Since a large part of my business model depends on choosing keywords correctly, I’m particularly conscious of changes in algorithms, ranking, search volume, and competing pages. And now it looks like we’ve had yet another change – people are calling it the Halloween Update.

I woke up one morning and my rankings on several of my own sites and gone way down, and the keywords that I was researching just the day before were no longer viable. Yes, I was frustrated, but I pushed through. I’m depending a whole lot more on manual keyword research than I ever did before, but I can trust myself over the tools that I have in my arsenal.  The tools will be updated as always, but make sure to double check everything manually, at least for a while.

Keywords and traffic are at the heart of what we do, and you’re trying to drive traffic to your site, you have to have Multiple Traffic Streams.  You need to do some article marketing and forum commenting, which is just the tip of the iceberg.  I’m following a new guide now to drive traffic to my sites, and it’s working for me, so I wanted to share it with you.  Make sure that you check out Multiple Traffic Streams.

I don’t know how many other people you know in IM, but over the years I’ve gotten to “know” a LOT of them. One of them is Spencer over at Niche Adsense Challenge.

Spencer has started a challenge to build a quality content site that earns income from adsense only; as I’m following along he’s revealing everything that he’s doing, exposing his own near mistakes, and you can even visit his challenge site to watch it progress. I have to say, it’s progressing nicely.

This is all rather fascinating to me, as I started out way back when trying to build a couple of authority sites and make money from them, but I didn’t do very well. Of course, I knew virtually nothing about keyword research, so that’s the main reason why. I didn’t know how to write articles for keywords, I barely knew how to build backlinks, I was really fumbling along.

I have started my own quality content site along with Spencer’s niche adsense challenge, but unlike Spencer, I’m not going to reveal my niche. Actually, I’ve started two of them, and I’ve hired a writer to write articles for one of them, while I’m writing for the other one.

Donna is running a special right now for articles specifically for this challenge, and she’s filling up fast, so I’d encourage you to act on it now if you want to get in.

I’m also working on my next special for you guys, but in the meantime, head over to Spencer’s site and read how he’s doing on his newest challenge!

Terri

Let’s talk about some powerful ways to get free and automated traffic coming to your website.

But, first…

The first thing you need to do before you start going after any traffic is keyword research. This is because you will building your traffic funnels around specific keywords. This means it’s critical to select your keywords properly.

While doing your keyword research, keep the following in mind:

• Will you be able to rank for these keywords? You’ll have to analyze the competition and see what’s out there for this.
• Are these “buying” keywords? If you don’t do your research you’ll end up with a lot of traffic that doesn’t buy from you. This is not what you’re looking for.
• Will these keywords bring affiliates? Generating your own customers is great – having other people do it for you is even better. So, it’s important to also target affiliates in the keywords you go after.

Although this is an essential step, doing it all by hand can take a very long time. Experts are expensive and don’t guarantee results. The upside is that these two factors keep most everyone from even doing their keyword research. The smartest marketers use website traffic software to automate this and other aspects of their business. This way you get this critical step done fast and done well.

OK, now we can talk about traffic…

Now that you’ve completed your keyword research, you can begin using these keywords to get traffic to your website.

Powerful Traffic Tactics:

• Surveys
• “Traffic Traps”
• Video Websites

Surveys

People love filling in surveys. And if you make it interesting, other people will post your survey on their website. And when they put your survey on their site, they will include a link back to your website. Think about that – you get website traffic for free just for making a survey! Most people think surveys are just for collecting data, but in this case you don’t even care about the answers. Just make the question interesting enough that people will want to share it with their own visitors.

“Traffic Traps”

Sites like Yahoo! Answers allow users to ask and answer each others’ questions. However, you’re interest in these sites is not to ask and answer questions. What you want to do is use these sites to generate traffic and leads for your business. One thing you can do is to visit sites like Craigslist and Yahoo! Answers and manually extract contact info to contact other users. So, if you’re smart, you’ll use website traffic software to do it all for you. This allows you to do the things in your business that can’t be automated and let the software just give you the leads.

Video Websites

Another great resource is video sharing sites like YouTube. YouTube is one of the most highly traffic and search websites on the entire internet! If you’re not taking advantage of this rich source of website traffic, then you are really missing out.

You don’t have to be able to make awesome videos for this to work. It’s really easy to just start with an article or something you’ve already written. Then just do a screen capture of yourself going through it. You can even get software that will automatically do this for you.

Summary

It’s not that hard to get traffic to your websites. It just takes a little time and some ingenuity. Plus, there’s lots of great software out there to help you.

Get started right away:

• Step 1 is researching your keywords
• Set up some viral surveys
• Make sure to use the “answer” sites
• Capitalize on video!