Archive for » December, 2008 «

Tuesday, December 30th, 2008 | Author: Zeke Camusio

30-12-08This is the last part of the series and I want to share with you some amazing tips to convert website visitors into customers and customers into long-term clients.

Why Should I Believe You?
Your visitors don’t know you. Give them a good reason to believe you. The most common way of doing this is with testimonials. They are great because your customers’ word, unlike yours, is unbiased. If you can, get video testimonials. Audio testimonials work great too. If you have written testimonials at least include a photo of your customer and the city they live in, website, and any other relevant information. Testimonials signed by “John M.” are not very credible.

Case studies are awesome. I love them. We are an Internet Marketing agency and our strongest selling argument is case studies showing how we’ve helped dozens of companies make thousands of dollars online. Nothing is more powerful than a case study.

Other great options are photos or videos of people using your products. You can also use reports or surveys done by third parties to help you get your point across.

Empathize With Your Audience
People need to see that you understand their problem. Show them that you know how they feel. Show them that you are talking to them. Get the problem out there, appeal to their feelings, and then suggest a way to alleviate their pain. Remember that people buy on emotions and they justify the purchase with logic.

Don’t Be Everything for Everybody

Find your niche and dominate it. Don’t just take any customer that is willing to give you her money. Remember that people want what they can’t have. That’s why when women and men play hard-to-get they become still more desirable.

This is a funny story. A couple of months ago we were getting more clients then we could handle. We decided to stop taking clients that didn’t match our Ideal Client profile. So we posted this profile on our website and asked the visitors to read it and fill out an application if they fit the profile. We would then review the application and decide whether or not we would be a good match. The whole point was to keep just a few clients so we could give them personalized attention. Guess what happened? We started getting more applications than ever. The fact that we would hand-pick our clients made our service even more desirable.

Call to Action
I am surprised by the number of websites that don’t ask for the sale on each page. People won’t do anything unless you ask them to. Whatever your call to action is, make sure that it is on every single page. It should be the focal point. Some calls to action might be: Add to Shopping Bag, Checkout Now, Buy Now, Fill Out the Form for a FREE Consultation, etc. Whatever you want your visitors to do, ask them!

Use Conversational Style
I always wonder why some companies try to make simple things complicated. You want to impress your visitors with your product, your offer, and your prices, not with fancy, meaningless words. Instead of saying “Our objective is to increase the profitability level of web-based businesses” say “We Help Companies Make Money Online”. In fact, that is our tag line.

The Golden Rule of Copywriting
I left this one for last because I want it to stick in your head. There is one thing that you need to accomplish to make the sale: show your visitors why they will be better off with your product than without it. That’s it. People want to live a better life. If your product can help them do that and you can prove it, you will make the sale.

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Friday, December 26th, 2008 | Author: Zeke Camusio

26-12-08This is the second part of the series “How to Write for the Web”, the step-by-step blueprint for writing killer copy.

Spend Most of Your Time on the Headline

About 5% of the people will read your copy but 85% will read the headline. Spend as much time as you can coming up with a good headline. Many copywriters recommend writing at least 50 headlines before choosing one.

Anticipate Objections
Prospects often make the same objections. You know your market better than anybody so come up with some common objections that prospects will make and answer them. Every product has flaws. Some companies write their copy hoping that the readers don’t find any objections. Big mistake, they will. So you better include all the objections in your copy and resolve them.

Make Your Copy Credible

Never make anything up and don’t write things that sound too good to be true. If you are showing some case studies from people who have obtained great but uncommon results, make sure you make it very clear. People will think “well, I might not be able to get those same results, but if I could just get half of it…”

Provide All the Information that Your Prospects Need to Make a Decision

It is very common to find websites that feature products with incomplete information. If you are doing it on purpose hoping people will call you to ask you questions, forget it. It doesn’t work like that. You don’t make deals by hiding information.

Minimize Risk
If you sell software, offer a trial period before people have to pay for it. If you sell informational products, offer a 100% Money Back Guarantee and let them keep your product just for trying it (it’s not like you are going to hack their computers and delete the ebook that they bought from you anyway). If you sell shippable goods offer 100% money back and, if possible, free return shipping. If you offer consulting services, offer a free consultation. Your prospects don’t know you, help build trust in you. Give something before you expect to receive.

Make them “Feel” the Product
Let’s say you sell handbags online. People can’t touch them so you should write copy that appeals to the senses. Talk about the smell of fine leather, the texture of the outside, and the softness of the cloth. Make them “feel” it.

Use Social Proof
We live in a community. We care about what others do. If a new restaurant opens in your town, you walk by on Friday night, and it’s empty, chances are you will never give it a try. Now let’s say that the same restaurant opens and every time you drive by you see a huge line of people waiting. You call to make a reservation and they are booked for the next two months. I bet that now you can’t wait to get in. The restaurant is the same but your perception of it is not. Use social proof to show your website visitors that others are buying your product and love it. Use testimonials, case studies, and a list of your clients.

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Tuesday, December 23rd, 2008 | Author: Zeke Camusio

03Do you want to discover how to write web copy that makes your visitors reach out for their wallets and buy your products? These tips will teach you how to write for the web.

Use Short Sentences
Don’t try to use fancy words. Get right to the point and make it simple. If a sentence looks too long, it probably is. Most of the times, long sentences could easily be broken up in two, three, or even four short sentences. Mix sentence lengths to make the text easier to read.

Avoid Text Cluttering
Text cluttering refers to those boring and long paragraphs that seem impossible to read. Some tips that might help you:

- Don’t go over 6-7 lines per paragraph.
- Don’t use the whole screen width, stay within 550-600 pixels wide.
- Use bold, italics, underlined text, and highlighting to make some sentences stand out.
- Use bullets, they are very easy to read.
- Use subheads to break down long text.

Get Your Reader to Say Yes!
Ask questions that your readers will say yes to. By saying yes they are identifying themselves with the problem you are presenting and they are qualifying themselves as people who could benefit from reading your copy. An example: “Do your feet itch? Do you wake up at night scratching them?”

Your Goal is to Get Your Readers to Read the First Sentence
Getting people to read your first sentence is 80% of the battle. Use graphics, captions, and headlines to make them feel like they HAVE to read the first sentence. Do you know what the goal of the first sentence is? To get people to read your second sentence.

Do Your Homework
Before you start writing your copy you need to find out what your prospects buttons are. There is usually one main reason people buy and usually three to five secondary reasons. Find out what are the “reasons behind the reason”. Your prospect might want to make more money, but her ultimate reason might be financial freedom or to spend more time with her family.

Find out what motivates a prospect to buy and write your copy around this concept. I’ve read many copywriting books and almost all of them teach you “the magic words that cause your readers to buy immediately”. I don’t believe in magic words. Your prospects are smarter than that. Don’t manipulate them. Learn what they want and give it to them.

Use Stories
Stories work because people love reading them. Would you read my copy if I started it like this: “On March 16 I received a little box. The mailman delivered it and then ran away. When I opened it, I couldn’t believe what was in there…”?

Use stories to tell your facts. Your copy will be a lot more entertaining and your readers will be glad you did.

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Wednesday, December 17th, 2008 | Author: Zeke Camusio

17-12-08Video marketing is a fairly new term. It means producing videos and posting them to several video sharing websites to boost your website traffic and get your name out there.

5 Reasons Why Video Marketing Is Great
1. Google is showing more and more videos in the search results.
2. Producing a video is very inexpensive and posting it is free.
3. Most video sharing services such as YouTube have several tools to help people spread the word. Think about it. People actually market your videos for you.
4. Millions of people promote their websites using articles, but just a small percentage of them use videos. The competition is a lot less fierce.
5. Video communities are a lot more active than article communities. It is not uncommon to post a video on YouTube and get 1,000 comments in a month!

5 Steps to Producing a Video
1. Decide what kind of video you want to record (talking head, based on a PowerPoint presentation, from your computer screen, interview, etc.)
2. Get a good microphone and a camera. It doesn’t have to be a professional camera. Sometimes a simple digital camera is enough.
3. Write the script or prepare the content. Do a practice run first.
4. Record it.
5. Do some minor editing using free software such as Windows Movie Maker. You will probably need to trim out the end and the beginning, and add a watermark with the URL of your website.

Where You Can Submit Your Video
YouTube – http://www.YouTube.com
Google Video - http://video.google.com/
Yahoo Video - http://video.yahoo.com/
FlickLife - http://www.veoh.com/
Blip - http://blip.tv/
Crackle - http://crackle.com/
Flurl - http://www.flurl.com/
BoFunk - http://www.bofunk.com/
Vimeo - http://vimeo.com/
Flixya - http://www.flixya.com/

A Case Study
In case you are still not 100% convinced that video marketing is an amazing tool to drive massive traffic to your website, listen to this. Last month we recorded four videos for a client and distributed them to the services mentioned above.

We used some tricks, picked the right keywords, and created some backlinks to them. Then we social bookmarked them, submitted their RSSs to some RSS search engines, and we finally pinged all the pages that we created. All this took us 4 hours. In 6 days, our client’s videos had 150,000 views! Do you realize what that means? 150,000 people discovered our client’s company in less than 6 days. He got 1,746 visits and $11,235 in revenues from that campaign. His investment was $215. Are you a video marketing believer now?

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Tuesday, December 16th, 2008 | Author: Zeke Camusio

16-12-08Podcasting is blogging with audio instead of text. Essentially, you post an MP3 file instead of an article.

5 Reasons Why Podcasts Are Great
1. An increasing number of people are downloading new podcasts every day.
2. Unlike TV, podcast can be played whenever the listener wants.
3. People can listen to them in their cars on their way to work or when they go for a run. You will get their full attention.
4. There is a lot less competition in the podcast market than there is in the article market.
5. Podcasting is a lot easier and less time-consuming than blogging and getting your articles published.

5 Steps to Producing a Podcast
1. Download Audacity at http://audacity.sourceforge.net/download/ or any other audio editing tool.
2. Get a good microphone.
3. Write the script (so the podcast doesn’t sound improvised and amateurish).
4. Record it in a noise-free environment.
5. Apply the noise-reduction filter in your audio editing software and save the podcast file.

Where You Can Submit Your Podcast
PodOMatic - http://www.podomatic.com/
Podcast Alley - http://www.podcastalley.com/index.php
iTunes - http://www.itunes.com/
Yahoo Podcasts - http://podcasts.yahoo.com/
Digg Podcasts - http://digg.com/podcasts
Podcast Directory - http://www.podcastdirectory.com/
Podcast Pickle - http://www.podcastpickle.com/
PodFeed - http://www.podfeed.net/
Odeo - http://www.odeo.com/
Digital Podcast - http://www.digitalpodcast.com/
Podcast.net - http://www.podcast.net/
Singing Fish - http://search.singingfish.com/sfw/home.jsp
Blog Universe - http://www.bloguniverse.com/
All Podcasts - http://www.allpodcasts.com/
Big Contact - http://www.bigcontact.com/
Collectik - http://collectik.net/collectik/
PodNova - http://www.podnova.com/
PodTech - http://www.podtech.net/home/

How to Save a Lot of Time When You Submit Your Podcast

I absolutely love these two tools because they submit your podcasts to the major podcast directories for free and they save you a lot of time.

PodPusher - http://www.podpusher.com/
Pod Submitter - http://www.podsubmitter.com/submit

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Friday, December 12th, 2008 | Author: Zeke Camusio

061Any online business needs to do two things right to get sales. They have to get traffic and they have to convert those visitors into paying customers.

This post will give you some amazing ideas to increase conversions. But before I start with my list, let me give you a warning. If your website is not getting any traffic, focus on that first. A friend of mine called me the other day and she told me that he was worried because she wasn’t getting any sales from her online store. I asked her how many hits a day she was getting. She laughs and said: “How am I supposed to know that?”

So the first thing we did was to install Google Analytics and the reason why she wasn’t getting any sales became evident: in seven days she got 13 visitors. If traffic is your problem, focus on that before you start working on tweaking your website to increase conversions.

Now, if you are getting several clicks a day and your conversion rate is too low (less than 2-5%, depending on the industry) then this post is really going to help you.

Make it easy for your visitors to contact you
Is your phone number visible at the top of every single page? Is the Contact Us page easy to find? Once people reach your contact us page, are you providing them with a contact form, email address, a phone number, and mailing address? If you have a fax number, include that, too.
Even if you have a contact form, include an email address. People might not want to email you at that moment but they might want to have your contact information for future reference. Make it easy for them.
Have a toll-free number. It’s only $10 a month. And display a physical address, not a PO Box. Most people don’t want to deal with online companies that do not have a phone number and a physical address displayed on their website.

Make information easy to find
First, use your analytics tool to find out what information people are looking for on your website. Maybe there is one product that gets a lot more attention than all the others. Once you’ve found out what information people are looking for, make it more prominent and easier to find. Don’t bury it “three clicks away”.

Have intuitive navigation
If you expect people to figure out how to get to where they want to go on your website, a majority of them will leave. The navigation is not where you want to get “creative”.

Your website is a marketing tool
A nice design is really important, but good copy is equally important. Don’t depend on cool graphics to make the sale. Use your words to convince them to buy from you. In my opinion, each website has to answer two questions using bullet-points:

  • Why your visitors should buy what you sell
  • Why they should buy it FROM YOU. (What sets you apart from the competition? Make sure that what makes you different from your competitors is of value to your customers.)

Make the text easy to read
Some tips:

Keep your sentences and paragraphs short. Most long sentences can be broken down into two or even three sentences. Don’t go over 6-7 lines per paragraph.

Use bold text to highlight the most important part of each paragraph.

Use bullets as they are a great way to summarize your main points.

Show your accreditations
If you are a member of the BBB or your local chamber of commerce, show the badges on your website. If you process credit cards online get VeriSign verified and get PayPal verified if you accept PayPal. If you’ve earned awards or are linked to an industry association, your website is a great opportunity to show your credentials.

Reduce sign-up and checkout times
Have you ever gone to a website, clicked on the Sign Up link and the form was so long that you decided not to fill it out? It happens all the time. If a piece of information is not vital to your business, don’t ask for it. If you really need to ask for a lot of information, get the names and email address in the first step. That way, if they don’t complete the registration/checkout process at least you know who they are and can remind them to finish the process later.

Avoid mistakes with your contact form
If your contact form has a CAPTCHA (that weird strings of characters that you need to type to prove you are human), get rid of it. CAPTCHA codes are annoying, and depending on your audience 10-50% will leave if you ask them to prove they are human.

Avoid having a “clear” button next to the “send” button. Many people browse the Internet intuitively. They don’t read everything they click on. If they spend 5 minutes filling in a form and then erase all the information by clicking on the wrong button, chances are they are not going to go over the whole process again. What is the purpose of a Clear button anyway?

For one of our clients we increased their inquiries by 27% by getting rid of their CAPTCHA code and the clear button. Do you realize how big that is? A tiny change increased their revenue by 27%!

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Thursday, December 11th, 2008 | Author: Zeke Camusio

072You might be wondering why I wrote the word “GROWING” in all caps. Because that is exactly what you need to be doing right now. Many business owners freak out and they hide in their caves waiting for the bad times to pass by. That doesn’t make any sense. If you are just waiting until you see the light at the end of the tunnel, your ship will most likely sink.

I would like to share with you some ideas to grow your business during the economic crisis.

Profit from your current customers
As obvious as this idea may be, you will be surprised with the number of business owners that sell a customer just once. Call your previous customers and find out how you can help them. According to statistics, someone who bought from you in the past is five times more likely to buy from you again than a new prospect.

Offer as much value as you can
These days, consumers and companies are more careful with their expenses. Give them great deals. It’s time to start running some specials!

Get out and meet people
Join networking groups, ask your customers for referrals, invite prospects for a coffee. Your chances of growing your business are not very good if you spend most of your day behind your desk.

Create alliances and find new strategic partners
Leverage all your relationships. Find other businesses that serve the same market that you do but are not your competitors. Find a way to work together with them and refer business to each other.

Educate yourself
If you can afford it, go to seminars and events in your industry. If your budget doesn’t allow you to do that, then read some books and blogs. Also contact your chamber of commerce; they will often host business classes. You will need new ideas and knowledge to stand out in a market so competitive.

Reduce your overhead
In case you didn’t know this already, your overhead is killing you. Go over your last quarter’s expenses and analyze each item by asking yourself this question: “is this costing more money than it is making?” If the answer is yes, get rid of it immediately or you will have cashflow problems really soon (if you are not having them already).

One word of warning: don’t cut your marketing budget for those campaigns that are actually working. Some people freak out and their brains stop working. Don’t let that happen to you. If something is working, do more of it, not less.

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Tuesday, December 09th, 2008 | Author: Zeke Camusio

081Internet is, in my opinion, the best tool ever invented. I just love it. It has made starting companies a lot easier. However, most Internet companies fail to make any money. Why is that?

Is starting an online business different from starting any other business? Yes and no. Yes, the technologies change. And no, most basic principles still apply. You still need to understand your target market, learn what they want, and provide them with it in a cost-effective way. You still need to learn what their buttons are and how to push them. You still need to know about finances, leadership, management, marketing, and sales.

Don’t think for a moment that just because you open a store online and Internet reaches the whole world people will buy from you. Venture capital firms call this “The China Myth” because so many entrepreneurs pitch investors on the idea that all they need is 1% of the Chinese market to be successful. The question is “How do you plan to sell to that 1%?” Don’t even think that because so many people have an Internet connection and you open an online store “someone will bite”. It just won’t happen unless you make it happen.

As an Internet Marketing consultant I’ve spoken with several people who start an online business, a month later they haven’t made enough money, and they decide that the business was a bad idea so they start a new one. Another month down the road they are in the same place. Nothing happens.

So many people are always looking for the next “hot” thing to do, the next “hot trend”, the next easy way to get rich overnight… so many people follow the so-called gurus who make money online by selling them e-books on how to make money online!

Don’t give up so easily. When you start a company, work on it until it becomes successful. Don’t give up after a few weeks. The truth is that a couple of weeks aren’t enough to figure out the right business model.

Another mistake I see often is people thinking too small and not considering the monetary value of their time. A woman told me the other day “I have an online business. Last month I made a profit.” When I asked her how much money she made and how much time she invested she said “I made $45 last month and I usually work 3 hours a day.” After doing the math we figured out that she was making $0.68/hour. McDonalds pays a lot more than that. I said “Good, that’s a great start. Now let’s think big.” and we went over a plan that helped her make $1,500 the next month. Your time is worth money. If you want to become rich overnight or make some easy money, don’t waste your time. If you are determined to building a solid business, Internet is one of the best things that could ever happen to you.

One last thought. I often see people spending 80% building a website and 20% promoting it. You should do it the other way around. If people don’t know about your website, your website doesn’t exist.

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Thursday, December 04th, 2008 | Author: Zeke Camusio

09After redesigning over 100 websites I now have a pretty good idea about the most common web design mistakes.

If your site is making some of these mistakes, fix them now! Otherwise, you are leaving money on the table every single day.

Bad Layout
Your navigation and layout have to be simple, obvious, and intuitive. If you expect your visitors to figure out how to get to where they want to go, prepare for them to leave. Don’t make them think, make it obvious for them. Forget about “cool” navigation. Make it simple and elegant.

Slow Websites
Keep your website light so it loads fast. There is nothing more annoying than those “Loading… 1%” messages. People don’t want to wait. Studies show that if a website takes more than 8 seconds to load, 21% of your visitors will leave and if it takes more than 20 seconds to load, 43% of your visitors will be gone! This is a tragedy. There are ways to achieve excellent designs that are also very light.

Bad Colors Choice
Most web designers are not professional graphic designers. They never learned what colors work well together and most importantly, what different colors mean. Make sure your website uses the right colors for your market and it is not hard on your visitors’ eyes.

Bad Music Selection
In most cases I am against music at all. I am talking about music that auto-plays (background music). A lot of people will visit your website from work and they don’t want annoying music popping up. Music also makes websites slow to load. If you decide that you want to have music on your website, choose the right one for your audience.

Under Construction Pages
What is the purpose of “Coming Soon” pages? This looks really unprofessional. Just don’t have them at all! Who wants to read an “Under Construction” message? If you want to generate curiosity about a section that you will be adding soon, have some teaser copy and possibly a list-building box: “Sign Up to Be Notified When We Release this Feature”.

Information is Hard to Find
This happens very often with your phone number and email address. Let’s say you own a restaurant. Most people visit your website to get your phone number and make a reservation. Put your number at the very top and make it huge!

Ads on Commercial Websites
If your website is supported by advertising, displaying ads is your business. But if your main stream of income is not advertising, get rid of ads. They look really unprofessional and they make you look needy.

Low-Resolution Images
There is nothing that makes me angrier than web designers who use low-resolution images. They look terrible! There are ways to optimize images so they are both light and visually appealing.

Splash Screens
Don’t waste your visitors’ time. They are on your website to learn about your company and services, not to see how talented your graphic designer is and the cool animations he can do for you. Don’t force them to take an extra step. They want information. Give it to them.

Passive Marketing
Your website is an excellent opportunity to tell prospects why your company is better than the competition, why they should buy from you, and ask them to take action. Be proactive.

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Monday, December 01st, 2008 | Author: Zeke Camusio

10Many of our clients ask us this question time and time again. “How do I promote my blog?” We are glad that they ask because we have a blog of our own and we have become very successful at driving huge loads of traffic to it.

If you always wanted to know how to promote your blog, this article is exactly what you are looking for.

Write quality content
It might sound obvious to most of us that your blog’s content has to be excellent. In many cases, however, bloggers write mediocre posts and spend most of their time trying to drive traffic to their blogs. Granted, they get a fair amount of visits, but those people will never come back. Converting one-time visitors into subscribers is by far the most important thing you need to do to keep a steady flow of traffic visiting your blog.

There is another excellent reason to write quality articles. The better your content is the more people will link to your blog. And as we all know, quality incoming links are the key to high search engine rankings.

Let your readers subscribe
There are two major ways people can subscribe to your blog: email and RSS. Give them both options. RSS is a great technology but a huge percentage of your readers are not very familiar with it.

Submit your feeds
Every time you write a new post, submit its RSS/Atom feed to the major feed directories: FeedAge, FeedRaider, FeedAgg, FeedFury, GoldenFeed, and BlogDigger. Also submit your blog’s main RSS if you haven’t done so yet.

Ping your posts
When you ping your posts, the search engines are more likely to index them faster. These are the ping services that I use:

http://rpc.pingomatic.com/
http://api.my.yahoo.com/RPC2

http://bblog.com/ping.php

http://blog.goo.ne.jp/XMLRPC
http://bulkfeeds.net/rpc

http://coreblog.org/ping/
http://ping.cocolog-nifty.com/xmlrpc
http://ping.rootblog.com/rpc.php
http://ping.syndic8.com/xmlrpc.php
http://rcs.datashed.net/RPC2
http://rpc.blogrolling.com/pinger/
http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping
http://rpc.weblogs.com/RPC2
http://xmlrpc.blogg.de/

http://xping.pubsub.com/ping/
http://api.moreover.com/RPC2

http://www.blogdigger.com/RPC2
http://ping.weblogalot.com/rpc.php
http://www.weblogues.com/RPC/
http://ping.bloggers.jp/rpc/
http://ping.feedburner.com/
http://api.feedster.com/ping
http://www.popdex.com/addsite.php
http://ping.rootblog.com/rpc.php
http://www.lasermemory.com/lsrpc/

Social bookmark your own posts
Create an account with the top social bookmarking services and bookmark each new post that you write. These are some of the ones I use: Digg, Delicious, Propeller, Technorati, Reddit, Google Bookmarks, Yahoo Bookmarks, MSN Bookmarks, Blinklist, Linkagogo, Wists, Kaboodle, Furl, Faves, and StumbleUpon.

Add social bookmarking capabilities to your blog
Give people the opportunity to bookmark your posts. There are several plugins that work for most blogging platforms. My favorites are ShareThis and Sociable.

Send a press release
I use PRWeb Premium service only when I launch a new blog for a client. It costs $360 so you can understand why I don’t recommend doing this for every new post you write. For new posts I use the free option of PR.com. You don’t get maximum exposure but it’s free and it only takes a couple of minutes to send a release using their service.

Submit your blog to the major blog directories
These are my favorite free blog directories. List your blog in all of them!

http://www.blog-search.com/
http://www.blogarama.com/

http://www.blogbunch.com/
http://www.blogcatalog.com/
http://www.blogcode.com/

http://www.blogexplosion.com/

http://www.blogflux.com/
http://www.bloggernity.com/
http://www.bloghop.com/
http://www.bloghub.com/

http://www.bloglisting.net/
http://www.blogrankings.com/
http://www.blogtoplist.com/
http://www.britblog.com/
http://findingblog.com/
http://www.geekyspeaky.com/links/

http://www.getblogs.com/
http://www.globeofblogs.com/
http://www.iblogbusiness.com/
http://www.lsblogs.com/
http://myblog2u.com/
http://www.quickblogdirectory.com/
http://sportsblogs.org/
http://www.theweblogreview.com/index.php
http://www.weblogalot.com/
http://www.dmoz.org

There are also some really good paid options, if budget allows:

http://www.joeant.com/
http://www.alivedirectory.com/
http://www.avivadirectory.com/
http://blogs.botw.org/
http://www.bloggeries.com/
http://www.bloguniverse.com/
http://www.business.com/
http://www.site-sift.com/
http://www.umdum.com/

http://www.uncoverthenet.com/
http://dir.yahoo.com/

Web 2.0 social networks
Submitting your articles to the most popular Web 2.0 social networks can seriously boost your traffic. For a comprehensive list of these networks check out this link: http://www.theoutsourcingcompany.com/blog/internet-marketing/the-best-websites-to-publish-your-articles/

Forums and blogs
Interact with your community, provide useful tips, and answer their questions. Become an authority in the field and invite them to visit your blog. Don’t spam them, though. Make sure that you are helping them, not just posting your blog’s link everywhere.

Use viral marketing
I think that all blogs should have an option to “Tell your friends” about it. Sure, your visitors can copy your link, open their email clients, and send your blog’s link to their friends. But if you don’t make it easy for them, chances are that they won’t.

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