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I just wanted to make a quick post thanking Geoff for writing a “free paid review” of my blog through a program he calls Reviewu. You can read his review here.

To follow up with that, I wanted to let you know that a few days ago my friend Richard over at the Link Building Bible Blog made a post about getting free backlinks from free reviews which is definitely worth the read, however I believe that CantGetRich.com should be added to the list.

I recommend reading Richards post, as well as taking a look at CantGetRich.com and especially his ReviewU section. For a blog with 162 RSS readers that is offering anyone free links and promotion, you would be stupid not to take up that offer.

Due to the nature of these posts, it may take awhile before Geoff gets around to reviewing you, but like people always say, you get what you pay for!

Every day I see a ton of blog posts and articles about complex techniques on what people think are great website marketing strategies. I see dozens of people selling (as well as dozens of people buying) useless ebooks about techniques that do not work, or even worse are the ebooks or people telling others about techniques that may have worked last year, but can actually be bad for your websites now.

I was inspired to write this post because I truly believe it is a must-read article for internet marketers and webmasters of all kinds. This article was written to help those who have been scammed into buying crummy ebooks and have lost a lot of money by putting their trust in the wrong people. I have done the same thing myself in the past. This post is also for those who are sick and tired of EVERY self-proclaimed link building expert who all tell you the same thing:

“Submit to directories, write articles, use social media, blah blah blah.”

No, we don’t want useless regirgitated content that you read 300 times before, we want easy advice to better ourselves and our websites, so that we can enjoy lots of long term targeted search engine traffic, and excellent free additions to our advertising income.

The 3 golden steps to website marketing success that will work for a website in any niche, with a marketer from any background, of any age, from anywhere in the world, are so simple that even if you blog about website marketing strategies like the blog you’re reading, to owning a website that sells guitars, these techniques will work for you.

Forget what everyone else has brainwashed into your mind and memorize these 3 steps to website marketing success.

Without further delay, here are the three steps to website marketing success.

1.) Content

Writing great unique content on a frequent basis is the number one way to build long term targeted search engine traffic. Google and most other large search engines feed upon content, especially if it is updated often. The more frequently you create new content, the more often the search engines will visit your site and crawl your pages. This in turn leads to the potential of immediate top rankings if there is a massive amount of new searches for a term (like when a disaster strikes such as a cyclone in Myanmar). Google wants the most recent news to appear above an old research paper about a cyclone that hit Myanmar five years ago. Frequently updated content also means that there will be more unique pages for the search engines to crawl, which means more internal links pointing to your strongest pages on your website. In simple terms, the more content that you create on a frequent basis, the higher the search engines will rank your site.

2.) Links

In addition to giving the search engines plenty of unique quality content to browse through, the largest factor that Google and other huge search engines have to base a sites quality from is how many other websites are linking to yours. The search engines count a link to your site much like a voting system. If two students are running for school president, and one of them has 200 friends voting for him and the opponent has only 180, by popular vote the person with the 200 friends would win, unless the kid with 180 friends had more of the official judges in his network. The same theory goes towards link building. Google pictures it as if there are 200 websites linking to SITE #1, and only 180 linking to SITE #2, chances are Google will rank the more popular site higher, unless SITE #2 has 180 very powerful related authority links and the 200 links are less related or filled with complete garbage/spam. In simple terms, after you are frequently adding quality unique content, the best thing you can do is to spend your time building links to your site and your articles/posts.

If you are ready to start building links, I recommend checking out my link building cookbook, which is the internet’s largest FREE unique one way link building resource. I guarantee you will see a 100% increase in your search engine traffic down the road from my FREE link building strategies, or I will personally quadruple your money back!

3.) Time

The internet is massive, and I would assume it is only a fraction of how large it will be in a few years. The search engines are not perfect, it takes a heck of a long time to index the entire web, which means your search engine optimization and your link building efforts are going to show slowly over a long period of time, and you shouldn’t expect results the first day.

I use to play a lot of chess when I was younger, and even had a personal coach who was a grandmaster at the game. After playing professionally for a few years, I started getting tired of having to do homework assignments for a hobby, and so I stopped taking lessons and ultimately quit playing. Even though I have not played a professional chess game in years, I still remember the last thing my coach Bill told me after I told him I didn’t want to play chess anymore because too much work was involved. The last words Bill said to me were…

“You just need to find the fun in hard work.”

While I never did find fun in chess homework, I have adapted Bill’s philosophy into my link building campaigns. Building links to your websites can be a lot of tedious work, but you just need to find the fun in it. I love working hard building links because it allows me the freedom of not having to go to a 9 to 5 job, work for someone I dislike, or be forced into doing work that doesn’t appeal to me.

In Conclusion,

The main thing I hope you take away from reading this is that there is no “secret formula” that you can only learn by buying someones product. The formula for success only involves writing great content and backing that up with an aggressive link building campaign. In the end, you will be receiving a lot of very targeted search engine traffic whom are known to have a better rate of buying your product, clicking your ads, or subscribing to your content.

It is a shame that most people are trying to scam others into buying products they don’t need, or selling strategies that don’t work. The truth is all listed here for free, so I hope you do me the favor of showing at least one other webmaster the truth about website marketing success by either telling him the 3 golden steps, by forwarding them to this page, or by helping promote this article.

This guest blogging post was submitted by Sharon Hurley Hall from Piggy Bank Pie.

Who doesn’t like to get something for nothing? If you own a blog or website, the idea of free traffic is tremendously appealing, and many of us are willing to do whatever it takes to get a few more visitors to our websites. If it’s as easy as putting a widget on your blog, so much the better. It doesn’t take a lot of effort and you stand to gain a lot in return, or do you? I’ve tried a few of these widgets - TheGoodBlogs, BlogRush, Entrecard and others, and I’m beginning to wonder if they are really worth it.

The Good Blogs - Not So Good

One of my first experiences with traffic widgets was TheGoodBlogs. Like most other sites, you sign up, add your blog, select some tags that fit it and put a widget on your blog. The idea is that the widget shows posts related to your content, and your content in turn is shown on other blogs. One of the things that troubled me about the widget was that much of the content actually shown didn’t seem that relevant to my readers, and my stats showed that very few visitors actually came to my blog from that site. After a while, I gave up on it and removed the widget from my blog.

Blogrush? No Rush!

I was a lot more optimistic about Blogrush when it first started. Ok, the widget was ugly, but at least it had possibilities. The ten tier referral system meant that the more people you signed up, the more your blog would be seen. Sounds good, doesn’t it? The trouble is that it probably works best for those who don’t need the additional traffic. If you are an A-list blogger, you can sign up thousands of people, earning referral and traffic credits and getting your posts displayed in even more places. For the rest of us, the traffic you get is fleeting, if it comes at all. I got a trickle of traffic from Blogrush at a time when I published some of my best posts. It was time to move to the next big thing - Entrecard.

Entrecard

Entrecard held even more promise. When you sign up for Entrecard you get to customize a widget to put on your site. You earn credits for dropping your Entrecard (like an online business card) on other sites and when others drop their cards on you. You use these credits to buy 24 hours of advertising on the site of your choice. So how does it work? I have had a lot of traffic from Entrecard, but most of it is drop and run traffic, lasting 5 seconds or less. However, if I spend my ad credits wisely, and advertise on a related site, I get new visitors who stick around a while and may even subscribe to my feed.

The Verdict

So, what’s the verdict? These widgets don’t work well for me. My blog (piggybankpie.com) is in the freelance writing niche and it’s been around for a while. If you have a brand new blog, these widgets are a great way to start getting traffic. If you have blogs that cover blogging, technology, gadgets or any of the popular topics on Technorati, then you will probably get a lot from traffic widgets. They didn’t do much for me. I have removed all of those widgets from my blog and am concentrating on building a readership in other ways, through social media and networking sites. And even though I no longer have the widget, I am still spending my Entrecard credits to advertise on blogs in my niche. That’s the best way to use it, in my opinion.

Collin LaHay’s Verdict: I agree with Sharon, most of these traffic widgets are not sending me a whole lot of traffic, however I have so much extra room by having two sidebars instead of one that I am leaving them up until I find something useful to replace them with!  If you think they are there because they are bringing me tons and tons of visitors, you would be mistaken.  I will be getting rid of them in a few weeks.

Photo by Jurvetson

This guest post was submitted by Patrick from Piggy Bank Pie Writing Services.

You’ve probably heard of Search Engine Optimization hundreds of time. But bloggers these days are looking at more efficient ways to drive traffic instantly. The answer resides in Social Media Optimization.

There are numerous social media sites on the Internet. Some are specialized in news feeding, others in bookmarking, but the main point is, they are tools you can use to promote quality content published on your blog. Now, I cannot stress how important this last sentence is. Promoting every single post that comes out of your blog may put you in trouble. You will be seen as a spammer, and users will simply ignore you. But if used wisely, social media sites can really boost your traffic and give you high, very high visibility.

Let’s look how we can nitro boost your traffic using social media sites.

1. Install ShareThis

Let’s start with the basic. If you want to help your blog with social media sites, you need the provide a tool for readers to help them vote and promote your content. The best one I know is ShareThis. This plugin combines most of the social media submission links into one applet, and the installation is done in a snap.

2. Activate FeedBurner FeedFlare

Many of your readers will grab your posts right off your RSS feed. But when comes the time to get votes, these readers are away from your site, and therefore less likely to give their thumbs up… unless you activate FeedFlare. FeedFlare ads a footer at the bottom of each of your articles in your RSS feed. It displays the count of Stumbles, Diggs, comments, Del.icio.uses, etc. Not only subscribers get instant and dynamic information of how the post is doing on social media sites, but with a simple click they can cast their vote, helping you reach even more readers.

3. Get The Sphinn Button

If you wish to play the social media game, you need to play it right. Leaving aside the Sphinn community would be a mistake. More and more bloggers are using Sphinn to promote… what’s often buried in minutes on Digg: Internet Marketing and Blogging content. Sphinn is not BloggingZoom though, you should be careful not to submit only your own posts. Provide Sphinn fans their favorite tool and install the Sphinn submit button on your site.

4. Write a Diggbait

What is a Diggbait? It is a post especially written for Digg users. Writing a good Diggbait can bring so much traffic that very often, shared servers (cheap hosting deals) collide under the pressure of gigantic network load. But still, if you survive a Diggbait, you can easily add hundreds of new RSS subscribers to your blog. Your host here, Collin Lahay, previously wrote this Diggbait and received 70,979 visitors from Digg in 3 days! You can read the results of his experience in this post.

5. Help Your Blog To Survive DiggBaits

If you read digg on a regular basis, chances are you’ve been sent to a site that collapsed under pressure. If you decide to focus your energy on Digg, help yourself by installing WP-Cache or WP Super Cache. The concept of caching is very simple. Each time a visitor goes to your blog, a PHP request queries your WordPress database and retrieves the content that goes into your page (the text you wrote). This might sounds like an instant process, but thousands users reading the same page mostly at the time would badly impact your server’s performance. Instead of going through this database querying process, a caching plugin saves a copy of your pages including their content on the server’s hard disk, leaving slow database calls aside. Surviving mammoth traffic from social media sites will surely help your blog’s reputation, and Digg users will be confident they can safely submit content from your site.

6. Invest In StumbleUpon

A poll on ProBlogger asked readers what was their favorite social bookmarking site. 34% of voters said StumbleUpon. The closest followers were Del.icio.us and Digg with 21% and 18% respectively. When stumblers are going nuts for a post on your blog, you can easily expect hundreds of unique visitors in a day. Now the question is, can you stumble your own post? Yes you can, just don’t overdo it. By using SU on a daily basis, you will vote sites and participate in the community. Develop friendships and socialize with other users to build a strong profile.

7. Optimize Your Content For Social Media

It is well-known that users from social media sites have a very short attention span. What it means for you is that if you wish to promote content on these sites, you need to slightly adjust your writing. Never-ending posts where readers can get lost in paragraphs and paragraphs of text will not work. Keep in mind that not only you are writing for the web, but in this case you are writing for social media users. Let’s digg into the mind of a StumbleUpon user (that was a social media joke.) Ok, you click the Stumble! button and a site shows up. Your eyes are seeing what’s above the fold, which means, you’ll see a title and maybe the first paragraph. Now remember, the eyes are looking at the title, but the mouse pointer is still on top of the Stumble! button. Your mission, as a writer, is to provoke a mouse movement to push the pointer away from this location and prevent the user’s index finger from clicking the trigger. First thing you need is a killer title. Now if you pass this step, readers are heading for the first paragraph. Tell them what they can expect but don’t give too much information, you want them to reach the bottom of the page. Remember that social media users love bulleted and numbered lists. This makes your post easily scannable, and increases chances of being voted.

8. Play By The Rules, But…

To rap this up, I’ll conclude by sharing some explorations I’ve done recently. Blog Catalog has user groups where you can post vote requests for either Digg or StumbleUpon. When you feel like you have something valuable to share, like killer content, you may ask for social media love in order to get more visibility. Now, be VERY careful. I’m not going to say that you shouldn’t join these groups, but you need to know that reciprocal stumbling can get your blog kicked out of SU. I’ve seen users posting vote requests for each and every articles they publish. And sometimes, stuff that would never get submitted otherwise. Concentrate on writing quality content, and votes will fall from the sky. Curious? Go to Blog Catalog and join the Stumble group.

Do you optimize your content for social media sites? Any tips you wish to share? Join the conversation over to comments.