Traffic Generation

I‘ve just read on John Thornhill’s blog that eBay will be banning the direct selling of digital items such as ebooks, audio mp3’s, domain names etc from March 31st 2008.

Sadly and quite arrogantly, eBay have deemed it necessary to only give a weeks notice on a policy that will dramatically affect the businesses of hundreds of sellers.

Targeted Campaign

The justification for the digital item announcement was that many ebayers were only buying/selling digital items to pad their feedback rating. This new policy will obviously eradicate that problem. It also appears to be part of a targeted campaign by eBay against feedback abusers, coming hot on the heels of their hugely controversial announcement to stop sellers leaving feedback for buyers.

Unfortunately, the business model of many vendors is to sell low-priced ebooks to generate leads and then upsell the buyer to higher priced items.

That model no longer exists.

It will however still be possible to market digital delivery items using eBay’s Classified Ad format. It costs $10 for a 30 day listing and allows you to link back to, and process payment from, your own website rather than through eBay. As nothing is bought or sold on eBay itself, no feedback mechanism is provided.

Also the ad stays up for the full 30 days so you can generate multiple leads/sales from the one ad.

Physical Products

The other alternative is to create physical products by burning ebooks to CD and delivering them by regular mail. Although the instant gratification of receiving an ebook within minutes will be lost, this may well be the way forward for many marketers.

Still, the biggest lesson to take out of this is never to place your entire business model at the mercy of one company.

Jack Humphrey has just released his 2008 version of the Authority Black Book, the Social Marketing Resource Guide.

Last year’s edition was downloaded over 40,000 times and provided some of the best hands-on advice for generating massive traffic to your blog or website using the power of social marketing.

It’s 67 pages of actionable content and resources and well worth checking out. You can download it free from here.

I‘ve just installed a very handy Wordpress plugin called Comment Luv after reading about it over at the Friday Traffic Report.

It encourages your blog visitors to post high quality comments by automatically putting a link back to the visitors last blog post.

Ofcourse, you’ll need to monitor the quality of comments closely to ensure they genuinely contribute to the conversation and aren’t just lame attempts to get a backlink.

However by default CommentLuv sets all the links to nofollow which should help keep the spammers at bay.

There seems to be a lot of positive feedback about this plugin and hopefully it will encourage more visitors to post comments and give this site more of a community feel.

Btw, if you don’t already have a Wordpress blog, plugins like this are just another reason why you should start one as soon as you can.

Anyway, check out Comment Luv below by adding your comment to this post.

I‘ve just read a fascinating post by UK Internet Marketer Frank Haywood about the SEO strategies he’s used to climb the Google Search Results for an extremely competitive search term.

For anyone using Wordpress in particular, his post contains tons of valuable advice regarding which plugins to use and how to fully optimise your blog.

But what I found particularly noteworthy was how Frank used the post as a list building strategy.

Here’s how he did it…

1. A few days ago, he made a regular post revealing that he’d managed to climb from page 30 of Google to page 19 for the keyphrase “Internet Business” in just 2 months. Now that may not seem like any great shakes until you consider that search term is highly competitive with over 19,400,000 competing webpages on Google.
2. In the same post he promised to reveal the exact SEO tips he used to improve his ranking in a future password-protected post (made today) but only for anyone signing up to his blog notification list.
3. He then password protected the new strategy-revealing post (using the Post Password functionality in Wordpress’ Write Post admin area on his blog). The post title however is still viewable to anyone arriving at his blog.
4. After posting, he sent a broadcast message out to everyone on his list to let them know the password.
5. Frank then offered to provide the password for $10 (which is money well spent in my opinion) to anyone not already on his list.

It’s certainly a novel approach for a blog. I havn’t seen it anywhere else which is surprising given how easy it is to password-protect posts in Wordpress.

I wonder if we might see a trend towards this type of subscriber-only or pay-per-view posting in the future?

What do you think? Post a comment below and let me know

Every month I attend a meeting of the Bristol Internet Marketing Mastermind Group.

It’s a meeting of fellow marketers from the South West of England and we get together to discuss what we’re working on, form business partnerships and learn new tricks of the trade.

Anyway, we had our last meeting a few days ago, and I picked up a useful traffic generation tip which I thought I’d pass on.

Here it is…

Say you want to get traffic to your blog or static website. Not an unlikely scenario I’m sure you’ll agree! Well, a good way to do that is to make useful and interesting comments on the high traffic blogs in your niche.

Ofcourse, it stands to reason that the first comments posted are the most read as they’re directly underneath the blog post itself. The problem then is how to track all the related blogs for new posts so you can be one of the first to comment.

That’s where Comment Sniper comes in…

It’s a neat little desktop app created by organic traffic expert Duncan Carver that notifies you whenever a new post has been made on a related blog.

You simply configure it to monitor the specific blogs you’re interested in and Comment Sniper does the rest.

As soon as it spots a new post, it flashes up a little message on your desktop (or it will send you a SMS text message using Skype if you prefer), so you can rush over and be the first to comment. Keep doing that over a period of time and you’ll soon have numerous quality backlinks pointing back to your blog.

A handy feature built-in to the software is the Blog Search utility. Just enter a niche topic and it will search all the major search engines for related blogs. It even displays their Alexa and Google Page Rankings so you can assess their worth.

Comment Sniper is 100% free, although you do have to register. Give it a try and let me know what results you get by making a comment below.

I’ll be tracking my results too and post my findings in a few weeks time.