One of the most important aspects to your Internet marketing business should be - getting targeted traffic and list building. Little or no traffic to your website will result in a low opt-in list. There a various methods to generating traffic to your sites, like PPC, article marketing, Ad exchanges as well as joint ventures. Although these are excellent methods to building your opt-in list, many overlook the effectiveness of blogging.

Blogging is the Key

Generating traffic and building an opt-in list all rely on advertising in one form or another. Some may not call it advertising, and regardless of what label you give it, people HATE advertising. Nevertheless, it is the life source of Internet marketing and without it, your business won’t survive. The key is to disguise it so it doesn’t look like advertising, and that’s where blogging comes in.

For some reason, Internet surfers are attracted to blogs! The need for every human to feel validated, provides the Internet surfer with a way to give their opinion or their two cents worth on any topic they choose to discuss. People are naturally curious, and they love to post to blogs but they also like to read posts made by others as well. This is where you use blogging for the sole purpose of driving traffic and building your opt-in list.

Join Other Bloggers

Go join blogging communities like My Blog Log and Blog Catalog, and get to know other regular bloggers by visiting their sites. Take you time and post relevant and helpful information that pertains to the topic. Don’t forget to include your website URL, as well as your signature tag at the bottom of every post. If you make educated comments, other bloggers will click on your sig tag and visit your website where they then become part of the “traffic”. If you repeat this process enough times, this will provide your visitors with an opportunity to join your newsletter or RSS feed - thus building your opt-in list.

Conclusion

Starting a blog is not as difficult and technical as it once was. Today’s cPanel provide a simple push-button system to creating your blog through Fantastico. If you haven’t started your blog, your missing out on a grand opportunity to building your opt-in list through blogging.

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Just like the cold virus spreads from person to person, so does a marketing campaign when done correctly. Viral marketing uses techniques that exploit existing social networks to increase awareness of a business or product. Viral marketing is a technique that has been used in the offline advertising word for a long time and has recently made its way to the Internet.

How Viral Marketing Works

Viral marketing is accomplished when a website or program facilitates and encourages people to spread marketing information along voluntarily. Viral marketing tactics include:

• ebooks
• branded software
• flash games
• the use of video clips
• images and even text messages

Viral marketing is very different from network marketing and multi-level marketing schemes. Viral marketing is essentially a separate activity all by itself and has little in common with either of these things. It does not involve participants signing-up or paying for anything during the marketing process.

Early Examples

A classic example of early viral marketing techniques was when companies placed links at the bottom of users free e-mail accounts so the recipients of the e-mail could follow the link to sign-up for a free account. Many people use this technique within their own e-mails now to advertise links to their business website. Additionally, many of the web based free e-mails services allow companies to place their link at the bottom of their users e-mails.

Word of mouth and other tactics have been used to spread information since the beginning of time. Using new technologies like the internet has made this method of exchanging information much faster. Increasingly people are spending more time online and they are creating online identities and communities. Viral marketing takes advantage of the power of having these communities easily accessible by connecting with people in the online communities, so they can connect to other people.

Spreading The Word

If a company creates a marketing material through a blog, video or article they can begin the viral marketing campaign by starting the spread of that marketing material using an RSS feed. They would place the item on a website other than their own using the RSS feed and other people will see it and spread it elsewhere. Thus, the marketing material takes on the characteristics of a virus.

When people see the blog, video or article they may become interested in its origins and use the information they obtained from it to seek out information about the company that created it. That is why it is important to discreetly brand you viral marketing promotions with your companies information. You don’t want to be overt about branding your content, but it is important to slip it in there.

Conclusion

There are many reasons people choose to participate in viral marketing. A successful viral marketing campaign will spread like wildfire all over the internet and generate a great deal of interest in what your business has to offer. It is the Internet equivalent of creating product buzz on the streets. Viral marketing is also relatively inexpensive as well because you are not paying for the message to be spread. The idea is that your potential customers are spreading the message for you.

Trackback and pingback programs were designed as a notification system between two websites. One website sends another website a pingback or trackback to notify them that something of interest to them has occurred on the site. These programs are most commonly used on blogs as a way of connecting a post you made on your blog to a post on another blog. The two things are basically the same, but do have a few minor differences.

How Trackbacks Work

Trackbacks can only be sent to one site, so when you use them you are presented with a list of the links in your story or blog post and you can only choose one site to receive the trackback. After you select a site you get a form that includes information about your post including, title, URL, URL of your site and the actual content of your post. At that point you edit any information you need to in the form and once you are done you can see a preview of your trackback. After all of this is done you will send your trackback off to your chosen site.

How a Pingback Works

Pingbacks are pretty much the same as a trackback, except they were designed after the trackback to fix some of the features that people didn’t like about the trackback. Primarily the difference in the two programs is that when you use a pingback you can inform several sites at once rather than having to select only one site at a time. The pingback program searches your entire entry for URLs and it sends a ping to every site that accepts pings in the content of your entry.

Pingback VS Trackbacks

Trackback and Pingbacks are pretty much the same program with similar functions and because of that you only need to use one of them. Both have their merits and most users decide which to use on a case by case basis.

Although Pingbacks are quicker to send they provide less information about your post, essentially all that they send out is a link. Trackbacks take much more time to prepare, but when you have to include more information they offer you that option.

Not all sites accept pingbacks and trackbacks because many have disabled the feature. These programs often have a feature that allows users to set their preferences for receiving pingbacks and trackbacks. Many people view these programs as spam and would rather not get them. This happens more often with pingbacks because of the fact that they are less specified.

Conclusion

When you are operating a blog, using a trackback or pingback service is important. It is essentially a way to let other authors know that you are quoting them in your blog or using information they have already written about. This can be a useful social networking tool for building blog readership.