My SEO Tips – Get Insights to Internet Marketing Tips

What is Publicity?

It is obtaining editorial coverage or features for your business from media publications and getting your business reported as news. Some examples of publicity are newspaper and magazine articles, radio and television interviews and Internet forums and much more. These are just a few reasons you should consider letting your business tap into the power of publicity.

1. Effective – Publicity has been proven to be 10 times more effective than traditional advertising. Your customers believe what they read in the newspaper or watch on the TV news because humans by nature believe what is reported to them as news.

2. Affordable – Obtaining publicity can cost as little as $0 dollars. Business owners can substitute a little time and imagination for money or hire publicity professionals, many of which have very affordable rates when compared to advertising.

3. 3rd Party Credibility – Having reporters write about your business in a news format gives your business 3rd party credibility that’s extremely valuable. Anyone can sing their own business’ praises, but getting respected people in the media to do it provides a type of credibility that ads and money just can’t buy.

There are numerous other reasons to use publicity. Next time you are looking for a new way to get the word out about your business, consider tapping into the power of publicity.

About The Author

Jenna Roman co-owns and operates JR Publicity, an Englewood, NJ-based public relations and marketing company with her husband, Josh Roman. For additional information, visit www.jrpublicity.com.

Here’s a common dilemma web marketers face, after spending some time and money your website is ready to go. However where is the traffic? You have already optimized your site with standard practise SEO checklist, but where is the traffic. Well if you just launched your site, you might need sometime for Google to index and rank your site before getting any kind of traffic. This wait could take awhile before reaching a huge critical mass where online marketers like yourself reach a breakeven point for your initial site’s investment.

Now as a marketer, you might want to try other means of traffic acquisition to increase the flow of traffic to your new site way before organic traffic kicks in. How you might ask? Let me share 3 methods I normally use for my own sites.

Method 1 – Buying Traffic

This is the fastest way to divert traffic to one’s site. However before jumping into this channel, you should set aside a budget and the maximum amount you would like to bid for per keyword. Failure to do so could potentially make you lose more than the benefits.

Platforms that I recommend for one to buy traffic would be Google Adwords, Yahoo Search/ Bing Search if your markets are targeted at the US. Facebook is also another up and coming platform to use.

These platforms all follow the same basic “Pay Per Click” model of charging advertisers for each click to their website.

Method 2 – Tapping into the Social Stream

These days, social networks and micro blogging platforms are the rage. Sites like facebook and twitter have huge communities of people which could be your potential traffic source. Therefore joining the social platforms and being involved in the conversation would help add another traffic channel to your mix.

One way to draw traffic from these sites to yours would be to find like minded people or your target audience and hang out around their space, either becoming fans or following them on their list. After getting them on your list, converse with them and start adding value to their hang out and they will come to your site in no time.

One of my favourite sites would be twitter as it is easy to join and finding my target audience is pretty simple.

Method 3 – Borrow Traffic

This method has a mixture of paid and free implementation. Let me explain the free implementation first. If you have friends with websites that already have traffic, you could ask them to help you out with maybe a promotional banner, a textlink or place a feature written by you on their site to help a friend out.

If you are in it alone, then you could try using article syndication services. These services allow you to syndicate your written articles to hundreds of webmasters who have similar sites or complementary websites to your business. What’s best these websites normally signed up to be alerted of new content so that they can place them on their site. Besides article networks, you could seek out sites with mailing lists and ask if they accept email endorsements where you provide content for their newsletter and they blast it out to their subscribers.

Now that you have 3 methods of generating short term traffic, here’s a tip on how not to let your efforts go to waste. Before running any traffic acquisition campaigns, make sure you have mechanism in place on your site to help capture all users that land on your site. So having an email capture or a call to action to get users to come back again is a good way of not letting your traffic acquisition go to waste as these users could become your repeat visitors.

I know this isnt a SEO topic however as I work on my clients and personal sites, I tend to seek or broaden my mind on how we can generate and get traffic with other marketing channels and means besides SEO or PPC. That’s why I thought it would be good to share these ideas with like minded marketers like yourself.

In this article, I like to cover promoting websites via the granddaddy of social media. What is it? Simple we call them Forums. Forums used to be the social platform where people congigate before sites like friendster, myspace or facebook. These forums are still in existence today and some have good traction that used correctly can help you increase traffic to your site and open up another traffic source. Besides being a traffic source, visitors on a forum can help provide free user reviews and feedback to help increase your site’s usability which helps increase stickness in the long run.

So how should one go about getting traffic from forums?

Step 1 – You have to search and research the forums that serve your niche or website industry. A simply way is to Google for forums that are of use to you. Try “[Your Niche] forums” or “intitle:[Your niche] forums or “[Your Niche] communities”.

Step 2 – Review the top 50-100 results and evaluate which forum sites should you join. Some tips on evaluating to see if the forum site is worth your while – check the lastest post, how recent are they. Are the content in the threads relevant, informative or are they just filled with spam. When was the lastest user registration, is it recent. For forums that are relevant in content and have recency, I would recommend them worth registering for.

Step 3 – Start the conversation, dont just drop your very first post with “Come visit my new site” Do yourself and the community a favour join in the conversation. As a tip your very first post should be at the introduce yourself section or answer a few threads that you are expert in. Do make sure your reply adds value and not put “nice comments”, “I like it”. If you like it, try to explain more about why you like it. By doing so, you wouldnt be seen as a spammer. For sites that allows things like that, you would be better off not posting in them.

Step 4 – Once you have a few posts in your bag, you can stir towards the section that best suits for you to ask questions or promote your site. Some tips would be like “I need your help with a new site that I am launching.”, “Looking for comments”, I have a site that I am launching which has the follow features, feedback would be appreciated”. You can also ask about your navigation, ask about the content, ask about the colours, or whatever else may be bugging you.

Step 5 – Review the comments provided and followup with the thread. Last use the feedback and work into your webiste, also do keep the thread alive as forums tend to push the most recent thread up to the top which is what people normally see first.

With these 5 steps, you should be able to get some forum traffic coming to your site for the initial launch. However don’t expect thousands of visitors from this method as it really is just one of the many other ways web marketers can use to generate traffic to their site. Remember at the end of the day it’s all about getting the ball rolling and anything you can do to proactively promote your web site has to be considered. So best foot forward and get exploring all those forums.

SHORT ANSWER: An expired domain is a domain name that was once registered to an individual or a company whose registration has expired.

LONG ANSWER: Domain names get “registered” to either you personally or to a company – you decide which way to go. Your domain name registration is good for one year, at which time you can renew ownership. After that, each year, you renew your ownership of that domain name. Domain name renewal costs anywhere from $5 to $15, depending on which domain name registrar you use.

Most domain name registrars give you the option of a multi-year renewal, which saves a few dollars and the headache of renewing every year. Multi-year renewals are a good idea if you have a domain name you are pretty certain you will want for the foreseeable future.

Even if you decide to let go of the website attached to the name, you can always use it for PPC and affiliate ads like the big guys do!

An expired domain name is one with an expired registration – no one can claim ownership. If you don”t renew at the end of the year, that domain name becomes available for purchase by someone else.

Why would someone allow a good domain name to expire?

• Maybe the domain name wasn”t so good after all!
• Absentminded website owners who simply neglected to renew their domain names;
• Webmasters who got tied up in other ventures or interests;
• Webmasters who discontinued a site due to time constraints;
• Webmasters who ran out of money to continue to operate.

Your domain name registrar should send you several renewal notices prior to the name expiring so you don’t miss renewing a domain name you want. Make sure you have a working email address on file with your registrar so you don’t miss a renewal notice!

When a domain name expires these days, the bigger domain name registrars assume control of the name for a few months before allowing it to be sold again. Your domain name registrar parks your old domain name because there might still be traffic to the site, traffic thta just might click on an ad. The parked page will now be filed with Pay Per Click ads with all the money going to the domain name registrar. Smart!

Here’’s the rub: if you decide you want the name back after it’s expired and the registrar has assumed control of it, the registrar will charge you anywhere from $50 to $150 (those are the prices I’ve seen) to pull that domain name out of limbo and reinstate it to you! (Even a domain name without much traffic might cough up a few pennies over time… even a blind squirrel finds an acorn now and then!)

The lesson here is, if there is any chance you can use that domain name, make sure your email address is good so you don’t miss your renewal!