Unfortunately, there have been a lot of sites with good content that have been penalized. So what’s going on here and how do you get traffic for the long term? Whether you’re new to SEO or you’d like to use it to get more traffic, I’ll go over a single tip that will work for many years to come.

A Perfect World for Google

Here’s what Google wishes: They want people to find relevant search engine results and provide the end user with a smooth search experience. However, this is never going to “perfectly” happen. People that are trying to build businesses will want to push their websites up towards #1 and that creates biased results.

Backlinks – What They Used To Do

When a website pointed their link towards your website, that would count as a vote (meaning your website is something special and should have some type of preferential treatment). So marketers would gain more backlinks over time. While quality and quantity was important, either one or the other would help without much negative impact. After all, if a competitor wanted to go against you, all they would have to do is point tons of backlinks at your website fast and from shady webpages. Just by doing that, they would be able to decrease your websites rankings.

Backlinks – Nowadays

Backlink quality is more important than ever before. While SEO’s can do whatever it takes to get backlinks, a lot of the backlinks used in the past have been and are in the process of being devalued. So should you give up on SEO?

SEO for the Future

While this is old advice, it still works and I’m sure it will continue for years to come!

Here’s this single tip that will work wonders: “Make your SEO appear as natural as possible!”

I mentioned “appear” on purpose. It doesn’t mean that all of your links have to be natural. It just means that you have to give off that perception.

A SEO Lesson to Learn From

I was tracking a site for several years and it was on page 1 for a keyword that received hundreds of thousands of unique visitors every month. The website itself wasn’t so simple. What the guy did was he followed the traditional SEO model. Optimize a page for a keyword and send a bunch of backlinks to it using that keyword. While there was a variety of keywords used, you could certainly tell that almost all of them were not natural links as they were using the same backlink keyword (ie. anchor text) and many of the websites that were linking to it were crap SEO blogs.

While there are a lot of techie SEO tips that I can teach you, the main thing to keep in mind is to allow search engines (and people that spy on you) to think that the links are natural. To get more ideas, simply ask yourself these questions while you build links to your website:

1) Would this website ever link to mine?
2) Would I ever get x amount of links in x amount of time?
3) Would this website ever link to me using x anchor text?
4) Is it natural for x website to link to me for x amount of time?
5) What keywords/images can be used to link to my website that are optimized?
6) What keywords/images can be used to link to my website that aren’t optimized?
7) Would a certain page have x amount of my link pointing to my page?
8) Am I using too many of x type of sites to link from?

Answer these questions and think about being natural and random as you build your links. By doing so, you’ll stay clear of the radar and build traffic for the long term. It’s a tedious process, but it will be worth your time!

Recommended SEO Tool

If you’re serious about getting more traffic to your website, here’s my #1 SEO tool.

When I first got started building my business back in the early 90’s, the first thing that I was instructed to do is write down all of the names of my friends and family members. Then next to those names, I would write down their phone numbers and prioritize the list. Then I would contact them to either schedule a face-to-face meeting or a time when they could attend a presentation. Does this sound familiar?

By doing this, you can reach your warm market and some might buy something from you or join your business opportunity because of existing rapport.

Let me ask you this: Would you rather put effort into recruiting your friends and family members or people that are actively seeking ways to build a business? Who is a more targeted prospect?

Let’s define a targeted prospect. Since I was trying to find people that are interested in a business opportunity, a business seeker would most likely be a targeted prospect (versus the majority of my friends and family members).

By targeting individuals that most likely fit your target market, the more efficient you’ll be at building your business.

Market to Your Target Audience

There are many ways to communicate with your target audience. One of the easiest ways to do this is through direct mail. Using this method, you can mail offers to your target audience using letters or postcards. If you’re mailing out a low volume (less than 5000), I highly recommend using pre-printed, peel & stick leads. Check out this red hot mailing list.

Of course there’s a lot of other details like keeping track of sales and returns, customer service, etc.

Most of the people that I’ve met over the years that have built home-based businesses do it part-time. As you can imagine, people that run part-time businesses need some type of leverage to earn full-time income.

Using Leverage to Build Your Business

The most common leverage is through franchises, sub-agents, sub-affiliates, sub-distributors, sponsors, etc.

If you’re not familiar with this type of leverage, think about a real estate firm. There’s a broker at the top with a bunch of agents underneath. That broker can be under another company where somebody at the top is making money off of them.

In the city where I live, there are companies like Century 21 and RE/MAX. Both of them have various offices run by different brokers. There might be slight differences between each one, but the thing in common is the business system offered by the companies.

A Cheaper Alternative to Buying a Franchise

While the idea of building out a McDonald’s business would be nice, it’s also pretty expensive. To create a McDonald’s franchise, you need a half a million (U.S.) of non-borrowed money. You would also have to pay for ongoing going costs to build and maintain the business.

In the Silicon Valley (California), you would spend at least a half-million just to buy a single family home. Most people that I know don’t have that much non-borrowed money. Typically, home owners pay for their home over a 30+ year period through a loan.

So how can you build your own business and get ahead? There are cheaper alternatives. For example, there are cheaper franchises if you’re planning on spending 10’s of thousands of dollars.

If you don’t have thousands of dollars to start your business, then you can gain leverage through a multi-level marketing business (MLM) or through a business that uses multi-tier affiliate marketing.

In both cases, there would be a hierarchy of members that promote products or services. Depending on the company, you would earn income from product or service sales plus the sales from members underneath you. Just by sponsoring others, it’s possible to create extreme geometric growth in your business compared to just building a business by yourself.

This is a powerful concept that was well understood by J. Paul Getty – which was considered to be the “Richest Living American” by the Fortune Magazine in 1957. He once said, “I’d rather have one percent of the efforts of 100 people than 100 percent of my own efforts.” This single concept has helped many ordinary people live extraordinary lifestyles.

• Buy inventory
• Stock up your garage with inventory
• Try to refer or sell products or services to your friends and family members
• Call prospects
• Conduct face-to-face meetings
• Do presentations
• Attend meetings
• Enhance your sales skills
• Personal recruiting

All of that stuff is typical for a traditional home-based business. If you’re looking at a traditional MLM / network marketing business, recruiting will be a big component of the business.

Some people enjoy building their businesses using these traditional methods. However, many of the distributors that I’ve met over the years do it because they focus on the end result.

There’s nothing wrong building a traditional home business. It really depends on your ethics and if you really enjoy the process.

For me, I push my business out using various methods. It helps accelerate the business process. After all, the more people that know your business, the higher probability that you can increase your profits.

What if you could build a business without spending much time on it?

That sounds pretty crazy and almost impossible, but it is extremely possible. When I mention this kind of stuff, some people think about using pay-per-click advertising (PPC) on the internet.

Yes, paid search engine traffic can save a lot of time. Stuff like search engine optimization, article writing / blogging does take a lot of time and hours.

However, PPC is a pretty techie form of advertising. You’ve got to set up campaigns, setup tons of landing pages, and do some algebra to make sure that you’re doing effective advertising.

What most online marketer’s don’t know is…

They can build their business with less effort and time. Yeah, it does take some capital, but it’s something that many people can still afford.

It’s offline direct response marketing.

You build a business using mail. Yeah, that’s old school but it still works. You can either mail stuff yourself or pay a company to do it for you. You also can pay a company for “responsive” leads at a low rate.

Here’s an easy method – pay a company to mail out an ad to targeted leads

How long does that take? For me, 0 minutes a month after the whole process is set up (which took me less than 10 minutes). If I want to change the amount of leads and send the ad out to more people, it might take me less than 5 minutes for the month.

Probably the only thing that takes some time is getting my mail, sorting it (like I usually do) and then following up with leads (which takes me less than 2 hours a month).

So if you’re looking for a non-techie, easy way to profit, consider direct mail!

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Nowadays – You Don’t Have To Be a Techie To Build Websites!

You don’t need to be a computer programmer, a hacker, or even a graphics designer to build a website. Nowadays, ordinary people are building websites with ease. Perhaps one of the easiest types to build is called a blog.

Are Blogs Really Easy To Build?

I can build a website quickly using a blog platform called WordPress. I’m not talking about the free hosted one at WordPress.com – but the one that you can download at WordPress.org and host on my web servers.

Can a person that has had barely any web hosting skills do that? With some time and effort…sure. A lot of web hosts offer automated installers. However, they just install plain vanilla WordPress which isn’t set up for people that want to easily build a business (fast).

So I decided to put together a special report that will show you how to build a “home business blog”…one that is easy to configure for most of the major niches out there.

Go here to get instant access to this report today: how to easily build your own blog

I’ve decided to compile a list of the ones that I personally use.  These are rated based on the traffic I’ve seen over several dozen exchanges that I’ve personally tested.

There are some marketers trying to push out their top 25 or their top 50+ list.  Most people that use exchanges don’t have the time or money to utilize that many.  In fact, most part-time business owners don’t have the time or money to effectively use all of the 10 that I’ve listed.

If you’re not sure where to start, I’ve added some more ideas on this page…so check out my top 10 traffic exchange list.

In this course you’ll learn:

• What is a traffic exchange
• The most common mistakes about traffic exchanges
• What are the best offers to promote through traffic exchanges
• What type of landing pages actually convert
• What are the top traffic exchange sites
• and more

Download this Traffic Exchange PDF and learn more!

How Do People Exchange Traffic?

Traffic exchange sites allow you to add your own website addresses to the site. Many of these sites push traffic to your site and other websites through web page views, banner ads, and/or text ads. However, you need points or credits to get traffic to the sites that you add.

Why Use Traffic Exchanges versus Other Forms of Traffic?

If you use them correctly, they offer one of the easiest ways to get traffic your website. This is great if want something duplicatable, if you want to get traffic on a tight budget, or if you don’t like creating content (ie. writing articles, creating videos, blogging, etc.) for traffic.

How Do You Get Traffic Exchange Points or Credits

Many sites give you points just by becoming a member. So after you register, you may get free points and you also earn the privilege to earn or buy points. Many TE’s allow you to sign up for a monthly membership where you get a certain amount of points every month, and you can also buy a certain amount of points as well.

You can also earn points by viewing other peoples websites. If you’re short on cash, this is how you can get traffic simply by using your time to view other sites.

The Major Problem With Traffic Exchange Sites

Most people use them the wrong way. I’m a perfect example of that. I used to think that you can just post affiliate offers just like advertising in pay-per-click (PPC) sites like Google Adwords. I discovered this tip from some internet marketing guru and is was a bunch of B.S. If you want to do well with traffic exchanges, you have to understand that traffic exchanges are different. You must understand the mindset of who’s actually viewing the offers.

Profiting from Traffic

After trying out traffic exchanges the 1st time, I decided to use up my credits to pump up content views. That still works. Later on, I decided to learn more about how to effectively promote on traffic exchanges. I’ve been getting better results over time and I the main reason is because I focused on the top problems of the traffic exchange audience …profiting from traffic.

Learning More About Traffic Exchanges

If you’re wanting to learn the basics of traffic exchanges, here’s a Traffic Exchange PDF course that you can download. You’ll learn a lot more about the problems associated with traffic exchanges and how to actually make money from them.

That may seem impossible, but there are people that have actually done that in less than a year.

Take a peak at this link:

http://ezinearticles.com/?type=mp

What’s interesting is that you’ll find authors that have published multiple articles that are within the top 30…some even grabbing over 200,000 visitors from a single article.

At first, I was thinking that these people really marketed there articles well.

So what I did was that I used my backlink finder tool to see if they actually did any off-page SEO. I tested several from the top and none of them had any backlinks to them.

Seeing that most of these articles were published within the past year shows that EzineArticles.com is still a great place to publish articles for traffic.

If you’ve never published an article before…

1) The first thing that you’ll want to do is register for an account at EzineArticles.com. After you do this, you’ll be able to start submitting articles. The first 10 take a while to get reviewed. After your first 10, then the submission process will be a lot faster.

2) Next, write an article related to your target market. Half of the time I’ll write articles on popular or trendy topics. The other half will be spent on writing articles based around “long tailed keywords”. I find these keywords using popular keyword research tools. This tool will help you find high demand keywords with low to medium competition. Without keyword research, you could spend your time publishing a lot of articles that won’t even be found in the search engines. So by using a keyword research software, you can save a bunch of time.

3) Submit your article to EzineArticles.com. When you submit your article, you’ll need to make sure that you have a title, the body, related keywords, a summary, and a resource box which contains a hyperlink to your landing page (ie. the page that you want visitors to go to). Make sure that you include an HTML hyperlink that people can actually click on to visit your website.

That’s the short version of article marketing.

While you may not strike it big just by publishing 1 article, you’ll find that as you publish more and more over time that a small percentage will get tons of traffic. It’s kind of like the 80/20 Pareto principle. Over 80% of you article marketing traffic will come from 20% of the articles that you publish.

Looking for More High Traffic Articles

Go to Ezinearticles.com and use their search function to find articles related to your niche. Once you find at least 1, view it and scroll all the way down to the bottom of the article.

You’ll find the text:

Most Published EzineArticles in the … Category

Under that sub-heading, you’ll find many high-traffic articles for that particular niche. You can also use my Article Traffic Finder tool to find high traffic articles in various article directories. You can search places like Search Warp, Idea Marketers, and Articles Base and look for a certain range of article views. It’s a simple, but pretty powerful tool!