How To Get Massive Free (and very close to free) Traffic – Part 1
If you are arriving at this post, we are analyzing a live campaign, blow-by-blow, to outline the steps involved. You can start at the first post HERE.
We have our keywords, our affiliate products and you should have your site set-up. If your site isn’t perfect, don’t sweat it, just get the darn thing up so you can start driving traffic to it.
This is the first post of a lot on getting traffic. There are so many way to get traffic it’s not even funny and we are going to focus on the free ways. There may be a couple here or there that cost a few dollars, but for the most part they are free.
Now, our whole goal here is to get natural, page 1 rankings for our SITE (not necessarily our articles) so we have long-term organic traffic. To me, this is the best way to drive people to our affiliate pages because it lasts. You are not constantly reinventing the wheel every day trying to get more and more traffic.
Articles and article directories are great for backlinks, but if done right, you can also get a ton of traffic from them.
So, if our goal is to get natural rankings to our site so we get a constant stream of traffic, then we are going to focus on 2 things: content and backlinks.
First, we have to focus on content.
In this post, we are going to talk about the 1st step in this content process – ARTICLES!
I know what you’re thinking, “Articles, how boring, I already do that…”
Maybe you do, but I bet 1) you don’t do it right and 2) you don’t use your articles like I will show you after you write them. I’ve got some really cool stuff in store, and your articles merely form the basis of our strategy.
So, first, let’s make sure you do them right, and I’ll provide some links below to what I’m talking about. And, hey, if you hate article writing, like I do, make it easy on yourself and outsource it. I have outsourced my article writing for this campaign to a group at www.PajamaTeam.com. It’s $6 per article and the quality has always been outstanding. They research your topic and crank out some very naturally sounding, convincing articles.
Here are the steps we’ll take for our campaign:
FIRST – Write 10 unique articles centered around 10 of our keywords.
A couple general guidelines on these articles:
- they should each be between 300-500 words in length;
- each article should focus on one keyword – this is important because too many times people try to focus on more than one keyword for an article and end up not getting ranked for any keywords. We want to focus like a laser on one keyword and one keyword only. This way you have a better chance of getting ranked for that particular keyword
- your article should have about 2% max keyword density. This works out to be your keyword about 2 times out of every 100 words.
- you should use LSI in your articles – LSI stands for Latent Semantic Indexing. This basically means that you include terms related to your topic. Google looks for LSI termswhen determining what a particular page is about. Let’s use my niche and assume our article was about “learning guitar.” Some LSI words might be “music” “speaker” “fret” “amp” etc. Do you get the point? Normally, if you write naturally as if you are talking to someone, LSI terms will naturally be interspersed in your writing.
- Always try to center your articles around a number of tips, or rules, or something. People love tips and secrets that will solve their problem. I have found that odd numbers work best, and 3 or 5 has worked best for me. So, it could be “3 tips” or “5 secrets” etc.
- In the resource box, ALWAYS have your keyword as anchor text and ALWAYS have your full URL as a link. The anchor text is important for SEO, but the full URL is important in case someone ever publishes your article, but does not keep the links live. If you just have anchor text links, and they don’t work, a reader won’t know how to get to your site. By putting your full URL as a link, if the link gets messed up, they can still make it your site.
- If you outsource your articles, be sure, be sure, be sure they are written by someone who has english as their native language.
Specific Guidelines On These Articles:
- The Title is your one line sales pitch to get them to click
The title should have your keyword/keyphrase in it and should incite curiosity. I ALWAYS start my article title with the keyword first. And then I put something catchy after it.
Kind of like a mullett – all business in the front, but crazy fun in the back!
As an example, if my keyphrase was “learn guitar online,” this is how my title might look:
“Learn Guitar Online – 3 Little Known Tips To Play Like Eddie Van Halen” or
“Learn Guitar Online – Man Learns Insider Secrets, Lands Music Contract” or
“Learn Guitar Online – 3 Rules You Must Follow Before You Learn Guitar Online”
So, as you can see, these incite some curiosity. You’ll notice that I made the 2nd one kind of like a newspaper headline. I have found that I get higher views when I craft them this way. In the 3rd one I use the keyword twice. I have had a fair amount of success with this in the past as well.
If you are stuck with some boring headlines or can’t think of any, here’s a trick you can use that’s right under your nose.
Go to Ezinearticles.com and do a search of the articles for your targeted keyword. This will bring up all the articles associated with your keyword. Pick any one of them, just make sure it is in a category that is your niche.
Scroll down to the bottom of the article and you’ll notice Ezinearticles lists out the “Most Viewed” and “Most Published” articles in this topic. There can be some manipulation of these views (which we’ll discuss in a later post), but for the most part you can look at which ones are getting the most views.
Look at their title and how it is set-up – is it catchy? Does it make you want to read it?
If so, make your like theirs. Don’t copy it word for word, but use the same format and change the words around.
The title is what will cause people to click, so this is extremely important to do right.
And, trust me, in the beginning you’ll have some flub articles that get minimal views. That’s OK. Learn from it and move on.
- How to Get Killer Click-Throughs in Your Resource Boxes
OK, I can tell you from the many, many bad articles I have written, that “For more information, visit www.samplesite.com,” or any variation of this, DOES NOT MAKE PEOPLE WANT TO CLICK. Maybe it works for certain types of topics and articles, but it has never worked for me.
There are 2 types of resource boxes that have worked well for me, I call them the 1) natural resource box and the 2) curiosity continuation resource box.
In the first one, I weave my links directly into the “conversation” of the article. This is kind of hard to explain, but I make it sound as natural as possible with a call to action.
Go to the following link and you’ll see an example of this:
http://ezinearticles.com/?Out-of-Control-Teenagers—Where-Did-I-Go-Wrong?&id=3773662
This article has gotten like a 55% click through rate – pretty good in my book.
In the 2nd one, I offer them more tips or something else if they click through. Read the end of the article in this one and you’ll see what I mean:
http://ezinearticles.com/?Get-Rid-of-a-Double-Chin-Fast—2-Secrets-of-the-Sculpted-Gods&id=3816225
As a side note, you’ll notice “Dirk Jensen” is not me! Well, it is me, it’s just a pen name, which you can do in Ezinearticles. This bears some mentioning. These days, for each niche I get into, I create a pen name. This way, when someone looks at my bio, they don’t see that I have written articles on 20 different topics. We are ultimately trying to be the “expert” in our niche, so if they see you have written about guitars, weight loss, double chins, etc., they will most likely automatically think that you ARE NOT an expert.
Bottom line is that the most valuable piece of real estate in an article is your resource box. You may have to play around with a few variations of what works for you and gets the most click-throughs. These ways have worked for me.
SECOND – now that you have your 10 articles written, go back and re-write those 10 articles
Center them around the same keywords. So, when you are done with both steps you’ll have 20 total articles.
In my next post I am going to tell you what to with these articles. Ezinearticles is part of it, but a very SMALL part of it. We are going to take this content we have created and put it into multiple formats and directories so we can squeeze every lasy bit of traffic juice out of them!
Stay tuned!
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