. Our task is to find the
most relevant keywords, that is, the ones that potential buyers of our product
are most likely to use, and get the maximum traffic for each of them.
Keyword Research
Your traffic floodgate starts here. There are many tools available to help you
determine what keywords your potential customers are using. Of particular
value are “long tail” keywords. These are phrases comprising several words
that hone right in on what you are selling but, because they are so specific,
are likely to have less competition.
For example, I’m selling a book that teaches you how to get more traffic to
your website. Ranking number 1 in Google for “traffic” is much harder than for
“more traffic to my website”. But a person doing the second search is much
more likely to buy my product than a person doing the first. In fact, the first
search might be a student doing a school project on automobile traffic
patterns!
Research Tools
There are free tools and pay for service tools. The major differences are that
the paid tools find more keywords and their results are more up to date. The
free tools may be using databases a couple of months old. Whether this
matters or not depends on the type of product you’re selling. For example, up
to date is very important for a seller of mobile phones, because of the “latest
13
and greatest” syndrome. If you’re selling an e-book on dog training, it’s less
relevant.
Free Resources
There are three main free resources, the Overture (Yahoo!) Free Tool, the
Google Free Keywords Tool and Wordtracker’s Free Keyword Research Tool.
The Overture (Yahoo!) Free Tool

Overture (subsequently acquired by Yahoo!) provide a free keyword research
tool at http://www.vretoolbar.com/keywords/.
Entering a keyword to research using Overture (Yahoo!)
Although sometimes looked down on as incomplete and out of date, the

Overture (Yahoo!) Keyword suggestion tool is still a good place to start, and
the price is right: Free!
Suppose you had a site selling lottery software or a lottery related service.
What keywords are your potential customers searching on. They will almost
certainly include the word “lottery” but this is far too broad a term to try to get
traffic for. It will be far too competitive.
Enter the word “lottery” as the keyword to get suggestions for and click on
Suggest.
You’ll see the loading message.
14
However, the site is often busy and you’ll get the following message (perhaps
several times.)
Site is too busy to respond
Just keep clicking on Suggest until you get through.
Lottery related keywords that people are searching on
You can see how valuable this information would be for someone developing
a lottery related website. Focusing on only the first five suggested terms (other
than just “lottery” itself) exposes your website to a potential 3,824,114 visitors
per month!
Even though this is an enormous number of visitors to try to tap into, let’s
check out “lotto” as well.
15
Lotto related keywords that people are searching on.
There are not as many results for “lotto” as there were for “lottery”, but the first
five terms still account for almost a million searches per month.
Although these results may be a month or more out of date, for this sort of
term that’s not very important. If you were searching on an item which
changes rapidly because of technology or fashion, such as cell phones, this
would be a consideration.
Your competitors will also be researching keywords and so you can expect to
work hard to get decent results for the terms near the tops of the lists above.
It’s often better to start off chasing traffic for the long tail keywords. These are
the ones with more words in the search term and fewer results. They are
easier to optimize for, easier to rank higher for and easier to get traffic.
Long tail keywords
16
It’s much easier to rank highly for a long tail keyword like “drawing lotto result
texas today” than for a generic one such as “lotto.”
The other advantage is that you know exactly what your visitors are looking
for. In the above example, you would make sure that the web page they land
on includes today’s lotto texas result (which you can probably get
automatically with a feed from the lottery site itself) and you’ve exposed your
offer to a potential 6,949 visitors a month! Just on one page!
The Google Free Keywords Tool

Google also provide a free keywords research tool at
https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal.
Looking for keywords based on “lottery” and “lotto”
You can enter more than one keyword. Then click on Get Keyword Ideas.
Naturally, the results are based on Google results only. And they’re sort of
based on the assumption that you’re going to use them in an Adwords
campaign. That assumption, however, gives us a really useful piece of
additional information.
17
Google search on “lottery” and “lotto”
The column Advertiser Competition shows who else is trying to get traffic for
that keyword. Even though the measure is via Adwords, it’s still a pretty good
indication of competition generally. Let’s see what happens is we do a reverse
sort on this column (just click the column header twice.)
Finding terms with less competition
The point is, if we can find long tail keywords with reasonable search volume
and little or no competition, we can rank highly on them very easily. We can
end up “owning” that keyword and cornering the traffic on it. nc education
lottery is a prime example above and in a less competitive area, you are likely
to find lots more.
Wordtracker’s Free Keyword Research Tool

Wordtracker has long been recognized as one of the keyword researcher’s
standbys. Originally available only as a paid product with a free trial,
Wordtracker now has a free version limited to 100 keywords. This is plenty for
18
our needs. The generation of thousands of keywords is really the province of

those practicing Adsense arbitrage, a subject outside the scope of this book.
The free trial of the full Wordtracker version is, of course, still available as
well.
For the free version of Wordtracker, go to

http://freekeywords.wordtracker.com.
Enter your keyword then click on Hit Me
We’re using “lottery” again to give us a comparison with other free tools.
Wordtracker will give us average daily results.
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Top results for “lottery”
Wordtracker has a big advantage in that it allows us to do long tail keyword

research just by clicking on any of the results from the initial search.
Long tail keywords based on “florida lottery”
As mentioned earlier, these long tail keywords can be particularly lucrative. It

should be easy to rank high for florida lottery daily results and there’s
nothing wrong with 109 visitors per day on one keyword!
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As well, checkout the Good Keywords tool at http://www.phil-

recommends.com/goodkeywords. You have to download the tool to your
desktop but it works well and is completely free!
HitTail
HitTail is another resource for finding long tail keywords that are relevant to
your site. HitTail reveals in real-time the least utilized, most promising
keywords hidden in the Long Tail of your natural search results. It then
presents these terms to you as suggestions that when acted on can boost the
natural search results of your site. The basic version of HitTail is free.
Go to http://www.hittail.com/.
Register to Use HitTail for Free
After you’ve entered your details, including your site’s URL, you will be
presented with two paid options, $9.95 per month or $99.95 per year. These
represent excellent value once your site starts getting visitors. At this stage,
you are just going to use the free version, so go back to the home page, click
on My Account and login with the user name and password you selected
during registration.
This page shows your Account Settings, followed by My Sites. Click on the
View button.
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This will bring up the HitTail JavaScript code, which you will need to copy into
every web page that you want to track. If you are using a template, this will be
much easier. Copy the code into your template or individual web pages
between the <body> and </body> tags.
Hint: Whenever I add 3rd party code to a web page, I surround it with
beginning and end comments. This ensures that I’m not looking at it a month
later and wondering what it is! So my HitTail code would look something like
this:


<script src="http://41413.hittail.com/mlt.js"
type="text/javascript"></script>

Once you’ve installed the code and uploaded the modified pages to your
website, HitTail will start recording the keywords that visitors are actually
using to find your site in real time and will make suggestions for additional
long-tail keywords based on these results.
To see these, get to My Sites as described above and click on View Stats.
The Suggestions tab will show suggested long tail keywords based on actual
searches.
Paid Resources
There are two paid resources that I would recommend, Wordtracker and
Keyword Elite.
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Wordtracker
The Wordtracker paid version has long been recognized as a staple for
serious keyword researchers. As mentioned previously, it comes with a free
trial. Go to http://www.phil-recommends.com/wordtracker.
Wordtracker keyword research tool signup
Click on Take the free trial.
This will allow you to use Wordtracker free for 7 days. It will also entitle you to
two free bonuses, a Keywords Basic Course and a 7 Day Video Course.
Although these are, not unreasonably, oriented towards using Wordtracker,
they contain a lot of good information about keyword research and usage in
general.
A full subscription to Wordtracker costs $59 per month.
Important: You will automatically be moved onto a full monthly

subscription if you don’t cancel your free trial during the 7 day trial
period. So if you choose this option, be very disciplined about your
decision as to whether you proceed or not.
Keyword Elite
The other paid keyword research tool that has become a legend in the
Internet Marketing world is Brad Callen’s Keyword Elite. You can have a look
at http://www.phil-recommends.com/keywordelite.
Keyword Elite is an amazing piece of software that is particularly suited to

someone who wants to drill down to levels of keyword that are simply not
available with anything else. From the website:
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Keyword Elite “disclaimer”
Of course, you then have to either create Adwords ads based on these
keywords or web pages optimized for these keywords in order to get the
traffic. But that’s not particularly hard. It’s finding the keywords in the first
place that’s almost impossible without such a tool.
Keyword Elite costs $176, but it’s a 1-time cost and you get lifetime updates
for free, along with a couple of very useful bonuses. You should check it out
just to read some of the testimonials.
Record Your Keywords

When you have the list of keywords that you want traffic for, keep them in a
text document (the type that Notepad creates.) You’ll use them throughout this
course.
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Traffic Floodgate Stream 2: On-Page SEO
Stream 2: On-Page SEO

What Is On-Page SEO?
On-page search engine optimization covers everything that you can do on a
web page itself to make it rank highly for your selected keywords.
The conventional wisdom is (or used to be) that you listed all your keywords in
the keywords meta tag, e.g.,
<meta name="keywords" content="keyword1, keyword2, keyword3, etc”>
and then blended them into the on page text, with your best keywords being in
headings or emphasized in some way.
This gave rise to software which built multiple pages from a template, each
optimized for a selected keyword. They looked pretty awful, but they ranked
well.
This worked for a while, but the search engines quickly learned to recognize
these software generated pages, and penalized them accordingly.
Having a keywords meta tag won’t do any harm, so you might as well include
it as a reminder to yourself, but as far as your home page goes, it’s a sales
letter. Write it totally with your human reader in mind. It’s only purpose is to
convert your prospects into sales. Similarly, the only purpose of your squeeze
page is to convert your visitor into a prospect and your thank you page is
there to confirm and complete the sale. We have other ways to win the search
engine wars.
You Must Have a Website

The days when you could make money just by advertising your affiliate link
are well and truly gone. Whether you are
• Selling your own product
• Selling a merchant’s product as their affiliate
• Selling contextual advertising such as Google Adsense
you must have your own website.
This stream assumes that you know how to build a website (or get someone
else to do it for you.) If this is not the case, please refer to Book 7 in the Ten
Steps to Launch Your Own Internet Marketing Business Series: How to …
Build a Website. This book has plenty of links to free resources for website
editing, finding and manipulating images, etc.
We will focus here on structuring your website to sell your own product or
another merchant’s product as their affiliate in order to get the maximum traffic
for the least effort.
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Website Structure Diagram
This diagram shows a simple structure that is easily extended naturally and
over a period of time to gather in more and more traffic.
The Structure Explained

The structure is simply:
• A home page that is designed to do one thing: Persuade your visitor to

click on your Buy Now button (if you are selling your own product) or
your Check It Out button (if you are selling another merchant’s product
as an affiliate.)
• A blog where you publish articles designed to position you as an expert

in your field.
• A download page, reached through a 3rd party payment gateway, where

your customers can download their products.
• A growing number of keyword specific pages, containing the same

articles that you have published elsewhere, all pointing back to your
home page and designed to rank high in the search engines for their
specific keywords.
• A site map so that the search engine spiders can find your keyword
specific pages.
Your home page has only three outgoing links, one to your blog, one to your
site map and one attached to your payment button.
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Outgoing links bleed page rank, so you want to keep them to a minimum.
The link to your blog is simply there because your blog is your only claim to
authority. It will contain articles that portray you as an expert in your field (see
Stream 3: Blogging) and serve to convince the doubters to buy.
The link to your site map is for the search engine spiders to follow. When a
spider visits your home page, it follows the link to your site map and from
there to all the other keyword rich pages.
Your Home Page Is for Human Consumption

Forget the spiders. Your home page is purely for human consumption. It can
be a Sales Page or a Squeeze Page.
The Sales Page Approach.

If you are selling your own product, your home page should be one long sales
letter, sprinkled with tempting Buy Now buttons. Remember that your visitor
has a problem that they need to solve. A discourse on copywriting is beyond
the scope of this Guide, but in essence your sales letter aims to show your
visitors that you understand their problem and to convince them that your
product is the solution they are after. This should be achieved by both your
own words and customer testimonials. Good graphics help, but will not alone
make the sale. Because it’s expected, you also need to give valuable gifts to
customers who buy your product.
If you are selling an affiliate product, your home page is similarly structured,
but the emphasis is different. You are reviewing a product that you have
purchased yourself, and you are telling your visitor how it solved your
problem, which is, of course, the same problem your visitor is searching for a
solution to. Instead of tempting Buy Now buttons sprinkled throughout, you
have tempting Check It Out buttons containing your cloaked affiliate link.
Because you are just one of many affiliates they could be buying through
(including themselves, in many cases) you need to give valuable gifts (bribes)
to customers who buy through your link.
The Squeeze Page Approach

With the squeeze page approach, you are not aiming to sell your visitor
anything right now. Your single aim is to get their details so that you can sell
them something, be it your own product or as an affiliate, later.
With this approach, it’s absolutely essential to bribe your visitors. You must
give them valuable gifts in exchange for their names and email addresses.
It’s Not All About Your Home Page

Your chances of ranking high in Google for your home page are fairly low and,
surprisingly perhaps, not that important anyway.
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Our aim is going to be to get a high rank for each of our internal pages that
have been optimized for specific, long-tail keywords. Our website structure will
comprise a home page, a blog, a growing number of keyword specific pages
and a site map. Plus a download (sometimes called a thankyou) page that a
customer is taken to after they purchase your product.
Your Blog
Stream 3 covers how to create a blog on your website. The purpose of your
blog is to publish keyword rich articles which will link back to your home page
and automatically ping the search engines and the social directory sites. As
well as positioning you as an authority, your blog will result in a spirally
growing number of important backlinks to your site. Stream 3 covers the detail
of doing this.
Keyword Specific Pages.

Remember that you created a text file of generated keywords? Over a period
of time, you are going to create a page optimized for each one of these. But
you’re not going to do it specifically for the website.
In Stream 4, you will learn how to write keyword rich articles and get them
published.
Each time you write an article, you have a new post for your blog and a new
page for your website. The article title becomes the header and the article
body the page contents. In this way, you seriously multiply the power of your
work. One single article gets backlinks to your home page from multiple article
directories, from your blog, from the services pinged by your blog and from
within your website itself. This multiplier effect is one of the single most
effective things you can do to get high search engine ranking.
Free Resources
I’m not a big fan of software that generates website pages for you. It’s too
easy to create pages that look really bad and it’s too easy to leave footprints
that will be recognized by the search engine spiders. On the other hand, it’s
really easy to create lots of pages, and if you take a few precautions …
HyperVRE
One that you can use free is HyperVRE (the VRE stands for Virtual Real
Estate.) It’s free, with an optional paid upgrade. The free version is all you
need for now. You can get it from:
http://www.phil-recommends.com/hypervre
Although HyperVRE is promoted as a tool for building Adsense pages, you

are just interested at the moment in using it to build keyword-rich web pages.
Don’t be tempted to include Adsense blocks and other contextual advertising
just because you can. By all means consider that for a separate exercise, but
not this one.
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HyperVRE creates fresh and unique content for each keyword rich page by
including rotating articles and RSS feeds oriented towards that page’s
keyword. This is great because you literally don’t have to do any work to make
it happen. The downsides are (a) you have no control over what’s going to
appear, and the standard of some of the writing is truly awful (which doesn’t
matter to the search engine spider but may turn off a human visitor) and (b)
the articles and feeds normally include outgoing links, which both bleed page
rank and tempt your visitors off-site.
If you want to try HyperVRE, do two things:
1. Upload only a few pages at a time, so that your site appears to grow
naturally over a period of time. Google is very suspicious of sites that grow
by several hundred pages between spider visits.
2. Use a text or html editor to have a look at the pages generated by

HyperVRE and remove any references or links back to HyperVRE itself (or
substitute your own internal site links.) Otherwise, you are allowing
HyperVRE to leave a big footprint that screams “software generated.”
Simple Search and Replace

Here’s a site where you can get a powerful but simple to use text editor that
will allow you to make a change to all of the files in a nominated folder almost
instantly:
http://www.phil-recommends.com/rjlsoftware
Click on Software – Utilities. Look under All of Our Windows Utilities.
Download Simple Search and Replace
They have lots of other useful stuff as well.
The other thing that’s a really good idea is to NOT use the templates that
come with HyperVRE. Create your own simple template so that your
generated pages look like all your other pages.
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Here’s an example of what a simple template for the Traffic Floodgate site
might look like. This is how it would appear in Dreamweaver:
Traffic Floodgate HyperVRE Template
If I had used HyperVRE to generate say, 200 keywords based on a primary

keyword such as “website traffic”, this template would create 200 pages , each
with the specific keyword as its title and containing an article and an RSS feed
based on the primary keyword.
By itself, however, that’s not enough. Before uploading these 200 generated
pages, I would write a paragraph mentioning the specific keyword three to five
times and insert it between the #Keyword# Title and the #Article_Title#. Yes, I
know this is actual work, rather than sitting back and letting the software do it,
but it’s why your generated pages will get ranked and others’ won’t.
StatCounter
You should have an invisible traffic counter on each page of your website and
statistics that show you the number of visitors to each page, where they came
from, what keywords they searched on, entry pages, exit pages, how long
they stayed and so on.
Remarkably, StatCounter does all this and more totally free! You can get an
indication of how popular StatCounter is from the fact that its Google Page
Rank is an incredible 9!
You can register at http://www.phil-recommends.com/statcounter
Answer a few questions about your site, and StatCounter will generate a
simple JavaScript that you add to each page of your website.
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Google Analytics
Google Analytics is a free resource supplied by (surprise) Google and
designed to help you learn more about where your visitors come from and
how they interact with your site. The Google Analytics site itself has a Page
Rank of 8. Find it at http://www.google.com/analytics/.
Google Analytics Sign In
Sign in using your Google account. If you don’t have one, go to the Google
main site and get one. You can then use it for all your Google activity,
including Adsense, Adwords and Gmail.
Go to Analytics: New Account Signup and enter your website details.
Google Analytics New Account
You will then be asked to fill in your name, phone number and country and to
accept the Terms and Conditions. You will then get taken to a page containing
the Google Analytics tracking code.
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Warning: At the time of writing, Google Analytics was in the process of

upgrading from urchin.js to ga.js. The default code shown was the old, legacy
code (to cater for those who already have the code on their site.)
Be sure to click on the New Tracking Code tab to get the current code and
then copy it into every page you want to track between the <body> and
</body> tags.
Hint: As good practice, I put all such tracking code at the end of the page (just
before the </body> tag, and surround it by Start and End comments so I don’t
forget what it is. For example:


The actual JavaScript code copied from the Google
Analytics site

It can take 24 hours after installing the code to see results.
Click on Continue after installing the code. This will take you back to the
Website Profile page, where you should (eventually) see a tick in the Status
column.
Click on View Reports to see statistics such as number of visits, number of

page views, number of pages viewed per visit, average time spent on site, etc.
There are also several overviews covering visitors, sources, content and a
world map highlighting where your visitors are coming from geographically.
This is not only profoundly interesting, it gives you essential feedback so that
you can move away from what isn’t working and do more of what is.
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Server Downtime
You should also monitor your server downtime, for two reasons. One, it’s a
good measure of whether or not you have a good, reliable host and two, if
your server is down on more than two occasions when Googlebot tries to
crawl your site, you risk having it dropped from the index!
Host Tracker has a free option that checks your site every 30 minutes and
provides weekly reports. It also has a feature that allows you to see what your
site’s response time is from servers all over the world. Just go to http://host-
tracker.com/ and enter your website’s URL.
Traffic Floodgate’s Average Response Time Was Less Than Half a Second
To use Host Tracker on an on-going basis, click on Sign Up and create a user
name and password. You will need to enter a valid email address as a code
will be sent to you that you must input to complete the registration.
Once you have confirmed registration, you will be led through the process of
entering your website’s URL for monitoring (the free plan allows you to have
up to two), the monitoring interval (how often Host Tracker checks your site’s
status) and your email address to receive reports.
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Setting Up Host Tracker for Your Website
After that, you can login at any time to check your stats. As soon as you login,
your uptime stats are displayed. These include when each check was done
and what the response time was. So it’s a great way to keep on top of your
web host’s performance.
Host Tracker Uptime Stats
Paid Resources
SEO Elite
If you’re really serious about getting the best possible position in the search
engines for your chosen keywords, there is no better tool available than SEO
Elite. At $167 last time I looked, it’s not cheap, but the best rarely is. You can
check it out at:
http://www.phil-recommends.com/seoelite.
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Site Map and Spider Map

One thing that will help get you indexed quickly and deeply is an XML site
map and, for the search engines that don’t recognize them, a spider map. You
can use an excellent free resource to generate these at:
http://www.searchenginepromotionhelp.com/
Click on Sitemap and Spider Map Generator, fill in a few details about your
site and these two extra pages will be generated for you, ready to upload to
your site.
Note that generation takes place from the files that you have already uploaded
to your web host, so after making changes to your site and uploading them,
you should revisit this site and regenerate your site maps.
Include a text link to your spider map on your home page.
Another facility this site offers that you should take advantage of is the
creation of your robots.txt file.
35
Enter the folders and/or pages that you don’t want to appear in search engine
results and, in the last panel, the URL to your site map. Upload the resulting
robots.txt file to your website. This will cause a deep and accurate crawl of
your site by the search engine spiders.
Submit Your Site Map

Once you have your new site map, use the free Google Webmaster Tools to
submit it to Google. This will get your whole site re-crawled much more quickly
than just waiting for it to happen. You’ll find these at
http://www.google.com/webmasters/ (PR of 9 – very popular.)
Sign in to Webmaster Tools with your Google account (if you haven’t got one,
go and register a Google’s main site) and then at the Google Dashboard,
enter your site’s URL and click on Add Site.
36
Then, under the heading Sitemap, click on Add, select Add General Web
Sitemap from the dropdown menu and enter your new XML sitemap’s file
name.
Adding a Google Sitemap
In order to verify your new sitemap, Google will send you some code that you
have to use as the name of an html file (so it looks like
namegooglesendsyou.html) and upload it to your site’s main directory. The
contents don’t matter. I just used my page outline, basically a header and
footer.
As soon as you let Google know that that’s been done, Google will verify your
site map, show a tick in the Verify column and schedule your site for a crawl.
And you’re done!
Check Broken Links

With the best will in the world, and no matter how careful you are, as your site
grows in size and complexity, the possibility of broken links (such as a link
pointing to a page that has been removed or whose name was changed)
increases. Neither your visitors nor the search engine spiders like broken
links. They make you look like an amateur.
So check for them after every change to your site and fix any you find straight
away.
You can check for broken links for free at http://www.dead-links.com/.
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Using Dead-Links to Check for Broken Links
Dead-Links will crawl your entire site and report any missing links. Note that it
will report a link as missing if it doesn’t respond quickly enough. However, all
you have to do is click on any link reported on screen as broken and see if it
comes up. You can even do this while the spider is running.
Any link you click on will open in a new window.
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The Dead-Links Spider Reports on All Pages Crawled
On Page Viral Marketing

On of the best ways to multiply your visitor value is if you can persuade them
to tell others about your site. But you have to make it easy for them to do so
and then reward them for doing it.
You do this with a Tell-A-Friend script. You need the following functionality:
• Customization, so that you can make it match the look and feel of your
website.
• Direct subscription to your opt-in list and autoresponder.
• Usage reports covering both sender and receiver.
• Ability to send to an unlimited number of recipients.
• Ability to redirect the senders to a thankyou or download page so that
you can reward them for taking action.
You can look for both free and paid scripts at http://www.hotscripts.com/.
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HotScripts Home Page
Warning: It’s a hugely overwhelming site. I find it difficult not to get totally
sidetracked and spend hours looking at fascinating but totally irrelevant stuff!
The one that I use is Mike Filsaime’s Viral Friend Generator. It has everything
I want and is a breeze to install and configure.
You can check it out at http://www.viralfriendgenerator.com/.
A Bit Left Field

This is an idea I’m playing with, but haven’t yet tried out. I’ll set it up on an
experimental traffic site and get some metrics on it in time to be included with
the first of your Traffic Floodgate monthly updates.
If you try it out first, please let me know your results.
The idea is this. Use the Google Language Tool to translate your website into,
say, 10 different languages.
You’ll find the Google Language Tool at

http://www.google.com/language_tools. You need to scroll down to Translate
a web page and then enter the URL of the page to translate, the language
being translated from and the language being translated to.
You can currently select from 24 languages. Unfortunately, Klingon isn’t one
of them, although you can use it for the Google interface itself. All the Trekkie
fans must be alive and well and living in Google!
40
Translate a Traffic Floodgate Page from English to French
Voila! Quality Website Traffic in French.
French Traffic Floodgate
41
Click on Remove frame and then save the resulting page as your original
page name, but with a language identifier, such as FR_ appended to the front
of it. You should save it in a Language (e.g., French) subfolder of your local
copy of your website.
Do this for each page of your website for one language. Then repeat for
another language. It’s a pretty quick process and totally painless.
To a native speaker of the translated language, it’s not going to be a smooth

translation. But that’s OK. We’re not looking to find non English speaking
customers.
What we are looking to do is multiply our non-duplicated content 10-fold with

very little effort.
Create a simple web page with text links to each of the translated index
pages. Its entries could be something like:
<a href=”\French\FR_index.html”>French</a>
<a href=”\German\GE_index.html”>German</a>
and so on. It could be called otherlanguages.html.
Then put a single link on your home page to this page. Something like:
<a href=”\otherlanguages.html”>Other Languages</a>
Simply upload your additional translated pages over a period of a few weeks,
so that the growth seems natural. You’ve now got 10 times your original
content. And Content is King!
Of course, there’s always the possibility that you might pick up a new French,
Italian, Spanish or Chinese (but not Klingon) customer as well.
Site Submission
You don’t have to submit your site to anyone. MSN, Yahoo and Google will all
eventually find it one way or another and then most of the others will pick it up
from them.
That said, submitting it yourself will get it indexed faster, both in the major
search engines and the myriad of smaller ones. The mutual backlinking may
get you a faster page rank.
Submit Equalizer
If you wish to do this, it’s best done by software. Submit Equalizer has been
around forever (a 1-page sales letter with a Page Rank of 4 just has to have
tenure) and is well thought of. You fill in your site’s details and it submits to a
couple of thousand directories automatically.
42
Submit Equalizer Home Page
You can also use Submit Equalizer to tell you where you rank in each Search
Engine for selected key words. This is very valuable feedback to help you
tune your site.
You can check out Submit Equalizer at:

http://www.phil-recommends.com/submitequalizer/
QU.I.T.
Submit your site to QU.I.T. (Quick Indexing Tool) as it does a lot of things
differently from others. Quit submits your site to six major social bookmarking
sites, several times through several accounts. It then makes Googlebot think
your site has fresh content and rush over to check it out. It pings all the major
and minor blog ping sites and utilizes several other techniques that the author
isn’t sharing at this time.
You’ll find QU.I.T. at http://www.bluehatseo.com/quit-quick-indexing-tool/.
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QU.I.T. Script
Just fill in your site’s details, click on Get Me Indexed, and you’re done.
44
Traffic Floodgate Stream 3: Blogging
Stream 3: Blogging
What Is Blogging?
Blog is an abbreviation of weBlog and is a website setup by freely available
software to act as an online journal where you can post articles, news and
comment on anything you want.
Why is a Blog Valuable?

The value of a blog comes from these facts:
1. Setting one up is much easier than setting up a website and adding posts
to it is just like using a word processor, so you can grow the blog naturally
and easily.
2. Because you can post anything you like, you can post content that is
relevant to your main site, is keyword rich and full of backlinks.
3. Blogs are indexed and ranked by search engines more readily than
mainstream sites.
4. You can setup your blog so that both the search engines and a large
number of social sites are automatically informed (‘pinged’) whenever you
make a post. This gets your new posts indexed rapidly and ranked highly
for their keywords (which, naturally, link back to your main site.)
Blogger and WordPress

You can set blogs up for free by using Blogger (which is owned and run by
Google) who will host the site for you or by using WordPress to create the
blog on your own web host. It’s not a bad idea to do both, as both have certain
advantages.
Your aim is to have a network of blogs getting traffic and then converting that
traffic into visitors to your money making site.
There is some evidence to suggest that it’s easier to rank high with a Blogger
blog than with a WordPress one. This is probably because the former is being
hosted away from your main site (and it probably doesn’t so any harm that
Google is doing the hosting!) and the WordPress blog is usually being hosted
on the same host as your main site.
When we look at creating a blog hex later, we will host WordPress blogs away
from your main site.
A potential downside of Blogger is that it’s outside your control. If the all
powerful Big G. decides it doesn’t like your blog, it can (and has done so in
45
the past) delete it overnight. Just in case, I like to duplicate every post I make
to Blogger on a similarly set up WordPress blog.
We will create both Blogger and WordPress blogs.
Create a Blogger Blog

Go to http://www.blogger.com.
Click on Create Your Blog Now
You will then be asked to create your account.
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Create a Google Account
Create a Google Account
If you already use other Google services, such as Gmail or Adsense, you will
already have a Google account that you can use to log in. Otherwise, fill in the
details to create one.
Once you have logged in using your Google Account, you will be asked to
enter your name to be displayed on your blog posts. Check the Accept the
Terms of Service box and click on Continue.
Sign Up for Blogger
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Enter Your Blog Posting Name
Name Your Blog

The idea is to name your blog with one of the keywords that you found out
and stored in a text file in Stream 1. Over a period of time, you should build a
blog for each keyword that is available. If your chosen keyword is not
available, try it with a dash (or even a double dash) between each word.
Choose Your Blog Template

You will get best results from a simple template with a white background for
ease of readability. I suggest Minima, Dots, Snapshot or Sand Dollar.
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The Sand Dollar Template Has Been Selected
Create Your Blog

After selecting your template, click on Continue and your new blog is created
immediately.
Instant Blog Creation
This instant blog creation is one of the main strengths of Blogger. That’s why I
like using it for the “create a blog per keyword” strategy. With practice, you
should be able to create a blog in less than a minute!
Start Posting
Enter a simple welcoming post. Just make sure that you use your keyword as
the title and sprinkle it throughout the post.
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Welcoming Post
Then hyperlink the first and last mentions of your keyword back to your money
making site. You do this by highlighting the keyword and clicking on the Link
icon in the toolbar.
Hyperlinking a Keyword Back to Your Site
Simply enter your site’s URL and click OK.
I like to bold the linked keywords as well, so that my post looks like:
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Our First Post
Click on Publish Post and you will get a reassuring and enthusiastic message
that it’s now out there for the world to see!
Success!
This is just your initial post, to establish the blog. You will post an article and
then a product review tomorrow. Never post more than 3 times in one day to
one blog. Google doesn’t like it. Don’t risk having your blog suspended or
even deleted.
Set the Blog Up Properly

Click on the Settings Tab and enter a description for your blog which, like your
welcoming post, contains your keyword sprinkled throughout.
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Keyword Rich Description
You can leave everything else at the defaults, except set Show Email Post
Links to Yes.
Why Not? Someone might!
View Your New Blog

Click on View Blog to see what your new blog will look like to a visitor.
How It Looks to the World
As shown above, you can click on View my complete profile and add a photo
and other information if you wish.
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Tweak the Settings

Click on each of the other topics under the Settings tab in turn. You can leave
everything at the default settings, except under Formatting, change Show Link
fields to Yes.
Your blog has now been set up to be search engine friendly. When you
post to your Blog it will automatically ping the search engines to let them know
it has been updated.
Add a Product Image

If you have an image of the product you are selling, you can add it to your
blog, along with a caption that links back to your website. This gives you one
more backlink from the blog as well as providing something else useful for
your visitors to click on.
Click on the Layout tab, then Page Elements and Add a Page Element.
Adding a Product Image
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There are several different types of page elements we can add. Select
Picture: ADD TO BLOG.
Add a Picture to Your Blog
In the dialog box that appears next, you can browse for your image, either on
your own computer or on the web, and enter its title and caption.
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Use your blog keyword as the title and for the caption, enter the name of your
product as anchor text linked back to your site. For example, the caption
above is <a href="http://trafficfloodgate.com" target="_blank"><b>Traffic
Floodgate E-Book</b></a>.
The blog now looks like this:
Our New Look
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Although this has taken several pages to write out, there are only a few simple
steps involved. Once you’ve done it a couple of times, you’ll be able to do it
very quickly indeed.
It’s free and it’s fast. Do one for each of your most important keywords, post
articles to them as you create them, and watch your traffic for those keywords
go up!
Creating Your Network

Now repeat the process over a period of time and create a large network of
blogs which you can interlink to get higher rankings and take on more
competitive niches.
You can easily create 5 blogs per day on relevant keywords and sooner or
later dominate your niche.
WordPress Blogs
Blogger is my choice of blogging platform to get a large number of keyword
specific blogs up and going in a short time. It’s all about backlinks and getting
my keywords ranked high.
The risk remains that because the platform is outside our control, you are
putting all your hard work into someone else’s hands. Theoretically, Google,
through Blogger, can shut your blog down in an instant, without even giving a
reason, meaning that all your hard work is gone for good. Now, as long as you
build your blogs the way I described, and post to them at a reasonable rate,
say 2 or 3 times week, you shouldn’t have any problems. But the possibility
remains. If you do get a blog deleted, re-register it immediately.
The choice of platform for the blog that will position you as the expert in your
field, which in itself will result in an increase in targeted traffic and which puts
everything in your own hands, is WordPress.
Like Blogger, WordPress is free and can be setup in just a few minutes. But
you can and should host it yourself. As you’ve already got a website hosting
your product, that will be where you also host your WordPress blog.
By using WordPress, you are also given instant access to plug-ins and tools
that aren’t available with Blogger. These tools can make your blog more
attractive to search engines and social bookmarking sites, as well as more
unique to your visitors. There’s a list of these plug-ins further on in this Guide.
WordPress can be installed on any hosting account that uses cPanel with just
a few mouse clicks. You should already have a hosting account for your main
website.
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My Web Host
If for any reason, you don’t yet have a hosting account, the one I use and
recommend is Host Gator. You can check them out by clicking on:
http://www.phil-recommends.com/hostgator/
Host Gator Website
I host around 20 websites with them, none of them have ever been down as
far as I’m aware and they always load quickly. They run Linux as their
operating system and use Cpanel.
Host Gator has a number of plans, starting at $4.95 per month. If you can
afford a bit more, their $7.95 plan offers great value and allows you to host
more than one domain.
Installing WordPress
Login to your cPanel at your domain. This is normally at
http://www.DomainName.com/cpanel but your web host will have given you
this information when your account was set up, along with your user name
and password. Once logged in, scroll down to the bottom of the screen.
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The Bottom of the cPanel Home Screen
Click on the Fantastico link underneath the smiley face icon.
Fantastico allows you to install many scripts on your website, including

WordPress.
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Stage 1 of the WordPress Installation
Click on the WordPress link under the Blogs section.
and then on New Installation.
Will already
be filled in.
Just enter the

word “blog.”
User name and

password of
your choice.
Use your real

posting name,
email address,
site name and
brief description.
WordPress Installation Details
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Your domain name will already be filled in. It’s a good idea to keep your
WordPress blog separate from your main website pages, so install it in a
directory called “blog.” This directory should not already exist. The WordPress
installation will create it for you.
Enter the name you will use to access the WordPress Admin section. Choose
one you will remember. There’s nothing wrong with “Admin” or “Administrator.”
No one will be trying to hack your blog and it’s easily remembered.
Likewise, choose a password for your WordPress Admin section that you will
remember easily.
The Admin nickname is what will be shown when you post to your blog. When
you post and view the blog, you’ll see that it says “posted by … Admin
Nickname.” Unless you have reason not to, just use your own name.
Enter the email address that will receive emails when new comments are
posted on your blog. This will probably be already filled in for you but you can
use any valid email address you like.
The Site Name will be displayed in the top and bottom sections of your blog
with most Wordpress Themes. The Description is sometimes displayed on the
sidebar. It varies with different themes. Don’t agonize too much, as you can
easily change them later, after you have had a chance to see how they look.
The email account configuration is only applicable if you intend updating your
blog remotely, via the Internet. This might apply if you were traveling. If you
know the details, from setting up an Outlook account for instance, fill them in.
Otherwise, don’t bother.
Finally, click on Install WordPress.
Check that the details are OK and click on Finish installation.
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This will again give you the details of where you have installed WordPress.
Take a note of these details for your records. And that’s it. You’ve installed
WordPress.
As with Blogger, once you’ve done it once, subsequent installations should

take less than a minute.
An Example
The site http://www.techcrunch.com was built as a WordPress blog. It has a
Google Page Rank of 7 (very, very good) and an Alexa rank of 1,784,
meaning that it was at the time of writing the 1,784th most visited site on the
entire Internet.
It contains technical data and it sells advertising.
Read on …
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TechCrunch has a PR of 7 and Alexa Rank of 1,784
As a result, TechCrunch sells 125 x 125 advertising banners for a cool

$10,000 per spot per month. So this site would be making over $100,000 per
month. And it’s a blog!
Changing The Default Settings

After each successful WordPress installation, you need to change some
settings from their default values. These changes will both improve your
search engine positions and increase your traffic.
Change The Theme

One of WordPress’s strengths is that the entire look and feel of your blog can
be changed just by changing the theme. It’s essential to do this as otherwise
your blog will look just like a hundred thousand others and many visitors will
leave because of that without ever reading your content (or worse, without
clicking on any of your links.)
You can select a new theme for free from http://themes.wordpress.net.

Choose something attractive, but with a light background for readability.
Remember that if you don’t like the result, it’s easily changed.
If you want something totally unique, you can get a theme specifically created
for you. This should cost less than $100 and can really make the difference
between people remembering your blog and coming back to it, or leaving
immediately. You can hire a contractor to create a theme for you at
http://www.Elance.com or http://www.Rentacoder.com. Or just Google “unique
WordPress themes.”
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Install A New Theme

Connect to your main site using an FTP program such as the one freely
available from http://www.coreftp.com and navigate to your WordPress
installation in the /blog directory. You should see the following files:
WordPress Installation Files
Double click on the wp-content folder:
And then on the themes folder. You will see two folders labeled “classic” and
“default.” These are the two themes that come pre-installed in WordPress and
this is where you will upload your new theme.
Your theme, whether it’s a free one or not, will be in a folder named after the
theme. Upload the complete folder to this directory.
The Theme cutline-3-column-right-11 Has Been Uploaded
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Now log back into your WordPress Admin section and choose the
Presentation option from the top section. You should then see a screen shot
of your new theme. Click on it to make it your default theme. Click on the View
Site link to see what it looks like.
Changing the look and feel of your site with a single click is a powerful
WordPress feature.
Here is a WordPress Blog using the above (free) theme:
Traffic Floodgate WordPress Blog
Login to Your WordPress Dashboard
Login to your WordPress Admin area using your website’s URL, followed by
/blog (if you installed into the blog sub-directory as recommended) followed by
/wp-admin. Something like http://www.yourdomain.com/blog/wp-admin.
This will take you to the WordPress login screen, where you enter the
Administrator username and password that you set up as part of your
WordPress installation.
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This takes you to the WordPress Dashboard, where you will make a number
of changes.
WordPress Dashboard
Delete The Default Post

Remove the default post which was created automatically during installation.
Click on Manage at the top of the screen. You’ll see there is a post called
“Hello World!” Choose the Delete option and then select OK in the popup box.
This deletes the post completely. You will be replacing this with your own
initial post.
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Rename Uncategorized Category

Click on Manage and then Categories. Click on Edit next to Uncategorized
and change its name to your site’s primary theme.
Delete The Blogroll

The Blogroll is where you record your outbound links. During installation, it’s
set up automatically with links to sites related to WordPress. The only
outbound links we want are to our own sites, blogs and articles. Remove the
defaults by clicking on Blogroll at the top of the screen. Then check all the
boxes and click on Delete Checked Links. This will remove all these links from
your blog.
Change The Permalink Structure

You need the blog title in the URL to improve your results in the search
engines. You achieve this by changing the Permalink structure to reduce the
number of levels it takes a search engine to find your post. This increases
their perceived importance.
First, click on Settings, then Permalinks.
Then type the following into the Custom Structure box at the bottom of the
main options:
/%postname%/
This will add the blog title to the end of your URL, without including any
additional characters.
Then click on Update Permalink Structure. You should get the message
“Permalink Structure Has Been Updated”.
If you get a message saying “You Should Update Your .htaccess Now”, it
means that you have to make some changes to the .htaccess file stored on
your web host computer.
Copy all of the code showing in the box underneath the message. You can do
this by right clicking your mouse inside the box where the code is and
choosing “Select All.” Then right click again and choose “Copy”. Create a text
file on your desktop (you can use Notepad for this), call it “htaccess”, paste
the saved code into it and save it. It will be called htaccess.txt. Rename it to
.htaccess (i.e., put a dot in front of it and remove the .txt extension.)
Login to your web host using the FTP program you used to upload your
website. Then navigate to your WordPress installation where you can see the
WordPress files. One of them should be .htaccess. Upload the new one that
you created, overriding the one that’s there.
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This will setup your permalink structure. For further information, check out the
WordPress Permalink Section.
Add Your Ping List

Your ping list is a list of services that will be sent a ping, each time you update
your blog. You can update this list by clicking on Settings then Writing. The list
is at the bottom of that page, called “Update Services.”
WordPress Ping List
You can obtain a current Ping List from
http://www.trafficfloodgate.com/pinglist.html
You can also use the Pingoat service to ping a large number of services from
a single, one time entry. Go to http://www.pingoat.com:
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The Pingoat Website
Just enter your blog details, click on the General heading so that all of the
services are checked:
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Asking Pingoat to Ping All General Services
and then click on the Go Pingoat! button.
Essential Plugins
Plugins are useful tools that can be added to your WordPress site with just a
few clicks. Some will get you more traffic, some will keep visitors on your blog
longer and some will give you more backlinks (always a good thing.)
There are hundreds of available, and some are pretty amazing. When you’ve
got some time, check them out at http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/ and at
http://wp-plugins.net/beta/.
These are the essential ones. These all help in SEO, return visitors and
tracking your statistics. Every blog you make should have these plugins
installed:
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Google Sitemaps
Optimal Title
Simple Tags
Tagalize-It
Chicklet Creator
Ultimate Tag Warrior
Sociable
Tan Tan Noodles
Google Sitemaps
The Google Sitemaps plugin creates an xml sitemap for Google to read and it
also pings Google whenever you make changes to your blog. This plugin
usually sees any new posts you make indexed in Google within just a few
hours!
Optimal Title
Optimal Title is used for SEO purposes. It adds your blog title to the beginning
of your Meta Title tag. This gives you a boost in search engine rankings.
Simple Tags
The Simple Tags plugin allows you to add Technorati tags to your blog posts.
This can bring in extra free traffic from people searching in Technorati.
Tagalize-It
Tagalize It is a plugin designed to help you to tag your blog entries throughout
the post, not just at the end. This should also be used for Technorati tags.
Chicklet Creator
Chicklet Creator adds RSS buttons to your blog so that visitors can subscribe
to your RSS feed quickly and easily. It gives you the options of which services
you want to show and which to turn off.
Ultimate Tag Warrior

The Ultimate Tag Warrior plugin allows you to add tags to your blog posts.
These tags can then be shown on your blog and sorted by popularity, which
can be a good indication of which pages on your blog are the most popular.
They can be added to the top or bottom of each post or alternatively to a “Tag
Cloud” on the sidebar of your blog theme.
Sociable
The Sociable plugin automatically adds social bookmarking service icons to
the bottom of each post. This gives visitors an easy way to bookmark your
blog to return to later. This also gives you extra links, which will improve your
search engine rankings.
Tan Tan Noodles
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Tan Tan Noodles is a plugin which allows you to view your Google Analytics
and Feedburner stats from within your WordPress Admin section. This can be
a great timesaver as you don’t have to visit other sites to get your stats.
You can get all of your plugins from http://wp-plugins.net/beta/. It’s the biggest
directory of WordPress plugins on the Internet.
To install your plugins, just upload them into the plugins folder of your
WordPress installation. Then login to your WordPress Admin section and
choose the Plugins tab at the top of the screen.
Scroll down and activate the plugins you’ve uploaded.
Promoting Your Blog

Your Ping List and Google Sitemaps plugin will index your new content every
time you post to your blog.
The next thing you should do is open a (free) account at OnlyWire. Go to

http://www.onlywire.com/ and setup your account.
Set up an OnlyWire Account
OnlyWire is a shortcut to all of the following social bookmarking sites:
Backflip
Bibsonomy
Blinklist
Blogmemes
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Blue Dot
de.lirio.us
del.icio.us
Diigo
Excites
Furl
linkatopia
Linkroll
Looklater
ma.gnolia
Markaboo
Rawsugar
Shadows
Simpy
Spurl
unalog
Wink
xilinus
You will need to create a login for each of these services, but once you’ve
done that, a single post to OnlyWire will post to all of them. This is very
effective and a huge timesaver!
“Posting” to OnlyWire is dead simple.
Drag the Save Page (std) link to your browser’s toolbar. Then whenever you
create a new web page or blog entry, click on Save Page (std) in the toolbar.
If you understand how to copy and paste html, you can add an “Add to
OnlyWire” link to any web page or article. Click on the Add to OnlyWire link at
the top of the page. This brings up the html to insert.
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Add to OnlyWire html Code
Substitute your URL and tags. This gives your visitors a single click method of
submitting your web page or article to all of the social bookmarking sites that
you have registered with OnlyWire. This is powerful stuff!
After Each Blog Post

As well as submitting to OnlyWire, you should submit to all of the following
services. Sign up at the websites. They are pretty much self-explanatory.
Digg
Reddit
StumbleUpon
BlogRush
You will need to go the FAQ section and view the video on how to add the
BlogRush widget to your blog.
Each of these websites have excellent Google Page Rank and submitting
your blog entries to them will get you both traffic and valuable backlinks, which
will increase your search engine ranking and then get you more traffic. The
first three above have a PR of 8 and BlogRush, which is fairly new and still in
Beta at the time of writing, has a PR of 6.
Blog Directories
You should also submit your blog to the major blog directories.
You can find a linked list of these at

http://www.trafficfloodgate.com/blogdirectories.html.
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Syndicate Your Posts to Web 2.0

One of the most effective things you can do with your posts to get traffic is
syndicate them to the Web 2.0 sites. This is easily done with Web2Submitter.
Web2Submitter Home Page
Web2Submitter costs $47 but is hugely effective and a great time-save. You
can check it out at http://phil-recommends.com/web2submitter/.
The Structure of a Blog Post

Sometimes you should post to your blog just because you’ve got something to
say or you want to share some knowledge. In that case, don’t worry about
keywords or anything, just choose a relevant title and write your post. You’ll
still include your resource box, of course.
Other times, most of the time, you’re posting for traffic. In that case, the
structure starts with deciding what keyword this post is aiming to get ranked
on. Then:
Title: The first word of the title should be your keyword.
Content: Your keyword should be the heading and the footing of your content.
In between, write a post that is any or all of useful, valuable, unique,
controversial, funny or insulting but mentions your keyword 2 or 3 times. Use
the Simple Tag plug-in to tag each occurrence of the keyword.
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Resource Box: Use the keyword as anchor text to deep link back to the page
on your website that is oriented to that keyword. This page can simply be a
repetition of the post, with a link back to your sales page.
If you’re stuck for posting ideas, Google your keyword and research the first
10 sites.
Using Trackbacks
Trackbacks are a great way to add more content to your blog and get more
exposure.
Essentially, you find other blogs in your topic and find posts that you would
like to comment on. It can sometimes be easier and quicker to comment on
what someone else has written than to write something new yourself. And, the
act of commenting can sometimes give you fresh insights.
But… instead of commenting directly on their blog, you post the comment on
your own (WordPress) blog, then scroll down to the Trackbacks heading
under Advanced Options:
and enter the URL of the blog you’re commenting on. If it’s a WordPress blog,
they will be automatically pinged and moderate the comment in the usual way.
If they approve it (and if it’s a constructive post, they certainly will) then you
have your entry on two blogs plus a nice backlink.
If the other blog is not a WordPress blog, you have to check that it’s
Trackback enabled and obtain the special Trackback URL to use.
Comment Sniper
One way of both increasing your blog traffic and enhancing your professional
reputation is to be the first to comment and/or Trackback on new posts at
influential blogs in your niche.
That’s exactly what the free tool Comment Sniper allows you to do.
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Go to http://www.commentsniper.com/.
Comment Sniper Home Page
Download the free tool and leave it running on your desktop while connected
to the Internet. This is what it does:
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Influential blogs related to your niche industry make new posts all the time,
posts that may be read by thousands of people in the months to come.
Comment Sniper gives you the chance to be the first to comment on that post
and ride that unique wave.
Setting Up a Blog Hex

No, a blog hex has nothing to do with witchcraft but it can seem a bit like black
magic. It takes a bit of time to build one but it’s a surefire way to setup an
ongoing source of backlinks to your main sites.
Simply put, a blog hex is a network of six blogs, each built on a different
domain and interlinked so that they channel all of their links back to where you
want them to go.
First, register six new domain names. They don’t have to be in your niche.
Pick generally popular niches such as health, self-help, sports, entertainment
and business as this will make it easier to get content. This will cost around
$50 a year from http://www.enom.com or anyone else. Do a Google search for
“cheap domain name.”
Get three cheap, different hosting accounts that will take at least two domains
each and which are not the hosting account you use for your main sites. Do a
Google Search for “cheap web hosting.”
Host two of your new domains on each account and for five of the domains
set up two sub-domains, which are just specialties within niches. For example,
if you had the domain TotallyHealthyProducts.com (and it doesn’t have to be a
.com extension, it can be .net or .info) you might have Tofu as a sub-domain,
so that its URL becomes Tofu.TotallyHealthyProducts.com.
Install WordPress blogs on each domain and in each sub-domain. Make sure
that you setup the ping list as previously described in this stream.
Set up the Blogroll in each WordPress blog to carry links, so that the main
domains link in a circle (actually, a hexagon, because there’s six of them) and
the five that have sub-domains also link out to the blogs on the sub-domains,
as illustrated in the following diagram:
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Blog Hex Diagram
Blog 1 links to Blog 2 which links to Blog 3 and so on through to Blog 6 which
links back to Blog 1.
Blogs 2 to 6 also link to each of their sub-domain blogs.
Blog 1 links to as many main, money generating sites as you wish, at least up
to 20 or so.
Add some original content to each blog to get the process rolling. You can do
this by writing them yourself, buying PLR (Private Label Rights) articles and
then spinning them so that they are not exactly the same as someone else’s
or searching for articles related to your keywords and posting them as is,
including the author’s resource box.
You will want to automate this with automatic article and/or RSS feeds, so that
it doesn’t become too time consuming.
One of the best ways of getting all this done automatically for you is through
software called The Blog Solution. It can literally generate thousands of blogs
in a few minutes from parameters that you feed it and you can set them up so
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that content is added automatically and over a period of time. It’s a fantastic
“set and forget” solution that will continue to drive traffic to your main sites
while you do more interesting stuff.
Check out The Blog Solution at:
http://www.phil-recommends.com/TheBlogSolution
By the way, the latest version of The Blog Solution will automatically add
keyword relevant videos to your blog, attracting even more visitors.
Summary
Almost 25% of the Internet population are avid blog readers. You are now
armed with the knowledge you need to use this growing trend to not only get
more and more traffic to your blogs and through them to your main sites but
also to achieve something that’s getting harder and harder, high Google page
rank.
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Traffic Floodgate Stream 4: Articles and Press
Releases
Stream 4: Articles and Press Releases

What Are Articles?
Articles are short (typically one page or around 500 words) discourses on the
topic that your sales product is about, or on related topics. They must provide
useful information and they must not be thinly disguised sales letters.
Your articles are designed to do three things:
1. Position you as an expert in your subject matter.
2. Get backlinks to your money making sites, thereby increasing their page
rank and search engine relevance.
3. Feed traffic directly to your money making sites from visitors who read
your articles.
Why Are Articles Significant?

Articles are one of the most powerful methods available to you to increase
traffic to your websites. And the reason is simply that article syndication is
widespread throughout the Internet. By this, I mean that there are many
businesses that make their revenue by publishing article carrying ezines
(electronic magazines) on sites that also carry advertising and all of these
businesses are continually on the lookout for more quality articles. They are
like a black hole that will swallow up as many articles as you can provide for
them.
Many article publishers syndicate their articles out to other publishers. This
means that if you publish correctly, your articles can end up on hundreds of
sites throughout the Internet in a matter of days, swiftly building up your
reputation and creating hundreds of quality, one way backlinks to your money
making sites.
The other good news is that, just as there are businesses who publish articles,
there are others who write articles for a living. Many of these are sold with
Private Label Rights, meaning that you can claim authorship and submit them
as your own. If you just do that, then of course sooner or later you’ll be
penalized for duplicate content, because someone else will have submitted
the same article before you. However, “spinning” the article to stamp your own
personality on it is relatively easy and much, much quicker than writing from
scratch. More on this later.
Anatomy of An Article
An article consists of four parts:
1. Title
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Releases
2. Abstract
3. Content
4. Resource Box
and we will look at each in turn.
Title
Each article you write (or “spin”) should be oriented towards one specific
keyword. But the title is often the only thing that a prospective reader uses to
make a judgment on whether to click further or not. So it needs to be enticing
as well. Make sure that the benefit that the reader should get from reading
the article is spelled out in the title.
Two proven ways of getting the click are:
1. Use a specific number in the title, such as “How to Date Beautiful Women:
5 Surefire Tips.” Incidentally, a Google search on the keyword “date
beautiful women” returns over 600,000 results, so there’s certainly a
market there!
2. Ask a question that can only be answered by reading the full article, such
as “How Can You Easily Reduce Your Gas Bill by Over 50%?”. The
keyword “reduce gas bill” returns several million hits on Google. An even
bigger market?
Each word in the title should be capitalized, except for “a”, “the” and short
prepositions such as “to” and “by.”
Abstract
The abstract is simply a summary of the article itself. Some ezine publishers
will show the abstract as well as the title, so regard it as another chance to
entice the reader to check out the full article itself.
The abstract, which is typically 50-100 words, should be regarded as an

advertisement for the article. As such, it should expand on the benefit
highlighted in the title and mention the keyword once or twice.
Content
Clearly, the content is the body of your article. Break it down into easily read
paragraphs, each dealing with one topic. You can mention the keyword once
or twice, but only if it can be done naturally. Your article must not look like an
advertisement. It’s aimed primarily at human readers and must provide value.
Re-read it and spell check it before submitting it.
Resource Box
The resource box is your reward for submitting an article. It positions you as
an expert and provides a hyperlink back to your website. (Some ezine
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publishers allow limited hyperlinks in article content, but most limit them to the
resource box, so make the most of it.)
Write the resource box in the third person. Imagine that it’s being written by
someone who likes and admires your work. Here’s an example:
Gordon Nome is a recognized expert on the subject of creating stunning

flower gardens that are the envy of the neighborhood. He is the author of the
wildly successful e-books “Planting and Decorating on a Budget” and “The
History of Garden Gnomes.” Gordon has made many popular television
appearances as a guest on Gardening America. You can read his invaluable
advice at:
<a href=”http://gnomesgardentips.com”>www.gnomesgardentips.com</a>
and, of course, if you went to this (imaginary) website, as well as seeing

Gordon’s gardening advice, you’d be invited to buy his e-books and subscribe
to his e-newsletter.
You can double the power of the Resource Box by modifying it slightly for
each article submission. Instead of using your site’s URL as the anchor text,
use the keyword that this particular article is about. If the directory you’re
submitting to allows more than one link in the resource box (and most do)
include both.
For example, Gordon writes an article on creating stunning rose gardens. He

would modify his resource box so that it read:
Gordon Nome is a recognized expert on the subject of creating stunning

flower gardens that are the envy of the neighborhood. He is the author of the
wildly successful e-books “Planting and Decorating on a Budget” and “The
History of Garden Gnomes.” Gordon’s
<a href=”http://gnomesgardentips.com”>stunning rose garden</a> tips are
widely sought after and he has made many popular television appearances as
a guest on Gardening America. You can read his invaluable advice at:
<a href=”http://gnomesgardentips.com”>www.gnomesgardentips.com</a>
This gives him stunning rose garden as powerful anchor text for backlinks as
well as the URL itself (useful for someone who has printed the article and
wants to visit the website.)
Article Power
At the time of writing, Joel Comm had just released his Instant Resale
Templates package to enough publicity and fanfare to ensure massive profits
to any affiliate who could get traffic. In a departure for Joel, his own website
featured a video as the “sales letter.”
Here’s the results of a Google search on “instant resale templates.”
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First Page of Results for instant resale templates
The right hand side is full of affiliates undoubtedly paying big money for
Adsense clicks on the keyword “instant resale templates.” However, most
people searching the Internet will always click on organic (free) results ahead
of these.
In the first page of organic results showing the first 10 positions, positions 3, 6,
7 and 8 are occupied by articles written by affiliates and published by third
party publishers, positions 4 and 5 are an article written and published on the
author’s own blog, position 9 is a Squidoo lens and position 10 another article.
Similarly, the second page of results is dominated by articles, blogs and

another Squidoo lens! These are all covered in detail in Traffic Floodgate.
These affiliates will all have made serious money from their promotion and
their efforts to get onto Google’s front page.
Why So Powerful?
Article publishing’s power lies in two primary areas, and you need to
understand both in order to get the most out of it.
First of all, articles are aimed at real people who are seeking the information
that you have.
Unlike the Google search example above of people searching for a specific
product, often to buy it from the affiliate offering the most attractive deal, most
are not looking for something to buy. They are looking for information. It’s
really, really important to remember that. It’s your article’s job to be found by
the person looking for the information (and that’s the job of keyword research
– see Stream 1), to supply just enough information to convince them that
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you’re the expert with the answer to their problem and finally, to persuade
them to click on the link to your website to get the complete answer.
Then, of course, it’s up to your website to persuade them that getting the
answer requires them to buy your product, or sign up to your membership site,
or just subscribe to your newsletter. In essence, that taking the requested
action is a positive transaction for them.
Second, articles are far and away the best way to get your websites highly
ranked in the search engines and to maintain that ranking over a period of
time.
This happens because the search engines give the most weight to 1-way links
into your website from recognized authority sites. Because of their nature,
their high rank, rapidly changing content and how long they’ve been around,
the ezine publishers are regarded as authority sites and every article of yours
that they publish contains your resource box with a 1-way link back to your
website.
Articles as Content
You’re publishing articles in order to position yourself as an expert author and
to get backlinks from authority sites (the article directories) to your website.
But every article you write is also website content. Here’s how to get the most
out of every article.
1. Publish it to all the recommended directories. Sooner or later, you’ll need

to get software to automate this task. Here’s the one I use and
recommend: http://www.phil-recommends.com/articlesubmitter.
2. Post it to your blog, using the article title as the blog post title. This will get
your article pinged to the social media sites in your blog’s ping list. Follow
the steps recommended in the Blogging Stream, such as submitting to
OnlyWire.
3. Build and publish a simple web page, using the keyword, with hyphens or
underscores for multiple words, as the web page name. For example, if
your article was titled “10 Tips for Breeding Alaskan Malamutes,” your web
page would be named breeding_alaskan_malamutes.html. The web
page’s contents are simply the article’s Title, Abstract, Contents and
Resource Box. At the top of the page, you’ll have your normal navigation
bar and then the label Syndicated Article.
That gets multiple value out of every article that you publish. But the article
directories that you publish to are themselves a rich source of free, fresh
content.
There are different ways of getting article feeds onto your web pages,
depending on what facilities are provided by the article directories.
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Many use RSS feeds. Here is how to get them displayed on your web page.
Go to http://www.feedforall.com/download.htm and download the free

RSS2HTML script. Unzip and FTP upload rss2html.php and
FeedForAll_XMLParser.inc.php to your website’s main directory. Print out
rss2html-docs.txt as it contains all the documentation.
Create a file called rss_feed_template.html with the following contents:
<HTML>
<HEAD>
<meta http-equiv="content-type"
content="text/html;charset=utf-8">
<TITLE>
~~~FeedTitle~~~
</TITLE>
</HEAD>
<BODY>
<TABLE width="100%">
~~~BeginItemsRecord~~~
<TR>
<TD>
~~~ItemPubShortDate~~~ ~~~ItemPubShortTime~~~
</TD>
</TR>
<TR>
<TD>
<B><A
href="~~~ItemLink~~~">~~~ItemTitle~~~</A></B>
</TD>
</TR>
<TR>
<TD>
~~~ItemDescription~~~
<BR><BR>
</TD>
</TR>
~~~EndItemsRecord~~~
</TABLE>
</BODY>
</HTML>
(just cut and paste from the above) and FTP upload it to your website’s main
directory.
Then all you have to do to create a web page that will display the current
contents from an RSS feed is to include in the web page at the point where
you want to display the feed:
<?php
$XMLFILE = "url-of-the-rss-feed-you-want";
$TEMPLATE = "your-websites-url/rss_feed_template.html";
include("rss2html.php");
?>
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with the appropriate substitutions.
For example, if I wanted to put the feed from Article Dashboard into a Traffic
Floodgate web page for the keyword guaranteed website traffic, I would go to
http://www.articledashboard.com/, click on Article RSS Feeds and select the
Internet Marketing category. The URL to be used is then displayed as:
http://www.articledashboard.com/rss/Internet-Marketing/198
So then I build a web page called guaranteed_website_traffic.php, write an

introduction that repeats the keyword a few times, followed by
<?php
$XMLFILE = "http://www.articledashboard.com/rss/Internet-Marketing/198";
$TEMPLATE = "http://www.trafficfloodgate.com/rss_feed_template.html";
include("rss2html.php");
?>
and upload it to my website.
This will drive traffic to your website for the keyword as you now have a page
that is not only keyword rich, but has constantly changing content, a very
Search Engine spider friendly combination.
And as you will also be submitting articles to this article directory under your
selected category, your own articles will also appear on this page, for even
greater credibility.
To see the above example in practice, click on Guaranteed Website Traffic.
Note that the opening introduction is long enough to push the articles to
underneath the fold. The articles are there only to entice a Search Engine
Spider to rank my site so that people find my page on a keyword search. I
don’t particularly want them reading the articles. I’d much rather they click on
the link that will take them to the sales page. In fact, it’s not a bad idea to
remove the <A href="~~~ItemLink~~~"> and the corresponding </A> from the
template file. The result still looks the same, but without any outgoing links.
Some article directories provide a nice, simple bit of javascript to display their
feed. This is easy to implement, but you have little control over its structure or
appearance.
For an example, go to http://www.articlesbase.com/ and click on RSS Builder.

Select a category and the number of articles you wish to display, up to 50.
There are also a number of appearance options you can play with, to match
your website’s look and feel. Click on Show Preview to see what it will look
like. Click on Generate Code when you’re ready. This will generate javascript
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which you simply copy and paste into your web page where you want the
articles to appear.
For an example, click on Free Website Traffic.
Tightly Focused Keyword Articles

This is a technique designed to get your blog entry ranked high for a specific
keyword, but you should still publish it as an article and use it as the basis for
a web page as previously described.
Use just the keyword as the title and link it to your blog. Say we have a
website about breeding dogs for profit and Great Danes are really “in” at the
moment. We want to be found for the keyword “breeding great danes.” Using
Blogger as an example:
Blogger Title: Breeding Great Danes
Then write your article in this format:
The keyword as both a header and a footer, in bold type.
The article content, between the header and footer, with the keyword
mentioned three or four times and used as anchor text linking back to the
blog.
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Blogger Article: Breeding Great Danes
This tight focus will help amazingly with high rankings.
Outsourcing Your Articles

Writing articles is surprisingly easy once you get the hang of it. Research your
keywords, extract relevant information from the websites that come up, join
the bits together into a new article and then spin it so that it’s your words.
If the thought really freaks you out, there’s plenty of people who’ll do it for you
at a reasonable price.
Wait until you’ve got ideas for about 10 articles on a given topic, as this will
make the per article cost much cheaper. Then post your request at
http://www.elance.com, http://rentacoder.com,
http://www.guru.com/index.aspx, http://www.agentsofvalue.com/ or
http://www.scriptlance.com/. It should cost around $5 per article. Let them
know the structure (Title, Abstract, Content) and approximately how many
words. Make sure that everyone who bids submits samples of their work. If
someone’s knowledge of English is not good, then their articles will not be of
the quality you want.
Submitting Your Articles

Here are some of the best places to submit your articles:
http://www.365Articles.com
http://www.Add-Articles.com
http://www.articlealley.com
http://www.ArticleBar.com
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http://www.ArticleBeach.com
http://www.ArticleCity.com
http://www.ArticleDashboard.com
http://www.ArticleFarm.com
http://www.ArticleHub.com
http://www.ArticleNexus.com
http://www.ArticlePeak.com
http://www.ArticlePros.com
http://www.ArticleSphere.com
http://www.ArticleTime.com
http://www.ArticleToGo.com
http://www.ArticleWiz.com
http://www.Article99.com
http://www.Articles411.com
http://www.BigArticles.com
http://www.Buzzle.com
http://www.Constant-Content.com
http://www.ContentDesk.com
http://www.EasyArticles.com
http://www.EzineArticles.com
http://www.GetYourArticles.com
http://www.GoArticles.com
http://www.ideamarketers.com
http://www.ISnare.com
http://www.LinkSnoop.com
http://www.Marketing-Seek.com
http://www.NewArticlesOnline.com
http://www.PromotionWorld.com
http://www.ReprintArticles.com
http://www.SubmitYourNewArticle.com
http://www.TheArticleZone.com
You can check out the current list at

http://www.trafficfloodgate.com/articles/bestdirectories.html.
A very quick way of submitting your articles to a large number of directories at

the same time is to use the paid service Article Marketer. This allows you to
submit one entry just to them and it is instantly submitted to all the article
directories that subscribe to their service. Different submission guidelines by
different directories are handled for you.
You can check out this service at:

http://www.phil-recommends.com/articlemarketer.
Alternatively, you can download software to your desktop that allows you to
submit your articles to a large number of article directories in one go. The
standard version is free and there’s an upgrade option.
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You can have a look at it and get the free download here:
http://www.phil-recommends.com/articlesubmitter.
What Are Press Releases?

A press release is not just another name for an article. A press release is an
announcement about something you have done, or are about to do, such as
the launch of a new product, in the expectation that a journalist will be
sufficiently turned on by it to pick it up and write and publish an article about it.
The journalist writes the article, not you.
Writing and submitting a press release is very easy if you have a story to tell.
The one thing it mustn’t be is a thinly disguised sales letter. A journalist can
smell one of these from a mile away and will trash it immediately.
Press Releases are another great way get back links from high PR sites.
One of the best places to submit to is http://www.prweb.com/ and with a PR of

7, a link on their front page is very worthwhile. Registration is free and they
have both free and paid submission services.
Sample Press Release from PR Web
Other sites you can submit press releases to are:
http://www.prfree.com/ (PR 5)
http://www.prnewswire.com/ (PR 8)
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Once again, you can submit your press release for free or pay for a better
service.
The following is worth reading in order to know what to avoid when writing a
press release. It is extracted from the Press Release Blunders section of
prfree.com:
Press Release Blunders

Nothing discourages a journalist from reading your release more quickly than
errors, either typographical or grammatical. You will want to proof - and proof
again - and then ask someone else for assistance.
When writing your release, keep the following pointers in mind:
Write To Journalists, Not Consumers.

Press releases that address the end users of your product or service are
inappropriate and will most likely be disregarded by the media. Addressing
your audience in the third-person - which means eliminating the use of the
word "you" from your vocabulary - can be a challenge. A well-written press
release encourages the media to take note of the information you are
communicating, and it increase the likelihood the media will be encouraged to
follow-up for more.
While your ultimate goal is to increase business, a press release forum is not
the medium to disseminate advertising or to sell.
Don't Be Flagrant
Aside from sounding like a sales or marketing piece, using characters outside
the standard alphabet to emphasize certain points in your headline or in the
body of your release will likely be caught by spam filters, preventing your
release from reaching the intended recipients. Exclamation marks (!) and
asterisks (*) do much to detract from the message you are trying to convey -
aside from damaging the credibility of your press release.
Overuse of words like "exciting" and "unique" have jaded the media - use
alternate vocabulary to make your product or service stand apart from your
competitors. Be sure if you make claims about your company that the claims
can stand up against the intense scrutiny of journalists.
Avoid Using UPPER CASE Characters.

Studies have identified that text written in all upper case characters is not only
significantly more difficult to read, it evokes an emotional response from
readers, as if you are screaming at them. Headlines and content releases
must be provided in mixed case - upper and lower case.
Clean Up Grammatical Errors

While you may be working against a deadline to submit your release, note that
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the extra time allocated to ensure your release is error-proof will pay off in the
long run - by appearing professional and polished.
Using a spell-checker is not enough. Words like "from" are easily missed
when spelled "form".
A time-proven method for error-checking is to start at the bottom, and read

from RIGHT to LEFT, moving UP the release. We have a tendency to read
quickly when proofing - using this method ensures you take the time to
actually read each word and check each punctuation mark.
If you are tempted to write your release during the submission process - don't.
Use Industry Lingo Sparingly

Using a lofty vocabulary to impress the reader with your written prowess
doesn't - and doesn't make it easier for journalists on a tight deadline to use
your release because they then must translate it into layman's terms.
Communicate your information in terms that are easy to understand - many

people write the way they speak, ensuring a larger population grasps the
concepts or ideas. If however, there are industry-specific terms that will be lost
if translated, or they are accepted in the industry, use them. Don't, however,
make up words in an effort to catch journalists' attention - those kinds of
things interrupt the reader's train of thought. And if it's confusing, more likely
than not, you've lost the reader.
Address Content Issues

Releases that either communicate an offensive message or don't provide
enough detail about the subject will be rejected. You may be tempted to
believe your release will be effective at enticing a journalist to visit a website
for additional detail if your release only contains a few words - you would be
mistaken.
Although it is important to be concise in conveying your message, leaving out

pertinent information that addresses the who, what, where, when, why and
how can do as much harm as submitting a 2,000 word release. A good rule of
thumb is to keep your release around 500 words when possible, as long as it
meets that criteria.
Clear Up Non-ASCII Characters

When you copy & paste your release, special characters may be converted -
for example, the trademark, copyright and registration mark symbols. Be sure
to review your release before submission to be sure you replace these
conversions with characters in parentheses - (TM), (R), (C).
Eliminate Manual Line Breaks

Hard returns at the end of a line of text will affect the way your content is
displayed. Be sure to remove them - use returns only at the end of each
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paragraph.
Include Contact Information

Incorrect or incomplete contact information for a release is discouraging to the
media. Be sure to include current information for at least one person
designated at your company to field inquiries from journalists who receive
your release.
Make Product/Service Detail Available Online

It's important to make additional information available online - and to include
that reference either in your release or contact information. The industry also
recognizes the value of including multimedia elements - photos, charts,
graphics - and journalists are always looking for these.
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Traffic Floodgate Stream 5: Backlinks and Directory
Submission
Stream 5: Backlinks and Directory Submission

What Are Backlinks?
Backlinks have been referred to many times in this course, as they are one of
the things you are seeking from your blog posts and article marketing.
Simply put, backlinks are links back to your website that have been placed on
other websites. They are important for two reasons:
1. Real live visitors may land on the other website and click on the backlink to
visit your website. This is particularly likely if they were searching on a
particular keyword and that exact keyword has been used as the anchor
text for the backlink.
2. The one thing that surged Google past its competitors when it first came
on the scene was the fact that while they were organized as directories to
which sites were submitted by owners who decided what keywords they
were to be found on (manipulated simply by repeating the keyword, even
totally unrelated ones, in the keywords meta tag) Google created a
program (Googlebot) that crawled the web itself and decided what was
important on the basis of how many other sites linked to it. This was a
revolution at the time and had everyone talking about it.
Now of course the algorithm is more sophisticated, but the number, quality
and relevance of backlinks, along with tenure (how long the site’s been in
existence and how long ago the domain name was registered) remain
among the most important factors in rating high with Google.
Blogs, Articles and Press Releases

We’ve already covered in great depth getting backlinks from blogs, articles
and press releases.
I’d just like to emphasize here the importance of continuing this process. All
businesses have to do some things every day, every week, etc. Make it your
task to post to your blogs and submit your articles regularly, so that the search
engines are always finding new, relevant content and links back to your site.
Too many marketers have a rush of work for a couple of weeks and then stop,
disappointed because nothing seems to be happening. Believe me, the
search engines factor this in. Stay there for the long haul and reap the
rewards.
Direct Request
You can often obtain a backlink to your site by direct request to another site.
Usually, this is in exchange for you linking back to them. A reciprocal link.
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Reciprocal links are not valued as highly by the search engines as 1-way
links, but are still worth having, as long as they are from relevant sites. Here’s
how to go about it.
Do a Google search for authority sites in your niche, looking for anyone who
isn’t a direct competitor. Use all of the keywords that you created in Stream 1
to find them. Check their Page Rank. (You should have the Google toolbar in
your browser, which will display the PR of each site you visit. If you haven’t,
go to http://www.google.com/intl/en/options/ and click on Toolbar.)
Download Google Toolbar
Select a number of sites that have a PR of 2 or more and that have contact
details, most likely e-mail or help desk. If they sell a product, ask yourself the
question “Would owners of that product benefit from owning my product as
well? And vice versa?” If the answer is yes, then you have the possibility of a
joint venture as well as a reciprocal link.
Create a link page for your site. It should have some good content, so that the
search engines give it some ranking (typically, this will get it a rank of 1 less
than your home page) but otherwise it’s there for your reciprocal links. Why a
link page? For one thing, you don’t want to bleed page rank by more outward
links from your home page and for another, it’s much easier to control all your
reciprocal links if they’re all on the one page.
Your link page will be constructed as a 2-column table, with the linked anchor
text in column 1 and the description in column 2. Don’t forget to regenerate
your site map so that the search engines can find your link page.
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Put a link to the home page of each of the sites you’ve identified, using their
web address as anchor text and a couple of appropriate lines from their
website as the description.
Then email or otherwise contact each of the sites asking if they would like to
have a reciprocal link. Tell them in anticipation of a favorable response, you’ve
already put up a link to them on your site. Give them the URL where it can be
found. This shows them that you are serious, you can be trusted and creates
a moral obligation on them to reply favorably. (If they don’t, just delete the
link.) Ask if they would like different anchor text or modifications to their
description.
Tell them exactly how you would like your link to appear if they are kind
enough to accept it. Give them the actual html code so they can just cut and
paste. It will look something like this:
<ahref=”http://www.yourdomain.com”><b>keyword anchor text</b></a> Two

or three sentences describing the solution that your site provides to the
problem the visitor is looking to solve.
Make sure that you maintain a list of each contact that you’ve made, when
you contacted them and what their response was. If anyone responds
negatively, thanks them politely for their consideration and remove their link. If
someone hasn’t responded after three days, send them a follow-up and give
them the rest of the week. Delete them if there’s still no response.
You will build up a collection of valuable links this way and you can, if you
wish, establish business relationships that can be utilized to mutual benefit.
Reciprocal Blog Links

There’s a very easy way to get reciprocal blog links. Go to
http://www.bloglinker.com/ and register.
Bloglinker Home Page
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Simply copy the line of code that you are provided with after registration to
your blog and then search for blog partners to link to. You automatically give
them a backlink and they give you one. The beauty of this lies in its total
automation.
Link Exchanges
Link exchanges are programs in which one site offers to link to another site in
return for a reciprocal link. The key component of a link exchange is the
requirement for a reciprocal link. In other words, they automate the manual
task described above.
Here is a list of some you could try:
http://www.build-reciprocal-links.com/
http://www.linkexchanged.com/
http://www.linkmarket.net/
http://www.simplylinking.com/
Buying Links
To get 1-way backlinks quickly, you can always buy them. They’re not cheap,
but they can either give you a quick boost in the rankings if you’re already
there, or get you out of the Google sandbox a little more quickly if you’re not.
Here’s a site that advertises relevant, hand-picked links from pages with Page
Ranks from 3 to 7. You get to approve all links before they go live, there are a
variety of packages available and it’s a 1-time, not recurring, charge.
http://isellpagerank.com/index.htm
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What a Cheery Looking Home Page!
Pricing? Well, you have to be prepared to pay. Even so, they’re cheaper than
a lot of the others. Here’s the package they say is their best value:
Ten 1-way links, including 2 PR5 and 1 PR6 links at an average cost of $26 is
actually pretty good, considering that they are from relevant sites, you do get
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to approve them and they last forever (or at least for the life of the site
providing them!)
Directory Submission
There are paid and free directories that you can submit your site to, under the
appropriate category. Yahoo! is the biggest and most well known, but there
are literally hundreds of others. Getting your site listed in them will improve
both page rank and traffic.
Yahoo! has a new free submission tool. And Yahoo’s Alexa rating is 1. Yes,
it’s the most visited site on the Internet. Simply go to:
https://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/submit
Submit Your Site to Yahoo!
Yahoo! is a feeder site to many other search engines, including the quite “hot”
Dogpile.
Check out the following sites to find the most appropriate directories to submit
to. You will need to have on hand your site’s title and a short description.
http://www.best-web-directories.com/
Free, Paid, Deep Link and Niche Directories
You should also check out
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http://www.top.seo-links.org/
http://www.web-directories.ws/
http://www.info.vilesilencer.com/
http://www.strongestlinks.com/directories.php (their directory list starts off with

the two most famous, Yahoo! and DMOZ. It’s very good to get into DMOZ,
which is entirely human edited)
http://www.directorysitesubmit.com/
Although this work is tedious, in the end it’s what will separate you from your
competitors and allow you to leapfrog over them.
Variety is the Spice

Try to avoid patterns. The search engine spiders are programmed to distrust
sameness. If between one visit and the next, your website goes from no
backlinks to 50, all using the same keyword and all from PR4 sites, it raises a
red flag.
Vary your anchor text keywords, vary the PR of the sites you get backlinks
from, link to internal pages as well as your home page (for example, if you buy
or otherwise obtain a PR6 link from another dog breeding site relevant to
yours, using the anchor text “square spotted Dalmatians”, linking to a page
named “square-spotted-dalmations.html” which has as its header “Breeding
Square Spotted Dalmations” you are pretty much guaranteed the top spot for
that long tail, targeted keyword.)
Plan Your Attack

As in many things, persistency is the key. Don’t burn yourself out in 1 week.
Have a steady backlinks plan. Set a goal of getting, say, just 1 new backlink a
day. If you get 5 one day, give yourself a break for the next four days.
Document what you do. Who you’ve emailed, when and what was their
response. What backlinks you’ve bought, how much you paid and how that
you check that they’re still live.
Above all, check your analytics so you can see what’s working for you and
what’s not.
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Traffic Floodgate Stream 6: Squidoo
Stream 6: Squidoo
What Is Squidoo?
Squidoo is a bit like a blog platform in that you can use it to build a site with
nothing but the most basic technical skills and the result depends very much
on how much (or how little) valuable content you can provide, it’s a bit like a
site builder where you can add content by plugging in feeds from other
suppliers and the end result is a bit like a regular website but different.
Squidoo calls it a “lens” and makes it easy for you to build one.
Why Build a Squidoo Lens?

For one thing, your lens is listed on Squidoo, which has a Google Page Rank
of 7 and an Alexa rank of 471, making it the 471st most visited site on the
entire Internet! And you can put anything in your lens, including anchor text
backlinks to your own site.
And you can have as many lenses as you like.
And they’re all free.
And Squidoo lenses often appear on Page 1 of Google search results.
Here’s an example. I decided I wanted to go up market and look cool when I

did a PowerPoint presentation to my client, so I Googled “designer laptop
bags.”
Over 300,000 Results for “designer laptop bags”
In the organic search results on page 1, a Squidoo lens was at position 7.
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Clicking on it takes you to the lens itself.
Typical Squidoo Lens
As you can see, a Squidoo lens is visually quite appealing, yet takes very little
work. The page is a combination of the lensmaster’s original content, links to
other sites and feeds from other sites.
Every lens also contains two big buttons where you can start on your own lens
creation journey.
Do Lenses Still Work?

Some gurus believe that the day of the Squidoo lens is over and/or that
everyone knows how to create a lens.
I don’t agree and search engine results bear me out.
First of all, I know from talking to lots of other people that the vast majority of
Internet users have still never heard of Squidoo. And second, I believe that
what happened is that everyone tried to jump on the Squidoo bandwagon at
once, built crappy sites that did nothing for them, and bailed out whining that
“Squidoo doesn’t work.”
Well, Squidoo is rapidly deleting all those rubbish lenses. All you have to do is
build a quality lens (or two) that has real content and looks attractive and it will
boost your site’s rankings.
I’ll devote the rest of this section to the “how-to” of building a Squidoo lens.
How to Build a Squidoo Lens

First of all, go to http://www.squidoo.com (naturally.)
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Squidoo Home Page
You might like to click on Wait, WHAT’s a Lens? to get the Squidoo
explanation from the founder of Squidoo himself, Seth Godin. As you’d
expect, Seth’s pretty famous. There’s even a WordPress plug-in called “What
Would Seth Godin Do?”
Then go straight to Make Your Own Lens!
Click on Get Started
Assuming this is your first time, select the Not yet radio button and click on
Get Started.
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Step 1
The next screen asks you what your lens is about. Remember that this is a bit
like branding in the offline world, so you should be looking to use the same
sort of wording everywhere. So what your lens is about should also be the
Title of your website. Enter it here. If you don’t like the look of it, rethink your
title and update your website pages if necessary.
Your title should brand you as the expert in your field:
Your Lens Title Should Brand You as an Expert
Step 2
You can choose from 4 different types of lens. However, choosing one type or
another doesn’t prevent you from doing whatever you like, Select either
money maker or do my own thing.
Select Your Lens Type
Step 3
Use your domain name as your Squidoo name and select the most
appropriate category.
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Pick Your URL and Category
Step 4
Enter the keywords that you would like to be found on. Just select the best 4
keywords from the keyword research you did in Stream 1.
Enter Your Keywords
Step 5
In this step, you are asked what you want to do with the money that your
Squidoo lens might earn. Realize that this is not the earnings from selling your
product from your website. Rather, it’s what your lens may earn from extras
such as Adsense or commissions on Amazon sales.
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So what you put here is up to your own conscience. My approach is to take

the earnings, if any, from this commercial lens but build a separate lens with a
hobby or private interest theme and donate its proceeds to charity. But it’s up
to you.
Earnings Destination and a Word of Encouragement
Step 6
Enter your email address, your screen name (you can’t have a space in this
field, so use either your real name without spaces or, maybe better, a catchy
identifier based on what your business is about, for example if you were about
breeding Dalmatians, you might use SpottedDog) your real name and chosen
password. Check the three boxes underneath.
1 Mandatory and 2 Useful Options
Click on Done! and see your new lens.
This, of course, is just the outline. From here on is where you make it unique
and something that real live people might actually want to visit.
Everywhere you see an button is an entry into personalizing that area

by adding content.
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Your New but Raw Lens
Checkout Top Traffic Lenses

Before building your own lens, it’s a really good idea to have a look at existing
lenses that are getting lots of traffic. That’s exactly what you want to do, right?
Fortunately, Squidoo makes it really easy.
Head over to http://www.squidoo.com/browse/top_lenses/traffic, where you

can check out the top 100 lenses by traffic.
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Top Traffic Lenses
You will see that lenses about making Squidoo work effectively are included.
At the time of writing, No. 4 was about Getting Your Squidoo Lens Noticed
and No. 7 was Lensmaster Tools and Utilities.
Edit Your Bio

Write up a brief biography of yourself and upload a photo. Remember that
Squidoo lenses are often quirky and humorous, so don’t take yourself too
seriously. Here is my bio for Traffic Floodgate.
Note the link to Traffic Floodgate at the end.
You have to code this using HTML:
<a href=”http://www.trafficfloodgate.com”>Traffic Floodgate</a>
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A Real Photo!
Leave the Make This Your Default Bio box unchecked, as you will want to
create a separate, keyword oriented bio for each lens you make.
Edit Your Tags

Next edit your tags. You have already established four tags when you set up
your lens, but you can add more. You should add up to another 16 tags,
chosen from your keyword research. Each tag gives you another internal
Squidoo link to your lens.
Edit Your Introduction, Contents and Discovery Tool

Introduction
Your introduction is the first thing your visitor is going to see after your bio and
a couple of Adsense ads. Make it relevant and make it interesting. Include a
picture of the product you are promoting. This is essential.
Contents
In the Table of Contents tab, include everything that Squidoo is suggesting, as
these will all add to your lens’s interest. However, the most important ones to
be at the top are a number of Text / Write Modules. These can each contain a
large amount of text (up to 10,000 characters) and an image.
The important thing is that they must have free, valuable content that is
relevant to the product that you are selling.
Think of them as like chapters in a how-to manual. Each one should deal with
a single topic, contain valuable information about that topic, but leave the
reader wanting more. Which, of course, they can get by buying your product.
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If you are selling your own product, take some relevant chapters and
summarize them. Same for a product that you are selling as an affiliate, just
be very careful that you are not plagiarizing. If in doubt, check with the
publisher.
Use your chapter headings as the titles. You can make them bold by
surrounding them with the <b> and </b> tags.
If you have a suitable, relevant image to go with the Text / Write module, be
sure to include it, as it will add huge visual appeal.
Discovery Tool
You want to turn the Discovery Tool on, as it helps Squidoo point back to your
lens from other, related lenses.
All you have to do is find three other lenses on your topic. As you would like
them to be highly ranked, you should either (or both) do a Google search on
“Squidoo: YourKeyword” and have a look at any Squidoo lenses that turn up
and/or do a search on Squidoo itself for any of your keywords.
Discover 3 Related Lenses
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Other Modules
You build up your Squidoo site not only with your own, unique content but by
adding other modules that feed their own content into your site. And some of
them, like Amazon, even bring their own affiliate programs with them!
To add modules, including more text / write modules, go to the bottom of the
page and click on Add Modules. Use Reorder Modules to bring your text /
write modules above all the others.
Drag and Drop to Reorder Modules
From here on, it’s a matter of adding modules and editing them one by one.
Don’t feel you have to do it all at once. I find the best thing is to delete all the
modules that I’m not using right now, so that my lens doesn’t look abandoned
and then add one more module every couple of days or so. That way, I can
make sure that module is as good as I can get it and in the sequence I want.
Unlike a lot of other Internet tasks, making a Squidoo lens is fun. It can be
quite addictive.
While you can build more lenses under the same account, you can also have
multiple Squidoo accounts. Just use a different email address for each one.
If you have your own product, you should also sign up as your own affiliate
and then build a new lens under a different account in order to review the
product. This can be a great thing to do, as it can force you to look at your
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own product with fresh eyes. Don’t be afraid to criticize it. You will gain much
more credibility than if you gush over it. Of course, you do have to end up with
a positive review and a recommendation that, on balance, if you have this
particular problem, you should buy this product as it is the best solution.
A Work in Progress!
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Traffic Floodgate Stream 7: Hub Pages
Stream 7: Hub Pages

What is HubPages?
They probably wouldn’t like the definition, but HubPages is a newer version of
Squidoo, in that it allows you to publish a site easily on their host and get
traffic to it. Their site already has a Google Page Rank of 5, and you should
use them, as early users of these services rank highly simply as a result of
tenure.
Go to http://www.hubpages.com.
Create Your HubPage Account
Sign Up for HubPages
You need to enter a name for publishing. As for Squidoo, use either your real
name (you can have spaces) or a catchy name based on your website’s topic.
Plus email address, password and one of the most difficult CAPTCHA fields
I’ve ever come across. Maybe it’s my eyes.
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Good to Go!
Skip over the next page (click on I’ll do it later) which is about hooking up your
friends from your hotmail, yahoo, etc. address books; this is for socialites, not
internet marketers.
You’ve got an Adsense account, right. Enter its details on the next page. Or,
sign up for Adsense (it costs nothing) and then enter your details. Click on
Link my Account. You should (eventually) get an email from Google inviting
you to confirm that you want your Adsense account linked to HubPages.
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Create Your HubPage
Hey! You’re Now a Hubber!
The first thing you should do is edit your profile. Click on Upload a profile
picture. This will also allow you to create a bio. I’m a great fan of using
humour in this section as it’s much more likely to get the click.
My Profile. Yes, Another Real Photo!
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You can download the 13 page Hub Pages Guide from

http://hubpages.com/docs/HubPagesGuide.pdf. Not a hastily put together
video but an actual printed manual.
Start Your New Hub

Once you have created your profile, click on Start a New Hub.
As with Squidoo, enter a title, web address and tags.
Start Your Hub Creation
The next page gives HubPage’s publishing rules. They’re pretty much what
you’d expect, but read and make sure you adhere to them.
HubPages calls the items that you can add to your Hub Capsules. So you can
add Content Capsules such as text and photos and Revenue Capsules such
as eBay and Amazon.
Click on the Continue button. This takes you to the HubTool page, where you
assemble your capsules.
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Assemble Your Capsules
The HubTool, Where You Assemble Your Capsules
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HubPage Capsules
From here, you can edit your title and summary text, upload your photo and
assemble other capsules. You can also add more tags. Use the same set that
you did for Squidoo.
Adding More Tags
When you upload your product photo, adjust its size so that it’s clear but not
overwhelming and give it a caption.
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Your Hub’s Title

You created this on the previous screen but can change it here.
Summary Text
Uncheck the Calculate summary automatically box and manually enter the
summary that you would like displayed when someone finds your hub in a
search.
Group
You can cluster similar Hubs together by creating a Group for them. Click on
this Tab, select -New- from the drop-down list, and give your Group a 1-2
word name. When you continue to publish new Hubs on the same topic, you
can go to this tab, and choose that Group from the same drop-down. This will
do two things:
1. It will put links at the bottom for Previous/Next articles in the same group,
for visitors who want to read more about the same topic by you.
2. It will cluster these articles in Google’s eyes, as well. Google will realize
that you’ve created a “center of excellence” on this topic, as evidenced by
the large and growing number of articles on this topic.
Your Capsules
Your Hubs are organized by Capsules of different types of content. The
default is: Text, Photo (Image) and Comments (from visitors to your Hub). You
can add multiple capsules of any type. For example, you might have two Text
Capsules, a Photo Capsule, a Video Capsule, another Text Capsule, and
finally a Comments Capsule.
Text Capsule
Click the button to the right to open the text editor and enter a Capsule sub-
title and description. The quickest way of building up Text Capsules is by
using the articles you created in Stream 4. The article title becomes the
Capsule’s sub-title and the article abstract + description becomes the Capsule
description.
Note that you can easily include links. Highlight the keyword anchor text, click
on the Link symbol (it looks like a chain link) and enter your website’s URL or,
if you have one, deep link to a page with the same name as the keyword. The
anchor text is automatically shown in blue, bolded and underlined.
Don’t include more than two links in your description, as otherwise your hub
may be flagged as a violation of terms (excessively self-serving.)
Photo Capsule
This is where you can upload pictures. Browse to find images on your
computer or on a website. If you want to upload more than one, click on Add
to Batch and then Load Images when you have them all.
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If you have multiple images, you can choose to display them as thumbnails or
as a slideshow. Each image can have a caption.
Comments Capsule
This Capsule allows readers of your Hubs to leave comments for you. You
can choose between various options:
1. Choose whether comments must be approved by you first before they
appear live. (Default is no)
2. Choose whether you’re emailed every time someone leaves you a
comment. (Default is yes)
3. Choose whether only signed-in HubPages users can leave you a
comment. (Default is no)
Add More Stuff

By clicking on the links here, you can add more Capsules beyond the three
defaults you see initially.
• Links. Not really necessary, since you can add links in the Text Capsule,
unless you want to generate a laundry list of relevant links. Also useful if
you’re interested in trackbacks and/or pingbacks, since only links from
the Links Capsule support them.
• Video. If you’d like to easily insert a YouTube or Google video, all you
need is the URL for the video. Insert it in the field and press the Preview
Video button. Once you can see the video, press Save to insert it into
your Hub.
• News. Enter keywords, and automatically related news items will appear
in this Hub.
• RSS. You can enter RSS feed links related to your topic in this Capsule,
guaranteeing fresh content.
• eBay and Amazon. You can list items offered by eBay and Amazon.
Choose the keywords, and preview what items are offered. Make sure
you apply for eBay and Amazon accounts, and enter their IDs into your
profile.
Amazon
Once you’ve been assigned an ID add it to your HubPages profile on the My
Account page in the My Affiliate Settings section.
eBay
Once you’ve signed up, you’ll get an email from Commission Junction
(www.cj.com) with your user name and password. Login to their site, click on
the Account tabs, and then the Web Site settings tab. You’ll see a 7-digit
number called the PID Number. Come back to your My Account page and
paste into the eBay slot.
Capsule Ordering
Use this to adjust your Capsule settings.
• Drag and drop to move Capsules above and below each other
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• Double-click a Capsule to toggle between full-width and half-width

• Move Capsule one step up or down
• Expand half-width Capsule to full width
• Collapse full-width Capsule to half-width
• Click the Reorder Now button to save these new changes
Saving Your Hub

The Preview button will launch the Hub in a new browser window for you to
see what it will look like in its published form.
The Save Unpublished button saves your Hub but does not publish it. You
should use this button if you need to spend more time working on your Hub
before it’s ready to show to the world.
The Publish button will save and publish your Hub for the world to see.
Finished Traffic Floodgate Hub
You will, of course, continue to add articles as text Capsules as you write or
otherwise source them, giving you yet another avenue of exposure.
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Traffic Floodgate Stream 8: Craigslist and US Free
Ads
Stream 8: Craigslist and US Free Ads

What Is Craigslist?
Simply put, Craigslist is a classified advertising site where you can advertise
for free. It was founded in 1995 by Craig Newmark.
Why Is It Important?
What makes Craigslist outstanding is that, at the time of writing, it had a
Google Page Rank of 8 (by contrast, Wikipedia, the most popular
encyclopedia on the planet, has a Page Rank of 6) and an Alexa Rank of 45,
meaning that it is the 45th most visited site on the Internet!
Craigslist serves over nine billion page views per month, putting it in 9th place
among web sites in the United States, to over thirty million unique visitors.
With over thirty million new classified advertisements each month, Craigslist is
the leading classifieds service in any medium. The site receives over two
million new job listings each month, making it one of the top job boards in the
world. The classified advertisements range from traditional buy/sell ads and
community announcements, to personal ads and even erotic services.
Why wouldn’t you want exposure to this sort of traffic and backlinks from such
an influential site?
And the good news is that all you have to do to get this is post an
advertisement. Well, you do have to get a few things just right …
Connecting to Craigslist
You can find Craigslist at http://www.craigslist.org/ and you’ll probably think
“Well, this is nothing special.”
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Ads
Craigslist Home Page
To sign up for Craigslist, click on Login and then Click Here to Sign Up.
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Ads
Craigslist Sign Up
Start Posting Ads

Once you’ve signed up and got your account, you can start posting ads.
Pick an area to post in, such as San Francisco Bay or New York City, select
the category service offered, then small biz ads.
What are you advertising? Why, the product you’re selling from your website,
of course, using an advertisement liberally sprinkled with backlinks to your
website, using your keywords as anchor text.
There’s no need to write new advertisements. You simply take the same
keyword rich articles that you learned how to write in Stream 4, that you’ve
already submitted to multiple article directories, posted to your blog and used
to create keyword specific pages from your website, and spin them as
Craigslist advertisements.
You’ll usually find that one paragraph from an article is suitable as an

advertisement, so a typical article can be farmed for five or so ads. All you
have to do is give it a suitable title and use the keyword as anchor text two or
three times.
Here is an advertisement I spun from a Traffic Floodgate article:
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Ads
Creating a Craigslist Advertisement
Note how the anchor text “more website traffic” is linked back to the Traffic
Floodgate site.
And this is how the advertisement will appear:
Craigslist Advertisement Display
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Ads
This allows you to check that your links are displaying correctly.
Note that the final line of the advertisement is an invitation to visit the Traffic
Floodgate website. This is because we are using Craigslist for two purposes.
One, to increase anchor text backlinks to our website, which will improve our
page rank and two, to pick up visitors from Craigslist itself.
Craigslist Acknowledgment
Multiple Ads
You can place multiple ads in different locations. Just don’t duplicate ads and
don’t overdo it. It’s far better to place say 2 ads every day rather than 10 at
once.
US Free Ads
Another place that you can place classifieds in a similar manner to Craigslist
is US Free Ads.
Not quite the same reach as Craigslist, but with almost half a million members
(and growing) and a PR of 5, definitely worth the few seconds it takes to place
a pre-written ad.
There are three types of membership available, free, gold and premium. A
free membership is suitable for non-commercial use only.
The gold and premium memberships contains numerous tools and features
that help you create stunning ads filled with information and photos which
have priority placement within the categories that you advertise in. You can
create your ads with optional HTML code, upload multiple images to each ad,
link to your website, insert PayPal buttons to allow people to buy or sign up
directly from your ad, have all your ads automatically renewed, advertise an
unlimited number of items or services, automatically create your own catalog,
and more.
A gold membership costs $10 per year and premium costs $9.99 per month.
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Ads
Sign up for gold. You can always upgrade to premium if you find your
subsequent usage warrants it.
Go to http://www.usfreeads.com/.
US Free Ads Home Page
Register, login and place your ads. Rinse and repeat. You will get direct traffic
from your ads, higher placement in Google and indirect traffic to your website.
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Traffic Floodgate Stream 9: Forums
Stream 9: Forums
What Are Forums?
Forums are websites where people with a common interest in a topic go to
discuss it, make announcements about it, ask questions and answer
questions asked by others. All in a particular niche.
Forums have one thing in common with small country towns. Everyone knows
everyone else in that particular forum (not personally, but by user name and
past history of posting) and they are suspicious of strangers. Why? Because
the stranger may have joined the forum just to get exposure to their website.
You’re the stranger! You have to gain their trust.
Promoting your site in a post is forum spam. Don’t do it.
Why Join a Forum?

Join a forum with two objects in mind:
1. To use your knowledge of your subject to answer questions that others

may have. By now, you should have a ton of relevant material, both in your
product and in the articles that you’ve written. So you can often give a
valuable and comprehensive answer to someone’s problem just by using
an extract from your product or article.
You’re doing this for two reasons. One, giving a good answer to
someone’s question helps to establish or enhance your reputation as an
expert in your field, and that’s always a good thing and two, your forum
signature will contain a backlink to your site (without any promotion – it’s
just there) so people will follow it to see what else you’ve got.
From some forums you’ll get backlinks from your forum signature. Others
utilize the no follow tag and you won’t. But a few links are better than none,
right?
2. To ask questions of others in your field. This makes you look more
genuine (you’re not pushing yourself as the only solution in town) and you
will get valuable research for your next product or the next version of your
current product.
You have to be in forum posting for the long haul. Pick a few good ones and
set aside half a day a week to post to them. Sometimes, of course, you’ll get a
hot discussion thread going and might make several posts one after the other.
Particularly if there’s a disagreement or clash of opinions involved. This can
be terrific exposure, but here’s a word of warning. Don’t get emotional. Always
be courteous. If someone is flaming you, telling you that you don’t know what
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you’re talking about, it’s their reputation that will suffer in the forum, not yours.
Unless you respond in kind. So don’t.
Finding Forums
Finding forums is easy. Do a Google search on .YourNicheTopic. forums and
have a good look at what comes up. Pick your top 10, join them and create
your forum signature. Look at other active posters’ forum signatures to
determine what style is acceptable. If backlinks are not allowed, don’t join the
forum.
An Example of a Forum Start Page
You will need to go through a registration process, which varies from forum to
forum and you will have to agree with their rules. These normally are just that
you won’t post obscene or offensive material, so go right ahead.
You’ll probably have to respond to a confirmation email to complete your

registration.
Edit Your Profile and Signature

Once you’re registered, edit your profile, including your forum signature. Put
some thought into this, so you only have to do it once. A complete profile with
a good signature for all your future posts is a worthwhile investment of your
time. If it’s allowed, include two backlinks in your signature, one a keyword
anchor text link to your website and the other the actual URL.
Use different keyword anchor text in different signatures on different forums.
Some forums have an Introduction section for new registrants. It’s considered
polite to make your first post here, introducing yourself and enumerating what
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you would like to get out of the forum and what you can offer. No, offering to
sell your product here is not a good idea.
Ask and Answer Questions

You’ll now have full access to the forum, so find a post that has a question
that you can answer or a comment that you have a useful comment on, or a
post that you would like to ask a question about (probably the most useful
initial post) and get going!
Post Articles
Once you’ve been accepted into a forum, you can post the articles that you
wrote (and are continuing to write) in Stream 4. This is a great way to get
more value out of them and more exposure. And who knows, you may get
comments on them that inspire a new article.
Consider this: In a couple of hours, you could probably post a question, post
an article and answer two questions on each of your 10 forums. Assuming two
backlinks in your signature, that’s 80 one-way backlinks for a couple of hours
work.
Posting Replies is Easy and Rewarding
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Traffic Floodgate Stream 10: Social Bookmarking
Stream 10: Social Bookmarking

What Is Social Bookmarking?
From an Internet Marketer’s point of view, social bookmarking is taking
advantage of the Web 2.0 phenomenon, whereby huge websites with major
social influence (along with high Page Rank) are built almost entirely by visitor
contribution. The Internet Marketer bookmarks his or her website, blog entry
or article and/or contributes content to such sites in order to get both visitors
and backlinks.
As with forums, you don’t just do a sales pitch, or it’ll be over before you start.
You either contribute valuable content or you bookmark your sites with a
useful comment.
An example of valuable (and very effective) content would be if you made a

video of yourself giving away “some” of the secrets revealed in the product
you are selling, or reviewing an affiliate product or demonstrating how to use a
software product and uploading it to YouTube. It’s unlikely to outrank the cat
doing a back somersault but it will get you backlinks. YouTube has a PR of 9
and is the third most visited site on the Internet.
Digg
You can find Digg at http://digg.com/. Click on Join Digg and become a
member of the Digg community.
Register
Join Digg
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Digg also has a PR of 9 and is the 113th most visited site on the Internet. How
it works is simple.
Visitors submit stories, articles or blog posts to Digg and other visitors either
Digg it, which raises it in importance or Bury it, which does the opposite. So
Digg is like a totally democratic newspaper, whose readers not only decide
what stories are to be printed, but where they are to be shown. The more
Diggs a story has, the closer it moves to the front page, where it gets lots of
readers and a massively important backlink.
As always, use an attention getting headline and valuable content for anything
you submit to Digg.
Submit
Once you’ve registered with Digg, you can submit stories:
Submit Your Link to Digg
The Digg Terms & Conditions specifically state that you can submit your own
content and they also recommend linking to the original source where
possible.
Now you’ll recall that when you created articles in Stream 4, you also put each
article up as a page on your website. So all you have to do now is submit
each of those URLs to Digg.
Email everyone you know and get them to Digg your article.
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Add Digg Buttons

The other thing you should do is add Digg buttons to all your WordPress blog
entries. You can get these from:
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/slashdigglicious/
This adds links to Digg and other social networking sites at the end of every
blog post.
http://tuggo.org/projects/diggit/
This adds a Digg button in front of the blog post. You need to download a zip
file, unzip it and upload the contents to your website according to the
instructions.
Why two? Simply to make it as easy as possible for a visitor to Digg your post.
You’re after the impulsive click here.
MySpace
It’s hard to ignore a site with a Google Page Rank of 8 and an Alexa Rank of
6, but the fact is that MySpace is almost entirely populated by totally socially
oriented teenagers and while there is no doubt that a prominent profile could
get you backlinks, the effort involved isn’t worth it. If this assessment changes
any time soon, I’ll let you know in one of the monthly Traffic Floodgate
updates.
Facebook
All the same thoughts apply to Facebook as to MySpace. They are almost
identical in terms of influence. Facebook has a Google Page Rank of 9 and an
Alexa Rank of 7.
Others
Just make sure that you have the plugins described in Stream 3: Blogging so
that anyone reading your posts can bookmark them at:
http://www.digg.com
http://www.del.icio.us.com/
http://www.technorati.com
http://www.stumbleupon.com
Technorati
As well as pinging Technorati automatically with every blog post, you should
register with them, create your profile and “claim” your blog. Claiming your
blog allows you to associate lots of tags with it and use Technorati services to
increase its visibility. This will push it up in the rankings.
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Register with Technorati
Claim Your Blog
You can also get a selection of Technorati tools to increase your exposure.
Click on Technorati Tools and have a browse through what’s available.
For example, you can add a Technorati This button to your browser’s toolbar.
Then visit your own website and use the button on every page, so that you are
not limited to blog post pinging for Technorati exposure.
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Technorati Tools and Widgets
StumbleUpon
As well as pinging StumbleUpon (Google PR 8, Alexa Rank 355) you should
register and join.
Join StumbleUpon
Once you have registered and logged in, download the StumbleUpon toolbar
to your browser.
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Then simply “stumble upon” your own website, blog and published articles
and use the toolbar to review and bookmark them. If possible, get friends to
do the same. Sometimes it just takes a few good reviews to get the ball
rolling.
Product Reviews
Find products related to yours, but not direct competitors, on Amazon, Barnes
& Noble and Epinions.
Epinions is at http://www10.epinions.com/.
Join Epinions
These reviews will help to reinforce your position as an expert and will bring in
direct traffic from people interested in the product you review. Equally
importantly, it will get you backlinks from some of the most powerful and
respected authority sites on the Internet.
The Answerman Can

Answer relevant questions at:
http://www.answerbag.com/
and
http://answers.yahoo.com/
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Answerbag is Swarming with Visitors
Include your backlink in your answer if it’s allowed (the rules change from time
to time, and site to site.) If not, just follow your answer with something like “If
you found this answer helpful, please visit my website at www.mydomain.com
where you can get lots more answers and free stuff.
Check out these other question and answer sites:
http://wiki.answers.com/
http://www.wikihow.com/Main-Page (create a small how-to article)
http://www.wikipedia.org/ (define one of your keywords)
http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/Main_Page (a new Wiki Encyclopedia project)
http://www.fluther.com/
http://www.wondir.com/wondir/jsp/index.jsp
http://yedda.com/
http://www.askeet.com/
http://www.wetpaint.com/
http://www.ehow.com/
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eHow is the 831st Most Visited Site on the Web
Trailfire
Trailfire is dead simple, it only has a PR of 3 and an Alexa Rank of 39,305, but
Google loves it and your trails will get picked up by Googlebot very quickly.
Once you’ve registered with Trailfire, you can link relevant sites together just
by clicking on the Trailfire icon. They then become a trail which you or anyone
else on Trailfire can follow. And you include a commentary at each “mark”
which someone following the trail can display.
So you need to find a few other sites that relate to yours but who aren’t direct
competitors and link all of them together, including your own site, in a “fire
trail.” You put a commentary on each one reviewing the site and including a
backlink to your site.
Go to http://www.trailfire.com/.
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Join Trailfire
Once you’ve created your username and password in Trailfire, click on

Download and get the Trailfire toolbar for your browser.
Then to make a trail, all you have to do is go to your own website and find
other, related ones, click on the Fire symbol in your browser’s toolbar, mark
the site and add your comment or review.
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A Trailfire Marked Site
Jumptags
Jumptags is a great way to organize all of your social media activity in the one
place. And you will get traffic just from using it. You can submit stories directly
to it, you can bookmark your pages and you can import bookmarks from other
sites such as Delicious.
Register with Jumptags
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Once registered with Jumptags and logged in, you can click on Create
Jumptag.
and add a bookmark, photo, video, RSS feed, note, HTML or Skype.
You can bookmark every page on your website easily.
Adding a Bookmark Jumptag
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Finally, don’t forget to use the wonderful http://www.onlywire.com/, which

automatically submits your posts to all these social bookmarking services.
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Traffic Floodgate Stream 11: Black Hat, White Hat
Grey Hat
Stream 11: Black Hat, White Hat, Grey Hat

It’s Not the Hat, It’s the Person Wearing It!
This addresses the question of what exactly is a black hat strategy.
My position is that a black hat strategy is one where you trick someone into
visiting your website when they were not conducting a search that would have
logically brought them there.
This type of strategy was pioneered by adult sites, who tagged every keyword
imaginable to get you to find their site, irrespective of what you were looking
for originally. Then when you got there, the site spawned pop-ups faster than
you could close them down.
To me, that’s despicable. That’s black hat. And I fully support the technical
advances and changes to search engine strategy that’s made it a thing of the
past.
But … If I have a website advertising a product that solves the well-known

blue widget problem, and when I search on relevant keywords I find none of
the sites on the first page have as good a solution as mine, then I believe that
any strategy that allows the people searching on those keywords to find my
superior solution is a legitimate one.
That’s why I say there’s no such thing as a black hat strategy, only a black hat
person. It’s the intention, not the technique.
Google doesn’t agree.
So you have to be careful.
Black Hat A Bit of Both White Hat
Choose Your Hat Wisely!
I recommend that you try out any “black hat” techniques on what I call a mirror
site. Get another domain name similar to your main one. If your main site was
based on the domain name “spotteddogs.com” then also register
“spotthatdog.com.” You get the idea. Get it hosted with a different web host
from your main site. Login with a different user name and password. Pay for
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Grey Hat
the hosting with a different credit card. Make sure there is no connection
between the two sites.
This is exciting, isn’t it?
Upload your website to both hosts. You shouldn’t get penalized for duplicate
content. Two out of how many million? But if you’ve got a few minutes, spin
your home page text by substituting synonyms and rearranging paragraphs on
the second site.
O.K. Now you’ve got a site that you can experiment with. Here are some
things to try (more to come, with actual case studies, in Traffic Floodgate
updates over the next 12 months.)
Search Engine Cloaking

This was absolutely the original black hat technique, and it can still be
frightenly effective today.
You use software that creates in no time flat thousands of keyword optimized
pages that look great to a search engine that can’t tell the difference between:
“If you are breeding Dalmatians, you really need to see my how to breed
Dalmatians website, which gives you everything you need to know about
breeding Dalmatians for profit.”
and
“breeding Dalmatians for the recommends is the best while how to breed
Dalmatians notwithstanding anything else is what they say breeding
Dalmatians for profit resounds wildly with just my old school.”
From the point of view of a search engine spider, the second one is just as
good as the first, whereas to a human visitor the first makes sense and the
second doesn’t.
But … the first requires your valuable time to create, whereas the second can
be generated by software in less than a microsecond.
What search engine cloaking does is generate thousands of keyword rich

pages like the second example above, but because it can tell the difference
between a spiderbot visitor and a human visitor, serves them up only to the
spiderbot. The pages exist, but are hidden (cloaked) from human visitors.
The original and still the best software to achieve this is Search Engine
Cloaker:
http://www.phil-recommends.com/searchenginecloaker
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Grey Hat
As always, grow your site naturally. Don’t go from 10 pages to 5,010 pages
between spider visits. If you grow by a few hundred between each visit, you
should be OK. And this sort of growth will increase the frequency of visits
anyway.
Forum Schizophrenia
This strategy requires you to create two fictitious identities and join a forum in
your niche as both. In the profiles, portray one as a newbie (“Newbie”) and the
other as an experienced IT marketer (“Veteran”). Don’t use any signature
backlinks.
As Newbie, post a couple of newbie type questions and see what sort of
response you get.
As Veteran, answer a couple of questions that others have posted.
Wait until both characters are well known and attracting comment and
responses to their posts.
Then have Newbie post a question to which your product would be a great
solution.
Reply as Veteran with an outstanding review of your product. How you bought
it, used it and it was the best solution imaginable to the problem being posed.
Provide a link back to your website so that Newbie (and anyone else who
reads the thread) can check out the product for themselves.
Black Hat Software

Most Black Hat software revolves around providing a simple method of getting
humongous numbers of backlinks to your site by having the software make
automated posts somewhere, such as an unsuspecting blog, making it look as
much as possible as if it had been posted by a real person.
This has given rise to the term “comment spam.”
Comment Posting
How I feel about it is actually determined by the nature of the comment.
I have all of my blogs set up with blogmaster moderation. So that if a

comment is left, I can choose manually to accept it or delete it.
Now if I get a comment that goes something like “zwxldv

http://www.sleazydomain.com and forall frightening yttfdh and yet more
http://yetanotherdomain.com without prejudice my almightly hresvcee we
could all http://www.imanaffiliate.com heres the storey”
then I’m going to delete it instantly.
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Grey Hat
But if I get a comment that says “Hi TrafficGuy. I visited your blog and read
your post “Top 5 Tips for Getting Free, Targeted Traffic.” I thought they
contained a lot of valuable information that would be useful, especially to
those new to Internet Marketing. Perhaps you would consider linking back to
my site at http://www.thetrafficcrashmethod.com, as I think your readers would
benefit”
then why wouldn’t I allow it to stay? I like comments. It makes my blog look
popular. Or my Hub Page. Or my Squidoo lens. Or whatever.
And yet both of these comments were generated by software. The difference
is twofold. The first is generated by crappy software, the second by good
software. The first is created by an uncaring idiot, and the second by someone
who has an idea of what sort of comment a blogmaster might approve.
But as well, it all comes down to relevance. Your automated post must be to a
site with some relevance to yours.
Automated Software
There are some very expensive Black Hat sites that are available only by
subscription and are very difficult to get into. I will be reporting on these in one
of the Traffic Floodgate monthly updates.
For the less expensive, a Texan software developer named Bishop Anders
has been involved in the creation of a number of software products that
operate on the fringe. These are listed below, and are all available for a single
purchase price. Please note that the descriptions are taken off Bishop’s
website and are a bit hyped up.
The main problem with buying a package like this is the sheer overwhelming
volume. The only way to handle it is to create a new folder on your desktop
and download everything into it. Then unzip each program in turn into its own
folder inside the main one.
Then tackle one program at a time, where “tackle” means do exactly what it
says, document every step and measure the results. If it doesn’t work, seek a
solution from the supplier. Only when you have concrete results that it does or
doesn’t work, move onto the next one.
I will be trying all of these out and reporting on them in Traffic Floodgate
monthly updates.
Tag & Ping Traffic Machine

"Tag and Ping" gives you a double shot for your efforts... First, it gives you
great backlinks, and next it gives you good human traffic to your sites and
pages.
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Grey Hat
You can easily drive thousands of qualified visitors and high quality backlinks
to your website... and you can start in less than 2 minutes because the
software is so simple to use!
Video Traffic Machine

This is the ultimate in video traffic software, allowing you to mass post your
videos to over 30 free hosting services that make up nearly 100% of all video
traffic on the entire web. It even comes with its own built-in video creation
ability!
Since video hosts get spidered so frequently by the search engines, this
enables you to get your video ranked for certain keywords very quickly-- often
within hours.
"G Group" Traffic Machine

Google Newsgroups is the world's #1 newsgroups site. People have been
trying to figure out how to get Google's attention for years. This software has
"cracked the code." NOW getting Google to give your links some attention is
almost as simple as clicking on a single button!
This tool includes the ability to strictly target your niche audience, to make
sure your links and traffic are very relevant.
Forum Traffic Machine

This may be the single most powerful forum marketing software available on
the web.
Using this program, you can quickly and easily multiply your marketing efforts
by establishing your presence and building authority in any number of forums
targeted for your niche, creating back links and driving interested visitors to
your website.
"Y" Traffic Machine

Can you imagine getting unlimited traffic from Yahoo not only with their
blessing, but also with their assistance?
It's true, and I almost didn't include this program in the package because I
could probably live off of the traffic from it alone. But since I'm including "all" of
my traffic tools, I had to be honest and include this one too.
Now you can access millions of Yahoo visitors every single day using this
simple software.
Banner Traffic Machine

This powerful program takes a perfectly legal loophole that exists in traffic
exchanges, and uses it to give you massive banner exposure on other
people's sites for free or very cheap (imagine 100,000 targeted visitors for
$20).
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Grey Hat
So instead of just getting a ton of untargeted trash hits to your own site from
those 'traffic sellers', you will actually be generating thousands upon
thousands of credits from banner exchange programs which will be providing
you with targeted real traffic.
Directory Traffic Machine

As you may know, directories can be a good source of back links and direct
traffic. This is especially true for directories which are targeted for your niche,
and for authoritative directories that carry a good page rank.
So I looked at the best directory submitters on the market, and built a better
one. This powerful program can do broad search with or without Page Rank,
and can also do narrow keyword search with or without Page Rank settings in
order to continually find more new directories to post your listings in.
"G Page" Traffic Machine

Imagine a never ending supply of google backlinks for as many websites as
you want...
That's all I'm going to say about this one ;-)
"WP" Traffic Machine

I have used this program to put brand new sites (Sorry, I'm not going to tell
you which ones... they are too profitable) to the top of Google within 3 weeks.
Have you ever seen a WordPress blog (there are millions of them). This tool
enables you to get traffic from them.
The program has numerous customizable features, and I will save the rest of
the details for members only.
B2E Blog Traffic Machine

This is an amazingly fast, professional backlink building software program that
will have you landing top search results positions for your website that is
relevant, keyword rich, and written precisely to your keyword-specific and
SEO needs.
This tool is so powerful that I recommend it be used only after you've studied
it, and followed my instructions to make sure you use it properly.
Stealth Traffic Machine

You're going to have to think outside the box a little on this one, because I
was a bit freaked out when I found out this was even possible.
Imagine that you had a tireless assistant that worked hard night and day
placing your advertisements on some of the most watched pages of every
single web site on the planet.
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Grey Hat
Sound impossible? Think again.
Shoutbox Traffic Machine

A shoutbox, saybox, tagboard, or chatterbox is a chat-like feature found on
many websites. This program allows you to receive a fresh stream of traffic
from those sites.
The benefits of shoutbox marketing are twofold. First, you get real traffic as a
result of your posts, and secondly you get the benefit of instant testing which
allows you to immediately recognize which headlines or tease copy gets
results, which of course can translate into massive results for your other
marketing mediums.
"SE" Traffic Machine

This is a genius little program that associates your domain with the keywords
you supply, and then helps to bring your site to the forefront of searches for
your particular keywords.
Pretty sweet, eh?
Image Traffic Machine

People love pictures, right? They love to show their pictures online, and they
love to look at pictures online...
Wouldn't it be nice if you had a way to capture traffic from the massive flood of
people looking at pictures on the Internet?
Now it's possible using this innovative software program.
VooDoo Traffic Machine

This one might sound a bit scary, but here goes...
How would you like to set up a brand new domain and instantly have 1000's
of 100% on-topic, keyword specific, targeted one-way backlinks within
minutes.
Not days, not hours... MINUTES.
Yeah, I thought so.
"UN" Traffic Machine

If you're an experienced web marketer, you might be aware of the "no follow"
tags used on many blogs, and how it affects the quality of links from those
sites.
This program finds sites targeted for your specific niche, where you can create
back links. More importantly, it only finds sites that do NOT use "no follow"
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Grey Hat
tags. It also allows you to specify certain or minimum Page Rank for the sites
you are finding.
Ping Traffic Machine

Blogging and pinging is one of the most powerful ways to get the search
engines to take notice of your site, and to get the search engine spiders
running to index it.
Now you can have the same effect, WITHOUT even having a blog. This
program gives you the benefits of having an UNLIMITED number of blogs (but
NONE of the work involved with blogging)!
It can also get a new site indexed in the search engines almost instantly.
Video Pop-in Traffic Machine

Okay, so this one is a little less of a traffic machine, and a bit more of a video
machine. However, I use it to build my opt-in lists like crazy.
And you know what opt-in lists mean, don't you? Repeat traffic!
So really I guess you could say it's a traffic machine in disguise ;-)
ICQ Traffic Machine

Since the beginning of the internet, ICQ has held the largest collection of
blogs, forums, and message boards ever amassed on the web.
You probably know what I'm going to say next...
Wouldn't it be nice if you could get traffic from all of them?
Now you can.
"VC" Traffic Machine

The details of this machine will be revealed to members only.
Anonymous Traffic Machine

Drupal Traffic Machine

Classifieds Traffic Machine

Stealth Banner Machine

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Grey Hat
(This is more of an "indirect" traffic machine, as it is a tool that creates a

super-effective form of advertising)
Toolbar Traffic Machine

(This tool is currently in "beta" testing mode. The stable version will be
available soon)
AQL Traffic Machine

(I have a friend who is making hundreds of dollars a day as a ClickBank
affiliate using this tool.)
All of these 26 “traffic machines” are server side software so you are not
downloading them to your desktop and running them. Rather you are
downloading the licenses that entitle you to run them remotely.
This does have the advantage that as improvements and additions are made
to the software, you are automatically running the latest version.
It also means that the charging model is monthly membership, rather than
one-time cost.
The cost is $97 per month, which is nothing if you actually use the software to
drive heaps of targeted traffic to a site that converts.
Future Traffic Floodgate updates will contain not only reports on all of this
software, but specific action plans for using it.
But if you can’t wait, check it out at:
http://www.phil-recommends.com/webtrafficmachines/
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Traffic Floodgate Stream 12: Joint Ventures
Stream 12: Joint Ventures

Drive Your Traffic Through the Roof!
The single best way of getting lots of sales for your new or repackaged
product and thereby building up your own list of loyal subscribers that you can
sell your next product to, is to joint venture your product launch with someone
who already has a list.
You can only get JV partners for a new product that you have created yourself
or outsourced.
The more JV partners you can get, the better … up to a point. This is because
there is a lot of list overlap. If you have ten JV partners, each with a list of, just
for argument’s sake, 10,000 names, then the combined total of unique names
lies somewhere between 10,000 (the same names are duplicated on
everyone’s list) and 100,000 (no names are duplicated.) In practice, the total
number of unique names might be around 30,000 to 40,000.
This means that a large number of subscribers are going to get promotional
emails about your product from more than one of your JV partners and some
will get them from all ten. And, of course, this is why whenever there’s a big
launch, you’re flooded with emails all saying “buy from me, because I’ve got
the biggest bonus.”
Competition amongst your JV partners is great for you, of course. The more
emails a prospect gets promoting your product, the more it seems to be the
latest “must have” and the more bonuses being offered, the more likely your
prospect is to be tempted.
How to Get JV Partners

Those Whose Lists You’re On
If you’ve been involved with Internet Marketing for any length of time, you will
be on a number of lists from other publishers or affiliate marketers in your
niche. They are your first port of call. They already have lists of people who
are interested in your niche products and who have likely purchased in the
past.
However, don’t expect getting in contact with them to be easy. Anyone who
mails out to tens of thousands of people has put barriers in place to ensure
that they don’t receive emails from tens of thousands of people. Don’t expect
to be able to simply reply to an email they’ve sent you.
Usually, the best bet is to visit their website and look for a Contact Us link.
This may lead to a legitimate email address or to a help desk. Using the help
desk is fine, as it pretty much ensures that you will reach the potential JV
partner (or someone working for them) and it’s just as confidential as email.
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Help desks often have a drop down menu for Subject and sometimes this will
even include JV Proposal.
Otherwise, try doing a Google search on your prospective JV partner’s name.

This will sometimes turn up contact details.
Others in the Same Niche

Your other source of potential JV partners is simply others in the same niche
as you, including competitors. If you are promoting your own product, it will
not be exactly the same as anyone else’s and so anyone who’s bought a
competitor’s product is a prospect for yours. In fact, they’re a better prospect
than almost anyone else, because they’ve proved that they will actually make
a purchase. Now your competitor is not going to sell them a second copy of
his or her own product, so why shouldn’t they promote yours and make a
commission?
Find these JV partners simply by searching on your best keywords. Visit their
websites and make a list of anyone who looks like a good match and for
whom contact details are available.
Contacting JV Partners
Before contacting anyone, get organized! Otherwise, you’ll be amazed at how
quickly you’ll lose track of whom you’ve contacted, what you’ve said, what
they’ve said and exactly what stage they’re up to. (Been there, done that.)
If you haven’t already got a bulk mailer, you can get World Merge from
http://www.coloradosoft.com/. It’s available as a free version, which simply
adds an advertisement for World Merge at the end of each email you send, or
you can get a licensed version for $59.
If you’re using World Merge, you can enter your JV Partners’ details into an
Excel spreadsheet and then bulk send personalized emails to them.
Create a JV Partners folder in Outlook or whatever email client you’re using to

receive emails and then a separate sub-folder for each JV Partner. Then as
you receive individual responses and reply to them, move both the response
and your reply into the appropriate folder. This way, you’ll have a record of all
your bulk mailings in World Merge (or whatever your bulk e-mailer is) and a
record of all your personal dealings with a particular partner in his or her own
folder.
What to Say
Just remember everyone in this game is interested in WIIFM (What’s In It For
Me?) so while there’s no doubt that you have to show them you’ve got a
worthwhile product, your focus should be on your sales letter (will it convert?)
and your affiliate tools (have you got pre-written emails, text ads, banner ads,
bonuses, etc. that will allow a JV partner to promote you with minimal effort?)
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Write your emails with this principle in mind.
What to Pay
Between 50% and 75%. I generally use 60%. Yes, you’ve done all the work to
create the product, build the website and do the affiliate tools but none of it’s
worth a pinch of snuff without customers. And that’s what these folk can
supply.
What About ClickBank?

This is a vexed question. Certainly ClickBank and other, similar affiliate
programs can deliver affiliate partners for little or no effort. But you have no
control over them.
I believe in two principles here:
1. Using ClickBank and seeking specific JV Partners are mutually exclusive.

Use one or the other, not both. Using ClickBank will weaken your JV
partner effort.
2. I would never use ClickBank for a product in the Internet Marketing arena,
or at least not until well after launch and after my JV partners have all had
a chance to get as many sales as possible from their lists. This is because
most people in the IM customer space are ClickBank savvy and more than
likely have their own ClickBank nickname. As soon as they go to purchase
your product, and see a ClickBank order form, they are going to back out
back to your website and look for the affiliate link. If they don’t find one,
they’ll go to the ClickBank marketplace and look for your product there.
Once they find it, they clear their browser’s cookies and then purchase it
through their own link, in order to get a 60% or whatever discount. You still
get the sale, but you have badly let down your JV partner.
Conclusion
Once you have done this a couple of times, you’ll find two things have
happened. One, you have your own list of customers who have bought from
you and who will buy again in the future, provided you treat them right. And
two, others will start seeking you out as their Joint Venture partner.
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Traffic Floodgate: The 12 Step Summary
The 12 Step Summary

1. Do Your Keyword Research … Pages 13 - 24
Traffic is directly related to keywords
Use free resources to get your keywords
Use paid resources when you’re further along
Record your keywords
2. Your Website and On-Page SEO … Pages 25 - 44

Structure your website properly
Create your sales page or squeeze page
Keyword specific pages
Consider a page generator
Put your analytics in place
Create and submit your site map
Initiate viral marketing
3. Blogging … Pages 45 – 79
Understand the value of blogging
Create and refine a Blogger blog
Create and refine a WordPress blog with plugins
Link your blogs
Promote your blogs
Set up a blog hex
4. Articles and Press Releases … Pages 80 – 93

Understand the power of article publishing
Learn the anatomy of an article
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Create tightly focused keyword articles
Outsource if necessary
Submit your articles
Create and submit press releases
5. Backlinks and Directory Submission … Pages 94 - 100

Get backlinks from blogs, articles and directory submission
From direct request
Reciprocal links
Link exchanges
Purchase links
6. Squidoo … Pages 101 - 112

Learn about Squidoo
Build a lens
Edit your details
Add other modules
7. Hub Pages … Pages 113 – 121

Learn about HubPages
Create a HubPage
Assemble your capsules
Save your Hub
8. Craigslist and US Free Ads … Pages 122 - 127

The importance of Craigslist
Post multiple ads to Craigslist
Use US Free Ads
9. Forums … Pages 128 – 130
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Find forums
Edit your profile and signature
Ask and answer questions
Post your articles
10. Social Bookmarking … Pages 131 - 142

Learn the importance of social bookmarking
Digg
Technorati
StumbleUpon
Trailfire
Jumptags
Review products
Become the answerperson
11. Black Hat, White Hat, Grey Hat … Pages 143 - 151
It’s a matter of attitude
Search engine cloaking
Forum schizophrenia
Comment posting
Black hat software
12. Joint Ventures … Pages 152 – 154

How to get JV partners
Contact your JV partners
What to say, what to pay
The ClickBank conundrum
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Traffic Floodgate Channel 13: The Video Stream
Channel 13: The Video Stream

I’ve referred to video a few times in the 12 Traffic Streams, but haven’t gone
into details.
This is because, although video is already hot in the YouTube type

entertainment field and is becoming hot in the Internet Marketing field, it’s not
quite there yet, despite some of the claims being made.
There are an awful lot of awful videos out there, turning people away from
sites and products in droves. There is still a sizeable number of Internet users
who will click away from a site the moment a page comes up with a video on
it.
The standards are being pioneered now, but until a bit more dust settles, I’m
reluctant to make recommendations.
But it’s coming, and coming rapidly.
I intend issuing a full Video Traffic Stream section as one of the monthly
updates to Traffic Floodgate in the very near future. It will cover best practice
for the creation and publishing of video, including both free and paid
resources, along with all of the ways you can use video to drive even more
traffic to your website.
Be on the lookout for it.
158
Traffic Floodgate: Can You Buy Traffic?
Can You Buy Traffic?

The Short Answer
Yes, you can, but it’s largely a waste of money.
Generally, purchased traffic is simply redirected from some general

“opportunity” type site. I’ve conducted a few experiments and checked the
analytics. The results have been consistent.
You do get the number of visitors that you have paid for.
You will get a small number, perhaps as few as 0.5%, who stay on your
website and read your offer and, if it’s a good one, a percentage of them may
convert (so our 0.5% comes down to maybe 0.05%.)
What about the rest? They leave like scalded cats, with a huge number of
them staying for 0 seconds, meaning that they’ve clicked away from your site
before it’s even loaded.
Purchased Lists
Can you get traffic from emailing a purchased list? Maybe some, but it’s not
worth the risk of a spam complaint. And you will get them. Purchased lists
usually come from co-registration where someone has signed up for
something and has, sometimes inadvertently, requested “more information.”
Commercial e-mailers like Aweber and GetResponse will not allow the import
of purchased lists into their systems, even though they force all such imports
through a double opt-in procedure.
If you must try a purchased list, follow these three steps:
1. Don’t put your money site at risk. A spam complaint will get it temporarily
suspended and you will be required to show that your email was timely
and on-topic and that the recipient opted in to your list. You can do none of
these with a purchased list. So set up a new site that you don’t care about,
on a different domain name and web host. Put a double opt-in squeeze
page on it.
2. In the first email you send, tell them you’re responding to their request for
more information and give them a 1-click unsubscribe link right up front.
Give them a gift as a reward for their subscription and tell them there’s
another on its way.
3. In the second email, remind them of the first gift and tell them you’ve got
another gift for them but they need to confirm their email address with you.
Send them to your squeeze page where they have to double opt-in.
159
Traffic Floodgate: Can You Buy Traffic?
You’ll lose quite a few of your purchased list this way, but the ones left have
double opted-in and are now your subscribers.
Google Adwords
You can get good, targeted traffic from Google Adwords and other Pay per
Click services, but it’s very easy to spend more than your return.
Entire books have been written about this one subject, but the three most
important rules are:
• Set your budget to what you can comfortably afford.

• Go for long tail keywords only as, being more focused, they are more
likely to get the click and will be cheaper because there’s less
competition.
• Check your analytics every day and drop what’s not working.
160
Traffic Floodgate: The IM Blueprint
The IM Blueprint
As I wrote Steps 1 to 10 of Making Money on the Internet in the Introduction to
this book, I was tempted time and time again to put in more detail. How do
you go about selecting a resale rights product and rebranding it as your own?
Exactly what steps should you follow to get Joint Venture partners that can
make the difference between making a hundred dollars and a hundred
thousand dollars?
But I knew that if I put in the sort of detail I wanted, it would end up being the
whole book.
And that’s not what this book is about. It’s about getting traffic, which I still
regard as one of the most difficult and yet most important parts of being a
successful Internet Marketer.
So in a way this book is aimed at those who already know everything

mentioned in Steps 1 to 10 and just need traffic to take them to that next level.
But on speaking to other people working in this area, I soon realized that while
most readers of this book already know something about some of the
matters covered in Steps 1 to 10, very few know everything.
So the logical thing to do was write another book!
It’s going to be called The Internet Marketing Blueprint: 10 Steps to

Internet Success and it’ll be available at my new website
http://www.imblueprint.com from Tuesday July 22, 2008.
Until then, may you have an unstoppable flood of quality, targeted traffic.
161
Traffic Floodgate: Gifts
Gifts for Traffic Floodgate Owners

Additional free gifts are available to Traffic Floodgate owners at:
http://www.trafficfloodgate.com/gifts/membersgifts.html.
Check back frequently, as I add new gifts to this page regularly.
162

Traffic Floodgate

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Traffic Floodgate

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Discover the secrets to UNLEASHING head spinning quantities

First Published May 2008 by Next Chapter Pty Ltd

A step by step guide to unleashing a flood of traffic to your website

This publication is not intended as a source of legal, financial or business

You are encouraged to print this e-book for ease of reading.

A Bit Left Field ..................................................................................................................... 40

Press Release Blunders...................................................................................................... 91

Connecting to Craigslist .................................................................................................... 122

AQL Traffic Machine ..................................................................................................... 151

Use US Free Ads .......................................................................................................... 156

Steps to Making Money on the Internet

Each of these steps is covered in more detail in my Short e-Book series: 10

website, these may be downloaded free of charge by owners of Traffic

Step 1: Create or Select a Product

Step 2: Research Your Keywords

Step 3: Get a Domain Name

Step 4: Get a Website Host

Step 5: Get a Payment Gateway

One advantage of ClickBank is that it exposes your product to a potential

Step 6: Be Ready to Capture Your Visitors’ Details

All of this will be handled either by an Autoresponder service or by

Step 7: Build the Website

Step 8: Upload the Website

Step 9: Get JV/Affiliate Partners

Now ClickBank, as mentioned in Step 4 above, will automatically get you

Step 10: Get Traffic!

Stream 1: Keyword Research

The trick here is to think in terms of information, not product. If someone is

Keywords and Traffic

The Overture (Yahoo!) Free Tool

Entering a keyword to research using Overture (Yahoo!)

Although sometimes looked down on as incomplete and out of date, the

You’ll see the loading message.

Site is too busy to respond

Just keep clicking on Suggest until you get through.

Lottery related keywords that people are searching on

Lotto related keywords that people are searching on.

Long tail keywords

The Google Free Keywords Tool

Looking for keywords based on “lottery” and “lotto”

Google search on “lottery” and “lotto”

Finding terms with less competition

Wordtracker’s Free Keyword Research Tool

our needs. The generation of thousands of keywords is really the province of

For the free version of Wordtracker, go to

Enter your keyword then click on Hit Me

Top results for “lottery”

Wordtracker has a big advantage in that it allows us to do long tail keyword

Long tail keywords based on “florida lottery”

As mentioned earlier, these long tail keywords can be particularly lucrative. It

As well, checkout the Good Keywords tool at http://www.phil-

Register to Use HitTail for Free

Wordtracker keyword research tool signup

Click on Take the free trial.

A full subscription to Wordtracker costs $59 per month.

Important: You will automatically be moved onto a full monthly

Keyword Elite is an amazing piece of software that is particularly suited to

Keyword Elite “disclaimer”

Record Your Keywords

Stream 2: On-Page SEO

<meta name="keywords" content="keyword1, keyword2, keyword3, etc”>

You Must Have a Website

you must have your own website.