101 Ways to Get More Web Traffic

1.Write and submit articles . It is a classic, but it works. This will be indefinite traffic stuck in the search engines for you. Write quality unique articles, not articles that are rehashed or provide no insight to readers, which is a huge problem these days.
2.Write and submit press releases, think prweb after you do one.
3.Write and ping blog entries. Always make sure to link back to your website with your blog posts. Try making multiple blogs and have them all link back to one main site.
4.Make sure your website is listed in DMOZ: http://dmoz.org/.
5.Advertise your website in the appropriate categories at Craigslist. Try posting your ads in the most populated cities in the world.
6.If a niche related forum that you frequently visit allows signatures, then make sure to add your website url in there.
7.Make sure to view related products on Amazon.com. You can try and take some customers from your competitors here by providing your own url if the product is similar.
8.Review websites in your niche on Alexa to try to take some of their traffic by including a reference back to your site.
9.Review some related products on epinion.
10.If you purchase a product that you actually like, then feel free to give an individual respect when respect is due and leave a testimonial. You should be able to get some traffic from that website if your testimonial is left with a url.
11.Whenever you send an email to someone, always add your website url as a signature.
12.Keep updating content on your websites/blogs? try at least once per week.
13.Tag blog posts at social bookmarking sites, especially at http://del.icio.us/.
14.Add photos to your blog with appropriate keywords.
15.Tag blog photos at Flickr.
16.Politely ask your readers to subscribe to your rss feeds.
17.Try coining your own term. Might want to trademark it if you smell that it will become popular.
18.Encourage readers to comment on your blogs.
19.Include translation for your websites/blogs, especially in Chinese.
20.Do not be boring, write about something that a wide select of people would want to know about.
21.Make sure to edit your writing (unlike what im doing ).
22.Comment on other related blogs.
23.Make a custom 404-error page for your website. You can provide a link back to your main website or even try to monetize it by offering a related affiliate program within your niche.
24.Sponsor a charity, most charities will link back to your website, and you are also doing a good deed .
25.Sell an item on eBay as a charity auction. Most charities will link back to both your auction and your main website.
26.Start a publicity campaign, do something that individuals in your niche will take note of.
27.Brand your website with a logo and a slogan/catch phrase. Think IBM.
28.Hold a crazy contest that people in your niche will talk about. This will equal more links and traffic to your website.
29.Build a tool that individuals in your niche will love and enjoy. Then give it away for free. If the tool is helpful, then you will get quality one-way links to your website.
30.Contact small newsletters sources offline and submit articles to them.
31.Become friends with editors of an offline publication.
32.Give speeches offline. Start small and local. Also, do not forget to participate in toastmasters meetings in your area.
33.Have a GREAT product. All of the marketing/advertising in the world will do you NO good if your product is sub par.
34.Make something innovative. If you are selling information, what makes your content something you cannot get from the local bookstore, Barnes and noble or even eBay for that matter?
35.Is your product groundbreaking? Will you leave individuals with no choice but to talk about your product or service?
36.Are you selling something that wide groups of people want to know about but there is limited/scarce knowledge?
37.Write good content, if your writing is good then people will share it with their friends. In addition, webmasters will use it as content on their website with a reference back to your article, or at least they should.
38.Spark emotions. If you get people emotional about something then they will most likely talk about it.
39.Get a custom t-shirt made with your website url on it, and wear it often.
40.Build a list of subscribers. Your list is like a golden asset to you if utilized correctly.
41.Write tip articles, such as ?Ten easy tips to blank-blank-blank.?
42.Buy traffic from the search engines by utilizing one of their PPC campaigns.
43.Open up a myspace account and find targeted friends so that you can promote your services to them. Do not spam people, myspace is cracking down on spammers and are starting to sue people.
44.Solicit a link from your local chamber of commerce.
45.Have an easy to remember domain name. If your domain name is too long or not memorable then people may forget your site.
46.Add a bookmark option to your website/blogs.
47.Purchase the misspelled versions of your domain name and have it redirect to your main one.
48.Use keywords in your image alt tags. For example, <img src="image.gif" alt="keywords go head" />
49.Make sure to include appropriate keywords in your title tag, search engines show more prominence or importance to keywords here.
50.Place appropriate keywords in your anchor text when linking.
51.If you have a profile anywhere online, always include appropriate keywords and link back to your website.
52.Try to get links from websites within your niche with a high pr (pagerank). Some The more one-way links (inbound links/backlinks) you have to your website, the higher your pr will become. Pagerank is important because websites with higher prs tend to have a higher search results in Google. It is a no brainier that if you can get number one for a competitive keyword then you will have enough traffic that you can handle? oh by the way its all free targeted traffic to remind you.
53.Outsource grunt work. Time is in essence money?. you can hire individuals at freelance services to send emails, request JV proposals, or to answer questions from prospective or current customers.
54.Offer something for FREE. Abracadabra is not the magic word, FREE is. It is like a worm on a pole for a fish in the water?. its bait! Offer a free mini course or free ebook to help collect more subscribers. You can always offer a backend to monetize on this opportunity, such as an affiliate product for example.
55.After someone orders from you offer a one-time offer that compliments your product. For example, if I offered a traffic ebook, then after the individual purchase it would make sense for me to offer a traffic conversion bonus for a limited time only.
56.Become the virus within your niche. Make yourself the bug and have people talking about your product. When people talk about your product then you can induce the viral effect. However, you must give people a reason to talk about you, and being like everyone else is not one.
57.Do your research and find expensive niches to tap into. A good way to do this is to find how expensive someone is paying for a keyword on a PPC search engine. If you can sell items that are more expensive more often then it is a quicker way to get rich .
58.Become an active respected member of niche related forums. You can do this by offering quality posts. Hint Hint, it is not the number of posts you make, it is the quality. Remember, quality or quantity. Many useless or negative posts will have people looking at you funny.
59.Test, test, test. Your flushing money down the toilet if your not testing to see what campaigns are bringing you in the most money compared to which ones are costing you money. When you test, you can eliminate the campaigns that are costing you dollars so that you can properly maximize your marketing efforts. Without proper testing, you are pretty much lost and can?t improve. You can only guess to what has or what is working. With proper testing, you do not guess, you know.
60.Stay up to date on what is going on in the world, you can monetize off hot topic trends.
61.Network, when you know more people you can find people that can help you get what you need.
62.Offer an affiliate program for your product or service. Make sure to let your satisfied customers know that you have one, if they like your product then they will be even more delighted to know that they will get money for referring you.
63.Write and give away a free ebook or report. It does not have to be long as long as its quality information neatly formatted and put together. You can also make a brandable ebook or report and allow affiliates the opportunity to brand their affiliate links in there to pass on to the next individual. You can then send this ebook to your subscribers or submit it to ebook directories.
64.Add viral components to your blog such as social bookmarking options, and a refer a friend option.
65.Be funny, people like something that will make them laugh and they will spread it for you if it is a genius idea.
66.Syndicate your content by using an RSS feeds on your website.
67.Answer people?s questions on Yahoo! answers with a link to your website in the sources area.
68.Put a link in the ?about me? section of your eBay profile.
69.Make and upload a viral video to you tube. Use appropriate keywords in the video description for your target audience.
70.Record an informative podcast and submit them to poplar podcast directories.
71.Provide helpful answers for Google adsense on their help forum with a link back to your website. Go here to check it out: http://groups.google.com/group/adsense-help
72.Get people to comment and add content to your site. When they do this, they will provide you unique content, no need to pay for ghostwritten articles.
73.If you cannot get JVs, then try to bribe webmasters for sponsored advertising space on their newsletters.
74.Include a media section on your website so that you will give the media an easy way to stay up to date on what your company is doing.
75.Try to teach a class at your local community college or university. The more exposure you get in the public, the more credibility you will receive.
76.Make a screensaver and make it easy for individuals in your niche to download it. Have eye candy graphics combined with your company logo to brand yourself.
77.Write something controversial and spread it freely to your target market. It can be something as idiotic as the Da Vinci code, but as long people talk about it, its a successful campaign. A few hints, something controversial is something that goes against established beliefs in your market.
78.Write and publish a book. Having your own book is a quick way to gain credibility.
79.Take a guru in your niche out to lunch, and pay for it.
80.Start an organization or club about something. This can be done online through Yahoo! or Google groups.
81.Volunteer. Donate your time to a good clause?you can always network with people and form connections at the same time.
82.Get involved in your community and try to run some type of outreach program.
83.Offer good customer service, you may be surprised on how many referrals you get just be having a reliable one.
84.Consider adding a direct mail marketing campaign to your marketing.
85.Put an ad in your local yellow pages to get some local customers. Yellow pages tend to be more successful then newspaper ads because individuals are looking for a particular service when they are browsing through the yellow pages as opposed to newspapers.
86.Post bulletins in your local supermarket. However, since not everyone may carry a pen or pencil, place your contact information and url on strips on the bottom so that individuals can rip it off and take it with them.
87.Host your own commercial so you can put ?as seen on TV? on your products.
88.Conduct surveys and publish them. These make you appear as an expert in your field of study.
89.Break a record or shoot to be in the Guinness world records for something.
90.Make a sitemap for your website.
91.Use a favicon for your site.
92.Make your visitors more involved in your website. You can help accomplish this by adding CGI scripts to your site.
93.Make sure you have no broken links on your site, and make sure that your website shows clearly in all browsers.
94.Find domain names that get traffic, purchase them, and have them redirect to your website.
95.Spell correctly whenever using keywords in writing.
96.Look at sites related to your niche to try to figure out how they get their traffic.
97.Properly optimize your website for the right keywords.
98.Try to avoid java scripts on your website as much as possible.
99.Do not use frames on your website.
100. If your website becomes popular and starts getting lots of traffic, try switching to a dedicated server. The longer you site is down equals the more lost visitors you will have.
101. Write a quality 101 article about a steamy topic that people want to know more about in your niche .
Doug
(c)http://www.imutopia.com/
http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=246573
Feb 17th 2007 5:33 am

David Meerman Scott keynote at BMA 2009 national conference

By Al Morel

If you are in the world of business, marketing, website design, etc. you are probably fielding some array questions about social media and what it?s all about.

This is one of the best resources I?ve found out there for explaining all this linkedinfacebooktwitterblogmyspace drama. I use it as a starting point when someone asks me abpit the subject.

This is a presentation that David Meerman Scott gave to the Business Marketing Association last year. It?s targeted for business-to-business applications but can be easily transferred for all types of uses.

Enjoy!

David Meerman Scott keynote at BMA 2009 national conference from David Meerman Scott on Vimeo.

The Five Biggest Mistakes Companies Make on Their Websites

The Five Biggest Mistakes Companies Make on Their Websites

People often ask whether we see any big ?mistakes? on their website. We usually respond with this question, ?What are the goals for your site?? Assuming your goals are to generate new leads or sell products and services, here are five ?mistakes? we often find on a website: 1. No Planning or No Tracking Who do you want to come to your web site? What do you want them to do once they get there? How many visitors turn into leads or customers? Analytics tools like Google Analytics can help you to see how people found your site and what they do once they get there. With this information you can take action to improve your marketing as well as the site content to help customers and prospects find you and reach their goals. Google Analytics is free and easy to configure for reporting on your specific goals. 2. Weak or Missing Call to Action Your customers come to your site to solve a problem. They want to quickly learn about what you offer, and, if there?s a fit, to buy your products or engage your services. Are you making it easy and quick for them to achieve those goals? If you?re not, then you?re losing customers. Every page on your site should have a clear call to action to make it quick and easy for your customer to achieve their goals. 3. No Email Registration Maybe your customer isn?t ready to buy. Then, you need a Plan B so that you can keep in touch and stay top-of-mind. Our recommended strategy is to get site visitors to sign up for your newsletter. Of course, if you don?t make this easily available to your customer, then they?re not going to sign up. We recommend offering customers the opportunity to sign up for your newsletter on every page of your site. 4. Lack of Search Terms Your analytics tools will show the terms that people use to find your site via search. If there are terms that describe what you want to be known for, does your site incorporate those search terms explicitly into its content? Are you linking from your content to additional information on your site using those exact terms for which you want to be known to your customers? It is important to use the terms customers are most likely to use in search engines. In other words, if customers find your site using the search term ?cool widgets,? then when they land on your site they should see content discussing ?cool widgets? and linking to content about ?purple cool widgets.? You can find out which terms are most popular on Google Insights for Search. 5. Not Enough Traffic to Your Site Search Engine Optimization is a start, but it needs to go beyond metatags and keywords. Setting a public relations campaign with timed press releases that link back to your site is key. Additionally, if you want your customers to find you before they find your competition, consider a Paid Search (Pay-Per-Click) Campaign.

Disable Click Sound in Internet Explorer (IE) for Windows XP/Server 2003/Vista

If you want to disable the click sound in Internet Explorer found in Microsoft Windows XP, Windows Server 2003 or Windows Vista, then follow these steps:

1. Open the Start Menu / Settings / Control Panel
2. Double click on the "Sounds" control panel. In this control panel, Scroll down in the events window until you reach "Windows Explorer" and under this you will find "Start Navigation".
3. Click on "Start Navigation" and you will see a .wav file appear in the "Name:" box. This is the sound that is associated with the click sound.
4. In the "Name:" drop down menu, select (None) and then hit "OK". This will set no sound to be played when you're navigating on the web.

Keep in mind that this will remove the click sound from hitting buttons and links on all web sites you visit until you set it back. This is a safe change to make and does not affect any other functionality of your Windows Explorer browser.

Difference between system standby and hibernation

What is the difference between system standby and hibernation?

In standby/sleep, the power is kept on to the memory, the processor is bought to a stop and devices are put into low power mode. However there is still some activity as the memory still needs to be refreshed (otherwise it looses its contents) and the low power mode of devices may not be all that low. Unplugging the computer from the mains (or removing/flattening the battery) will result cause a cold reboot with possible data loss. Startup from standby is very quick as the devices need to be woken and the CPU restarted.

In hibernate, the memory is written to the hard disk (in the hiberfil.sys file), along with the state of devices and the CPU and then the power is turned 'off'. The computer is still burning a little power as things like keyboard/mouse/LAN power on features are supported. However, unlike standby, unplugging the computer from the mains doesn't result in a col boot or data loss as everything needed is stored on the hard disk. Startup is still pretty quick as the memory needs to be read from the disk, the devices reactivated and the CPU restored to the same state is was when the hibernate started.

Vista goes one step further with its 'hybrid sleep' mode which writes all the same stuff to the disk as a hibernate does, but then keeps the system in standby mode. If the power hasn't been interrupted then the restart is the same as a standby restart, or if the power has been interrupted then a warm boot from the hibernate info on the hard disk is used.

However, almost all computers are never completely turned off unless the power/battery is removed. PC power supplies have a special power lead to provide 'standby' power that is always there even if the computer is 'off'. It doesn't matter if the computer is in standby, hibernate or a full shutdown, that standby power is still there. This means the power supply is still alive and chewing power.

Most ATX power supplies have a kind of efficient 'baby' power supply built in to supply this standby power when the main power supply is off. However I had one very inefficient power supply that drew nearly 60 watts even when the computer was fully shutdown! I'd say it didn't have this baby component and used the main power supply circuit all the time. I've since 'retired' that power supply!

So to answer the original questions "is this what some people mean when they say they never really turn their computers off?"

Basically yes.

Does hibernation consume any power whatsoever?

Yes, although often (but not always) it is a relatively small amount of power (20 watts or so).

Put your hand on the case above the power supply of a computer that has been off for a while and you will often still feel warmth as the PS supplies the standby power.

Turn a hard drive into a fridge magnet

Affordable new local search website

OddBodd.com is an affordable new local search website that offers the advantage of a video introduction when someone clicks on your listing. They are offering incentives for people who sign up prior to their official launch. You can see examples (including my listing) and get more information by visiting their website: http://oddbodd.com/

ZBot trojan attached to flight ticket confirmation

I just received the following email message in my inbox:

Subject:Your Online Flight Ticket N 49444

Greetings, Thank you for using our new service "Buy airplane ticket Online" on our website. Your account has been created:
Your login: israel@leichtman.net Your password: passR5AW
Your credit card has been charged for $601.66. We would like to remind you that whenever you order tickets on our website you get a discount of 10%!
Attached to this message is the purchase Invoice and the airplane ticket. To use your ticket, simply print it on a color printed, and you are set to take off for the journey!
Kind regards, Southwest Airlines
If you get such an email DO NOT OPEN THE ATTACHMENT

Attachments are .zip files with filename E-ticket_N7399294.zip (random number) with inside a E-ticket_N7399294_and_Invoice_for_N73992943442.exe.

On an infected computer the trojan will create a new files like %System%\ntos.exe, %System%\wsnpoem\audio.dll, %System%\wsnpoem\video.dll and creates a new directory %System%\wsnpoem.

It also adds and modifies entries in the Windows registry and make connection with a server for http://*********.ru/alaska/alaska.bin. It opens random TCP ports in order to provide backdoor capabilities.

Hacking autorun for USB flash drives

How to: Quick intro to hacking autorun for USB flash drives

Disclaimer: This tutorial is designed to show existing vulnerabilities and should only be used on systems you own, or have permission to execute this on. Removable media devices don?t deploy malicious code and steal data, people do.

Autorun will not work with ?regular? USB flash drives the way that they do with CD-ROMs, but there are some tricks that you can do that will come very close. I say ?regular? in that as many may know there are ways of modifying U3 drives so that they appear as CD-ROMs on Windows systems and can thus use autorun to silently run your ?tools? without any indication anything is happening. The U3 hack however is a bit more complicated, I will do another ?How to? on that later. For now let?s just discuss how we can create an autorun.inf file on a regular ?ol USB flash drive that will do some interesting things.

Also it is important to mention that some of these techniques will even work if autoplay is disabled!

First, although we cannot have an application run automatically with a traditional USB drive, we can make it so that when a USB drive is plugged we have Windows make a suggestion to the user and all they need to do is click ?OK? to a specific application or script you have deployed to the flash drive.

First in Notepad create a file called autorun.inf and save it to the root of your USB flash drive of choice. In the autorun file put this:

[autorun] icon=lilguy.ico open=howdy.bat action=Click ?OK? to play this fun game!

The first parameter is ?icon? this tells Windows what icon to use as the icon image for the drive etc. This is important for the social engineering portion of the trick, you must consider your target. The image you choose should help instill trust in the application they are about to run.

The ?open? parameter indicates the program you wish to run, this can be an executable, or as in this case a .bat file. You could even call a .bat file which calls a series of executables. Go crazy.

The next parameter is ?action? this is what will trigger the autorun dialog to appear. This text will appear in the dialog box along with your icon, so you probably want make this friendly, something like ?Fun Game,? you probably don?t want to put something like ?Click ?OK? to install backdoors and trojans!?.

Now unplug your flash drive and then replug it in, a dialog box like this should now appear:

So this is not as good as automatically running the application, but is useful nonetheless and there have actually been successful simulations where this has been used. A security consultancy used this technique as a proof of concept to test a credit union client of theirs. Several drives used this simple technique to run exectue a trojan that sent some simple data to an external email account. They scattered the drives in the parking lot, several employees picked the drives up on their way into work and within a short amount of time the email account they had set up was receiving emails.

Now we have our basic autorun.inf setup. But notice that if you click cancel and then click on the drive you just see the contents of the drive. However we can take this one step further, if the user is smart and their spidey senses are tingling from the dialog menu that appears and they click cancel, with the addition of one more line of code to the autorun.inf file that will automatically execute the code we specify when they click the drive either from ?My Computer? or Explorer. This is different than a true autorun as it still requires a user to take an action to exectue the application, but still a significant security risk.

Add these lines to your autorun.inf file

[autorun] icon=lilguy.ico open=howdy.bat action=Click ?OK? to play this fun game! shell\open\command=howdy.bat

OK save it and then unplug and plug the drive back in again. This time when the prompt appears hit ?cancel?. Now go to double click the drive under ?My Computer?. The application will automatically execute. By the way, this second portion will still work even if autoplay is disabled on a system and is actually more dangerous than the dialog in my opinion.

So what if we don?t want to execute a command on the drive and just open a webpage? You could execute Explorer in your .bat file to do this, or in the exectuble you run, but there is a quick and easy way to do this in the autorun.inf file. Replace the last line with this instead:

[autorun] icon=lilguy.ico open=howdy.bat action=Click ?OK? to play this fun game! shellexecute=http://www.usbhacks.com

Retrieving an Entire website

wget: Download entire websites easy v1.0.4 (en) Fooling sites to let wget crawl around wget is a nice tool for downloading resources from the internet. The basic usage is wget url: wget http://linuxreviews.org/ Therefore, wget (manual page) + less (manual page) is all you need to surf the internet. The power of wget is that you may download sites recursive, meaning you also get all pages (and images and other data) linked on the front page: wget -r http://linuxreviews.org/ But many sites do not want you to download their entire site. To prevent this, they check how browsers identify. Many sites refuses you to connect or sends a blank page if they detect you are not using a web-browser. You might get a message like: Sorry, but the download manager you are using to view this site is not supported. We do not support use of such download managers as flashget, go!zilla, or getright Wget has a very handy -U option for sites like this. Use -U My-browser to tell the site you are using some commonly accepted browser: wget -r -p -U Mozilla http://www.stupidsite.com/restricedplace.html The most important command line options are --limit-rate= and --wait=. You should add --wait=20 to pause 20 seconds between retrievals, this makes sure you are not manually added to a blacklist. --limit-rate defaults to bytes, add K to set KB/s. Example: wget --wait=20 --limit-rate=20K -r -p -U Mozilla http://www.stupidsite.com/restricedplace.html A web-site owner will probably get upset if you attempt to download his entire site using a simple wget http://foo.bar command. However, the web-site owner will not even notice you if you limit the download transfer rate and pause between fetching files. Use --no-parent --no-parent is a very handy option that guarantees wget will not download anything from the folders beneath the folder you want to acquire. Use this to make sure wget does not fetch more than it needs to if just just want to download the files in a folder. Copyright (c) 2000-2004 Øyvind Sæther. Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.2 or any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no Invariant Sections, no Front-Cover Texts, and no Back-Cover Texts. A copy of the license is included in the section entitled "GNU Free Documentation License".