‘Word of mouth’ advertising simply means spreading the words about a site, product or anything via humans. In other words, it is the most easiest, super performing and cheapest forms of advertising and/or marketing method. In our daily life, word of mouth is everywhere. Remember when your friend suggests you a song? Or a favorite restaurant? Or which car to buy? Or did they show you a amazing website they just found? How about that weight-loss product they which they used?

All of these are ‘word of mouth’ free marketing. It is a good method as long as your website, blog or forums falls under ‘general’ categories such as entertainment, music etc

Consumer vs Seller

How can word of mouth marketing benefit consumers?

I am no marketing genius, but i can tell you this. If i am about to buy a new car, i would definitely take advices. If i am going on a movie we would definitely watch the one which everyone seems to be talking about. Won’t you? As a result ‘word of mouth’ advertising is very beneficial to the consumers. Because it gives the us, the consumers the knowledge we need, the reviews, the experience and information of the product or simply the recommendation of what/what not when we need something.

For a seller, word of mouth is viral. If people are talking about ‘it’[assume 'it' to be whatever you want] then that ‘it’ is a hot money maker.Period. Every form of business uses the ‘word of mouth’ advertising methods. Be it by creating stunning advertisements for there products or creating controversial stories or reviews. This form of advertising cannot be out-beaten by any other. People are tend to do, to buy or to see what there family members, friends and everyone else is.

however its useless if you trying to sell something, do affiliate marketing, make money via adsense or cpa. because you are making your own family members and friends to buy something which isn’t worth the time or efforts you put in.

How can ‘word of mouth’ help small business/sites?

Specially on the Internet? Does word of mouth just means telling about your creations to your family and friends?

word of mouth is not limited to just ‘you telling your friends & family’ but in a more simplified sense, if your site is amazing and worth the time for your visitor then those visitor [who ever they are, from any corner of the world] will definitely tell others about your site, that is the word of mouth.

like how we come to find about sites such as facebook, youtube, blogger, bing, etc etc most of them are via word of mouth, not advertisements that you come across. Always remember content is king, no matter what your niche is, if you want to dominate it then concentrate on quality. Put your self in the shoes of your visitors and think like them.

Here is what i do, when i create a website, or a blog post or anything online. I first test it out myself and ask my friends to test it too. Then ask yourself,

• do i like this website?
• will i buy this product?
• is this webpage worth my time?
• am i enjoying the sites design?
• is this site user friendly?
• are these posts and information valid and worthy?
• Will this benefit me?
• Is this the right price?
• Are these information relevant to the topic?
• Will i recommend these to my friends?

be honest to yourself because you are visiting the site as a visitor and do what you would do while surfing other websites on the Internet.

How can i start the next ‘word of mouth’ revolution??

Easy there. Don’t get carried away, its not easy to get people talking. Specially for us bloggers, no one actually reads blogs these days – thanks to the countless number of ‘unwanted’ and ‘repetative’ blogs out there. But there is still hope.

Word of mouth is a very hard advertising & Marketing form. But it is very well worth the time & efforts you put in aswell.

There are always ways to make your site popular by ‘word of mouth’, how?

1. Create topics that are short, simple and to the point. Give your visitors what they are looking for, don’t send them on a wild goose chase.

2. Write about controversial topics, this would definitely get you lots of criticism, but on the other hand it is a good way to give short term boost to your website traffic, this method works best in sites related to celebrities and current world issues, etc

3. Comparison – compare a subject, a product or website with others or with yours. Give your honest opinion about these. This will help the visitors make a better choice while you play the role of a middlemen

4. Write about hot and current topics. Share your view, after all this is the Internet and the only reason you are going to be successful is by being honest to yourself and giving your opinion, within limits of course.[make sure you don't go wild, it could do the opposite of what you want lol]

5. Don’t try to force your visitors or clients into doing ‘word of mouth’ advertising, this is mostly seen in the case of ‘e-mail this to your friend’ ‘share it with your friend’ ‘send this to your friend and get this/that free’ etc. Such tricks are short-lived, maybe to get something those visitors might do as you ask, but you are forcing them to do so. And its a proven fact that the others who receive those emails or any sort of info from friends are less likely to visit your site or even try it out. It will be somewhere in the spam/junk folders.

6. Be funny, creative and think out of the box. No one is going to talk about you, if you are like every other ordinary blogger/seller. Word of mouth works when there is something ‘unique’ or should i say ‘crazy’ to discuss. But remember, it could be also embarrassing and life destructing if you do something extreme foolish, like most of those youtube stars do nowadays.

7. Don’t create a hoax, never lie. Have you seen about the story on CNN recently about a 6 year old boy flying away in a hot air balloon? and later it turned out to be a hoax. This is a best example of ‘word of mouth’. Sure it created a story and made it a international news. But now that is turned out to be a hoax, it is going to be opposite of the parents might have expected. Long story short, don’t lie just to get fame or popularity. Specially in the online world, fame & popularity is useless because its only limited to your ‘user name’ or a particular site. Creating a hoax in order to be famous or get good ‘word of mouth’ visitors is going to be very harsh later on. The consequences can be fatal in some cases lol

8. 1 small trick for ‘freebies sites’ is to give freebies for ‘free’. Did that make sense? Well here’s the thing, nowadays 90% of the freebies sites on the ‘Internet’ are NOT free. The site owner obviously wants to make money, its either a CPA or some sort of obstruction the visitor has to face in order to get his freebie. If your freebies are ‘free’ it will definitely get you lots of ‘word of mouth’ visitors. But then again, how will you make money? The answer to that question is easy. You make money by giving freebies. Do a search on google, there are many CPA networks that have ‘freebies’ offers which you get ‘paid’ for to promote. So imagine if you are extremely popular in your niche, this 1 cpa offer can bring you big bucks without forcing your visitors to fill unwanted surveys, etc.

Last but not the least remember to go according to your long term plans. Word of mouth can also be achieved if you keep it simple, honest and don’t concentrate on just making money!

Good luck & i would like to apologies for my delayed posting – thank you for being patient everyone.

regards, SJ

well yes you read it correct. Till now people keep talking about alexa ranking, alexa traffic ranks, etc etc but no one ever told you that there is actually a way to get traffic from alexa.

But before i come to that let me tell you a bit about alexa. Alexa is a ‘site monitoring’ service that monitors your site statistics, such as traffic, geo-analysis, page views, age group of traffic and many more things. It then ranks your website among all others based on your traffic in a particular month. This is called a alexa rank.

What is the use of traffic rank?

Alexa traffic rank is of no direct use to you. Unless you are a web analytic of course. However it does effect your sites popularity and income indirectly. When advertisers look for websites to advertise on then they consider few factors, alexa traffic rank is one of those factors.

Alexa is very popular among all webmasters, there is absolutely no webmaster that don’t use alexa to monitor his site and improve his rankings.

Tell the secret already!

ok alright, there is no big secret. Its a very simple thing which the smart savvy people have noticed and are taking extensive advantage of it. While others might not even know of such a feature.

You must be wondering what this feature is which you can use to get traffic ‘from’ alexa? Well let me explain you in easy words. Alexa has a feature called ‘reviewing’. Everyday thousands if not millions of people look up on sites such as google, yahoo, msn, twitter, youtube, facebook, amazon….. the list is too big. But you know what i am talking about, the big guys with the traffic rank 1-100 get lots of views on there profile pages.

Won’t alexa care?

That is the sad part unfortunately. Alexa as a big reputed company should be more considerate about its own site. I find many people writing ‘useless’ reviews on sites with good traffic rank. Sites such as google, yahoo, etc. Not only does they write useless reviews, they actually SPAM the hell out of them.

Take a look at the screen shot below on reviews for yahoo.com or go directly to this link. Make sure you go to the ‘review’ section though.

You see how people simply just spam like that? But worse off, there are others who actually pay a visit to those links. This has been tested in fact, if you go and write a review with a reference to your product then you get lots of targeted visitors. But your product must be relevant to the site you write a review for. That works even better.

Now wait! I am NOT asking you guys to spam there. Now that you know of a way to do so. But i told about this basically for everyone to know more about the services they use. Informational purposes only. I didn’t try yet but i wonder what effect it will have on my site in terms of traffic.

I also noticed some people write reviews multiple times and some do this on daily basis to try and keep their reviews on first page. This is hilarious and am rather disappointed in alexa. I mean don’t they have any maintenance? How can they allow so much spam on their reputed site? If that wasn’t enough, but these reviews also hurt the image and reputation of the sites about which they are written. For someone who is new to facebook and if he reads such Spam reviews about it on alexa, do you think that person is going to join facebook? I highly doubt that.

Is there another way?

In fact there is. There are 2 ways you can get traffic ‘from’ alexa, legally and spam free traffic. But how?

1. You can use the above method ‘without’ spamming, meaning giving your honest reviews with a link to your blog or site under your name. Such reviews won’t be considered spam and would actually get you traffic and people won’t even call you a spammer. So review writing on alexa is a new traffic generation method on my list.

2. You could do it like how the others do. Make your site popular, gain higher rankings. No don’t worry, rankings in top 100 or even top 100k is very hard. But you can aim for higher traffic ranking in a particular country or on a particular topic. I mean there are 190+ countries in the world [not sure how many total, damn i am not good at geography] and each country has its own ranking sites.

Once again please don’t spam and i do HOPE someone from alexa reads this message and actually employees someone to remove off those Spam comments and reviews. I had the notion that they do have staff who does that, but i guess they get too much spam reviews daily. In that case how about ‘moderating’ the reviews before publishing them?  That won’t be hard to implement i guess. Folks at wordpress might be helpful too. It will certainly reduce the spam.

And sorry for the late post guys, i was busy with lots of work. Take care and don’t spam. good luck in this new adventure, do it legally though.

Till then have a great day,

SJ

Traffic is the most precious asset of any website, blog or online business, and almost all new start ups fail in protecting traffic loss, which results in their business being paralyzed before they could even start to the fullest potential.

But the most important thing is, that those who fail in this are mostly the ones that do not realize the difference between ‘real people’ and the term ‘traffic’, but i can’t blame them, because the so called gurus teach them about traffic as if it is some bots which will pump us money like a ATM, but on the other hand those who learn about the value of traffic and understands the needs and requirements of those people who visit their sites and then use the learned information to optimize their service are the ones that will really make money online.

So keeping that in mind, i did my research and found lots of interesting things and facts that will make traffic coming to your site vanish. So this is how you can ‘not’ lose traffic from your sites, do and don’t of blogging. Remember making money blogging isn’t rocket science, all you need to do is learn by trial & errors.

1. Less advertising: Don’t Offer any advertising on your website or blog if its less then 30 days old.

2. Stick with your niche: Make sure your website carters to the needs of the subject on which its built upon, i.e stick with your niche don’t wander off.

3. Don’t fake comments: Do not do fake comments on your posts or add fake subscribers to your feed burner.

4. Engage: Participate actively in communication by replying to comments on your posts.

5. Be Original: Make sure your content is original, fake content of any sort, even PLR and MRR articles are useless and it could hurt your search engine rankings as well.

6. Don’t annoy: Never Do pop-up or pop-under advertisements, its a very well known fact that visitors hate the pop ups and are tend to run away from a site that spams the visitor with tonnes of pop ups.

7. Respect the Big G: Obey the rules of service providers, advertisers and other programs that you are affiliated with, for example AdSense, do not offer them or ask your users to click those ads or use words such as ‘pick a link’ etc, such terms can get you banned not just from the program but from the search engines as well. Use words such as ‘sponsor ads’ instead. Getting banned form search engines means NO traffic.

8. Build links & community: Make sure you submit your site to all top search engines, directories, etc. Write ezine articles for article directories and get back-links to your site, maintain a must follow blogs list and use them to build more back-links. Check out making money by writing to find more useful article sites that you can also use to build a community & make money at the same time.

9. Don’t spam or scam: Do not spam on social media sites or any site for that matter, set your goal every month or week and do not deviate from those, never try to scam or make money illegally, such things might be bountiful for some time but in the long run your in loss. Read how to detect online scams to find out more about what you shouldn’t do in order to be scam & spam safe.

10. Get a new theme: Make sure your website design and layout is user friendly, do not use too many dark or eye irritating colors, get better themes. Attractive themes means more loyal visitors, take a look at these amazing themes.

11. Cloak your links: Cloak your links, do not start using affiliate banners in your advertising space. Get the pretty link wordpress plugin if you have a wordpress blog to automatically cloak all outbound links, just like i do on my blog.

12. Don’t do flash: Don’t use flash banners and too much flash work, search engines don’t detect flash as good as they do words, even if you get your flash content indexed in search engines you will have a hard time ranking them.

13. Build a List: Make sure you offer your visitors RSS feeds and subscriptions, its always advisable to start building a mailing list since the start, you can also create a custom landing page and use list building techniques to build a huge list of opt in subscribers. Offer Free reports, ebooks or products to attract more subscribers. Take a look at my article on how to build a list. Get a auto responder which are the most important list building tools, the top 2 in the industry are aweber & getresponse.

14. Don’t buy traffic: Do NOT waste real money doing blog promotions, blogs with content are not worth promoting with real money on services such as the ‘get paid to’ or ‘opt in lists’ or even the custom ‘traffic’ packages from sites, such traffic is pointless because for a blog the most important traffic is the readers and those who are interested in the niche you are working in, Google AdWords and other advertising networks should be used to promote affiliate products instead.

15. Keep your blog alive: Remove the first default post on the blog, the blog-roll and make sure you adjust your plugins and widgets, this is the step where most ‘new comers’ fail in blogging. Read my post on the must have plugins for wordpress bloggers.

16. Customize your site: Customize your Error pages to give it more professional look, add a custom favicon and custom blog logos to fit your overall blog design. If you don’t know how to add a favicon to your site then read about it on my post.

17. Let them search: Offer search in your site and make sure its visible by the visitor, this helps the reader find what he is looking for.

18. Be Social: Offering links to your other accounts including social networks and twitter is always advisable, this helps build a relation with the visitor and could actually gain you loyal readers.

19. Use a traffic retainer: When users exit from your site,its up to you, if you would like to include a ‘exit pop up’ that could ask your visitors to check out another offer, etc. But this is not advisable for normal content sites and blogs, as it would not work and is most effective on landing pages. Check out this amazing pop up plugin for wordpress blogs if you are interested.

20. Use google Analytic: always analyze your traffic on a daily bases, note down the visitor trends and the change, keep yourself updated to your traffic sources, top landing pages and use this information to optimize your service.

21. Write for people not for bots: Remember what i said about the term ‘traffic’ and the ‘actual traffic’ ? always keep in mind that people visiting your site are real and not bots, so give them real things and make your posts look real, as if your giving a speech or talking to someone on email, the more personal and targeted you get the more the reader will read further. Read how to seo for beginners to learn more about mixing SEO with real content.

22. Be simple: Don’t get too professional, their are many people on the Internet and depending on your niche, specially on a ‘make money online‘ niche, 80% of the visitors to your site might be new comers and they will have a hard time understand your hard use of terms and concepts, so break down your content and information to make sure everyone can understand

23. Give credits: Most traffic is attracted to ‘sources’, which means nothing else but a list of ‘top’ services or ‘top tools’ etc, such source posts are always indexed quickly on search engines and study shows that users spend more time on ‘source’ posts then on other average posts.

24. Check your work: Make sure your posts are spelling free, the font and color of your font are readable, divide your content in paragraphs and/or point-wise this would give a more organized look and feel, which will guarantee a longer stay.

25. Make a point: Highlight and bolder the area or words that are of importance, the semi title and the title, use more eye catching terms for your title of the post. Post title should ALWAYS be search engine keyword related, for example someone looking for ‘twitter tools’ are likely to search with keywords such as ‘twitter tools’ ‘top twitter tools’ etc, so make your posts with similar titles, don’t use titles that are very long, for more information check out my previous posts on how to write great articles and content and how to make money writing.

Don’t forget to share this post, subscribe to my RSS feeds & follow me on twitter @sameerjoad till then have a good day,

SJ

First let me tell something about ‘people search’, do you know that your name is very important? not just in the real world but on the online world your name is a very important tool, thousands of people could be searching you on google to find more about you! your friends, your networking friends, your family members and many others, that’s why having a presence online is necessary.

Well the fact still remains that almost 80% of people who will search you will search via some search engine, basically google, yahoo, bing or aol, and that’s where the google profile comes in.

Google  lets you create your own public profile something that could be very useful and handy, how?

1. When ever someone does a search on your name, your Google profile will be the first to show up, specially if they search via Google, other search engines will also detect the strong presence of your Google profile.

2. Google lets you add external links in your profile, so you could add links to your twitter account, face book, your website or anything you think that needs mentioning, thus making a better public appearance and spreading information about yourself and your site, services, products, etc etc

3. A link on Google to any site is very powerful! specially a backlink to your site or blog from google.com could boost your search engine rankings, that is the easiest SEO trick you could imagine, even if the backlink is a nofollow.

That’s all i could tell you, it will take like 15 Min’s to create a Google profile which could be very helpful for you later on, so go ahead and get yourself the free Google SEO bonus if you don’t have one yet!

you can check out my profile here – Sameer Joad

Go here to make your own – Google Profiles.

Don’t forget to share this post, subscribe to my RSS feeds & follow me on twitter @sameerjoad till then have a good day,

SJ