So many Internet marketers like to throw around the term “Viral Marketing” to sound smart, savvy and cool. But the truth is, very few really “get it”. Just because you WANT something to be “VIRAL” doesn’t mean that it will be, or even if it will work!

“Viral Marketing” simply put, is where you are giving away something of value so the recipient will WANT to pass it on to others…right? Yes, but not quite. “Viral Marketing” describes ANY strategy that encourages individuals to pass on a marketing message to others, creating the potential for exponential growth through the exposure and influence of the message.

So it spreads like a VIRUS.

Do you or have you ever had a Hotmail address? This was one of the Internet’s first highly successful Viral-Marketing campaigns. Think about what the smart minds at Hotmail pulled off. They gave away email addresses AND service. And they attached a tagline at the bottom of every email message sent. Get your private email account. (Or, something to that effect.) Then, they simply stood back as people emailed their network of friends, family and business contacts all over the globe.

A simple, BRILLIANT strategy.

Soon it becomes, WOW! All my friends are using Hotmail. I want to use it too!

BINGO.

An effective Viral Marketing strategy should incorporate some sort of giveaway OR natural viral element that begs to be passed on and does NOT scream “sales-pitch”.

It could be a controversial or newsworthy video or a humorous email or a special report that deals with a unique solution to a problem affecting certain individuals.

Make sense?

You also need to make it brain-dead simple for people to pass your message on to others.

Make it exciting!
Make it interesting!
Make it newsworthy!
Make it scalable.
Remember - Controversy sells!
Solve a common problem for your marketplace!

Most importantly, begin with an end in mind because ultimately you’re promoting YOUR products and services.

WHY should anyone feel the urgency to pass on your message to others? Do you ask them to do so? Do you provide simple instructions? Your marketing “virus” will die a quick death if you don’t incorporate these critical elements.

Remember this point, the quickest way to KILL any Viral Marketing message is to be BORING!

Dress up your PDF files with cute graphics and cartoon style characters to add more personality and pizzazz to your e-books and special reports. By doing this you will deliver more impact, increase readability, boost profits, create a viral effect (if executed properly), and most important of all you will stand out from the hundreds of boring sites out there!

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Adapted by an article from JD Reilly.

About JD: JD Reilly is committed to helping others succeed at internet marketing with tested and proven products and strategies. The success is built upon-A focused target market, A product people are hungry for, A marketing strategy and Automation. His latest program, social traffic explosion, provides everything you need to know about driving a lot of traffic into your website and may be found at: http://JDReilly.biz

But if you’re trying to make money online - particularly if you’re running a blog - repeat traffic doesn’t necessarily make economic sense.

To start with, since regular visitors are constantly exposed to your advertising, its appeal will quickly start to diminish. And the more they visit, the less effective it’s likely to become.

What’s more, repeat visitors know exactly what they’re coming back for - your content. As they focus more intently on what you’ve got to say, the efficiency of any ads around them is likely to dip even further.

Not the best situation for you, despite your hoards of happy users.

Of course, one way to offset this effect is via referrals within your content, and while it’s a strategy that works for many, in truth it’s a difficult thing to do well.

There’s a very fine line between informative copy and what amounts to a bare-faced, hard sell; your recommendations will need to provide real value or risk being seen as a money-grabbing sham. And hunting down worthwhile products takes time and effort, meaning more hard work in addition to maintaining your blog.

So what’s the solution?

The answer is to take a smarter approach to the advertising you already use. A simple yet radical change that employs basic smargeting techniques to recapture your audience’s flagging interest.

Before going further, it should be pointed out that while conventional online strategy relies heavily on blending - ‘camouflaging’ ads by making them similar in appearance to the page itself - smart targeting focuses instead on ‘psycho-blending’, or formats aimed at a particular audience. This may even involve regular ad changes on the basis that novelty generally provokes curiosity.

But let’s look at just how smart targeting can successfully target repeat traffic.

A blank canvas

The first thing to do - and you may need to take a deep breath here - is drop your ads altogether.

Yes, that’s correct - get rid of them, or at least reduce their quantity substantially … although before you stop reading entirely I’ll point out that you’re only going to do this for new entries, and only for short periods of time.

If this seems crazy, remember that new updates are precisely the ones recurrent readers are likely to see very quickly. Your advertising has far less impact on this audience in any case, but what you will do is place ads on your pages a week or so after publication.

That way, they’ll be seen by any casual traffic arriving via search engines or other links to your site.

It’s a simple change to make, but an effective one with real benefits.

To start with, it’s likely that regular users will quickly come to appreciate their custom ‘ad-lo’ environment, but as well as making loyal readers happier, there’s another advantage in it for you.

Because by creating a blank canvas, you’ll be in a position to employ the most subtle smart targeting trick of all; which is to now run intermittent campaigns.

Think about it - a regular visitor opens your blog to discover a couple of banners. They haven’t seen ads on your site for a while, so this sudden appearance not only attracts attention, but hopefully, also prompts them to investigate further.

And because these campaigns will be brief and sporadic, even visitors irked by an apparent return to the b(ad) old days will quickly realize they’ve nothing to fear.

In other words, it’s a win-win situation - for your most devoted visitors, and hopefully, you and your finances.

Smart Targeting formats

Making ads work harder is what smargeting is all about, and once you’ve created a blank canvas environment you’ll want to smarget your ad formats, too.

For each one-off ad blast, experiment with a different advertising vehicle. Peelback ads; mini-malls; inline text - you’ll find plenty to choose from right here at clickspiration.com. And with each new mini-campaign, you should aim for contrast to maintain a sense of surprise and click-curiosity.

What’s more, by keeping a close eye on stats every time you use a different format, you’ll get some idea how psycho-blending relates to your own segment of users. Was inline text a surprise success? Then perhaps it’s a format that particularly appeals to your specific audience profile.

Of course, the element of novelty will always have a strong influence on such findings, and whatever is being advertised is clearly another major factor.

But despite these variables, any higher than average ad popularity is certainly worth testing further. Which is something you can do very easily by running these formats in your back-dated, ad-rich pages aimed at casual traffic.

So there you have it - a simple yet effective smargeting technique for optimizing potentially problematic traffic. Enjoy its success!

Adapted from an original article by Mike Brennan

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However, sometimes the tried and true ways work just as well as the new-fangled tactics. If nothing else, start your site off right with the basic search engine optimization before moving on to using Web 2.0 resources. While the use of meta tags and keyword density may seem old-fashioned, these methods are the perfect foundation to getting more search engine traffic to your web site.

To help you get started building a strong foundation for your web presence, use these five tips:

1. Always do thorough keyword research and target phrases with good search numbers and low competition for the best results. Take advantage of on-page meta tags, paying special attention to the title and description.

2. Build one-way links to your site. One-way links may not directly increase your number of visitors, but they will help increase your search engine rankings. Use directory submissions and blog comments for a simple way to get more non-reciprocal links.

3. Participate in online forums. Search out communities that fit your site’s niche. By commenting regularly and intelligently, you’ll soon establish yourself as an expert in your field. Provide real value to the message boards and you’ll be rewarded with more targeted traffic to your site.

4. Write and submit articles. Refer to your keyword list for article ideas and write an informational article that suits your site’s content. Not only will you benefit from a one-way link, but internet users will find your article and visit your site to learn more.

5. Write and submit a press release. Submitting your site to the wire services is an excellent way to build quality links and let the world know about your site. Have your press release professionally written for the best success.

If any of these tasks appear too daunting, consider outsourcing the projects to skilled professionals. Make sure the company you work with does manual submissions; the results will build more naturally and you’ll see better success from article and directory sites.

Use our Search Engine Marketing Services to increase your search engine traffic organically. We provide SEO services to fit any budget.

What’s an expired domain name? It’s a domain name that never got renewed by its owner so that it’s out there, ready for use by someone else. This can be true for a variety of reasons, such as that there was no interest in the original website, that the owner ran out of money, or even that the owner him- or herself died. Whatever the reason for the expiration, when a renewal fee is not paid to continue using that name, it still functions just like any other domain name. There’s one difference, though, and that is that an expired domain name doesn’t have a website anymore. Instead, searchers trying to find this page get something to the effect of “404 error” when they come to the site itself.

This is a waste of traffic when this happens; when an expired domain name points to a “not found” webpage, basically, the person searching for the information has gotten nowhere. Many domain name companies have realized this, so many sell expired domain names either through an upfront and direct sale or by utilizing an auction. With either of these methods, sometimes a domain name can fetch anywhere between under $100 to over $1 million. In some cases, these sales also include the original website.

How do you as a webmaster know if an expired domain name is worth buying for your own use? First, check to see the Google page rank of a domain name that has expired. To do this, download Google’s toolbar and type in the website name of the expired domain name. If the page indicator is grayed out, the name itself is worthless because Google has banned it. The rank itself will tell you how popular the page is, although most not banned would be all right. What you really want to look for as a webmaster is for a page rank number between 6 and 10. This means that the website, in its first incarnation, was very popular.

You also need to find out what’s called the “Alexa” rating of a domain name that has expired. This determines how much traffic has actually gone to a particular domain name. If a website has not received a significant quantity of traffic, there will be no Alexa rating. To tell what the Alexa rating for an expired domain name is, go to Alexa.

Finally, you need to see how many websites link to the expired domain name. To do this, go to Google (usually the best search engine to do this) and type in the command “link:” (with no quotes) followed by the URL of the expired domain name (with no spaces between the colon and the URL). If many links are returned, this means that traffic coming to the expired domain name was legitimate and not somehow simply falsely “generated” to give an artificially high page rank.

Discover Kevin Sinclair’s system for making profits regardless of whether anyone joins your network marketing business.

Here are 5 proven ways to bring not just traffic, but highly targeted traffic to your website that can convert to revenue for your business.

Post To Forums- Forums deliver highly targeted traffic because the people that are on forums have already but their hand up and said they are interested in whatever the subject that is being discussed in the forum.

Link Exchanging- This works when you and someone else that has a business similar to yours exchange links to each other’s websites. This way you can share traffic and it also helps with your ranking for search engine optimization as well.

Video Advertising- the statistics are showing that video use on the web is on a rise and a steady rate. People are spending more time on sites like youtube and other video sharing sites. This is a great way to advertise your business and you can also do so with little cost.

Pay Per Click Marketing- Pay Per Click marketing allows your ads to show up on the right side of search results with major search engines. You only pay when someone clicks on your ad, this can be an effective way of advertising because you can decide to have your ad show up only when your “target keywords” are typed into the search engines.

Article Marketing- This is another very effective method of advertising online where you write short articles about your subject matter and distribute it to the major article directories online.

This method works so well because search engines love relevant unique information, they spider these article directories often and you will find that if you submit your article to the right directories, your article can appear very quickly on the first page for your optimized keywords. Your articles can also be syndicated all over the Internet as well. Article marketing is also free!

I wasted 17months trying to drive profitable traffic to my website, but you should not do the same. Instead click here to get a copy of my “Quality Traffic Report”. In it I will show you my results after testing article marketing vs. google pay per click, you can use the results to start driving profitable traffic to your website. You can also visit http://www.qualitytrafficbuilder.com/trafficbuilding

What Does Driving Website Traffic Mean To You?

If your answer is to increase sales or even to build a proper list of subscribers then this was made for you. For most of the marketers out there it really means fuel to their online presence.

Your ability for driving website traffic can either make or break you. Perhaps you’ve read a lot of articles out there perhaps not but you can take these 2 quick ways to drive unique visitors starting today.

1. Step Up By Analyzing Your Competitors

I’m not a person that really loves to compete with any others. You might even think the same way as me because all you want is to get qualified traffic and nothing less.

What we’re going to have to do is to check out just what some people in the same niche market as you are doing to drive traffic. Go to Google’s Keyword research tool and enter your intended URL there.

Once you’ve done that, get keyword ideas will list down all the possible keywords that your competitor is bidding or targeted. Use these ideas to literally map your traffic plan.

2. Find Some Problems People Are Having

Its not uncommon that there are still a handful of prospects in your niche who still has the same common problems. As the days go by this number increases because of the rise of the age of information.

You can check this by going to Yahoo answers and see what kind of problems people are asking about in your intended market. If 1 person has a question about a particular item, you can bet that there are at least 50 more.

The magic of this is that you know these people are genuine ones who are looking for a solution desperately. Capitalise on that by generating a solution to these specific questions.

Its Not Over

Driving website traffic is not that tough at all if you are focused and always on top of the game. All it takes is a little discipline to keep at it day to day and on a regular basis. Make it part of your lifestyle and you will reap the results you want.

Do you want to learn more about getting traffic?

Download your free blueprint here: Driving Website Traffic

Vern How is a webmaster, author and a traffic generation expert. His website currently serves over of 4,500 unique visitors per month