How do you actually convince someone to pull out their credit card and actually busy something from your website?

Anyone who knows the answer to that question, or even part of the answer is worth a million bucks. Unfortunately there ins’t any one answer and ‘the answer,’ such as it is, comes slowly and hard. And further, it is different for different types of sites.
Strategies for Education sites are going to be different from strategies for sites that sell machinery.

My personal strategy for promoting sites is the “learning library” approach where lots of free information is provided for browsers with a soft sell approach. This type of promotional strategy works well for education related sites, dating sites, some web and Internet related sites, for example SEO content sites, but not web design sites. Maybe more…

The learning library strategy means creating an online library of material that is related to your product or service. See my other posts on Anatomy of a Content Site, Broad Conent and Content Sites Sell

Surveys and statistics released this week show that Web2 continues to explode and Web1 brochure sites are stagnating and getting left in the dust. Consider:

* Blogger.com is the web’s fastest growing service at 528% over last year.

* Myspace.com grew at +318%

* Wikipedia grew at +275%

* Traditional web1.0 sites are losing ground: MSN.com (+1%), AOL.com (0%), ebay.com (-3%), Yahoo.com (+5%) and Google is still positive at +21% but slowing.

The Wall Street Journal summarizes the ComScore Data in New Trends In Online Traffic
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Here is a great plug-in that I have found for increasing traffic from Social Bookmarking sites. This Wordpress plug-in automatically bookmarks your site to Social Bookmark sites each time you post, including:

blinklist.com
furl.net
del.icio.us
myweb2
shadows.com
simpy.com
spurl.net
ma.gnolia.com
blogmarks.net
rawsugar.com
smarking.com
linkrolling.com
blogmemes.net
markaboo.com
linkagogo.com
feedmelinks.com

This plug-in avoids spam with a clever option which randomly selects ‘X’ sites for submission, so you aren’t spamming.

Check it out Auto Social Bookmarking

Lots has been written about promoting blogs which covers the basics, of pings, submitting, creating content people want to read and all that. In this article I thought I would take it one step further and talk about some of the techie SEO aspects of promoting an blog, and specifically, avoiding penalties.

For the basics of promoting a blog, the best article I found was Margin of Eric - Making Yourself Known.

This is the place to start and covers all of the basics.
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