* Should something happen to your websites or online content, you don’t have to start over and find new people to sell to. You already have a ready-made group of people who have decided that they want to hear what you have to say and have probably already bought from you.

* Typically, if you’ve built a targeted list and treated your subscribers well by sharing valuable information (as opposed to continually promoting to them), the bigger your list, the more money you can make.

* If you are an affiliate marketer, having a responsive list can help you to become a Super Affiliate, which not only equates to more income – it also means that you may have a chance to win cool prizes in affiliate contests. Being a Super Affiliate also means that you can becoming sought after for large launches.

List building requires effort to bring traffic to your website and convert visitors to prospects on your email list. Here are three ways to get targeted traffic to your website and build your email marketing list.

1. Give them something for free when subscribing to your list

You are asking your prospects to give you their email address and name – your prospects know what this is worth to you and they are less likely to provide their details unless they see value in doing so.

By offering something for free, you are overcoming this objection to begin with.

Downloadable audios are great gifts. Consider creating a podcast (mp3) of an expert interview, yourself sharing some great tips about your niche, or an interview with yourself sharing great information about your niche.

Another idea is to create a video demonstrating a ’secret technique or discussing some of your strategies in a visual way?

If your software developer, why not give away some software in exchange for their email address?

As an affiliate marketer, you can write a review of the product or service you are offering explaining how you use it and how it helps you. In fact, you can record an audio or video doing the same thing.

Whatever you choose to do, make sure that you give phenomenal value with your free item.

2. Post on your blog regularly – using your chosen keywords.

Search Engines love fresh content and the more often you post on your blog, the more traffic you will get.

Write a blog post every day for 2 weeks and check your traffic stats – you should have more traffic!

Ensure that you have your lead capture process set up to convert visitors to subscribers – make it easy for your visitors to join your list.

3. Ad Swaps are certainly an excellent way to grow your list fast and effectively.

Find another business in your niche that has a similar size list (or similar response) and send each others offers of a free item to your own list.

The key is to plan your swaps with offers that will appeal to your niche and not to do it too often, as you will desensitize your list.

These are just three ways that you can generate traffic to your site and build your list . They all require some work from you – success doesn’t happen overnight and whilst you can outsource a lot of the work, understanding the basics will definitely help you. Building your list will most certainly help you create a sustainable, and profitable business.

Why YouTube? With over 110 million unique visitors a month who watch, on average, 65 videos per month, why would you want to be excluded from that? There are loads of opportunities available to market your product or service and expand brand awareness. Of course you’ve got to start somewhere so create an account, setup a channel and get it looking how you want it to look.

The YouTube Search Algorithm puts a lot of stock in the following five things : Title, Description, Tags, Number of Views and Rating. If you’ve got the first three done right, you should do well in the last two. But for successful YouTube Marketing you need to have content that people want to see. Comedy is fine but for your marketing needs, a how-to will probably suit your purposes the best

You not only need interesting content, you need to optimize for the search engines. Since YouTube processes over 3.5 billion searches a month it’s the 2nd largest search in the world. Optimization means having a very good, concise title, highly relevant tags (keywords), and a great description. In regards o the description, it’s always good to include a clickable link in the first 27 characters. Why 27? Well that’s the length of descriptions prior to ellipsis (the three dots you click to read more). Use a major keyword or tag as the clickable link as well and it will save space and be useful.

URLs and phone numbers are ideal things to include throughout the video as they give viewers information without being too intrusive. This will help lead people from your video to your business. That branding will help get the word out and you should also include call-to-action options throughout the video (like the clickable link does in the Description). You can also promote you video by dropping links in comments on other popular videos. Or if your product relates to videos that are already popular making spin-off videos is a great way to get connected to those videos. Related videos are a big way in how people find things on YouTube. For tons of info about online video marketing in general head over to ReelSEO.com.

The whole purpose of a website is to get visitors. You can equate a website with a store in a shopping mall. No matter what you are offering: vitamins, ebooks, software, information or just advice, without anybody walking into your store, you might as well close shop. The mall is your environment, as the World Wide Web is the environment of your website. You have to advertise your offline store as you must your online website, and traffic is your life blood, as shoppers are to an offline store.

Without website traffic you may as well give up, as a shopping mall store would close its doors, so what can you do to attract the traffic that your survival depends upon? The answer to that question could fill a book – and a very large book! Much depends on how you look at it, but there are basically four different ways of directing traffic to your website:

1. Search engines 2. Online advertising 3. Offline advertising 4. Word of mouth, or buzz advertising.

We don’t have the time or space to go over all the techniques that you are probably use to hearing about. So let’s have a look at a couple of ways that are not talked about much but are very productive traffic generation techniques.

Search Engines

This is not about SEO because you will have read all you can about that. It works if you know what you are doing, but generally not if you just follow instructions by rote. However there are ways to use search engines to get to your web pages.

Smart pages is one technique that is used. Smart pages are created using keywords that people use in order to get information on the web. You create as many of these pages as you can using different keywords. Your visitors never see these pages, even though the spider can find these smart pages when they search the web. There is software that you can purchase to create these pages so you won’t end up with duplicate webpages.

When somebody using the search engine uses one of these long-tail keywords, the search engine is likely to have indexed your page using that keyword, and the visitor will be directed to it, right? Wrong! The visitor is directed to the landing page that the software directs it to. You can generate hundreds, or even thousands, of Smart Pages on your website, each based on a little used keyphrase, but when it is, the visitor gets to the page on your site that you have programmed it to: it could be your home page or it might be a squeeze page or a sales page.

That is just one of many techniques that can be used to direct search engine users to your website when they are seeking information with which you can provide them.

Online Advertising

There are many online advertising techniques that people use, including using blogs to advertise their URL and article marketing for the same purpose. Web2 sites have been used, but they are not very productive, but there are other options. You can get free links from your own Facebook page: for every website or blog you possess, and what about Twitter? You can advertise your website on your twitter posts. You can also use PPC, but not Adwords that can be expensive. Searchfeed offers good pay-per-click ads for 1 cent. If you use searchfeed, you can get by spending $25 a day, which equates to 2500 visitors to your website every day – for $25!

Offline Advertising

When advertising any product, any traffic that you can drum up is good traffic. Go to your local free newspaper, put an ad in it advertising your website URL. This has been proven to be a great technique for getting traffic to ones site. Sending out flyers through to mail, you can purchase mailing list on peel and stick labels of people that are interested in online business opportunities. Post cards are a great source of visitors to your website. Sometimes we forget that advertsing offline can be just as rewarding as advertsing online.

Buss Advertising

Many people are scared to try buzz advertising, but it can work if you have a good idea on your website. Audio postcards were a good idea that never took off – buzz advertising could have made them more successful. Get talking about your product, and get your friends and relatives to do the same. Leave business cards with your website lying around, and get posters going about it. The more work you put into buzz advertising, the more effective it becomes.

One thing that is for sure, is that you will always need traffic to your website. You will have to find what works for you. If you have not tried some of the ways mentioned in this article, you might be missing something who knows.

The importance of traffic cannot be overemphasized, and traffic generation techniques are of extreme importance to the future of your online business. Why? Because without visitors you might as well have no website at all.

Having a site that indexes high in search engines gives the feeling like having money in the bank. SEM, search engine marketing, is at the very heart of generating quality traffic to your site. When you have enough knowledge to insert the popular keywords in the search engines, you will yield a high result on the search engine results pages, also known as the SERPs, then you know you are advertising the correct way.

What do you do if you have the greatest website on the entire web for pet supplies? Your website’s address is your URL. Google, along with the many indexing spiders that it employs, will soon index your pet supply website.

Simply telling your friends to search for a common term, such as “pet supplies”, is not an effective way to ensure that your website will show up as the first listing. You’ll get in excess of 68,000,000 hits if you search the phrase “pet supplies” on Google. This is the reason as to why SEM is so vital. You have to exposure with the aim of people can discover you.

SEM will include SEO, which is search engine optimization, search engine submissions, search engine maps, local search methods, PPC (Pay-Per-Click) along with other search tools and keywords. The concept of PPC advertising is one of the most efficient ways to effectively market your site in modern search engines.

Simply stated, you join up with a PPC advertising company, create a small ad using the keywords that target your market. When a keyword you used for the ad is searched for, then your ad or advert will show up right along side the search engines results.

Using the proper keywords in your advertisement is essential to get maximum exposure within most search engines. To end up at your website all someone has to do is click on your ad when they are using the search engine. You pay the PPC company for each click when someone clicks on your ad. A great way to generate traffic on your web site is the following.

Keep in mind you should always use SEO on your web page. Websites use a certain standard called SEO for search engines. The better the SEO, the higher in rank your website will show up in search engine results. Site optimization begins with properly place keywords imbedded throughout the textual content of your site. You must take in to consideration how important it is to keep your website relevant to the information you’re trying to convey. Google appreciates those who click on forward links and other pertinent pages inside the text also.

One should not keyword stuff when using SEO. If your keywords are used out of context or over saturated, it will cost you in rank. You can find more detailed information about SEO for free online.

When you use search engine marketing, you should keep a few things in mind. Methods for generating traffic rely in some way on search engines. If you want search engine exposure, you will learn to use SEO in almost everything you wish to market. Advertising though world-wide web serach engines can be accomplished by using one of the manyt pay services that are readily available.

Some businesses employ paid advertising on major commercial portals in the Internet, in hopes that the traffic generated by these pages will eventually flow into their own company website. Others make use of the ingenious pay-per-click (PPC) system, which virtually requires no start-up cost on the part of the advertiser. He or she only pays for the amount of traffic that he or she generates through the public’s accessing his or her website through that particular link; no payment is made at the initial ad placement in various media.

In general terms, these two advertising methods are good solutions when you need quick traffic boosts in the shortest possible time frame. For a minimal amount of hours invested you can dramatically reduce the learning curve needed for the more traditional search engine optimisation. But as with everything in life there are advantages and disadvantages and search engine optimisation is definitely no exception.

If you were to begin cataloguing the sheer volume of existing online information you would become completely overwhelmed and extremely confused and very quickly. Services such as Google work hard at helping you sort through the clutter and confusion by delivering to you the most relevant search results based on your particular keyword searches. The tools offered by the search companies are becoming more and more intuitive each day, but ultimately these services must also work on their own business model to continue offering the service they do. Which brings us to our next point…

Google states that you must play by their rules if you want to use their services. They are expending a lot of energy ensuring that advertisers create ads with a high degree of relevancy to their advertised Web site. It therefore stands to reason that advertisers who stray from this requirement will be penalised to the extent of removing the advertisers listing from the returned list of search query results. This is to ensure a higher quality of advertised listings and guarantee more useful information will be returned to the search engine user. More relevant search returns; more perceived value in that particular search engine.

The primary aim should always be to provide quality information in a highly relevant context and target keywords that relate closely to your websites main topic or theme. Your search engine marketing should always retain a primary focus on studying which keywords yield traffic that benefits your business the most, then set about structuring your web site to meet this demand. Enter link building for your business.

The third and best long-term strategy for increasing traffic to your website comes from the process of link building. Our goal with this method is to obtain back links from other websites that demonstrate to the search engines we have a web site of authority. Back links are simply the term used for getting other websites, preferably of high authority themselves, to provide a link on their site leading back to our site.

Link building for your website can single-handedly offer the best returns for your SEO program. Over time, the experience gained will make you more effective at choosing potential link partners and other websites to publish your links on. The returns for link building can be twofold, the first is direct page visits from the link on relevant websites, the second is the search engine ranking boost that comes from attaining relevant links.

If the primary reason for attaining back links to your website is to prove to the search engines that you are an authority site, then it stands to reason that you must also create the impression of expertise and knowledge with everything that you do. With this impression comes an increase in perceived value and trust. This trust and increased authority will as a result attract more web sites wishing to be affiliated with you. And so the cycle continues…

Another way to do this is by soliciting the help of affiliate web pages. Businesses try to make affiliates by constantly reviewing products, articles, and services offered by other companies on their websites that could serve to complement the service or products to their own. This gives the other company greater impetus to provide links to the business because after all, it features their product. This also results in mutual referral, especially in the case of two complementary products.

Prior to canvassing a potential Web site to become your link partner, you should always be considering the suitability of the sites purpose. It would be counterintuitive to approach Webmasters who practice unethical seo techniques, who in the long run would do more harm for your site than good. It is also worth noting that prior to contacting a potential link partner, you should have some clearly defined benefits for why your prospect would want to link back to your site. As with any business transaction, people are more inclined to transact with you if they can see a direct benefit for them.

Relevance, congruence, and even similar reputability are just some factors that can make link-building campaigns more effective. With effective links, a business’s search engine ranking will increase.

He talks about how img alt tags don’t help your rankings any more but I think you should still use them for accessibility reasons.

Keywords meta tags? He does not use them anymore on his websites as Google gives very little weight to them today if any at all but again other search engines still use them for the rankings so it really depends if you are optimizing your pages for Google only or for Yahoo, MSN, Ask and others. If you are optimizing for all engines then it doesn’t hurt to include keywords meta tags, Google might not look at them but certainly will not “punish” you for including it on your website.

He also thinks that keyword density analysis is a waste of time but instead does an intensive keyword research and spends most of the time on that in any search campaign. Another good point he makes is about importance of getting Quality Contextually Relevant Links versus less valued links acquired through “link farms” or any similar link exchange program. I have to agree that is better to get 10 Quality Links than 1000 crappy, non-related links.

Another great tip he gives is on meta description tag. Latest research shows that it is not so much used for higher ranking but more of a marketing space. The description tag is what will show below your website title on search results page so what you include in description is what might get people to click and come to your website, if it “grabs their attention”. So use description tag wisely.

Here’s the video:

What do you think? Comment below.