There is one hard and fast rule in generating income for your website: A steady flow of website traffic. If no one goes to your site, it hardly bares a chance of generating an income. Many sites have tried and failed in doing so, and these results to the sites demise. It takes money to maintain an income generating site; it also takes money to make money.

BUT, it doesn’t take a whole caboodle of cash to generate website traffic for your site.

Ever wonder how does big hit sites drive traffic top their site? Most of them are spending tons of money to drive the traffic to their sites, investing in many advertising campaigns and different forms of marketing schemes and gimmickries. This is all worthwhile because, well, they are what they are now, high earning, big hitting websites.

You don’t have to do this if you don’t really have their resources. There are many ways to generate low cost website traffic without having to spend what you don’t have or can’t afford. Many people have banked on high cost methods and have ended up losing their shirt over it.

Here I present to you the Top five ways to generate low cost website traffic that could help your site a whole lot. Even if you only get a small percentage of successful visitors in to client ratio it still works especially if you get a high number of website traffic.

Exchange Links

This is a sure and proven method. Rarely would you see a site where there is no link to another site. Many webmasters are willing to exchange links with one another so that they could produce more public awareness about their sites. You’ll soon see and feel the sudden upsurge of the traffic coming in to your site from other sites.

A major prerequisite in exchanging links with other sites is having the same niche or content as the other site. They should share a common subject so that there is continuity in the providing of service and information to what interests your target traffic.

Exchanging links also boosts your chances of getting a high ranking in search engine results. It is common knowledge that search engines ranks high sites that have inbound and outbound theme-related links. With a good ranking position in the search engines, you will generate more traffic in your website without the high costs.

Traffic Exchange

This is like exchanging links but on a different higher level. This may cost a bit more than exchanging or trading links but could be made cheaper because you get to earn credits. You can use those credits when viewing others traffic, while you earn credits when someone views yours.

Traffic exchange services are the viewing of another’s site or page. This is done vice versa where a site can use your sites contents and so can you to his or her site. You both benefit from each others efforts to generate traffic. The other sites visitors can go to your pages and know more about your site as well as theirs. Once again the public awareness of your sites existence is boosted.

Write and Submit Articles

There are many e-zines and online encyclopedias in the internet which provides free space for articles to be submitted. If you want to save costs, you can do the articles yourself. There are many freelance writers who are willing to write for you for a small fee, but to save money, it is wise to do those articles yourself.

Write articles that are themed along with the niche of your site. Write something that you have expertise on so that when they read it, they can feel your knowledge about the subject and will be eager to go to your site. Write articles that produce tips and guidelines to the subject or niche your site has.

Include a resource box at the end of your article that can link them to your site. Write a little about yourself and your site. If you provide a light, information-laden and interesting article, they will go to your site for more.

Make a Newsletter.

This may sound like hard work because of all the articles you may need to use to build a newsletter but on the contrary, this is not so. There are many writers and sites that are willing to provide free articles as long as they can get their name in on your newsletter. This will also provide free advertising for them as well.

As your newsletter gets pass around, you can widen your public awareness and build an opt-in list that can regularly visit your site.

Join Online Communities and Forums

This only requires your time and nothing else. You can share your knowledge and expertise with many online communities as well as your website. You can get free advertising when you go to forums that have the same subject or niche with your site.

Share your two cents and let them see how knowledgeable you are with the subject. As you build your reputation, you also build the reputation of your site, making it a reputable and honest business that could be frequented and trusted by many people.

Subscribe to Gerardas Norkus’ free Internet marketing newsletter at http://www.netmarketingstrategies.com and discover heaps of tips, tricks and secrets that will quickly boost your online sales and profits.

So you don’t have a way of managing all of the customer responses coming through your inbox? I can relate, please let me share a personal story.

When I first started my online business, I didn’t know what an autoresponder was, and I was intimidated by setting one up on my site. I simply had an HTML form set up that would send e-mail address of people that wanted my newsletter straight to my inbox. I can only imagine the amount of money that I was leaving on the table. I had no way of responding back to my potential customers. When I saw a newsletter signup come into my inbox, I would copy and paste a reply back to them.

The times have changed. Not only is the above situation not acceptable, but there’s no way you can effectively grow your business without an autoresponder.

After all, since you now have your website set up to sell your e-book, you are going to need a way to handle the various types of correspondence being sent to you from potential customers.

Autoresponders are an effective and economical innovation (software program) designed to “respond� to any messages a website receives. Thousands of online businesses use autoresponders to send a confirmation “thank you� notice when anyone registers with their email address on the site. Think of them as an answering machine for your website.

Using an autoresponder is a critical component to having a successful ebook business. Not only do you need to respond to messages and inquiries, you must implement an email sales campaign to promote your ebook. If you were to try to manage the emails yourself, the task will eventually become impractical and extremely time consuming. You could hire someone to answer them, but when your site is receiving several hundred hits a day with an average of 50% registering to receive more information; you would need to hire several people thus making the cost very prohibitive. In business, “time is money and money is time�, and online, and autoresponder is the only solution.

If you do not have an autoresponder, you will lose sales, and lots of them. If you are not using an auto email program to get these non-committals to return to your site, you will not be able to sell your ebook to them. It’s really as simple as that.

How does an autorepsonder work? By utilizing the information you input into the programs, the Autoresponder will automatically answer any email or sign-up your site receives. You can even program a variety of responses and how many times you want to send your customers an email; plus any sales receipts, download information and access, support problems – can all be effectively handled by an autoresponder. Obviously if there is a support situation, you or your webmaster will need to step in and fix the problem, but the autoresponder can easily let the customer know that someone will be emailing them soon to help.

Due to the nature of your business (e-book sales), you will need a variety of email autoresponses depending upon the situation. A typical list of responses for an e-book sales site might include some or all of the following:

1) Thank you response for visiting and signing up;

2) Free newsletter emailed to all sign-ups;

3) Special offer emails to entice purchase;

4) Purchase notification/invoice;

5) Thank you for purchasing;

6) Informing of your newest e-book;

7) Offer free course/bonus for signing up;

Notification of problems/complaints received from customers;

9) Notification of feedback received.

Basically the uses of the program are endless, in fact anything that you would want emailed to several customers can be handled through an autoresponder. And just like the almost limitless uses, there are a vast number of autoresponder companies vying to handle your e-business correspondence.

Many sites have free autoresponder programs available which handle minimal email tasks; however because you are trying to sell ebooks, you should look for a system or service that does not limit the capabilities of your emails. Make sure you get unlimited email size plus you will need the ability to send multiple emails to the same person over a period of time. Remember, the reason for sending several emails over a course of time is based on the fact that most customers (about 60% – 70%) do not purchase on their first visit. If they are interested in learning more about your ebook, they will sign up for more information. And this is when you use an autoresponder to send multiple targeted information emails to drive those reluctant customers back to your site for the purchase. You will also want to have the ability to track your emails to assess the effectiveness of such a campaign. We use www.aweber.com and www.getresponse.com is also a good solution.

The messages you will want to send will depend upon the reason for the need to respond. One way you can handle this by having multiple email addresses for your site. Here is a short list of email addresses you will need:

1) support@yoursite.com

2) Yourname@yoursite.com

3) Yourassistant@yoursite.com

4) sales@yoursite.com

If you need additional addresses, do not hesitate to set them up and use them; the more you categorize your customer’s emails, the better you, your webmaster and your autorepsonder program will work. The autoresponder will know the difference between newsletter sign-ups, customer logins, purchases, and so on. This is all configured in the program, as is sending notification emails for receipt of a customer’s inquiry at one of your listed email addresses. Again, you or your webmaster will manually have to answer any inquiries received at a site listed address. Unfortunately at this moment in time, autoresponders cannot read and answer emails. I would imagine that sometime in the not too distance future this will become a possibility. One can always hope!

Now you understand why autoresponders are an important if not critical ingredient in developing a productive, functioning, 24/7 e-book sales site. Using one will help increase your sales, drive those hesitant potential customers back to your site and take care of those everyday tasks associated with having a professional and courteous Internet business. Offering excellent customer service is a significant business building tool, especially for online businesses when a customer assesses you and your site faster than you realize.

David Hennebery is the owner and creator of a very successful ebook called ebookprofitmaker. He is regarded as an expert in eBook marketing and selling. To contact him email support@ebookprofitmaker.com. Receive 35% ebook discount for reading this article.For more details visit http://www.ebookprofitmaker.com/articleoffer.html

Earlier the blogs were synonymous to the personal weblogs or online diaries. But this is no longer the case. Yes, the horizons of blogging have taken an all together new facet today. A number of professional or business blogs are published these days by various web masters. These blogs are especially written to raise the links on their websites. Moreover, these blogs successful attract the visitors and direct the targeted traffic on the official sites of the blogger.

Thus getting links and posting links to the blogs have become an important part of the blogging today. To understand how does the links from blog comment work for your link promotion, read the article further.

Let’s begin with the basics. Blogging is an interactive activity on the internet. Any one can write any piece of information, commentary, article or any other form write-up and get it published on a common web page as a blog.

The other bloggers post their comments or reply to the posted blog or forum and thereon begins a chain of replies as a thread of comments. People from all over the world share their views and reviews via blogs on the diverse subjects all over the planet. The blog can include their hobbies and interests, marketing strategies, business related discussions, language, country or the culture related issues and everything else.

Simply because the blogs cover every variety of subjects, they have become a good source of link for many websites. A good comment for a blog encourages a person to add your link to the other website. By indexing links from blog comments you can draw huge attention on your website.

Apart from the regular written blog comments, you will also find some audio comments for a blog. No matter what your profession is, you will find links from the blog comments for all kinds of blogs. The blogs are even written for a particular profession.

You can also get the blog comments for your business field by writing articles on that theme. You can expect the blog comments from all sorts of people. By posting a blog you invite other people to comment on your idea or piece of writing. If your writing is good then you can expect great comments from highly skilled people. This increases your chances of getting good links from blog comments.

Always remember that your blog must be interesting. Write what people want to read. Make the people to follow your blogs. Write interesting articles, so that no one misses it. Superior content will attract people to recommend you. Do not forget to mention the signature at the end of a blog. Carefully add a signature link to your blog so that the interested people can revert back to you.

Blogging is a marketing strategy where you get personal with your clients or the readers. When you reply to the feed back received from the other people, it opens up the line of communication further. A greater number of positive comments will attract the other websites to add a link to your website.

Links from blog comments is one of the three sources of links from the blogs. The blogs further contain a link list called blog roll and internal links to the other weblogs.

Discover advanced link building and link popularity tools and resources as a Member of: http://www.Link-Advantage.com

Link popularity tools are widely used by various webmasters to judge their internet presence. Even the web crawlers or search engines are using the effective popularity tools to measure the rankings of the various websites. You can also use the latest tools such as link popularity software, online optimizers and prowlers to boost up the page ranking of your website(s). By using these tools, you would certainly gain a greater number of targeted traffic as well as business contacts.

First of all lets us discuss the basics of link popularity. A website is always ranked on the basis of its link popularity. And link popularity is nothing but measuring the number of quality links on your website. Your website can support certain links—inbound outbound and reciprocal links— with other websites in the forms of text link, banners or advertisements. The more quality links you have, the more popular is your website. So, a good link popularity tool or software would drastically increase your page rank provided by the major search engines.

So using link popularity tool is a must for you these days. They help you increase the targeted traffic on your websites. The smart software are even capable of finding out the right links for you. The right links are the ones that are related to your website. For example: if you have a perfume website then the website providing information on perfumes will be made to link to your website by these software.

Apart from this, they also track your link popularity regularly. This further helps you take the apt steps for improving on your links and the top page rank do not seem far any more.

Links if placed properly can bring the most of the internet traffic to your website(s). But how can you find out which ones are the right software for you? Simply, pick a link popularity tool that helps you place your links at the proper places. These software are adept at finding out the websites with good page ranks for you. They find the websites that are related to your websites only. This means that no useless link will be added to your link directory and your link popularity will increase smoothly.

The more quality links you have on your website, the more traffic your site will find. The link popularity tools are one of the most important ways to improve your website ratings in the top search engines. In fact some technical experts hold the view that you should not imagine a good rating by the search engines without having a good network of links.

These tools are easy-to-install and can be installed on every type of operating systems.

Adding more to the benefits of these advanced tools, they can also help you link to your competitors. Some software in the market ensures you to link up with the best competitors in the market. After adding a link to the website, the link popularity tools automatically send an email for reciprocal link request.

You also get the complete reports of quality links with the help of these link popularity tools. You will get to know with whom you are having the links. This way, you can utilize the link popularity tools to enhance the performance of your website.

Discover advanced link building and link popularity tools and resources as a Member of: http://www.Link-Advantage.com

Have you seen one of those post-it pop-up? The one that looks so realistic, with awesome shadow effect. If you don’t know what I am talking about, try opening the following website:

http://myhobbybooks.com/wowpop

They look awesome don’t they?

And something like this is always good for your web marketing campaign. One reason, it never gets blocked by pop-up blockers. And another, it really grabs the attention of your web visitors.

This is good when you want to increase subscription rate to your ezine, or promote an affiliate program, or even increase sales.

But you wonder, how do they do it? You thought that you can achieve similar result, and you try, and try, and try… you tried GIF image, JPG image, none of those can get the job done.

But there’s one thing that you just don’t know. Many pro web programmers know this, but not the normal web designers … maybe even most web designers don’t know how to do this.

The secret is in PNG image format.

PNG image format is the little-known image format that you can use on the web. PNG image format is unique because you can do the Alpha effect with it. The Alpha effect is where you set transparency factor on certain areas on the PNG image. That is what makes the shadow looks so real.

With the Alpha effect, you can set transparency factor from 0% to 100%. So it can be 30% transparent, 50% or even 79%. Have a look at the pop-up again, and take a close look at the shadow – Now you know how it’s done.

But there is just one problem – Internet Explorer don’t really support PNG image format. While you can still call PNG image format using the IMG tag, Internet Explorer ignores Alpha factor. In Internet Explorer, PNG image just don’t appear properly.

So how do we solve this …

Luckily you can still call PNG image in Internet Explorer and have the Alpha reflected using a special CSS command. It’s the AlphaImageLoader().

But this will lead to another problem. Before you can call the PNG image, you first need to identify the browser your web visitor is using. If the visitor is using Firefox, Opera, Netscape or any others, you can call the PNG using the IMG tag. But if it’s Internet Explorer, you need to use the AlphaImageLoader().

And of course, this can always be solved with a bit of Javascripting. And with a little more Javascript and CSS, you can have the PNG image floating over your web content. You can even make the pop-up disappear using the OnClick event trigger.

If you’d like a complete code and PNG image to your own photorealistic post-it pop-up, try visiting WOW Pop-Up. Below is the URL address for WOW Pop-Up where you can get a free set of the code and the PNG graphic.

Iszuddin Ismail published the WOW Pop-Up and is giving away free code and PNG graphics to your own photorealistic post-it pop-up. Get a set of four PNG pop-up graphics for free. http://WOWPopUp.com

Over the years there has been lots of discussion in the SEO community regarding building links to a web site. The debate is particularly heated at the moment, as Google rolls out its “Jagger” upgrade.

Let’s start with what we mean by inbound links, also called backlinks. These are links from other sites to your URL, which direct the surfer directly to your site when the link is clicked. The basic premise is that if you have high ranking sites linking to you, then you must yourself be important and have valuable content, and hence you should rank highly. The way in which Google ranks sites is called Pagerank and can be seen as a green line on the Google Toolbar representing ranks 0 to 10. As Google states

PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page’s value. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But, Google looks at more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves “important” weigh more heavily and help to make other pages “important.”

Important, high-quality sites receive a higher PageRank, which Google remembers each time it conducts a search. Of course, important pages mean nothing to you if they don’t match your query. So, Google combines PageRank with sophisticated text-matching techniques to find pages that are both important and relevant to your search. Google goes far beyond the number of times a term appears on a page and examines all aspects of the page’s content (and the content of the pages linking to it) to determine if it’s a good match for your query.

So, back to the question “Does having inbound links to your site help your site’s credibility”, and hence visibility when searched. The broad answer to this question is “yes”, but with a number of very important caveats which we will cover in the other sections.

OK, so backlinks are basically good, especially from high ranking sites, so how do we get them? The first way, and best way, is by having such great content on your site that all these high-powered sites want to link to you. Downside to this method is that it is slow and takes lots of time and effort on your part. But don’t worry, when anyone tries to build a level playing field there are always people out there that will provide work-arounds.

The first one was reciprocal links, whereby you say that you will link to a site if they also link to you. That’s stretching the original idea, but it’s not too bad because how many of these sort of links are you going to set up? Well, actually, some people have created thousands of such links between sites, maybe not what Google initially intended!

But then, due to the emphasis Google placed on link popularity, the concept of link farms was born. These are sites that link to other sites purely to increase the links to the site. Pay a few dollars and get thousands of links to your site. Too good to be true – you bet. Google hates link farms and sees these links as spam and will actively penalise sites that use such links. So, the first rule of linking is do not use link farms. The second rule is do not use lots of reciprocal links, Google can easily check this and the “Jagger” update that is currently rolling out seems to be particularly focused on penalising sites with lots of reciprocal links. The jury is still out on whether “themed” links will be treated in the same way. “Themed” links are links to sites that are very closely aligned to the same primary topic as your own site. If you think about this, it makes a lot of sense and is much more likely to be based on real content-based linking.

We believe another area Google is focusing on is how quickly your site gains backlinks. If your site is one month old, it is hardly believable for it to gain 100 real backlinks in that time. So, the third rule of linking is to ensure your links build in a realistic way. In all of these ways, Google is trying to ensure fairness and that’s why new sites are often held back in the results pages.

Finally, we should mention the sites that will improve your ranking – the Directories. There are many of these, but the most important is DMOZ, also known as the ODP. DMOZ is the Open Directory Project and is the largest, most comprehensive human-edited directory of the Web. It is constructed and maintained by a vast, global community of volunteer editors. It gets the name DMOZ from the acronym for Directory Mozilla, as it is administered by Netscape Communication Corporation. It’s Pagerank is 9 and hence a link from DMOZ will help your site. We recommend that everyone visits http://dmoz.org and attempts to get listed, it’s free. The Yahoo directory is also important and free for non-commercial sites, but $299 a year for business.

So, in summary, by far the best way of getting links is by having a quality site that other people want to link to. So again, we are back to content. If you provide quality information, over time, more and more sites will link to you, and if they are in the same business sector as you, so much the better.

And now a poem

Written by my partner, reflecting the Jagger update.

Just when you thought it was safe,

To step once more into the water,

Google throws in an undertow,

For doing things you didn’t oughta,

Just when the surfboard is glistening,

And you’re ordering champagne,

Google has been quietly listening,

And feels you need more pain,

Those link farms you visited,

Weren’t health farms after all

Reciprocal now is the term

For what Big G’s doing to you all,

Your trillions of two way linkages

Now millstones to make you stagger,

Your new nightmare shrinkages,

Brought to you today by Jagger,

A strident voice proclaiming links,

Are running quickly out of time,

Under the boardwalk of history,

Lying decimated all down the line,

This will not be the last time,

That your website is torn and frayed,

That Google will paint it black,

Or the devils sympathy card is played,

Just shine a light on your website,

Is it still under your thumb?

Or is it hijacked like flight 505,

By others who would become,

Your link promoting partners,

Who just ask your link return,

And now you owe the reaper,

And your harvest starts to burn,

Simmering in the torrid glare,

Of a Google bent on being cool,

Where everyone should fight fair,

Everyone obey the golden rule,

And slowly and inexorably we move,

Out of shadow and into light,

With every upgrade evening up,

The distance twixt wrong and right,

And every route 66 drives towards,

Eliminating devious spam-like crimes,

And ever inexorably inches forward,

Towards its own stated guidelines.

John Fowler trained as a Mathematician and has worked in the IT industry for over 30 years, much of the time in sales related functions. He now spends his time between being a partner in SEO Gurus and as a sales and management trainer for ICT companies. John can be contacted via http://www.seo-gurus.co.uk