However, never one to give up a networking opportunity, the bathroom queue itself turned out to be the place to do your networking, names and business cards were exchanged, thoughts and opinions were passed around, even once inside the bathroom the conversation only stopped when people went in to their respective stalls and continued as they exited.

Where’s the most unusual place you have ever networked and exchanged business cards with?

Your pagerank increases because more sites are linking to yours. The higher the pagerank of the linking site the more ‘juice’ it can pass on to your site. You won’t gain too much by having a PR5 website as opposed to having a PR3 site but as I mentioned above there are some situations where you might want to concentrate on just building the pagerank.

The first is if you want to use the site as a feeder site to your main ‘money’ site or sites. By increasing the pagerank of this site it gives more weight to your link. The second situation is if you want to create a niche blog for the purpose of selling links. The higher the pagerank the more money you can charge so obviously it makes sense to do so in these cases!

Since you are not focused on search engine rankings you can post comments on various dofollow blogs. This doesn’t work particularly well for increasing your rankings because the site owners can get a bit sensitive when you use a keyword anchor text. However they are far more likely to approve a comment if you just use your name. There are plenty of places that list dofollow blogs, just do a quick Google search for it!

Another way is to go to the DigitalPoint forums and look for people selling links on high pagerank websites. It’s important to find people offering permanent links rather than a monthly rental. Try and be as discreet as possible when buying links, you don’t want to advertise to Google what you are up to!

One method many people forget about is to try and boost the pagerank of sites that are already linking to you. For example many of us have done article submissions and got a link back to our site this way. These links provide very little in the way of increasing our Pagerank however if you start to bookmark the articles to various dofollow social bookmarking sites then you can increase the value of the link.

Remember, increasing your pagerank is not necessarily about submitting to directories and article directories as these links are very low value. You need to be getting links on pages that already have a good pagerank or at least working on building the pagerank of the actual pages that are already linking to your site.

What methods do you think people should use to rapidly increase the pagerank of their site (ignore getting links for search engine ranking, we want high power links that don’t have to be relevant).

Information Overload

This is probably the biggest problem all Internet marketers have when it comes to making money online. To make you feel better the vast majority of people suffer from information overload in the Internet marketing arena – there is just so much information that is being rammed down our throats each day by people trying to sell you stuff.

The best advice that can be offered here is to unsubscribe from mailling lists and don’t get caught up in the hype. Stick to one thing that interests you and focus all your time and attention on that. If you like the idea of affiliate marketing then build affiliate websites, if you like the idea of making money from Facebook Ads then spend all your time doing that. If you want to create AdSense sites, build just AdSense sites until you are making money from it.

Too many of us get distracted when we hear about other people earning thousands of dollars per day. They either got lucky or concentrated everything they had learning how to make money from that. Stop reading sales letters, stop reading emails sent from other marketers, just focus on one area you want to make money in and ignore all the noise around you.

Giving Up Too Soon

Here’s another truth for you: Making money online isn’t hard but it requires commitment and dedication. Even if you have purchased and are following the best system in the world from the latest guru who’s cutting 5 figure checks each month, it’s going to take some time to see results. If you put up a squeeze page because you want to start building a list (which is a very good thing to do) and find that no one wants to enter their information, don’t give up! You’ve learned something, either the offer wasn’t tempting enough or the copy wasn’t enticing enough. Try something different and keep going until it works.

The same goes for affiliate marketing. I know there are people out there making all this cash by putting up simple affiliate sites recommending a product and they’ve proven that it works. If you have tried it and the site didn’t bring in any sales then you need to keep going until you have found something that works for you.

Too Much Reading, Not Enough Action

Action, or lack of, is probably the biggest mistake made by Internet marketing newbies. They read all the latest strategies and techniques, they ‘live’ on the various marketing forums (you know what I mean!) but they don’t actually do any proper work which makes money. Every time you do something you need to ask yourself a question: how will this help me make money?

Writing an email to your list is a fairly obvious way to make money, submitting articles to article directories can make money in the long term by helping your search engine rankings. On the other hand, filing all the PLR and resell products in to catagorized folders on your hard drive or setting up filters and labels on Gmail so you can see all a ‘gurus’ emails in one place doesn’t help you make money – it’s a time wasting task.

So how else can we get traffic if not from the search engines? Here are 3 simple ways of getting more traffic that doesn’t rely on the search engines:

Embrace The Community

Whichever niche you are in there is probably already an active discussion forum (or several) and several authoritative blogs. You need to be able to tap in to this by branding yourself and your website within the community. For the forum you need to be fairly active everyday joining in discussions and answering questions. For your username use your real name and if you are allowed to use a signature put a link to your site in that. For authority blogs, try to be the amongst the first people to comment on new posts, subscribe to the RSS feed if you can so you are alerted straight away when there is a new post. Use your real name and link it to your site. Don’t promote your site, but leave relevant comments, building up your visibility in this way gets you noticed in your niche. If your site provides valuable information or services then you might even start getting natural links and recommendations.

Get On The Twitter

You should view your Twitter followers the same way as an email list – assuming you are building an email list, which you should be if you are not. The more people you have the more people will be clicking through and if you are posting relevant interesting links then you can get a very high click through rate – be warned though: don’t make every Tweet promotional. Mix it up, and if you post a link make sure it really is valuable. If you are able to build up a big enough following, every time you make a new blog post you can get a flood of traffic from Twitter. It works far better than any social bookmarking tool can ever do.

Create Giveaway Viral Ebooks

Creating and giving away high quality eBooks serves two purposes: one it builds your list and two if the information in the ebook is of a high enough quality it will get other people giving it away too. The ebook includes many links back to your own sites which the readers can click. This is a fairly old method that seems to have gone out of fashion but still works extremely well in any niche.

These are just three methods to generate more traffic to your site without relying on the search engines. Of course there are many more such as using an affiliate programme to help sell your product or service or getting yourself published in offline magazines or becoming a guest writer on a number of industry blogs.

Does this mean that you can safely ignore age old on page optimization techniques? Well, if you already have top rankings and thousands of backlinks then you can probably focus your time on other areas such as creating great content but if you are struggling to get good rankings or can’t break in to the top 10 try following these simple techniques that can nudge you from obscurity to the top 20 or 30 with no additional effort.

Optimize Your Title

So often I see websites which have the same title and description on every page. Google recommends using unique titles and descriptions for each page to help people (and search bots) understand what the page is about. Your title should focus on the keyword you are trying to optimize for a particular page, generally you want to target the high search volume keyword for your homepage and then various longtail keywords for the subpages. Ensure your keywords form the first part of the title and that it doesn’t run over 60 characters. If you are using WordPress, install the popular All-In-One-SEO-Pack to help manage titles and descriptions for each blog entry.

Add Header Tags

Some doubt has been cast recently by SEOMoz about the value of header tags (h1, h2, h3 etc) but many people are still reporting that they are getting better rankings by putting their targeted keywords in header tags. Effectively they shout out to the search robot that ‘my page is about this’. Primary keywords go in the H1 tag, secondary keywords should go in the H2 and H3 tags.

Create a Good Internal Linking Structure

Google likes to see a good, organized internal linking structure and you can use it to your advantage too. Your navigation links should be in plain text, don’t use images, javascript or worse, Flash, for your navigation menus. When linking to another page in your site, try and use the keyword you are targeting for that page in the link, this tells Google what the page is about and you can get a ranking increase for this.

Install An XML Sitemap

They jury is still out on the benefit an XML sitemap can bring but since Google allows you to submit one in their Webmaster Tools area you can guess that they place quite a lot of importance on it. Simply search for ‘sitemap generator’ and you’ll get loads of sites which will crawl your website and create an XML sitemap that you can add to your site and submit to Google.

These are just four of the most basic methods you can use. Other methods include ensuring your pages use keyword rich addresses, using clean and valid code and making sure you mention your targeted keywords several times throughout the page.

Now, if you are anything like Jeff Johnson, who had his AdSense accounts disabled back in 2004, it might be the best thing that ever happened to you. In Jeff’s case his ‘error’ was to have two accounts, one for him and one for his brother. However, as it turned out, once he was free from AdSense his online income exploded – so take it as a sign of things to come!

AdBrite – http://www.adbrite.com

This advertising network has been going since 2002 and is one of the biggest independent ad networks. It doesn’t have the contextual technology that Google has but you can choose the category you want to target and it will serve up ads based on that category. Obviously you need to use some common sense here as a website about gardening doesn’t need to have ads for forex trading! One problem some people might have is that they only pay out by cheque which is issued in USD.

LinkWorth – http://www.linkworth.com

If you have a site with good traffic and Google PageRank then you have the option of earning some good money with LinkWorth who specialize in link based advertising. Their advertisers want to place links on relevant websites to get traffic and boost their search engine rankings. As a publisher you have a wide range of options to make money from this site and it’s strongly recommended.

Amazon Associates – https://affiliate-program.amazon.com

Obviously it depends entirely on what sort of website you are running but many people have found that the Amazon Associates programme is even more profitable than AdSense under the right circumstances. Although Amazon only pays commission on products people have bought the great thing about Amazon is that people buy all kinds of products from it. So you might have a site about healthy dog food and link to some highly relevant dog food products on Amazon (another great thing about Amazon is the almost unlimited range of products they sell), this will make you a few dollars if you make a sale but often people end up buying books, DVD’s, computer games and all kinds of other things.

Amazon also have an option called Omakase which works a little bit like AdSense but it tries to automatically put relevant products infront of your customers based on the context of the page. It’s a little bit hit and miss at the moment though.

There are plenty of other alternatives like Bidvertiser and Kontera, but in our experience they don’t have enough advertisers to replace the income you might have been making on AdSense.

Do you think I’ve missed out any obvious AdSense alternatives? Let me know by leaving a comment in the form below.

Then you have Jeff Johnson promoting his Traffic Voodoo which seems to be concentrating on the various Web 2.0 sites that you can leverage to get traffic and no longer rely on just Google. I can’t comment on what his product is like but I’ve watched a couple of the free videos here and here and the stuff he’s talking about seems really decent.

Finally there is another web traffic product that is being promoted called Traffic Siphon. A bit of an odd name but I guess all the good trafficXYZ.com’s were taken. This product is by a guy called Mark Barnard who I’ve not heard of before.

Traffic Siphon Review

The package looked good so I went ahead and purchased it. Here is what I’ve got to say about it…

The Price

At the end of the day the price is the most important deciding factor when it comes to buying these products. At $67 I think it’s reasonably priced for the content that you get inside (more on that later). However, they are very sneaky and underhanded by charging you a monthly $47 fee unless you cancel the subscription. I couldn’t find any mention of this on the sales page and I think it’s fairly unethical to do it.

I managed to grab TrafficSiphon.com on a special $1 5 day trial but they seem to have removed that option now. I still had to make sure I canceled the monthly subscription though!

The Content

The content is presented in a series of on-site videos loaded up via Amazon S3 cloud storage. There are some 20 videos in total, including some bonus ones and they are all between 5 and 20 minutes in length. I found the videos to be really slow loading even on a 2MB connection. I would have to open up several tabs and load the videos in the background for several hours so that I could watch them uninterrupted.

If you are not already aware, despite the claims of earning thousands of dollars from Clickbank as an affiliate, this is not an affiliate training guide, it’s 100% focused on how to get traffic to your site so your results will definitely vary!

For most people who have been building and promoting websites for several years a lot of the traffic generation methods should be well known to you – I mean honestly, who hasn’t heard of directory submissions, article submissions, press releases and social bookmarking – all of which are covered here.

There are a few golden nuggets to be found, for example I learned about a fantastic new technique to get my EzineArticle content viewed more often and get it ranked higher in the search engines.

A lot of the techniques are borderline blackhat (what us SEO’s like to call greyhat), such as using Yahoo Answers for traffic, getting your links / signatures on forums that don’t allow you to post these things, finding blogs for the sole purpose of commenting, finding the .edu and .gov links etc. A lot of them I already use anyway, but like I mentioned above, a few nuggets of information that helps refine my own techniques.

Summing Up: The Good

The $67 price point is very reasonable for the content you are getting, especially if SEO is still new to you. The videos are all very easy to follow and you can start implementing the strategies right away. Even as a person who has been promoting sites for over a decade I still learned some new techniques thanks to this course.

Summing Up: The Bad

Like all good Internet marketers, Mark Barnard has implemented an upsell once you have made a payment. Except he’s gone overboard and there are no less than 4 upsells and downsells trying to get you to buy products and information for up to 3x what you just paid. I didn’t find any of the up/downsells to be compelling enough and got a bit annoyed with that.

Also, the sneaky trick of charging you $47 per month to access the information is a bit unethical – I can’t even see how he’s justifying the ongoing cost unless he plans to add new content each month, but there is no mention of that.

Should You Buy Traffic Siphon?

If you are looking for new techniques and don’t mind being borderline blackhat with your SEO (I personally don’t have an issue with it) and promotion then I can recommend this course at $67. Even though I already knew most of what he teaches, I consider myself enlightened on a number of areas now.

Click here to buy TrafficSiphon now

In the good old days we could have used sites like Delicious, Digg and Mixx and their authority was enough to get Google come running to your site

http://caitax.net// – PR 5

http://neosibookmark.info/ – PR 3

http://newdigg.info/ – PR 3

http://phpduggonline.info/ – PR 3

http://technocrazy.net/ – PR 3

http://www.actual-concept-ent.com/ – PR 3

http://www.imcurtain.com/ – PR 3

http://celebhungama.com/ – PR 2

http://dig.gr/ – PR 2

http://disuka.com/ – PR 2

http://myspaces.org/ – PR 2

http://shiftlogic.org/news – PR 2

http://writer-base.com/ – PR 2

http://www.blogtack.com/ – PR 2

http://www.bookmark24.eu/ – PR 2

http://www.diggmarket.com/ – PR 2

http://www.tagyourpost.com/ – PR 2

http://clickuplink.com/ – PR 2

http://esocialbookmarks.com/ – PR 2

http://getboo.info/ – PR 2

http://bookmarkshub.info/ – PR 2

http://listbookmarks.com/ – PR 2

http://searchwhat.info/ – PR 2

http://bookmarkshub.info/ – PR 2

http://www.business-planet.net/ – PR 2

Add any other dofollow social bookmarking websites in the comments below!

If you sell 7 products then your commission goes up to 6% and as I found out today the commission is applied to the first 7 products too, for some reason I always thought you get 4% of the first 7 products and then 6% on the next 22 products and 6.5% on the next 100 products etc. I’m happy to be wrong in this case!

Another point to note is that this commission is reset each month so every month you start off on 4% and have to work your way back up to 7%. Oh yes, and the commission structure doesn’t apply to electronic goods, you earn a flat 4% regardless of how many you sell.

Phew, why do they insist on making it so complicated! Still, I’m chuffed to bits to see sales coming in from Amazon when I’m not even promoting my Amazon sites!

But I think Google must have changed the rules a bit because despite my AdSense account reporting dozens of clicks and CTR’s of 5-10% on most of the sites, the amount I’ve earned from all those clicks is precisely zilch. Nothing.

This is unusual because out of all the sites in my account only one of them is now earning money from AdSense, and it’s not even designed to! It does get plenty of traffic though.

Over 50 clicks and no AdSense earnings

I’m guessing that my sites are under some kind of filter which means that they don’t earn any money for the clicks they generate. Maybe Google thinks they are not high quality sites, maybe the CTR is too high, I’m not sure. There is also the issue of Smart Pricing in AdSense, but even if this applies to my account, I should be earning something for those clicks.

Does anyone else have the same experience? Lots of traffic, plenty of clicks but still earning nothing in AdSense?