[ExperienceAdvertising]

Hey everyone, I hope you are having a nice week. I wanted to put together and share some of the strategies I use to build organic, or free traffic, to my sites. These aren't rocket science and pretty much as whitehat as you can get. Let me know if you are using these strategies or if you would like to add to these organic SEO strategies please feel free to do so.

1. Unique Content Every Day - I think most people that have been in organic search a while would agree that frequently posted, original content is the best strategy you can use to get more free traffic to your site or blog. If you look at sites like Mashable, the leading Social Media resource, they are posting 30-40 new articles a day to their site, which builds the site much larger every week and basically posts their new pages into Google search results in seconds. This is what you want to acheive with any site, that instant search results effect with your content. Think of how much more traffic you can generate with more pages of content. But content has to be written by someone, I usually suggest outsourcing your content production to people like Mommy Bloggers that you can approach and Facebook friends that want to write for extra money, at around $10-15 per article. If you can't do the outsource thing, you just have to power out as much content on as many different subjects as possible, depending on what you are promoting with your sites or blogs. I'm pretty much a WordPress enthusiast, so consider making WordPress your content management platform of choice for ease of posting and they have wonderful free templates available.

2. Sharing Your Content - Sharing is the best way to increase the exposure of your site's content, especially in this Social Networking day and age. There is so much opportunity to have other people you know or are connected to share your content with people they know. The more compelling a piece of content, the more likely it will get shared and shared again. Also, the more you share other peoples content, by doing things like: Liking their post, Sharing their post, commenting on their post, and retweeting their post, the more they will share your content. Kind of like Karma I supposed, but it really is true that the more you do that for other people the more they will do it for you, I know this from experience. Some of the best places to share your content are: Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, LinkedIn Groups and Digg. There are other but these are my mainstays. I do submit to social bookmarking sites too like Delicious, Reddit, and Google Bookmarks, but there is some question as to how much this benefits your content, although I personally think it helps in the long run to build inbound links and get a few more rankings from their sites.

3. Keyword Research - Its important in planning a new site or blog that you know what keywords are the most popular for that niche. You can use the Google Keyword Tool to mine the most popular phrases and related popular phrases so you know what keywords to focus your site on and the content you will create. This will yield popular keywords and more obscure keywords, but at the end of the day you need to hit on everything with your content and pages over time. One important thing to remember is to be focused with your site on your core topic initially and then you can get more expansive in related keywords as you go along posting. Hitting on more obscure keywords in your page titles and content can pull organic rankings usually easier than more popular keywords with a newer site. Over time, as you hone your site into a powerhouse of content and good optimization you may rank well under your core keyword phrases, but this is a work in progress that has to be improved over time with good SEO strategies in place.

4. Link Building - I wanted to cover Link Building a little bit because it's a mysterious topic for most affiliate marketers and there is a lot of information and misinformation out there about it. My stance on link building is it's a worthy thing to work on for you sites within reason. Some of the best ways to build link in my opinion are: good blog comments, forum post frequency with signature in place (keep your posts great though), blogroll links you can trade other bloggers for, online press releases (which contain a couple hyperlinks in the text), and social bookmarking. All of these methods are free (except press releases) and worthwhile to do once you set-up a procedure for doing them. Like anything, what you put into it is what you get out of it with your link building, and it grows over time so you have to stick to it and the rankings will improve. I mean it can't hurt really to build links in these ways. Don't be obnoxious with it though as one piece of advice.

These are just some ways to improve your organic search rankings and get more free traffic. I tried to keep it practical, so let me know if you have any questions or would like to discuss anything. Feel free to comment! thx!

[Chris]

Yes all good solid practices to build on, well presented too Evan!

Cheers

Chris

[bluephoenixnyc]

ExperienceAdvertising, on 25 January 2011 - 03:21 PM, said:

4. Link Building - I wanted to cover Link Building a little bit because it's a mysterious topic for most affiliate marketers and there is a lot of information and misinformation out there about it. My stance on link building is it's a worthy thing to work on for you sites within reason. Some of the best ways to build link in my opinion are: good blog comments, forum post frequency with signature in place (keep your posts great though), blogroll links you can trade other bloggers for, online press releases (which contain a couple hyperlinks in the text), and social bookmarking. All of these methods are free (except press releases) and worthwhile to do once you set-up a procedure for doing them. Like anything, what you put into it is what you get out of it with your link building, and it grows over time so you have to stick to it and the rankings will improve. I mean it can't hurt really to build links in these ways. Don't be obnoxious with it though as o

Evan, this is a superb list--and it's great knowing that other marketers are readily embracing their content provider roles! I did want to elaborate on link-building--it's exactly what it sounds like, but link building works the best only when there's a theme to the lists you're publishing as blog posts. Like for example, the AM Affiliate link round-ups we publish in the mornings M-F are meant to be hot news stories for the morning. Link building can be fun, because you can use almost any source (Twitter, mainstream news sources, personal blogs) to customize your list. We've definitely done Affiliate Summit-themed link lists in the past.

Again, great list!

[ExperienceAdvertising]

I agree but what you are referencing is linking to other good content which is a good idea too as long as it is good content. My points are in reference to pro-actively building inbound links to your sites from other sources. thx!

[ExperienceAdvertising]

Chris, on 25 January 2011 - 04:33 PM, said:

Yes all good solid practices to build on, well presented too Evan!

Cheers

Chris

Thanks Chris!

[jimlillig]

One thing you might want to add if you are going to go through all the effort is list building. eMail and mobile phone #'s for text campaigns. Texts get read like 90+% of the time... I'm just saying...

Cheers,

Jim

[ExperienceAdvertising]

Sounds good Jim...I will include it in the next article. thx

[AffiliateHound]

In your section on keyword research, you mention only the Google Keyword Tool. Do you believe that the Google Keyword Tool is adequate or is investing in a paid service such as Wordtracker a better way to go? I've relied on the free Google tool up to now, but have been considering investing in Wordtracker. Any thoughts?

[ExperienceAdvertising]

I think the Google keyword tool is probably enough for your keyword research needs. It's improved a lot over the last couple of years. I think it goes deep enough but if you need more suggestions Wordtracker might be good. Let me know if you need any help with your keyword research, as I really like doing keyword research. thx

[TammysTake]

Evan, these are awesome suggestions...your a guru for sure! Keep make the great suggestions!

[ExperienceAdvertising]

Lol thx Tammy...you're too kind! I will for sure!

[Caseyfern]

Ok, stand still. > ka-FLASH < I am bookmarking your BRAIN! Great article!

[ExperienceAdvertising]

Hahaha nice! I love that Caseyfern...so motivating me right now to write!

[fenderfiend]

Great stuff! Could one generate decent traffic to a relatively small website....say just a few pages?
mine is nothing short of a spec of grain but it stands meaning in todays affiliate marketing...I have everything down and done besides generating traffic and I really dont want to go Adwords or anything paid like that. Any advice? Or just add, add, and add?


Matt

[ExperienceAdvertising]

Matt...I agree, post, post, post....install Wordpress on the site, pick a nice theme to match your site maybe (I have a great free theme site), add your affiliate banners, post an article, then share it and bookmark it. Then repeat over and over...and watch your traffic come in through Google Analytics (this can be added to your site if not already). Thanks and let me know if you have any other questions.

[Deborah Carney]

Some really good information in this thread! With Evan's permission I moved this from his OPM forum out here into the Meet Market because these are exactly the kinds of threads that we would like to encourage people to create and have discussions in.