You probably already know some good methods for getting a lot of traffic to your site(s), but in my opinion, buzz marketing ranks at the top, and the best part — it’s Free! If you aren’t using buzz marketing, you are missing out on an avalanche of links, swarms of traffic, and yes — even fame and fortune!

What is Buzz marketing?

Buzz marketing is the art of creating a “buzz” or generating excitement and making your audience hungry for more. With buzz marketing you can be featured on some of the major sites and go viral, without buying a paid review or link, resulting in a swarm of visitors to your site. How would being on the main page of Digg, Propeller or Reddit impact your business? Your traffic would skyrocket and people would link to you creating even more traffic (you might even get so much traffic that your server will go down)

What is Viral marketing?

Viral marketing is the art of creating a message that will be spread voluntarily by others for free.

Benefits of Buzz and Viral Marketing techniques

I can explain this in just four simple words: links, traffic, name recognition and money. As webmasters we all want links and traffic as these lead to money in the long run. Without traffic our sites are dead in the water.

Step-by-Step Buzz Marketing Methods

Here are some topics that are crucial if you want to create a buzz for your articles, websites or blog posts.

1: Your Information Needs to Have Broad Appeal

You all know what the meaning of “niche”. This might come as a surprise to you, but niche-specific articles often don’t have the mass appeal and are more difficult to spread virally than content that has a broader appeal.

Here is an example: Let’s say you write an article on Digg, a popular Web 2.0 site and your title is “Digg Censors Content.” With a dull title like that, you could have killer content but not create a buzz or get linked to or even read. Most likely, readers will be skimming titles and pass that one right up.

To make this article have a broader appeal, change the title of this article from “Digg Censors Content” to “Ding Dong, Digg is Dead”, as Problogger did. Now that is a headline that will certainly stir up controversy and curiosity, create a buzz and get linked to and spread virally. In one simple step, you can increase the probability of this article being a success simply by changing the headline and topic to one with broad appeal and one that makes people curious enough to read it.

2: Be Negative and Go Viral

Notice also that the article, “Ding Dong, Digg is Dead” is a negative article about Digg. Content with a negative slant will get discussed more than a positive slant! Search engines are very adept when it comes to finding information, especially reviews. Many readers out there search for the negatives of a product, website or even a person or event.

Bad news travels faster and farther than good news, and you can use this to your advantage. Have you noticed what proportion of the news is bad news? It is a huge percentage.

Negative topics cause controversy. Readers will comment agreeing and disagreeing with you, and that creates great content and buzz and spreads virally.

Look at the buzz stories of the past several months and here are some of the articles you will see:

o Mortgages/Foreclosure (negative)
o Gas Prices (negative)
o Britney Spears stories (negative)
o George Bush/Politics (negative)

How many headlines do you think Britney Spears would get if all the Paparazzi had to say is that she was a glowing example of motherhood, she was at the top of her career, and her marriage sound? Not many, is my guess. Trust me, a negative slant always has more chance of creating a buzz.

3: Resource Lists

People love lists! Resource lists, Tips and Tricks, Helpful Hints, “Best Of” lists — readers love lists. Anything in list format is a guaranteed winner. To create interest, simply add a number to the headline. As an example, using our “Digg” topic, you might use “Ten Reasons Why Digg Sucks. This combines both a negative slant and your list technique — easy but deadly!

4: Be Unique

This trick applies to both your headline and your content. The Internet is a very crowded place, and everyone is trying to grab some attention. So if you want to get noticed, you must provide interesting, unique content that stands out from the crowd.

Think creatively, don’t be afraid of controversy, be edgy or even weird, – try it all. Put some personality into your posts and articles. You can never be too creative!

5: Curiosity Killed the Cat and Gets Readers Attention

If you want to create buzz, arousing your reader’s curiosity is a dynamite method. Use a teaser in your headline and you’ll create a headline that makes people want to know more.

Looking at the existing Digg front page content today, there are some articles that attract curiosity:

Here are their titles:

5 Dangerous Things You Should Let Your Kids Do

The Science of Toga Parties: Are Belushi and Animal House to Blame?

The 5 Best Foods That Will Kill You

Wouldn’t you want to read those stories? Notice that not only do they use a teaser in the headline, but they also use the list method.

6: Packaging

Your website template and overall appearance are crucial too. Something as simple as adding an image in your blog post that brings your topic to life visually can make all the difference.

7: Shifting the Focus From Me to You

Shift the focus of the article from first person “me and I” to second person “you”.

Example: Do YOU want to know how to make ….

Doing this puts the focus on the reader, involves them, and helps to keep their attention. How do you feel when you are talking to someone who only talks about themselves? Pretty boring, isn’t it?

Summary

Above are seven methods I use to create buzz. I have personally seen thousands of people swarming to an article after bookmarking it, using these techniques.

Most would agree that links are one of the most valuable assets of any website or blog. They drive traffic and help to increase pagerank. This, in turn, makes your web property more valuable and better able to sell text links, paid reviews, and affiliate products. They also help you to rank higher in Google which can bring a huge amount of traffic daily.

Is the Traffic Targeted?

I’m not going to pretend that the traffic from a winning buzz marketing campaign is highly targeted traffic. If you want laser targeted traffic, you can always run a PPC campaign. The point of these techniques are they are FREE. Anyone, regardless of budget constraints, can use buzz marketing to get traffic and search engine ranking.

So How Do I Make Some Money With Buzz Marketing?

Think of buzz marketing as a launching pad or your 15 minutes of fame. It is a way to get noticed. Always follow up successful buzz campaigns with more interesting content or your new found readers will quickly lose interest and move on. Use the attention you get, the traffic and links, your opt-in email subscriptions and feed subscribers to monetize the success of your buzz campaigns.

Latent Semantic Indexing. All of the Search Engines have invested in this technology and if they are not using it now, they will be soon.

The definition for LSI is as follows:

Latent semantic analysis (LSA) is a technique in natural language processing, in particular in vectorial semantics, patented in 1988 [1] by Scott Deerwester, Susan Dumais, George Furnas, Richard Harshman, Thomas Landauer, Karen Lochbaum and Lynn Streeter. In the context of its application to information retrieval, it is sometimes called latent semantic indexing (LSI) – http://www.cs.utk.edu/~lsi/

LSA uses a term-document matrix which describes the occurrences of terms in documents; it is a sparse matrix whose rows correspond to documents and whose columns correspond to terms, typically stemmed words that appear in the documents. A typical example of the weighting of the elements of the matrix is tf-idf (term frequency-inverse document frequency): the element of the matrix is proportional to the number of times the terms appear in each document, where rare terms are up weighted to reflect their relative importance.

This matrix is common to standard semantic models as well (though it is not necessarily explicitly expressed as a matrix, since the mathematical properties of matrix are not always used).

What does all of this mean in English? Well, it’s pretty simple for the human brain to comprehend, but complicated to approximate mathematically. Essentially, what all of this means for the average site builder is that instead of thinking exclusively in terms of niches and whole pages based on single keywords, you should think more about organizing whole thematic relationships in contextual hierarchies sometimes called inverted pyramids, Silos or Matrices? Pages and sites should contain thematically related words and subdivisions rather than being completely keyword centric and the linking in general should flow from general to specific.

Thematic Keyword Technique – Manual Approach

It seems everyone and their brother sells or promotes a keyword tool. The good news is that the best one is FREE. Now, I said it is the best not the easiest.

The best keywords on the internet come not from WordTracker, Keyword Discovery, Overture or the army of keyword tools that get their words from one or all of those sources. The best keywords come from GOOGLE. How do I know they are the best? Google is the most used Search Engine on the internet. Consequently, their source of keywords is vast.

If you let them, Google will provide all the tools you need to make money on the internet for FREE

Let me show you how to make a killer list of thematically related words with the Google Adwords Keywords Tool External.

First, copy and paste the following URL into the address bar of your browser:

https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

The page will open to the following:

2. Put in your keyword – use synonyms and click get more keywords – let’s do fishing for an example.

3. At the bottom of the returned list, click add all. The keywords are then transported over to the right side of the page and you have all the words that Google provides for that specific keyword phrase.

4. Pull up another web page window and go to google.com. Do a search for your main theme and just leave that page open showing all the results.

5. Now go back to the Google Keyword Tool and select Site-Related Keywords and your browser should display the following:

6. Take the first URL from your Google search (in this case www.fishing.com) and put it into the tool and click get keywords.

You should get a list of words thematically grouped by the words in the Showing keywords grouped by these terms area below:

Continue down the page and you will see the groups and words like this:

Send all the keywords over to the right side of the page and repeat the process with all of the URLs on the first and second pages of Google. Then, edit, filter and hand select your words as needed and you’re done.

Take a look at all the words that are returned by Google and think about what is really going on here. You are essentially getting Google to give you all the words they determine are thematically relevant to the content on each of the sites on the first and second pages of results. It is not simply a drill down to the useless and obscure. It is relevance by thematic relationship and these word sets contain the perfect building blocks for their Latent Semantic Indexing algorithms. If you create sites with these word sets, provide good content, properly construct your site and linking architectures and execute some well thought out promotion, your sites should rank very well.

The part that may be somewhat hidden or elude some of you is that in the process of extracting related terms, Google also returns thematic subdivisions that can form the basis for a fully themed website. You may have to pick and choose a bit, but I think you get the basic idea. You can also get a good idea of how to section your web site by using a tilde (~) in front of a Google search term inside the search box. Those features return all the words that are related to the original word and they can also be used as the basis to formulate web site sections or subdivisions for proper site theming.

Another much simpler way to do all of this plus a lot more is to make a small investment in NicheBot. $1 gets you started with NicheBot and as little as $9.97 per month gives you access to the best (and least expensive) keyword tool on the market. Did you read the part where I said you can get started for a measly dollar bill?

If you’ve done any sort of keyword research, then I’m sure you are used to seeing a keyword and a count number that represents the search demand.

It’s sort of one-dimensional. Know what I mean?

What if I told you that you could look deeper into a keyword and look at monthly trends of a keyword.

That would be much more insightful, now wouldn’t it?

Well, I would like to show you exactly how you can pick winning keywords every single time — and you can literally do this blindfolded. Well, not really, but close enough.

Download the PDF below in the zip file below, use an unzip program like www.winzip.com to open it and Adobe Acrobat Reader to read it and be prepared to be blown away.

The Keyword-Jackpot.pdf

P.S. Without even a hint of hype, there is nothing that can touch this…

The Keyword-Jackpot.pdf

I build a lot of websites and use bum marketing techniques to get traffic to my websites as well as search engine optimization to get good rankings in the search engines . The search engine industry changes every year, and some search engines change many times every month. For that reason it’s hard to go through the entire publishing process and still have a relevant and current information about search engine optimization. Aaron Wall’s book on SEO provides the most comprehensive and current information available.

The SEO Book takes you right through the vast spectrum of techniques, tools, theories and history of Search marketing. While some chapters are lighter than others, every one is packed with detail, with an interactive section at the end of each for quick reference to tools and sites mentioned.

For experienced Search marketers, it may not be quite what you think. I presumed it would be very much aimed at the newbie market, and whereas it will certainly benefit those new to Search, for the more experienced marketer it proves an invaluable reference, and refresher on each facet of the game.

The best part, for me, is the fact that it’s an eBook, and is being contantly updated and revised. At the time of writing im reading another paper book on PPC, and that one, whilst enjoyable, and only just published, is already woefully out of date. The SEO Book is not.

Chapter Walk Through

Chapters 1 & 2: Why Search? – A Brief History of the Web

The first two chapters are introductory, well duh! They’re not entirely skipable though. There’s a basic introduction to Search which touches upon some concepts such as document frequency and inverse document frequency, which are explained in greater detail in a later chapter.

Search Spam is hit fairly early on in these early chapters and a good overview of the technical, consequential and ethical considerations is given without (too much) bias toward Aaron’s personal stance.

“Tying ethics to SEO techniques is a Marketing Scam. Either a technique is effective or it’s not”

The second chapter rounds of with an extensive run through of the issues to consider with domain names. It covers all you might expect including tld’s, dashed-domain and language considerations. Though flagged as “not needed” by most site builders, the section on niche network building is pretty cool too, though lacking in serious specifics.

Chapter 3: General Internet Topics

For those new to site building, this chapter gives an overview of some of the seo-centric considerations to take into account when building from the ground up. The point being, that SEO is more than just links, it’s built into everything you do, every decision you make. Such topics as CSS, templates, includes, and CMS software are covered in brief, with the only noticeable ommision being a good list of SEO friendly blog/cms program.

The copywriting section here was good, providing what looks to be an excellent list of recommended books and good tips on writing copy with an emphasis on sales copy.

Usability is also covered, with a large section on the evils of Flash based design and the virtues of CSS and small file sizes for Search engines.

An overview of revenue generation models concludes the chapter with talk of contextual advertising, affiliate programs, and a great piece on one of my favorite rant subjects: “It’s not about price, dammit!” – “Price and Value” is a good read in this section if you’re new to marketing in general, or just need to be reminded a little

The remainder of the chapter focuses on the bullet points of online business models, typically a long paragraph or two on each point.

Chapter 4: Writing for Search Engines

This is where the SEO Book, for me, really begins to take off. It depends on knowledge levels I guess, but this and the next chapter were the most interesting parts of the book as far as I’m concerned.

Keywords, keywords, keywords. Yep, it’s all about those keywords, and this chapters primary focus is just that. We start off with some general admonishments to focus on specifics, and leave generics well alone. Swiftly moving into targeted Search phrases, the book walks you through keyword conversions, the keyword pyramid, and keyword research — with a great list of keyword tools and services.

Keyword suggestion tools and discovery techniques are an essential part of any seo’s toolkit. There are good explanations of such tools as Wordtracker, Google Suggest, Overture Keyword Suggestion and Google Keyword Sandbox, aswell as a whole list of lesser known but powerful research tools.

Keyword competition was a great section for me, as many of the tools cited were known to me, but not necessarily bookmarked, and some of the techniques for judging the competitiveness of a keyword/phrase were very new, or long forgotten — This particular section i’ll most likely come back to time and time again, not to mention finally sorting out my outdated keyword tools bookmarks. Smashing stuff.

Meta tags, along with page title’s takes us right back to SEO 101, the take home here comes from the large section on page titles where the focus shifts to ROI.

Optimizing page copy as you would expect is de-emphasized as an important part of SEO in this next section. The focus instead, tunes to page structure and good use of headings, and other HTML elecments aswell as how to smoothly integrate keywords naturally into a page.

Content building concludes the chapter, with a strong statement on how junk content will only damage most websites. The list of ways to find quality free content however, is superb, with ideas for finding both cheap premade content, cheap custom written copy and more premium freelance hire.

Chapter 5: Interacting with Search Engines

This is where it all starts to get very interesting for Threadwatch regulars, it’s the meat of the book, and for me, the best chapter by a long shot.

After busting a few myths as an inroduction, we kick right into the contraversial topic of comment spam on blogs. It’s a contentious issue at best, and I think it’s handled very well, presenting a view that’s anti-automated script, pro-thoughtful commenting in order to attract both attention from peers in your niche, aswell as Search engines. It should be noted that this book isn’t an instruction manual in the black arts, it’s aimed at the ordinary to advanced site builder, not professional spammers.

Directories provide a strong topic for the next section, and it’s really where you start to see just how current the SEO Book really is. After listing some of the larger, better respected directories, the topic of junk directories is broached, with references to Trustrank graphically explained, aswell as techniques for determining the value of a directory link and places to find good ones. Current thinking on Google and directories is a damn good read in this section. From what i’ve seen around forums at the time of writing, many just don’t want to believe — If you’re ignorant of current Google trends in this regard, this short explanation will put you bang up to date.

Search engine specific SEO provides the focus for the next several sections, running through each engine in order of market share. Topics for each engine typically include:

• Ranking algorithms
• Specific tools and techniques
• Perils and pitfalls
• How to succeed in that engine

The section on Google as you might imagine, is particularly strong. Everything from topic sensitive pagerank, to latent semantic indexing, to Hilltop is covered with varying degrees of detail. If the section on Google was an eBook in itself, I’d buy it.

Really, this part of the book is so jam packed with information i couldn’t take it all in, i think it will take me three or four goes to for it to sink in properly.

After some advanced tips for Google, that includes some great techniques for finding link partners, the other engines are all given similar, but lesser treatment. That’s not to say that they’re lacking, just that the main emphasis is somewhat proportionate to Search engine market share.

Linking, as a general topic gives much food for thought, with topics such as varying anchor text, directory submission tips and the pros and cons of reciprocal linking.

Tools for link analysis are discussed in some depth, with references to such essentials as SEOElite and Optilink before touching on tips for link requests, both sending and receiving.

The hot topic of buying links bows us out of the chapter, with good sections on how to evaluate links for rent. Link brokers are touched upon, but the odd, and glaringly obvious ommision here is the lack of any kind of commentary, recommendation or even list, of link brokers. Instead, Aaron wants you to email him…?

Chapter 6: Pay Per Click

This section particulary interested me as at the time of writing, im anticipating my first foray into the murky waters of PPC.

After a brief introduction, we move right into the two main players: Yahoo! Search Marketing (which needs updating, as it still reads as Overture) and Google Adwords.Yahoo! Search Marketing, formerly Overture is something i know even less about than Adwords, so i’l confess to skimming a little here, as it just didn’t interest me as much as moving onto the Adwords section. It did seem to be a reasonable introduction to YSM though, with sections on SiteMatch and LocalMatch, a good overview of the YSM provided tools, third party tools and copy writing for this specific medium.

Google Adwords — Now this did interest me, and as again you might expect, being Google, it was a more comprehensive section to wade through.

Click Through Rate (CTR), is the first port of call as we navigate through the, what is to me at least, quite complex Adwords set of topics, features and considerations. CTR’s role in the Adwords algorithm is the topic of course, and well explained — we move onto cover ExactMatch, BroadMatch and PhraseMatch, which prior to reading, were all a bit of a mystery. If i can get it, anyone can.

Details on how to use the Keyword Sandbox aswell as negative keywords and dynamic keywording make for good reading also.

Look out for the bonus! “How to Slash Google Adwords Costs to Maximize Profits” was an eyeopener to a PPC newbie like me.

Syndication levels are explained in the next section, covering each in detail, with tips on how to maximize performance for each. This moves on to a large section on Adsense, and in particular, what it means to Adwords advertisers including some advanced advice on click fraud.

General tips conclude the chapter, with a range of information from simple to sophisticated.

Chapter 7: Monitoring Results

At this point, the book starts to wind down. After a brief note on the importance of constant monitoring of results, we move right into the juicey subject of SEO worst practices which outlines many techniques that no longer work, and may get your site penalized or removed from Search indexes. There are a few mentions of shady techniques that currently work, if done correctly also.

The chapter serves as somewhat of a miscellaneous section to the book, covering a range of tips and tricks to bear in mind, and although a little disjointed does contain some of the “good stuff”.

Chapters 8, 9 & 10: Buying and Selling SEO, Quick Start Tips

To be frank, the business of buying and selling SEO services holds little interest for me, so for now at least, i’ve just not read them.

The Quick start tips chapter is a nice roundup of the more important points raised throughout the book, and brings us to the end nicely.

And the Verdict is…

I loved it! I’ve wanted to read this book for over a year now, and can’t believe I’ve been without it all that time.

As both a tutorial, and a reference, it’s a wonderful piece of work, with an unrivaled depth of current, up to date information on an ever changing subject: Search Marketing.

As far as I’m concerned, SEOBook is a must read for anyone serious about web site development you need to read SEOBook.
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