Allan Tan’s Internet Marketing Resource Centre

A picture is worth a thousand words. We know that one. Did you know that a picture might be worth a little more free traffic to your website, too?

There are a few reasons why the presence of graphics or photos can assist in driving traffic. The first is the fact that more people are using image search functions on the major search engines to find things. After all, a picture is worth the previously mentioned thousand words and sometime searching visually just makes sense. The funny thing is that a lot of these people aren?t searching for photos–they?re looking for products or information and they?re using the presence of photos as a way of ascertaining which sites could be of value.

So, what does that mean to a traffic-hungry webmaster like you? Use pictures. Make sure they have relevant text on the page. Give them descriptive file names. And while you?re at it, use ALT text to provide a fair and accurate description of the image.

Who knows how many visitors a picture might be worth. It could be well over a thousand under the right circumstances.

There are many ways to draw in traffic to your website through the use of multimedia, and photos are no exception. You may wonder how a photo can bring in visitors, but there are several ideas you may not have considered. And no–you don?t need to run a photography website or blog for this to work either!

If you have a free photo service account, or participate in any of the popular social networking programs–you have a way to entice potential customers to your sites.

Think of a photo as a marketing tool. A billboard in smaller form, pictures tell the story. If you run a website on restoring antique cars, you can try taking a photo of a restored vehicle and posting it on your networks, your profiles, or your blog.

Popular networks such as MySpace, Twitter, and Facebook even now allow the uploading of photos through mobile devices. Most will also allow you to leave a caption in case the photo doesn?t speak for itself. The photo itself will usually link back to your site, or a profile where you have your site URL located for readers to see.

This is just one great way to use photos to gain free website traffic. Get creative and find other uses for those relevant photos you have!

Social networking is the popular way to drive free traffic to your website. Webmasters use these sites to their advantage. They rely on people just like you to promote their website and help bring in more traffic. This is the way of the Internet and StumbleUpon is high on the list with Twitter and Facebook. The more you socialize the more traffic you receive.

Remember when you were in school and the teacher complained because you did too much socializing in class? Well, today, you are going to see your socializing pay off. You can honestly say that you did learn something in school to help you succeed if you were the social butterfly. Social networking is free traffic. You can use any of the many sites to find friends, get traffic and market your website all for free.

The nice thing about social networking is that you meet people from different areas of the world. You are not stuck in the country that you live in. This means that your website is going to be seen around the world. StumbleUpon allows users to give a little testimonial about your website that will help nudge people in the right direction–right to your website.

Forums that are in your same niche area are great places to mingle and state your intentions. If you join in conversations and become known for what you have to say, people are going to follow any link you supply. Of course, this takes some time because people need to get to know you first. However, links to your website will stay visible for everyone to see. You can drive traffic to your website by becoming a force in your niche area.

If you have a wealth of information about catfish fishing and you have an e-book to sell, you want to join a forum with other anglers. The forums should be populated with real people. May sure, before you join the forum to check the areas of interest to make sure that there are recent entries. You want a forum with at least five digits in followers.

After you join, you can add your website link in your signature. This allows anyone to click it and land on your website. After time, you can talk about your knowledge and what you might have for sale or for the readers to enjoy. Free marketing is always the best way to make money and get traffic.

One thing that is known about the blog community is that bloggers are always willing to help a fellow blogger. Whether you?re trying to get your name known to the blog community or you are looking to increase the amount of free traffic you receive.

Often, a blogger may need to take a break from blogging but doesn?t want to lose traffic to their site while they are on hiatus. They may ask other bloggers to fill in for them as guest bloggers. Guest bloggers write related content to be posted on the other blogger?s home site. If you?re ever asked to be a guest blogger take advantage of the opportunity to find new readers and get new traffic.

Your posts will be read by the other blogger?s visitors and readers. Every day that you post as a guest blogger, you can blog about topics that have appeared on your own page and use those topics as click throughs to your own blog or you can simply add your URL to your bio in every post. Guest posting is a great way to introduce yourself to a new community and interact with readers and possibly gain new ones.

Every now and then a blogger discovers that the best way to promote something would be to show their audience rather than tell about it. Video can be a very powerful medium, and not just because it?s gaining in popularity. Youtube, Vimeo, and Blip.tv are just three of the many free video submission sites available on the Internet.

By creating an account at any free video submission sites, you can video blog about a product you?re trying out, share content that you would have otherwise blogged, or create a tutorial and instructional video blog on how to do something. Posting the video on your site as well on the submission site introduces you to a new network of readers and viewers. Keyword tagging helps viewers find your video page faster.

In order to get free website traffic back to your blog from the videos you create, add your url to the videos as well as your public profile on the video site. Many video bloggers include a line that reads ?for more information?? and input their URL. Adding numerous video and building a channel are an excellent way to gain new readers and viewers on to your site.

Most content on the Internet today is user driven, meaning anyone can create content and post it online. The thing is that not everyone knows how to use SEO (search engine optimization) to get their content seen by search engines. If you’re one of those people who are creating content but not sure how to get it seen, consider setting up a Hubpage (hubpages.com) and let them do the optimization for you.

Hubpages allows users to create and set up their own hub for free and submit content that they retain the rights to. You can have your own website and repurpose the content or create new content on Hubpages with backlinks to your main website. Hubpages has been considered an authority by Google so the content you create may get to the search engine results faster than if you had written and posted on your own site.

Since Hubpages allows you to link back to your main site and create a user profile for free, readers can find your content and click through your main site, which is where you want the traffic from the Hubpages you create to go to. However, Hubpages can also be utilized as your main site as well which still results in free traffic.

Details how to drive FREE traffic to your website available here.

In theory, it’s all rather simple. You join a forum. You set up an account with a signature line linking back to your website. You begin posting on the forum, providing high-quality information and hoping to get some attention for your site.

Then you notice that the signature that appeared within your user control panel isn’t showing up on the actual forum site. What’s happening?

It might be a forum rule. They’re often overlooked, hidden in stickies on the top of threads or buried.

Many forums don’t allow new members’ posts to include a signature.

Others allow the signature, but apply a ‘no follow’ tag to the photo.

There are many variations of the limitation, all of which are designed to stop would-be forum spammers from practicing their evil deeds.

If you’ve been trying to make something happen in at forum and can’t see your signature, start checking the fine print. You might not be eligible. You can either run off to another forum in search of a new link fix or you can wait it out and ‘earn your stripes’.

In Internet marketing niche, The Warrior Forum is one of the kind you should check it out if you want to make your presence in IM world.

Hunger for more FREE Traffic? Click the think here then.  See if you like the good stuff I give you.

The old school of thought about article marketing: Distribute your articles everywhere you can.

The new approach: Pick two or three quality sites.

Why the difference? There are some good reasons for the divergent perspectives.

Those who advocate mass submission are generally more interested in backlink generation than in direct traffic production. They realize that Google’s treatment of duplicate content will render most every submission “invisible” to searchers. They also know that Google will still take note of the backlinks.

Those who advocate limited distribution argue that you can muster the same traffic effect from a single submission to the right directory and that Google doesn’t seem to be treating inbound links from articles with the same gusto it once had.

So, which way should you break on this issue? If you have mass submitter, software, I’d continue to bombard the net with your articles. There’s no such thing as a bad link, after all. If you don’t have a submitter and you’re more interested in driving traffic to a landing page than engaging in SEO, it makes sense to limit your submissions to the sites that matter.

Resource:

Articles Marketer

More Free Traffic

Profiles–they’re everywhere! From social networking sites, to niche groups, to professional networks- at any time the average person has ten or so online profiles at various websites. Think of the potential these profiles have to bring in free traffic to your website. With each link to your site you increase its visibility, but you also add to the power of the web working for you while you’re offline.

Whether you’re actively participating in these sites or not, your profile will almost always remain active and visible to anyone who stumbles across it. Advertising your website URL on any profile you set up makes sense. Of course, you may have a niche site that you don?t want associated with certain profiles. In that case, you may only want to share your URL when the network you are on is more generalized, or geared toward a larger audience.

If you use Gmail, you can now create a profile that Google creates as a webpage. When someone does a search for you or a site you are associated with, the profile will show up at the top of your search. This is a great way to advertise your site, as Google allows you to add unlimited links and references on this profile. Take advantage of this marketing tool to get traffic to your website.

Need even more free traffic?