Karlonia.com

Article marketing for search engine optimization has received a lot of attention recently, and for good reason. An effective article marketing campaign can drive an extraordinary amount of targeted traffic to a website, directly and through search engine ranking. Google seems to respect those websites who participate in article marketing because it isn’t quick, dirty, or unethical; therefore, it’s not considered black hat SEO.

In order for your article to be accepted to an article submission site, it must pass certain guidelines for quality. These sites exist to provide an end user with their choice of many quality articles to syndicate in order to keep their site’s content fresh. If an article submission site has a lot of spam or self-serving articles, many of their customers will start to search elsewhere. That is why the writers are held to such strict guidelines.

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It might seem as though anyone who starts a blog can make it a successful enterprise. To borrow from a certain baseball movie: “If you post it, they will come.” Although this is the first step, driving traffic to your blog is not as simple as it seems and can be the most important aspect of your endeavor. There are a few techniques that you can take advantage of to obtain easy blog traffic and ensure that the world will see your website and perhaps even read your articles. Blog marketing can be as easy or as difficult as you want it to be.

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One of the most common methods of building backlinks is to use forum signatures. This is considered by many to be a weak method of building backlinks, and in the opinion of this author not the best, but it can still be useful when done correctly. The art of signature backlink building is actually simple and easy to follow and you’ll find that it can produce great results when done properly. This article attempts to explain that process and goes into details on how to do this for both SEO benefits and relevant traffic.

The Basics of Signature Links

Posting forum signatures is a pretty straightforward process. They are the images, links, or text provided at the end of every post you make on a forum. The trick is to find forums that allow links in this section, particularly ones where you can choose the anchor text. Make sure to follow all rules on the forum regarding links in your signature. Make note of how many characters and links can be added, what is acceptable, and what is considered spam. You’ll have the best results when you follow the rules.

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Share Ad Space owner Rod Baker sent out an Internet “Wakeup Call” on the status of the traffic exchange and PTR industries yesterday, urging members to actually pay attention to the advertisements they are surfing through instead of just breezing through them in multiple tabs to collect the credits. From my standpoint, his message is decidedly unsurprising. Although I was a frequent traffic exchange user from 2004-07, since the last time I reported on the happenings at Share Ad Space my focus regarding traffic building has shifted almost exclusively toward keyword targeting and search engine optimization, a strategy which has brought me much more success than I ever had with any kind of traffic exchanges or paid-to-click types of sites.

About two years ago, these industries began to experience significant decline, and the quality of traffic from these sources has become notoriously poor, as the SAS owner’s message seems to bear out. Also around this period, AdSense and other revenue-generating programs began to seriously distrust them because of the poor quality of traffic and the potential for click fraud. Although I played around with traffic exchanges somewhat during the early days of this site, I was ultimately forced to come to the conclusion that the extra exposure derived from these sources (including even Entrecard, which is not much more than a glorified traffic exchange) was definitely not worth the time and effort required to keep the “hits” coming. In the process, I have also protected myself from potentially crippling bans on my main revenue generators.

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In my ongoing quest to test different monetization methods, I have finally installed a Scratchback widget on the sidebar and now have relatively cheap text link ads available for only $1.50 each. It is placed above the fold just below the RSS buttons. Any incoming link placements are set to remain on the site until 10 others are purchased and bump the first one off the list.

Originally created by Jim Kukral, the ScratchBack system is designed to allow bloggers to receive tips from readers, but instead of using the standard donation buttons, it allows the blogger to “scratch back” the reader by providing a text link in exchange. Although technically the payments are considered tips, the effect is the same as buying text links for traffic and branding recognition without having to worry about messing around with Google’s PageRank algorithm and bringing down their wrath on hapless webmasters. All links in the widget are automatically set to nofollow and are also contained within JavaScript, which means that they are unlikely to unduly influence search engine rankings.

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The popular traffic exchange EasyHits4U has launched its own toolbar today, hoping to provide members a convenient way to access the site’s surfbar along with many other options. Recognizing that some of my search engine visitors have been looking for information on this particular program, I have posted their latest news update below. Meanwhile, if you already have too many toolbars and are looking to remove some, you can look at my posts on uninstalling the Yahoo toolbar from Internet Explorer and Firefox.

To bring your EasyHits4U traffic exchange to the next level, we have created a special toolbar which is full of handy features and absolutely free for all our members. It has absolutely no spyware or adware. This toolbar platform is used by Greenpeace, Discovery Networks, Answers.com, Lufthansa and many other respective companies.

Preview of EasyHits4U toolbar — in reality it has way more features than above and highly interactive:

Here are some of the main reasons to use it:

1. Direct surfing links and complete EasyHits4U site navigation;
2. Highly customizable — if you don’t need some of its components, just choose “Toolbar Options” in the system menu between the EasyHits4U logo and the search box to remove those unneeded items. You can always put them back later if you change your mind.
3. Email Notifier (get notified of new messages in your mailboxes), Messages Center, Community Chat, Web Radio, Weather, Google Search, and cool Gadgets (you can switch off any of these options any time);
4. Optional popup blocker, cache/history/cookies cleaner;
5. And of course, some special bonuses/contests will be available to our toolbar users only (as soon as our toolbar community gets enough members, which we hope will be very shortly

Try It Now!

Fully compatible with both Firefox & Internet Explorer. Installation takes about 15-20 secs.

Even if you were not going to use any kind of toolbar, just give it a try — simply install and use it. We really hope that you will like it and it will become your everyday tool with all those handy features inside.

Today I received an email from a traffic exchange that I have not used very frequently called Tip Top Traffic. Although this particular program is designed for manual surfing, the owner Thom Pearson has managed to implement a new technology that allows users to move to the next site in rotation without actually having to click on anything. Here is the official announcement.

Hi Karlonia,

No-Click Surfing, Hover Surf, and I’m sure there are other names for it

And Now - We Have it.

Save the Strain on your Clickin’ Finger.

Just move the Mouse over the link or button for next site, that’s all. no need to click.

If you have ever felt pain in your finger hand or forearm after a clicking session you will know just how good this news is.

I am REALLY looking forward to the time when ALL my favorite Traffic Exchanges have this.

AND WE HAVE IT NOW - Enjoy

That’s all for now folks.

As always, if you have any problems, questions, suggestions or comments, just use the support ticket system or forum. You are Always welcome to write to me about anything.

Best Wishes,

Thom

While typing this post, I have the Tip Top Traffic surfer open right now in a separate Firefox tab. The “clickless” surfing seems to work pretty well. As soon as the timer runs out for each page, the surfbar displays four little squares with distinctly different colors where the timer countdown numbers are located. To the left of these four squares is a fifth small square with the words “Next Site” to the left of it. This fifth square displays a color that matches one of the other four. Normally the user would click the colored square that matches the one beside “Next Site”. With the new system, I only need to move the mouse over the matching color and it automatically moves to the next page; there is no need to click.

Another benefit I noticed is that there are no longer any problems with wasted time because of accidentally mis-clicking and hitting the wrong square. Whenever I hover the mouse over any of the three non-matching colors, nothing happens at all until I move the mouse over the correct color. This is a time saver because under the old system, if someone clicks on the wrong color, the rotator would move to another page and display a “Wrong Click” message. The member would not be credited for the page view but would still have to wait for the timer to run down before being eligible to begin earning credits again. With the new system, there do not seem to be any “wrong” clicks - just keep moving the mouse until it hovers over the matching color in order to get the credit and go to the next page.

Right now, according to my stats I am receiving a relatively favorable 1:1 ratio on this exchange with a 15-second timer. The surfing is very smooth and there are chances for bonus credits and small cash amounts being offered for every 30 page views. This might be a good time to build up some credits for later use. Alternatively, you could use them immediately to promote affiliate programs or drive traffic to lead capture pages for list building purposes.

If you have arrived at this page from Entrecard, chances are that you have already seen all of the posts popping up everywhere about the new ebook and site improvements. Therefore, if you are already a current Entrecard member, this post will not contain any earth-shattering news; however, if you have not yet experienced the traffic building potential of this relatively new community, this might be a good time to take a serious look at it.

As I mentioned above, Entrecard has indeed implemented some significant site improvements within the last week. Probably the most important of these for most people is the capability to add multiple blogs to the same account. This will allow people who have multiple niche blogs to install the Entrecard widget on these sites and earn credits and traffic from them without having to go through the tedious hassle of setting up separate Entrecard accounts and managing multiple email addresses.

My own favorite improvements are the changes that have been implemented in the Campaign interface. It is now possible to sort the various blogs and their widget ads by several different criteria including cheapest price, most popular, most recent, or biggest advertiser. Best of all, you can click on the little “Advertise” line at the bottom of each blog’s widget and instantly send an ad request through to them with a single click — no more wasting time clicking through to every single profile page. For someone like me who is often sending out 100 or more ad requests per day, this has been a major time saver. As you can see from this screenshot of my Entrecard account, I have been having plenty of fun with the new advertising system:

Meanwhile, in addition to the site improvements, the Entrecard administrators have also published a very useful tutorial ebook along with their latest email update. It provides a nice step-by-step guide for how to get started with Entrecard and includes strategies for intermediate and advanced users so that everyone can participate in the system and enjoy it to its maximum potential. I was even fortunate enough to have my little banner ad displayed on page 8 of the book as one of the screenshots of the “On Your Widget” column. This is a good thing because as the ebook is distributed throughout the Internet and readership increases, more people will see the Karlonia.com site name in the picture, which will help with the branding aspect of my overall advertising efforts.

Entrecard is also offering a bonus of 2,000 credits for anyone who publishes a post about their new multi-blog contest and links to the ebook. The contest is for people who have multiple blogs that can be added to the system and are associated with an existing Entrecard account. Anyone who has at least two blogs registered and verified with Entrecard by June 25th is eligible to win 15,000 credits in a random sweepstakes drawing on that date. The full details about the contest and updates can be found at the relevant entry on the Entrecard blog.

For the first time in approximately two months, ShareAdSpace.com has released an important program update. Probably the most significant news is that advertising credit and upgrade prices have been reduced by 20 percent, bringing the cost of 100,000 credits down to $16. Although manual traffic exchange hits are usually not considered particularly high quality, this still looks like a pretty good deal for those of us who have affiliate or lead capture pages to promote.

In the past, I have usually been able to make one sale at Clickbank for every 10,000 to 12,000 credits. This actually represents a favorable conversion rate in this scenario considering the fact that an average sale for me nets $23.50, which is more than the cost of the entire 100,000 credit package. Therefore, the risks with this program are still relatively low even though the traffic does not convert as well as the visitors coming from search engines. Here is the actual text of the latest update:

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Rod Baker of Share Ad Space and Million Hits Lotto fame is getting ready to take out the virtual trash, according to a new program update released yesterday. Earnings rates and advertising revenues in the traffic exchange and PTR industries have been declining over the past two years, at least in part because of too many junk paid-to-promote (PTP) types of sites infiltrating the traffic exchanges and diluting the value of credits and purchases for serious advertisers. Such sites are typically littered with banner ads, popups, and sometimes downloader Trojans or other nasties that irritate and annoy surfers to the point of boycotting the programs altogether.

The SAS owner, along with webmasters of related programs, are hoping to clean up their respective niche industries by implementing stricter requirements on what types of sites are allowed to be displayed to the viewers. Hopefully this will result in a smoother surfing experience and better conversion rates for advertisers, which will in turn increase earnings possibilities for the members.

I have had generally favorable experiences with SAS during the three years that I have been a member there. Although not always active with the surfing, I have purchased advertising credits for low rates in the past and have been gradually distributing these among various affiliate pages. The results are nothing spectacular, but I have made enough in commissions through sales of Clickbank products to offset the cost of advertising purchases and still have a small profit left over. After the proposed changes go into effect on April 1, I might start building up more credits at SAS and the newer Million Hits Lotto site so that I can increase the possibilities of making future sales. Meanwhile, here is the full text of the latest update:

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Throughout the first quarter of 2008, there has been a noticeable increase in traffic here at Karlonia.com. After the initial launch of this blog back in March 2007, traffic had been increasing very slowly until I finally reached the 100 visitor mark last December. More recently, however, the pace has really picked up. This morning I woke up to discover that I had managed to bring the traffic levels to over 500 24-hour unique visitors for the first time in the site’s history:

Although higher traffic numbers are usually encouraging, the best news about the recent totals is that none of this is low-quality “garbage traffic” such as autosurfs or bots. In fact, after manually counting up the visitors from search queries that Firestats was able to detect and display, I arrived at a total of 242. Additionally, there were another 21 visitors from the Live Search bar that Firestats did not display the full queries for, and there were also several visits in the referrer list from other search engines such as Dogpile, Excite, Alta Vista, the CNN search bar, Technorati, a German search engine called Ottosuch, and several other lesser search engines, bringing the actual organic search traffic total closer to 300. I’m also bringing in more visitors from Entrecard, blog comment links, and “clicks of curiosity” from other webmasters who discover my URL in their referrer stats.

As a benefit to my readers, I will use the rest of this post to summarize and describe what I have been doing to bring in the traffic and provide some tips for newer bloggers to accelerate the traffic building process:

1. Smart SEO: After the first few months, I realized that it would be difficult to rank for any highly competitive keywords unless I could get backlinks from some major authority sites. But for a site like mine, this is very difficult because I just don’t have the popularity or insider connections to pull off such a feat. However, I discovered that I could often rank well for lots of other keywords that were less competitive but still received significant search traffic.

   I put together a strategy whereby I would do SEO research and optimize my pages for targeted keywords before publishing them, with the goal of bringing in at least 5-10 visitors per day for each page. By doing this, I reckoned, the multiplying effect of having many content-rich pages would add up over time. By the numbers, 5 visitors per day times 200 pages yields 1000 daily visitors, which will hopefully be enough to pass critical mass and allow unsolicited natural linking to occur, thus allowing my SEO operation to run somewhat on autopilot.

   This strategy worked to some extent at first, although I still had problems with pages dropping into Google’s supplemental and omitted results, while others seemed to pop in and out of the SERPs intermittently even when I received good rankings. The big breakthrough came about two months ago when I began aiming inbound links at specific pages that I expected to rank well instead of simply getting more links to the site’s home page like most people do.

   Most of these inbound links have come from blog commenting. After publishing a new keyword-targeted page, I would seek out other blogs (preference was given to DoFollow, but I did not use these exclusively) that had pages with content and keywords similar to my own. Then I read through the other blog’s article, left a non-spammy comment, and repeated the process with a few other blogs until I had at least 5-10 good links pointed at the page. In most cases, I did not attempt to put keywords into the name field of the other blogs; the only exceptions were instances where it was clear that the site owner was openly allowing this practice.

   Within a few days of gaining the backlinks, search traffic to the target pages increased, but better yet, this traffic has remained and become more reliable because the pages have attained a certain “stickiness” and are not dropping in and out of the results anymore. Another beneficial side effect of this strategy has been an increase in crawling frequency to non-targeted pages, which has caused older pages that I had completely forgotten about to gain a foothold in the SERPs and bring in traffic for all sorts of interesting “long tail” queries.

   The main disadvantage to this method is that it requires a fair amount of time to find relevant sites, write comments with substantial content, and set the links for each page, especially since I have over 300 pages and am publishing a new one every day. However, I am hoping that once the traffic to the site reaches a certain critical mass, other sites will begin linking to my pages naturally without me having to expend so much effort to acquire the needed links.

2. Entrecard: Participation in the Entrecard system has provided a nice boon to Alexa rankings and has complemented the search traffic nicely by drawing in visitors from the webmaster community along with members of the general public who are arriving at this site through the search engines. In order to increase Entrecard traffic, I have used multiple tactics including reliably reciprocating drops, purchasing low-cost (in terms of credits) advertising at lots of different sites, and dropping on popular or active sites. I will also occasionally drop on “newbie” blogs in order to get some fresh faces in front of my site and increase the chances of gaining more repeat visitors in the future.

   I try to use up my maximum allocation of 300 card drops per day whenever possible, which allows me to rack up more credits and purchase more advertising on other people’s widgets or through the shop feature. Amazingly, as of this writing, I have managed to climb into 5th place out of 197 blogs (based on advertising price) in the Internet marketing category. There are still a few more things I can do here, such as actively participating in Entrecard’s forum or getting an article published on their blog, but I am only one person and there are only 24 hours in a day.

3. Scratchback widget advertising: I am beginning to pick up a significant amount of traffic coming from the various sites where I have purchased text link ads through the Scratchback widgets, and these ads may be having a small favorable effect on SEO as well. Scratchback is a system where you can make a small donation (tip) to another site owner by clicking on an open link in the appropriate widget. These donations are small cash amounts, usually in the $1-5 range, although they can be as high as $25 depending on the preferences of the site owner.

   In exchange for the tip, you are allowed to place a text link ad for your site and even choose the anchor text. The main limitations are that you only get 20 characters of text and the links are nofollow (in order to avoid being penalized by Google for paid links). However, not all search engines recognize nofollow and it still provides a good avenue for traffic, especially if you can find a relevant site for your text link placement.

4. Social directory and community sites: The BlogCatalog and MyBlogLog widgets on many sites have provided an opportunity for me to gain much exposure by simply visiting other sites that are members of these particular networks. When the other site owners see my little avatar appear on their widgets, many of them will click through to my profile page and eventually my blog, resulting in a steady influx of new visitors.

   Meanwhile, I have had many people add me to their friends lists at BlogCatalog and leave messages on my profile pages, giving me the opportunity to visit other sites and leave appropriate comments. Although I haven’t been nearly as active with these types of sites as I have with Entrecard, the traffic is ongoing, and my brand name (Karlonia) is steadily being distributed onto an increasing number of other people’s profiles and lists.

5. Blog commenting: Although I have tended to regard blog commenting as a relatively convenient SEO tool, the original purpose of this medium was to allow the commenter to give feedback to the blog owner and join in a community style discussion similar to a forum or bulletin board service. Even though I have now established my own site and become semi-addicted to SEO, I have not completely forgotten about the original spirit of commenting. I have occasionally left rather lengthy and informative comments on other people’s blogs whenever I found a post that really interested me or saw an opportunity for me to contribute some of my ever-growing store of knowledge to the readers.

   Because there is the ability to place links back to my site in the URL field, a well-placed and useful comment can be a decent source of traffic from curious visitors to the other site. Over time, if one can leave enough quality comments on lots of other sites, the accumulated hits can add up to a significant and diverse traffic flow.

6. StumbleUpon: I am relatively new user of this particular venue, but I have received some nice bursts of traffic from it occasionally. A few of the other Entrecard members have Stumbled this site and a small sampling of its pages; however, I have yet to explore the full potential of this system. From my experience, it works very much like a manual traffic exchange with no timer on it. By clicking the “Stumble” button on the toolbar, you can keep surfing through a nearly infinite number of web pages and can even control which ones you see to some extent by choosing preferred category tags. Actually doing the stumbling can eat up a lot of time that could be used for other tasks, but it is still a good way to gain exposure to new websites that would otherwise remain undiscovered.
   
   
   
   

   Well, that about wraps it up for the major traffic sources that I have tapped into thus far. Of course, there are still more promotional avenues out there that I have not gotten to yet, such as PPC (pay per click), email lists, various offline advertising methods, and the relatively new Project Wonderful. Meanwhile, if you have any other useful traffic building tips to share, feel free to use the comment section to describe your discoveries.