How To Start An Online Business | Malaysia Internet Marketing Blog » Traffic Tips

Guest Posting Opportunity

William — Mon, 24 May 2010 06:38:42 +0000

Guest posting is a great way to increase your traffic, by leveraging on somebody else’s website and attracting some of their readers over to your blog.

It’s a win-win situation for both bloggers, with free content for the blog owner who is receiving the guest post, as well as increased traffic from the writer of the guest post.

I must admit that I haven’t done a guest post myself, I’m waiting to launch a more ‘International’ site before I start leveraging on some of the contacts that I have and build from there.

However, I’m open to anyone who would like to guest post on OBM in return for a link back to their website/ blog at the bottom of the article.

Of course I’ve got some requirements for my guest posts, but we’ll discuss that personally later on

If you’re interested in guest posting for Online Business Malaysia, please feel free to contact us and we’ll get back to you shortly.

Thanks and can’t wait to hear from you guys (and gals)!

-William

Posting About Politics. Yay or Nay?

William — Sun, 17 May 2009 05:43:58 +0000

It seems like posting about politics is a sure-fre way of getting traffic to your blog. Well here in Malaysia anyway.

Political news is always a hot topic, maybe because of its gossip like appeal. And particularly in Malaysia, because such a large amount of the population are fed up with politicians and the government in general.

Politics stirs up the most emotions, mostly anger I’ve noticed. And it’s the easiest for people to comment on, as they want to vent and let their frustrations be known.

What better place than the anonymity (typo?) of the Internet?

I’m going to do a few posts on political news to see if it does bring in traffic… but how targeted will that traffic be?

Then again, making money is an evergreen topic, so I think any traffic is targeted traffic.

What do you think?

How Do You Add A Facebook Badge To Your Site?

William — Sun, 08 Mar 2009 05:32:44 +0000

In a previous post I told you how Facebook could drive traffic to your site, but how do you get people to add you on Facebook easier? Why not add a little Facebook badge to your website (like mine on the right)?

This post was created to specifically answer the question above, which I received from @ChuckAinsworth via my Twitter account. Hope it helps Chuck! (Tweet this article to your friends if you like it, use the blue bird icon on the right. Thx!)

OK first things first, login to Facebook.

Click on your ‘profile’ page.

Scroll down the left hand side till you see this little link labelled ‘Create a Profile Badge’ and click it.

Modify the look and content of your badge. The screen shot doesn’t show it, but there’s a preview of the badge as you make the changes so you can see what you’re doing.

Click ‘Save’ when you’re done.

For blogger and myspace users, click on the buttons that you see on the screen and it’ll do it for you automatically.

For Wordpress users, copy the code you see in the bar and then login to your WordPress blog.

Under ‘Appearance’, click ‘Widgets’ and add a text widget like what you see above. Paste the code into the text box that opens up, give it a title if you want, click ‘Done’ then click ‘Save All Changes’.

You’ll also want to rearrange the widgets to place the text box higher or lower up on your sidebar.

That’s it, reload your webpage and you’re done!

Hope you found this little tutorial useful!

If you did, Tweet it…

Thx,

-William Lee

5 Tips To Drive Traffic To Your Blog or Website

William — Tue, 24 Feb 2009 04:22:41 +0000

Boosting traffic to your blog is always the bane of any Interent marketer or even just a regular blog owner. Here are a few simple tips that can put you on the right track.

And if you find one that works better than the others? Then rinse and repeat…

Blogs are a very popular ways of promoting your product or service. They are easy to install, easy to administer and easy to update. And search engines love them too. But what is a blog without traffic?Exactly. Here are five quick ways to boost traffic to your blog and start seeing those big sales.

1.Have A Ping List Ready

There are hundreds if not thousands of blog services that you can ping to let them know that you’ve made an update to your blog. These services then take your new post and display it in one form or another on their site. Just search ‘blog ping list’ in Google or try a few of these:

http://www.bitacoles.net/ping.php

http://bitacoras.net/ping

http://blogdb.jp/xmlrpc

http://blog.goo.ne.jp/XMLRPC

http://www.blogdigger.com/RPC2

http://blogmatcher.com/u.php

http://www.bitacoles.net/ping.php

http://www.blogoole.com/ping/

http://www.blogoon.net/ping/

http://www.blogpeople.net/servlet/weblogUpdates

http://www.blogroots.com/tb_populi.blog?id=1

http://www.blogshares.com/rpc.php

http://www.blogsnow.com/ping

http://www.blogstreet.com/xrbin/xmlrpc.cgi

http://blog.goo.ne.jp/XMLRPC

http://bulkfeeds.net/rpc

http://coreblog.org/ping/

http://www.lasermemory.com/lsrpc/

http://mod-pubsub.org/kn_apps/blogchatt

http://www.mod-pubsub.org/kn_apps/blogchatter/ping.php

Although there is of course alot more available. This is just to get you started.

2.Add RSS Buttons For The Most Popular RSS Readers

Yahoo, Google, Feedburner, bloglines etc are all popular feed readers that your visitors may be using. So make sure you give them the option to add your RSS feed to any reader that they may be using. This way readers can easily subscribe to your feed. Speaking of which, have you s ubscribed to my blog yet?

3.Regularly Update Your Blog

Search engines love a regularly updated blog. They consider it fresh and new content and favour those that do update often. You should try and update your blog at least once a day, although don’t go overboard. Too many updates in a day has the opposite effect and isn’t liked (10 posts a day or more).

4.Post in Forums

Post useful comment in forums that are talking about your subject matter. I’ve personally never been very good at getting traffic from forums because you have to stay very engaged to get a good amount of traffic from them. But traffic does come, so keep at it and be patient.

5.Use Blog Search Engines

Blog search engines such as Google Blog Search are plentiful out there, from blog search engines targeted at health blogs and a range of other topics. Just do a search for ‘blog search engine’ and add your site to their directory.

These are just a couple of the things you can do to slowly drive more traffic to your blog and hopefully start making more money online.

Keep trying,

-William Lee

Driving Traffic To Your Site With Facebook

William — Wed, 18 Feb 2009 07:28:01 +0000

Facebook is the 5th most popular site in the world (according to Alexa) and you’d think it’d be a great way to drive traffic to your website right?

Well not exactly.

You have to remember that the people on your Facebook account are technically meant to be your ‘friends’ and most of the time most of them are your friends, people you know.

So if you start a niche site about shoe polish… do you think ALL your friends deserve to know about it? Is this your target audience that you are trying to push an affiliate product to?

I wager it’s not.

But if you’re starting a site that means something to you, such as a personal blog, a food blog or maybe an Internet marketing blog like this one, I’d say you could market to your group of friends.

It might be something they can relate to and hence come and visit your site.

So if you think your friends ARE your target audience, here’s a good way of getting some traffic and exposure.

1) Login to your facebook account.

2) Click on your name on the top right hand side of your facebook page.

3) Click ‘post link’

4) Paste the complete link to your article. NOT just your homepage. The reason is if you post your article link, Facebook will try and find an image from the article to use and add it to your link.

5) Click ‘Preview’ and let it load. If a little summary like what you see above doesn’t display, you have to remove the trailing ‘/’ from your URL and try again. (NB: Sometimes it doesn’t work even when you do that. In that case, I have no idea what to do… sorry.)

Choose a picture from the available options and if you’re fine with everything, click ‘post’.

6) If it posted correctly, you should see it show on your wall like this.

7) Facebook will then decide which of your friends would like to know this information and post it on their Facebook ‘newsfeed’ on their home page. And more often than not, the people that Facebook think would like to know what you are up to are your closer friends or who view alot of your pictures.

These people are likely to click your site, pay a visit and who knows, maybe even tell a friend?

8 ) I’ve been doing this for one of my other sites since the day it launched (about 5 months ago) and here is the proof of the traffic. It is easily in my top 5 sources of traffic.

Petalingstreet.org is a Malaysian blog aggregator that I use for that site because its targeted audience is Malaysia.

So why not give it a try? You may get 10, 20, 50 or even 100 visitors almost immediately to your site. But remember that these people are your friends, please don’t SPAM them with useless information ok?

Add me to Facebook! (or click on my picture in the sidebar)

-William Lee

Drive Traffic To Your Site With Unique Article Wizard

William — Mon, 16 Feb 2009 15:44:33 +0000

Unique Article Wizard is an online tool that has been going around the Internet marketing circle for quite a while now. Apparently alot of the big Internet marketers use it to bring in traffic to niche websites, or even their own branded sites.

How it works is you supply an article to the Unique Article Wizard program and it will ask you to rewrite the article one more time. It then takes both of these articles, combines them in many different ways and creates hundreds of slightly different articles.

They claim that this is enough to prevent Google from punishing the article content for ‘duplicate content’.

The Unique Article Wizard network comprises of more than 1000 article directories and blogs which your unique article will be sent out to. Each of these unique articles will have at the bottom, just like a normal article a resource box.

You can put your link there linking your article back to your website. The ‘blogs’ in their network will do a pingback to your site, another way of getting back links to you.

Unique Article Wizard slowly sends out these articles on a time delay basis so as to not make it look like your site is getting too many back links at once. However, some people have said that after only 2 days they are already getting listed on Google for some good keywords.

I’m still thinking whether or not to get myself a copy as at USD$67/month, it’s not the cheapest tool out there. Along with my recent purchase of an Aweber.com account, that would bring my monthly Internet marketing expenditure to USD$86/month, or approximately RM300/month.

That’s NOT small change.

But think about it this way… if I manage to make one sale every 2 days, at an average affiliate comission of $25 using a combination of these two tools, that adds up to USD$375/month or RM1300.

That’s ALSO not small change.

I would have easily paid for my monthly subscription to Unique Article Wizard and Aweber with a nice profit in hand.

All I’d have to do then is repeat the process for other niche sites and affiliate products.

I’ll let you know how it goes,

Unique Article Wizarding,

-William Lee

What Does 20 Million Unemployed People Look Like?

William — Sat, 07 Feb 2009 04:00:19 +0000

Following up from the last post I wrote about unemployment in China, I made a quick presentation and uploaded it to some presentation sharing sites to see if I could get some traffic back to my site as well as send some traffic over to one of the affiliate products I am pushing.

See if you can spot which product I’m trying to sell…

What 20 Million Unemployed People Look Like

Publish at Scribd or explore others: Business How-To Guides & DIY maverick money maker job fairs

Can A Feed Counter Help Increase Traffic/Subscribers?

William — Fri, 16 Jan 2009 06:02:26 +0000

Encouraging people to subscribe to your blog is extremely important in building and maintaining a long term following. Personally, I use Feedburner.com to handle all my feeds as it’s user friendly and I suspect it’s slightly favoured by Google (since Google owns Feedburner.com).

One way that I’ve found helps encourage people to subscribe to your feed is by a) blatantly asking them to subscribe to your feed b) showing them the feed counter of how many subscribers you have.
Part a) above is pretty obvious on my blog, just down the left side of my blog and you’ll see what I mean.

For part b), I’ve tried it on one of my other blogs and I’ve slowly noticed the total number of subscribers increase as the days go by. Have a look for yourself:

For now it's going up... let's hope it continues

I put up the feed counter (which you can see under my ‘subscribe to me’ image on the left) when my total number of subscribers was 20 people. Since then it has risen up to 47 at it’s peak, but it does go up and down, although never below 30 people.

Why does the total number of subscribers go up when they see the feed counter? I think it has something to do with ‘authority’. They deem you to have some sort of credibility if they see that other people care enough to subscribe to your feed, so they might as well do the same.

But I suggest to only put it up when you have 20+ people subscribing to your blog. Showing people a low number could have the exact opposite effect as what I’ve described above. Some people suggest you don’t display your feed counter until it reaches 100 visitors, but you can try it lower and see how it goes.

Offering people something free for subscribing to your blog would probably increase the number even higher than what I was able to manage. Maybe I’ll give it a try for this blog and see what happens?

Cya!

-William Lee