OK, for those of you that do not hang out in the cluttered halls of my computer and/or office, you may not have heard of “The Challenge.”

And some of you may have heard of it, but under another name.  Up until this year, “The Challenge” was known as the 30 Day Challenge, or 30DC.  The 30DC was a free training program that showed anyone (and I mean anyone) how they could get started online and earn their first dollar by the end of the challenge.

Trouble was, it was only 30 days long.  And was chock full of information.  All really good, very valuable info, but just a metric ton of it.  Crammed down your throat in 30 days.

You ever had one of those winter semester courses in college?  You know, the ones that you take while everyone else has gone home for Christmas over like 2-3 weeks?

Imagine taking Calculus IV in one of those courses and you’ll have some sense of what the 30DC was like.

So, for this year, things have changed, and they have changed for the better.

Gone is the 3o days and we’re just left with “The Challenge.” The format is now 90 days long, with a 7 days on/7 days off format.  This makes it much easier for people to participate that are still working “real” jobs and gives you plenty of time to go back over lessons if you need to.  And, each lesson is only 30 minutes long, so you’re not completely going to lose your life during that 90 days.

So, now that you know what The Challenge is, why don’t you join us?  It is, and always has been, completely 100% free of charge to participate in the challenge.  You can find out more about it by going to http://www.challenge.co

Why am I doing The Challenge?

Simple.  Yes, I do know a thing or two about running a business online, but there’s always more to learn.  And what better way to learn than from some of the best in the business?  I can’t think of one!

Also, this year I plan on doing a lot more “giving back” to others and help them as much as I can during this process.  So, you’ll see me blogging here quite a bit on what we’re talking about during The Challenge and how you can learn as well.

I’m also heading up a small, semi-local group based in Kentucky that will be helping each other out as we move along through The Challenge.  If you’re interested in joining the group, hit me up on Twitter or Facebook and I’ll get you the info.

We’re in Pre-Challenge stage right now, Lesson 1 doesn’t officially hit until July 13th, so there’s still time to join in before we officially kick off!

Join us at The Challenge!

To Your Unending Success,

Mike Paul

Good Sunday Morning….

Right now, there are countless of ways to drive traffic to a site. But even though there are a lot of strategies, none of them can guarantee you results overnight. Driving traffic to a site is still the hardest job there is when it comes to maintaining a website. Traffic can be obtained by advertising and promotion. But do you know that you can get people to visit your website just by creating a newsletter?

People surf the internet for various reasons. But more than anything, they are online because they want to gain some information about something. Some people want to research more about a product before buying. Others are looking for suggestions from other users. And there are those who surf the internet just to gain knowledge. Therefore, if your site has good content, the higher the chances that you’ll amass a good number of unique visitors from time to time. But what if your website is not an information portal and is actually an e-commerce site? Adding too many articles to it may be a problem because you already have loads of pictures and images to put up.

Well, if that’s the only concern that you have, the solution is quite simple. All you really have to do is to create a regular newsletter about your products and relevant information about them. Newsletters could provide you with both repeat and unique visitors on a regular basis. Just make sure that you got some juicy headlines and eye-catching offers included in your newsletters. And for sure, your visitors will visit you every now and then, check your new and old products, and stay until they are ready to buy your products.

To be successful in making newsletters drive traffic to your site, you have to maintain an active list of email addresses of people to whom you can send your newsletters. The list doesn’t have to include thousands of email addresses at once, if you don’t have that yet. What’s more important is that you’ll build your list slowly along the way. Besides, a targeted list is better than the lists you can buy from so-called online marketing gurus.

A functional mailing list is the moving factor behind making newsletters for traffic. And you can get the email addresses of your visitors right from your site. Make sure that you have some scripts installed that allow your visitor to subscribe to your newsletters and to receive exciting updates that you might offer. Try to include a script wherein they can invite their friends as well. This allows them to easily recruit visitors for you. Your visitor’s friends could be an integral part of your daily traffic requirement.

The newsletters that you create regularly should be stored in one folder of your website. Always upload new newsletters promptly. You can use the actual web page to be sent to the people on your list. Or you can simply send the link that will take them there. Between these two options, it is always better to send the page itself so that people will see your newsletters at once. This way, they can easily click on the live links included in the message if and when they find your articles and offers interesting enough. Now that’s instant visitors for you.

So try to do the math. Imagine how many visitors you’ll get if only around 10% of the 1,000 people would come and visit you. That’s 100 unique visitors everyday. The number can’t be that high, you might say. But then again, who’s keeping you from sending your newsletters to millions of internet users? Just go ahead and keep updating your email database. Your traffic will definitely experience a spike in the days to come.

You can also keep an archive of your previously sent newsletters on a certain part your website for future reference. If you successfully create your newsletters to be both informative and exciting, then people will definitely go back and view them, even if it several months old. A database of newsletters could provide you with recurring traffic without too much effort on your part.

If you have yet to use newsletters as a strategy to drive traffic to your site, the right time is now. Don’t be left behind by your competitors. Your website deserves to be seen, appreciated, and visited by hordes of traffic everyday. Start making that captivating newsletter today.

It’s a fact of life: the weirder or funnier the video, the more hits it
generates. The more hits it generates, the more it is palmed off to
other Internet subscribers. The more people who see the video, the more
hits it generates.

It’s a win-win scenario that entails a bit
of creativity, a bit of posting, a bit of word-of-mouth advertising and
voila! You’ve got (what else?) a hit.

This is the theory that backs the promotion of viral
videos on websites. A viral video is really any video clip that spreads
a virus on the Internet. It is usually passed on through blogs, emails,
instant messages or other media sharing websites like YouTube. The most
successful viral videos are the funnier, if not weirder amateur clips,
although there are some noteworthy (and copyrighted) commercials, and
excerpts from TV series and movies.

Many
online advertisers are now seeing the potential of the viral video
phenomenon, and some of them are opting for this as a new marketing
strategy. Why? The answer is simple. Some videos are calling so much
attention that they cross over to the more conventional arenas of the
media: the newspapers, radio and TV shows. It provokes a domino effect
that gathers a lot of momentum with very little expended energy.

For the more hard-nosed net marketers, videos can be used
to jack up traffic to a projected website, provided that it is done in
connection with the products and services available on the website
itself. Making them funny or weird is one way of making the video stand
out among the thousands of new videos being uploaded on the Internet
daily.

There are two ways of placing a video on your website.
One: you take an already popular video and upload it to your page. Two:
you create your own video and upload it to your page. If you are opting
for option number one, it might be best to judge first if the content
of the video is even remotely associated with the theme of your
website.

If
not, it would be best not to post it. That video can be downloaded from
other sites, and you just as well may be getting more competition you
can handle. Sure, it might generate traffic for some time, but is it
quality traffic? And for how long will the interest hold out? Besides,
posting any video for the sake of posting something just might have a
negative effect on you and your website. Site visitors might assume
that you are as disorganized as your page and as a marketer, you would
not want that.

The second way is to create your own video, which is more
advisable if you are seriously considering the quality of traffic going
through your site. It does not need to be a funny or weird video. The
trend these days is leaning towards informative “how-to” videos. If
your video or videos complements the other graphics, banners and
articles of your site, you will not only have an increase in quality
traffic, but an increase in the “expert-reputation” as well.

Creating
your own videos is one of the fastest ways to start generating free
traffic to your websites.  With the vast number of people that are
watching more and more videos online, you need to get active and be a
part of the video revolution going on right now on the Internet.

Michael
Paul is an author and entrepeneur that teaches businesses and
individuals how to increase targeted traffic to their website to
increase their earning potential.  He knows the best ways to maximize
the tools on the Internet to deliver massive levels of traffic to any
website.  One of his favorite tools is an automated service that
submits your articles, press releases, videos and audio podcasts to
multiple sites.  You can use this same service at
http://www.easywebtrafficcreation.com Visit them now.

Everyone knows the importance of driving traffic to your website. Due to this, there are tons of techniques being taught about traffic generation, some of which cost money while others are free. But when you’re first starting out in Internet Marketing, money is often in short supply. This means using more free traffic generation techniques than paid ones. Again, there is a plethora of free traffic generation techniques taught online. But in each of these techniques, there is a certain twist or two that the gurus don’t disclose. It’s in these twists that real money is made.

Everyone who has been in Internet Marketing for any length of time knows that one of the most popular free traffic generation tactics is writing articles. Every guru teaches you to write keyword-centric articles in a properly chosen niche and submit them to article directories. This is a tremendously effective technique that creates backlinks to your website. The effects are basically two-fold. Firstly, your website increases in Page Rank and propels up the search engines and secondly, the articles you wrote also gets indexed by the search engines thus providing another way for people to find your website. All this is well and good and has become common knowledge. But here’s the twist to this technique.

Instead of only submitting your articles to article directories, it is more effective to submit them to website or newsletter owners in the same niche. Offer your articles to them for free and request that they publish them. Chances are high that they will if your articles have good content, thus giving you lots of article exposure to targeted readers. This is more pro-active than submitting articles to directories.

Next is the forum marketing technique, another popular free traffic generation method. Every guru teaches you to scour the forums in your niche and make comments, ask questions, offer solutions and attach a link to your website in your signature file. Once again, this is a great tactic to generate backlinks which will ultimately draw traffic to your website. Here’s the twist to this tactic that most gurus don’t teach.

When you join a forum in your niche, take time to read every category therein. Get to know the problems faced or questions people ask in each category. Compile these problems and questions and create a report with solutions and offer this for free to the forum members. Inside this report you put links to your website or blog. Once again, this is a far more effective method of generating traffic than just making a comment or two in forums.

Lastly, there are the free social bookmarking sites that can be used to generate traffic. What gurus teach you to do is to bookmark your webpages or your articles in article directories so that they get linked by social bookmarking sites like Digg or Stumble Upon. Here’s how to tweak this strategy.

Instead of just bookmarking your webpages or blogposts etc, look at what’s highly ranked in the social bookmarking sites first. Search for something related to your niche and if found, then write an article for your blog and bookmark it. Then go to the existing highly ranked post and add a comment to it that includes a link to your blog. That way, you get another quality backlink to your site and draw the visitors reading the highly ranked post to your website or blog. Hopefully, they will vote for your article, too thus pushing your post up the social bookmarking site’s favorite list.

These are the little tricks about free traffic generation that the gurus hardly teach you in their coaching lessons but they use these themselves to earn the big bucks. Now you can do the same.