Archives for July 2011

There are three hurdles to get videos popular on YouTube, so you can generate traffic back to a site. The first two are up to you, but I can help with the third one.

1. Pick a topic people are interested in
2. Produce a decent video
3. Optimize the video

I've got some experience with testing on YouTube with over 500 videos on one of my accounts alone: youtube.com/affiliatetip

So anyway, once you've got a video, you need to optimize during the upload process, and there are a few key items where you can improve the potential exposure of your video, and therefore the resulting traffic to you.

The title is your headline, and you should treat it as such – make it descriptive and simple. If you're reviewing a product, use the complete product name as the title.

The description is the magic field where you can set yourself up to get traffic, because if you put a complete URL in the description, it will turn into a live link.

Some people just plant the URL before the actual description, but I think that makes for a bad user experience, so I go with something like this…

Shawn Collins of http://blog.affiliatetip.com answers a question from an affiliate about whether he should be worried that he will get caught when he blatantly violates the terms and conditions of the affiliate program.

That's just the first line of the description – you can see the whole thing at the Should Cheating Affiliates Worry About Getting Caught? video on YouTube.

Next up are the tags, which are the keywords that best describe your video content.

Finally, there is the category. YouTube currently lets you choose from about a dozen categories, so just pick the one that's closest to what you are covering in the video.

Here is an example of a video I did in 2007 that continually drives traffic for me.

In this case, I probably should have used a direct affiliate link for the product, but it's been great for introducing visitors to the site.

But I have tried another spot for URLs that went direct to the products, and that has been successful, too. I've included the URLs right in the video like this one.

I was a bit surprised at the number of people who actually typed in the URL from being in the video like that, and that short link redirects to an affiliate link.

A big plus on having it in the actual video is that when people embed it to their site, your description doesn't show, but the link in the video is still there.

If you use both a URL in the video, as well as one in the description, be sure to make each unique, so you can track their effectiveness.

I've touched on using email previously with Using Email to Drive Traffic to Your Site in chapter five, and I can't emphasize the importance of email.

Simply put, using the RSS from my site(s) to automatically generate email newsletter for my subscribers is one of my biggest traffic sources.

The great thing about reaching your audience by email is that they have double opted-in to receive your email, so they're genuinely interested in consuming your content.

Now it's up to you to deliver.

The cool thing about RSS to email with AWeber is that you can set up automatic email newsletters to feature excerpts from your posts, and when your subscribers click to read more, they are back on your site.

I explained back in chapter five how you can set up RSS to email with AWeber.

So take a look there to set up your RSS and enable more people to make their way to your site(s) from email.

I use a couple different tool to harness the power of Twitter to drive traffic back to my sites, and it is routinely one of the best referrers of visitors for me.

If you're not familiar with Twitter, it's a social network where people can communicate messages in 140 characters or less.

And those messages, or Tweets as they are known, can include links.

So you want to have a presence on Twitter, and if you don't already have an account, go and sign up right now at Twitter.com. But you should have already registered for Twitter, right?!

While you're there, be sure to follow Extra Money Answer on Twitter @xtramoneyanswer.

After you're all set with your Twitter account, there are two other services I use and would recommend: SocialOomph and TwitterFeed.

SocialOomph is a service to send out time-delayed Tweets.

They have a lot of other useful features, too, but the time-delayed Tweets are my favorite.

These aren't going to be Tweets about your site, per se, but just part of your contribution on Twitter. Nobody wants to follow an account that just has links blog posts.

So, it's important to post on Twitter to interact with your followers and initiate conversations.

That's not as easy if you're traveling or really busy in some other way. In those cases, you can set up Tweets to go out later with SocialOomph.

One way I use the service is to enter in dozens of Tweets about different events and times for things taking place during the Affiliate Summit conference.

My other vital service is TwitterFeed, which connects the RSS feed from your blog to Twitter.

When you sign up with TwitterFeed and then get it all connected to your RSS feed, every time you make a post to your blog, it will automatically post a message to your Twitter account, too.

One thing I would suggest that you tweak in the Advanced Settings in TwitterFeed is to select “Title Only” under Post Content. Then your blog post title will appear with a link to the post.

There are some other options, but you can ignore them without any problem.

NetworkedBlogs is an app on Facebook that enables you to pull your RSS feed into Facebook to post automatically to your Facebook profile and/or one or more Facebook pages.

I mentioned the service previously, but wanted to reiterate it, as it is the tool that enables Facebook to be one of my main traffic sources.

The process to create an account with NetworkedBlogs is straightforward. Just submit your blog name, url, topics covered, the language of your blog, and a description.

After you complete the registration process, simply follow the instructions from NetworkedBlogs to connect your blog to your Facebook profile and/or page(s).

This not only provides an efficiency for you, as each blog post automatically gets pushed to Facebook, but it exposes your blog to a bigger crowd.

The posts from NetworkedBlogs include the blog post headline, a summary, an image from the post if there was one, and a link to the post.

They offer a free and premium version of NetworkedBlogs.

I pay for the premium option at a rate of $19.99 a month, which comes with a handful of perks, including more exposure on NetworkedBlogs and quicker pulling of feeds to get posted.

Either way, it's a useful tool, and you could always upgrade later if you thought it would make a difference to you.

People that use your content without permission are lousy thieves, and you should embrace them.

Wait… what?

That's right. There is an upside to the creeps that steal your content.

They are typically too lazy to change anything, including links you've included in your posts. So any links to other parts of your site will still be there to link back to you.

Don't freak out when you see people trying to make money on your words.

Help them by selecting the option so the RSS feed displays full text, as I mentioned in chapter four: configuring WordPress.

Also, Google is taking steps to assist authors of original content to get their due credit.

Take a look at the Webmaster Tools: Authorship page for information on optimizing your site, so Google can tell that you were the content author.