In the previous post I already told you a few words about article marketing, as one of the best ways to get free targeted traffic to your site. However, if you want to increase the effectiveness of this method, it’s necessary to keep in mind some important things.

First of all, your article has to be extremely relevant to your site. Always try to write about topics that are very similar to what your site is about. Doing so, the people will find your site interesting and a possible solution for their problems.

On the other hand, try to write about niche topics. Simply choose a subtopic,  2-3 keywords and focus only of them. Of course you have to watch out for the quality of the content, so don’t use your keywords too often. The optimal distribution is to have your keywords in the title (very important!), 2-3 times in the body and if possible, in the “tags” section.

Before choosing your keywords, do some research! What keywords are popular and where can you find little competition? I know, it makes the whole process more complicated, but if you find good keywords, your article could be at one of the top spots in the search engines for months, even years!

Use the resource box to promote your site. It’s always good to call for action!

You can get a better ranking for your article, if you pick out a paragraph, submit it to the social bookmark sites with a link pointing to your article.

There are some other factors, but these were the most important ones, which can really boost your number of visitors, and indirectly your sales.

I hope you’ve already started to set up your own website or blog. If you finally finished it, you will need to get visitors that click on you ads or buy the products you want to sell. Of course, the best way to get targeted traffic is to write good content, optimize your site to a few keywords and achieve a good ranking in the search engines. But it takes time to get indexed, and nobody wants to wait months to finally get some visitors. So here are the best free methods you can use to promote your site:

1. Article Marketing

It’s a very simple, but effective way of getting high quality traffic. You just have to write 1-2 articles every day about topics, which are relevant to your site. Just place a link pointing to your page at the bottom with a text like: “If you want to read more articles/tips, simply click here!”
Submit them to the main article directories like Ezinearticles or Goarticles and wait for the people

2. Forum Marketing

It’s very similar to article marketing. Register to relevant forums and starting posting comments. Most of the forums enable the signature function, which means, you can automatically place links at the bottom of your comments. If you look like an expert of the topic, people will click to your site.

3. Posting to Blogs

It’s the same receipt: Find some relevant blogs and post quality comments with a back-link to your site. But the content of your comments should be really good not to get deleted for spamming.

4. Social Bookmarking

Write a paragraph about your site, and submit it to social bookmarking sites like Digg or Propeller.

These methods are useful for various reasons: You get free traffic links to it, which increase your search engine rankings!

If you decided to start a long term internet business, you will have to kill the two main fears almost every beginner has:

“I can’t create a website!” and:

“I don’t have any innovative ideas!”

I’ve heard these two excuses many times, and to be honest, I nearly had to laugh. Not because I’m a genius or something like that, but because I can’t do this things either. I’m not a professional website maker, or a scientist, but you don’t have to be!

Since Blogs and free web templates exist, even my dog can build a website in a couple of minutes! It doesn’t have to be beautiful designed and super-professional. It only has to provide information what people are searching for! And here comes the next thing:

What should you write about? The question is: what are you interested in? What are you likely to talk about with your friends? You don’t have to find out anything new to be successful. You just have to choose a topic/niche and be the expert there. If you are working a few hours every day with your site, you will see results after a few months. You will see how the number of your visitors and how your site’s popularity is growing and you will start making money! It’s that simple!

So don’t worry, you don’t have to be an expert or a genius to build up your own online empire, just stick to the two basic rules of internet marketing: focus only on the important things and don’t give up!

Before I go into detail, I want you to understand the “theory” of choosing a money making opportunity. I know, it sounds a bit funny, but in my opinion it’s the most important factor of your online success. So here are my advices:

First of all, decide what kind of business you want to do. If you only want to work part time to earn some extra cash immediately, you can take online surveys or sign up for a data entry job. If you are planning long term, I suggest you to start building your own website and/or blog. There are some other solutions in between like article marketing, pay-per-click advertising, etc. The number of online money making opportunities is nearly endless, so it really depends on you, what you are interested in.

BUT, there are two things, which are the same whatever option you choose:

1)  Choose only ONE or MAXIMUM TWO opportunities, and concentrate only of them! The biggest mistake a beginner can do is to buy all the internet marketing eBooks to try out all the methods. Forget it. You won’t get rich from reading 2000 sites. I recommend you to choose one or two eBooks, read them, and learn the techniques from A to Z. If you focus only on 1-2 things, you will later have 1-2 strong income streams, instead of earning a few bucks here and there.

2)  Act now! Yes, it sounds a bit like a TV Shop commercial, but it’s very important, that you start your business right now! Remember, you only earn money, if you have something to earn money with (like a website).

Well, that was the poor theory of internet marketing. Perhaps these two guidelines sound too obvious, but you can’t imagine how big percent of the people fail, because they don’t comply with these two simple tips.