One of the best ways that you can drive traffic to your web site for free is via Articles Marketing! This is one method that I love best because it is free, effective and it builds credibility for you online!

To put articles marketing in simple terms: it means that you write an article about a topic, submit the article to articles directories, then allows other web sites or individuals to use your article for their own use but with your author’s credits and copyrights intact so that you are still the legal owner of the article or contents that you have created.

Anyone can become an author and writer online if you want. And these are the steps that you can take to start your article marketing:

1.    Write an article on a topic that you are interested about.
2.    Find a popular article directory to submit your article to. One very popular article directory is ezinearticles.com.
3.    Taking ezinearticles.com as an example, you can go to ezinearticles.com and sign up for a free account to start submitting your articles. Most article directories allow you to set up an online account for free.
4.    Upon successfully signing up for ezinearticles.com (or any article directories that you have chosen), submit your article to ezinearticles.com and wait for the editors at ezinearticles.com to approve your article.
5.    When your articles have been approved by ezinearticles.com, your article will appear on ezinearticles.com and you can reach out to potentially tens of thousands of traffic when you are being featured on ezinearticles.com.
6.    When your article appear on ezinearticles.com, many web sites or individuals/businesses will “pull” your article from ezinearticles.com and publish them on their web sites if they like what you write or if they think what you have written is relevant to what they are doing. What this means is that once you submitted your approved article to ezinearticles.com, you may potentially see many web sites all over the Internet featuring the article that you have written! What do you think this can do for you?

Articles marketing can help you to improve your visibility online and increases the likelihood of people finding you on the Internet.

Using my own experience, I took about 20 minutes to write one article in January 2007, another 10 minutes to submit it to ezinearticles.com. So far, this one article has generated me more than 100 email opt-ins, earned me more than USD$110 as of this writing, plus my article is appearing all over the Internet on other web sites. Not bad for 30 minutes of work! What if I multiply the effort by 10 times? Think about it!

Some tips for you when you write your articles:
a)    Remember to include a link back to your web site in your resource/credit box so that you can direct traffic back to your web to collect opt-in, or to read your salesletter, or to buy something from you etc.
b)    Each article directory has their own rules and regulations for submission of articles, so ensure that you comply to all of them. Failure to do so means that your article will be rejected and you will need to re-edit the article and submit it again to ensure your compliance with their articles writing guidelines before your article will be approved.
c)    There are article submission services that can help you submit your articles to many articles directories if you are wiling to pay for such services. You can search for it online.
d)    If you hate to write, you can also outsource your writing to some ghostwriters for a fee. You can look for ghostwriters online if you need some!

In summary, article marketing is a free, long-term strategy to generate web site traffic. To me, this is one of the best ways available to anyone because if you can do it right, you can do it only once, and get paid many times over and over again!

Another free and effective way to generate traffic to your web site will be the use of forums.

As you should already know, a forum is an online place where you can meet like-minded individuals with interest on the same topics. Traffic to a popular forum can be a lot and this is where you can leverage onto a forum’s popularity and tap into some of those free traffic to your own site.

But how do you do that, you may ask? Well, there are a few ways that you can ‘steal’ some traffic from a forum legally.

1.    One way is to start up your own forum if you know how to.
You must be thinking now: “Hmm… I do not know how to start up a forum!”

Sorry to tell you right in your face but you are wrong! I can teach you or anyone else on how you (or they) can start up a forum within a few minutes even if all of you are not a technical wizard. However, this is not the scope of this article.

Yes, start up a forum for yourself and attract traffic to your site. Usually forums are targeted at certain topics and everyone in a particular forum is usually interested in the same topic. Plus the fact that traffic are usually repeated traffic, which means that a forum user will return to the same forum over and over again in order to participate in the forum discussions. More than 2/3 of my Google AdSense revenue comes from my forums’ traffic, so I know this works!

2.    The other way is to find forums that are relevant to what you are doing for your site and be a forum member there.
Signing up for a forum is usually free, so join the forum community that you are interested in and be part of the forum. Join in the discussions whenever you can and do provide useful and valuable information or advice to the forum community there. If you can build up credibility and a solid reputation for yourself in the forum, then at will even be better.

So how, you are asking “Yes, I understand you, but how do I get traffic to my site from the forum?” The answers are simple, and there are 2 common ways you can steal traffic from the forum that you are in:

a)    Below each of your forum posting, you can include a forum signature below your post. A forum signature can often be a hyperlink to your web site or just a statement that you want to put across to your readers. Whenever someone sees it, there is a likelihood that someone may find it interesting and click on your forum signature. Most forums should allow a forum signature as many forums software allow a forum signature to be set, unless the forum owners or administrators disable this function. A popular forum discussion/thread can have many new and repeated views by forum visitors and you are exposing your forum signature to them. This increases your visibility online and increases the chance of someone clicking on it and going to your web site.

b)    The other way is to write or indicate your web site link in your forum postings. You may be asking someone to review your web site or give you some comments on your web site. Or maybe you have provided some useful information on your forum post and you can re-direct them to another web site whereby they can find more information on what you have posted. For example, the visitors may get a free report on another web site when they follow your link.
However, when you are doing this, be careful of what you are doing because if you are doing advertising blatantly without providing any real value to the forum community, you may be banned by the forum administrators.

This is another free, proven, time-tested and popular way of driving traffic to your web site. Try this out and do this consistently, I guarantee you will see results!

I hope you have enjoyed the first 3 series of “How To Monetize Your Web Site Traffic”. Today, I will talk about Kontera’s ContentLinks, another popular traffic monetization system for you to turn your web site or blog traffic into potential cash!

Kontera’s ContentLinks are contextually relevant keywords discovered in real time on a publisher’s web page that are automatically turned into a link to the most relevant and highest paying text ad from one of Kontera’s thousands of advertisers.

Kontera’s ContentLink In-Text Advertising solution lets you monetize your content in real-time, enabling an incremental increase in ad revenue by providing a new source of untapped ad inventory that does not compete with the other ad programs running on the site.

ContentLink also creates a valuable user experience by serving relevant and informational ads that match the user’s interest and frame of mind.

At the core of Kontera’s patent-pending technology are a set of proprietary algorithms that enable publishers to maximize their revenue and earn higher Click Through Rates. Statistical text analysis and clustering methodologies are used, combined with semantic analysis procedures.

Kontera’s platform, proven and optimized, on thousands of web pages over the last 7 years, facilitates the analysis of each web page in real-time. Keywords and topics are then extracted and ranked, and then instantly matching to the advertiser’s most relevant text ad.

The greater relevancy between the content, keyword and text ad made possible by Kontera’s proven technology increase the publisher’s revenue.

ContentLink provides the following features:

Instant Implementation
High Click-Through Rates (CTR)
Increased Incremental Revenue
Positive User Experiences
Untapped Sources of Ad Inventory
24/7 Customer Service
Online Reporting
Editorial Integrity
Content Monetization
Publisher Control & Customization
New Publisher Value-Added Functionality
and more…

Are you looking to increase your advertising revenue? Then Kontera enables you to take control of your advertising operations and increase your ad revenue with Kontera’s comprehensive advertising management solution.

Implementation is also very easy. When your sign-up with Kontera’s ContentLinks has been approved, you will be given a piece of code and you only need to paste it into your web pages and Kontera will start to serve ads on your web site. The implementation is exactly similar to Google AdSense or Chitika’s eMiniMalls as well.

Signing up as a publisher is free! You can visit http://www.kontera.com to read more about ContentLink Private Label Publishers Solutions.

The world’s best search engine Google has a very popular revenue-sharing program known as AdSense. It is a fast and easy way for web site publishers of all sizes to display relevant Google advertisements (ads) on their web site’s content pages and earn money from Google. Because the Google ads are related to what your visitors are looking for on your web site (or matched to the characteristics/interests of the visitors that your web pages content attracts), you finally have a way to both monetise and enhance your content pages to make some money from Google online.

With Google AdSense, it is also a way for web site publishers to provide Google web and site search functionalities to their site visitors, and at the same time, to earn some money by displaying Google ads on the search results pages.

Google also provides many useful tools for their publishers to increase traffic, provide smart analytics, or add interactivity to their web sites when you are accepted into their program, for example, Google Analytics.

So, how does Google AdSense work and how you can make money using Google AdSense? The concept is simple, if you go to Google.com and do a search for something, most of the time, you will see some “Sponsored Links” that appear on the top or right side of the screen that are relevant to what you have just searched for. Advertisers basically pay Google to display these ads and they are charged a pre-determined amount every time their ad gets clicked by an internet surfer. This is known as the Pay-Per-Click advertising in the industry, also known as PPC advertising for short.

With the Google AdSense program, your web site will also display these same, sponsored ads on your site, just like on the Google search engine, and you can get paid for it by Google for visitors’ clicks. Every time a Google ad is clicked on your site, you will receive a certain percentage of what Google receives from the advertiser. Once your account reaches $100, you’ll receive a check in the mail.

The Google AdSense program is free to join, and it combines pay-per-click (PPC) and pay-per-impression advertising – meaning that you get paid for valid clicks on the ads on your site or search results pages as well as impressions on your content pages. You will need to have a web site in order to apply for AdSense. (If you need a professional web site, check this out. You will get a free domain name with unlimited domains hosting with this! If you need help, contact me via this blog and I will show you how you can create a beautiful, professional, designer web site within 1 hour even if you do not know any technical skills like HTML! What I am going to show you have put some freelance designers out of job! )

If you already have your own web site, you can also implement AdSense on your web pages immediately after you have been approved by Google for the program.

Google will review your application and follow up with an email to you within 2 to 3 days of your AdSense sign-up. If you are accepted into the program, you can log in to your new Google Adsense account and get the HTML code to insert into your web pages. This is a very simple procedure to do so, hence do not worry about the technical implementation of the program on your web site.

However, I have a tip for you. Build up some contents on your web site or blog first before you apply to Google AdSense, if not, they will likely decline your application. Also, just for your information, there are some people who earn a 5-6 figures income from Google every month just from Google AdSense alone!

You can sign up for Google AdSense using the banner link below:

In today’s instalment of the “How To Monetize Your Web Site Traffic” series, I am going to introduce to you another PPC program known as Chitika – eMiniMalls.

Will you be interested to put an Interactive Merchandise Kiosk onto your web site and get paid for per click onto your kiosk? Does this sounds interesting to you?

Chitika’s flagship product, eMiniMalls, brings any product promotion to life on the Internet.

With Chitika’s eMiniMalls, you can provide your users with relevant content and comparative shopping information without even leaving your web site or blog! You can choose from thousands of products to feature on your web site – from mobile phones to baby strollers.

eMiniMalls enable a convenient, non-intrusive and interactive shopping experience for your audience on your web site. Geo-targeting in U.S., Canada, Europe, New Zealand and Australia means that you can now display localized merchants, products and prices on your web site.

Chitika’s intelligent coding learns and adapts to emphasize products your viewers are interested in buying, bearing in mind that as users interact with eMiniMalls, you earn PPC revenue from Chitika.

This is another great traffic monetization system for your web site to give you an additional source of extra income.

Sign up today via the banner below now:

There are many ways to monetize your web site traffic. When I say monetize your web site traffic, I am talking about how you can turn your web site traffic into cold hard cash, into money!

With Web 2.0 being the trend in 2007, there are many new ways for any publishers, also known as web site owners, blog owners etc, to turn their precious traffic into cash.

This instalment of the series “How To Monetize Your Web Site Traffic”, we will talk about one such model known as the BidVertiser.

BidVertiser is actually a Pay-Per-Click (PPC) Traffic Monetization System. Basically, you insert BidVertiser’s PPC ads into your own web site and when your visitors click on an ad, you get paid for every visitor that clicks on an ad.

BidVertiser enables you to make as much as possible from your advertising space, by letting advertisers bid on your ad space. They pay monthly, either by cheque, or instantly through PayPal with a minimum of only $10 payout.

BidVertiser will always display the highest bidders on your site, assuring the maximum revenue possible at any given time. It also gives you a simple point-and-click tool to help you customize the layout of the ads to fit your site’s look and feel, in order to retain the high quality of your website.

BidVertiser enables you to filter-out any unwanted ads. Prior to your own filtering, each ad has to be pre-approved by BidVertiser’s editorial team. This mechanism gives you a peace of mind with regards to the ads displayed on your website.

You can use the Publisher Center from BidVertiser to generate detailed online reports to monitor your ads performance, including the number of page impressions, clicks, click-through rate, and the total amount you’ve earned.

This is getting more and more popular with online publishers! You can join them today by signing up using the banner below:

What are you waiting for? Join the tens of thousands of web site publishers to start making money from your Website or Blog with BidVertiser!

If you do not monetize your traffic, you are leaving money on the table!

FeedBurner will make a couple of announcements very soon as a direct result of its acquisition by Google. This means that Feedburner can now afford to offer more of its premium features for free.

TotalStats and MyBrand, both previously for-pay services, are now being offered at no charge. And with FeedBurner Stats PRO, you can see the number of people that have clicked on the individual content items in your feed, and also obtain the context of your Reach, which estimates the number of subscribers that interacted with your feed content, on a daily basis. MyBrand is also offered at the PRO level, and lets you in a sense, brand your feed URL (mysite.com/feed rather than feeds.feedburner.com/mysite).

Previous PRO customers will not be charged as of June 2007, and those that sign up for new Feedburner accounts will also reap the benefits of having these existing tools now offered for free, as indicated by the PRO badge next to their feeds.

Now you know why I love Google so much! Whenever they acquire a service-based company, very often than not, they will turn those paid services to free services for all after they acquired the company!

Check out the details here !

In part 1 of my “How To Track Traffic To Your Web Site” series, I have introduced to you Google Analytics. Now, I am going to introduce you to another popular and free service known as the StatCounter.

StatCounter is a free yet reliable, invisible web tracker, that provides highly configurable hit counter and real-time detailed web stats. You only need to sign up and insert a simple piece of code on your web page or blog and you will be able to analyse and monitor all the visitors to your website in real-time for free!

StatCounter is a fast, responsive, quick loading and reliable service. And it allows Invisible Tracking – so, you will see no ads on your web site.

StatCounter’s accurate real-time website statistics with detailed visitor tracking and analysis helps you to discover where your traffic are coming from!

Some of their key features include:

• Invisible or Visible Counter – your choice!
• Custom Summary Stats based on all your visitors
• Highly detailed Analysis of your pageloads
• Manage multiple sites from one account

• Discover:

- what keywords visitors use to find your site
- your most popular pages
- links used to reach your site
- what countries your visitors come from
- how visitors navigate through your site
- and much more!

• Email reports
• And MUCH more!

I am using StatCounter, in conjunction with Google Analytics to have a better understanding of the traffic coming to all my web sites and blog! You can try using it too!

To sign up, you can go to http://www.statcounter.com for more information!

There are many ways to track the traffic to the web site. Some of them are free, some are paid services.

Why do you want to track your traffic? The reason is simple: So that you can know where does most of the traffic to your web site is coming from, and you may want to spend on time on targetting the places that are bringing you the most traffic to give you the best results. Capitalise on the best methods and drop those ineffective methods after you have tested them out!

This is especially important if you are paying for your advertising and you want to make sure that you stretch your limited advertising dollars to the maximum for best ROI results.

Today, I will talk about Google Analytics, a free traffic tracking services from Google that is available to all advertisers, publishers, and site owners.

Google Analytics helps you find out what keywords attract your most desirable prospects, what advertising copy pulled the most responses, and what landing pages and content make the most money for you.

It is easy to use for novice marketers, while delivering all of the capabilities that experienced web analytics professionals expect.

Google Analytics helps to track all online campaigns, from emails to keywords, regardless of search engine or referral source.

It also has all the features you would expect from a high-end analytics offering. It provides tightly integrated AdWords support as well, so you can view AdWords ROI metrics without having to import cost data or add keyword tracking codes.

I am using this for myself as well and I love it, especially when it gives me information about where my traffic are coming from so that I can focus my time on what has been working for me. The best part of it is that Google Analytics is FREE!!

You can sign up here for Google Analytics.

Here is a trick on how to insert YouTube video into your WordPress blog! Cool stuff!

See the video here…

Like it? Leave your comments! I spent 10-12 hours online these days playing with all these Internet Marketing stuff! Show me some appreciation, will you?