Mobile SEO is a common misnomer in both the search and mobile industries. It simply doesn’t exist.

Why? When most people say “Mobile SEO,” what they really mean is local SEO. They’re talking about optimizing your website for users on their mobile phones doing searches on the go. For example, if you own a pizza shop and someone types in “Pizza” when they’re in your city, you want your result to show up first.

Is Local SEO the Same as Mobile SEO?

Yes. 

These are some of the most powerful, impactful, viral and moving social media events of 2011.

Japan Earthquake and Tsunami

Japan’s earthquake and tsunami touched the world. The resulting chaos at Fukushima and the nuclear radiation brought increased concern about nuclear power globally. The world pooled together its resources to help Japan recover.

An hour after the quake hit Japan, there were reports that Twitter was experiencing 1,200 tweets posted every minute. And at most times today, eight or nine of Twitter's top 10 Trending Tropics — such as #prayforjapan, #tsunami and #japan — were directly related to the earthquake and tsunami.

On Facebook, people not only posted thoughts and prayers for the people of Japan, but also used their updates to tell friends and family where they are and how they are doing. Facebook pages related to the disaster, such as Japan Earthquake, also popped up, grabbing nearly 3,000 followers in about 12 hours.

Death of Steve Jobs

Steve Jobs was one of the most iconic and influential people of the Silicon Valley. He revolutionized three different industries: The PC industry, the music industry and the animation industry.

Steve Jobs, along with Steve Wozniak, created the first personal computer to have an integrated keyboard. They were the first to create a completely workable all-in-one computer. He created the iPod, the first mobile device capable of holding over 1,000 songs. He created iTunes, the most popular music store on the planet. He also helped found Pixar, which created the first computer generated full picture movie in history.

Internet users likely broke records as they jammed Twitter with tweets marked #iSad and #ThankYouSteve and flooded Facebook's news streams, swiftly spreading the news of Steve Jobs's death. Twitter activity hit 10,000 tweets per second following the announcement about Apple's co-founder death.

UK Riots

The riots in the UK were blamed in large part to social media. Riots were organized and incited through text messages, social media sites and other forms of Web 2.0 communication.

During the riots, questions of how much control governments should or shouldn't have over mobile communications became a central concern.

Here's a video that reveals how English rioters used Social Media.

Death of Muammar Gaddafi

Muammar Gaddafi, died on 20th October, 2011 during the Libyan Civil War 2011. He was fired at by the NTC and captured alive but wounded after taking refuge in a large drainage pipe with his loyal bodyguards. In a video published soon after, he can be seen draped with a cloth and his body being paraded and kicked by anti-Gaddafi protestors.

On Twitter, many users expressed joy at Gadaffi’s death, including tweets in Arabic saying things like “God is great” and “Libya is now 100% DEGAFFINATED”.

Social Media IPO’s

Pandora IPOed at $2.56 billion, LinkedIn IPOed at $4.2 billion and Facebook’s IPO is estimated to be at over $50 billion, creating over 1,000 millionaires overnight.

Social media has taken over the web sphere and social media sites, which hardly had any attention at all just five years ago, are poised to take center stage of both the internet and the business worlds.

Hurricane Irene

Hurricane Irene had windspeeds so dangerous that President Obama declared an evacuation of New York City. In addition to whipping up the seas and the winds, Hurricane Irene also whipped up the twittersphere.

Tweeters were using social media to keep one another up to date on danger zones, safety tips, family information and more. It put social media to a humanitarian use. More than a million Twitter messages were posted about Irene.

A Facebook page was created to help strangers try to return found items to their owners. As of today, more than 98,600 people had "liked" the page and many had already posted images of items they've found.

Wikileaks Scandal

Wikileaks is an organization that collects leaked intel from private companies and governments and published them free of charge. Wikileaks has caused scandals which spread through social media amongst the US government, worldwide governments and Fortune 500 companies.

Many equate Wikileaks to being the social sphere’s underground news source. It’s not for profit and doesn’t have their own publication. Instead, they let readers and users spread the news for them.

Middle East Revolution

Social Media played an important role in organizing protests, revolutions, build public support, and government crackdowns. The year 2011 saw uprisings in Syria, Egypt, Yemen, Tunisia, Libya etc.

The usage of social media was extensive. One Egyptian activist had tweeted during the protests, "We use Facebook to schedule the protests, Twitter to coordinate, and YouTube to tell the world."

British Royal Wedding

The British Royal Wedding in 2011 was the first royal wedding since social media took off. The wedding was streamed live on the internet and users commented on the wedding alongside the event.

In addition to the television audiences, the ceremony attracted 72 million live streams and a reach of 101 million streams on YouTube across 188 countries. The wedding has been listed in the 2012 Guinness Book Of World Records for the record of Most Live Streams For A Single Event with its 72 million streams.

The British Royal Wedding was an occasion that the whole world talked about, not just the British.

Rebecca Black’s “Friday”

Rebecca Black’s “Friday” ignited a storm of controversy in the social sphere and quite a bit of all-out bashing. As of today, the video has more than 95,000 likes and 380,000 dislikes which is almost four times more “dislikes” than “likes” on YouTube. The video raises questions about both youth and fame, as well as the direction of the music industry in general.

Why This Kolaveri Di

Why This Kolaveri Di was the most downloaded song on mobile devices in India within just 18 days of its release. The song was the first song in Tamil, rather than Hindi, to be shown on MTV India.

The Twitter hashtag #kolaveri quickly hit Twitter’s top charts after its launch. The kicker? The song is a soundtrack for a movie – And the movie hasn’t even been released yet.

The song spread through radio and press, but many believe that its fame and popularity was caused primarily by social media. Till date it has more than 30 Million Youtube views.

Launch of Google Plus

Google Plus was the fastest growing social media network with 62 million users within 6 months of its launch. It introduced innovative new features, such as “Hangouts,” which allowed people to create impromptu video conferences. It introduced “Circles,” which allowed you to easily control who gets to see what on your social network.

Occupy Wall Street

Occupy Wall Street is an ongoing protest movement that quickly took hold on Twitter, Facebook, Reddit and many other social media networks. Bloggers all over the world took up the cause and helped spread the movement.

It started off with a poster in the middle of Adbusters magazine and #occupywallstreet with the hashtag on the cover. The Twitter feed started going crazy with that hashtag. The idea quickly spawned protests in other parts of the world: Occupy Dublin (Ireland,) Occupy London, Occupy Melbourne and more.

Occupy Wall Street clearly demonstrated the power of social media for organizing groups and moving the world politically.

These were some of the most powerful social media events of the year. Each of these events reached millions of people and further established social media as a dynamic way to spread ideas and information.

If you’ve been working in the internet industry for some time, it can be easy to underestimate how much specialized knowledge you actually have. Before teaching someone how to build links, you’ll often have to go over a lot of things that you consider basic.

All that said, here’s how to take a brand new link builder and turn them into a pro.

Basic Training

The first step to teaching someone link building is to teach them the fundamentals.

What is a high quality link? What is PageRank? What is anchor text? What is the difference between an in-body link and a footer link, the difference between a no follow link and a do follow link?

The best way to teach them the basics of link building is to expose them to concepts gradually. Don’t just dump a 200 page eBook on them or send them to read 50 articles. Instead, teach them one concept a day or have them read one article a day while they’re learning the rest of what they need to know.

Software and Procedure

Next teach them about all the software they’ll need to know how to use, the basic procedure and linkbuilding techniques that you plan on employing.

Have them watch you do it several times before asking them to do it for themselves. A few of the most important things to cover include:

• Data gathering tools. Tools to check PageRank, tools to check traffic, tools to check nofollow status of backlinks and so forth. Make sure they know how to use the tools and have the tools installed on their own computers.
• Status of current projects. What kind of links are you targeting right now? What are the bottlenecks and what are the next steps? What was the mentality or philosophy that went into cultivating these links?
• Linkbuilding tools. Make sure they know how to use any tools necessary in the actual link building process. The exact tools depend on your methodology, but can include social media submitters, backlink checkers, content spinners, etc.
• How to find and make contact with websites. Walk them through the process and make sure they understand what it’s like before trying it themselves.

Teaching Them the Sales Sequence

The first 30 days on the job will usually give you enough information about the candidate that you’ll be able to tell whether or not they’ll succeed in the long run.

Though technical skills can be taught to a lot of people, the most important skill when it comes to linkbuilding is sales. The ultimate question is: Can this trainee convince other people to link to your website?

Within about 30 days, you should be able to find out.

Teaching your candidate the sales sequence depends should be part theory part practice. In the beginning, you’ll want to hold their hand through the process. Once they know what the process looks like, you’ve got to let them go to see whether they sink or swim.

The most important aspects to cover in the sales sequence include: 1) Finding potential sites to get links from, 2) Researching those sites, 3) Making the initial contact and 4) Closing the deal.

Throughout the whole process your trainee needs to be keeping great notes. If they hit a block in the road, it might make sense to have another team member take over the correspondence. If that happens, they need to know exactly how to pick up where the first person left off.

Do several links together in the beginning to make sure they understand everything from front to back. Then give them a few assignments and have them report back. Finally, once they’re up and running, create a set of metrics that you want to track and let them do their job, using you as a resource if they have any questions.

Launching an eBook is much like launching any other product. You first need to do extensive market research to make sure you’re creating a product that people want to buy. Then you need to spend a lot of time creating a good product, so that people who buy it will buy again in the future. Finally, you need to market the product well so that your target audience knows about its existence.

Here’s how to write, launch and sell your informational eBook.

Before You Write a Single Word

Before you write a single word, you need to do your market research.

Doing your market research involves figuring out exactly who your target audience is. Once you know your audience, you then need to figure out what they want.

Your audience should be a very specific group of people. For example, if you’re selling a weight loss product, “women” is far, far too generic. Instead, you might want to go for something like women in their 30’s who are about 40 pounds overweight. You might even want to go more specific than that: Housewives in their 30’s, 40 pounds overweight.

This gives you a very specific market to cater to. It allows you to market to your highest ROI market segment.

Once you know who you’re talking to, the next step is to figure out what they want. There are a few ways to do this.

You can do your research online. Find message boards, chat rooms and website dedicated to your market segment. Look for repeat questions and pain points that seem to come up often.

Also read magazines that cater to your market. What kind of hot buttons do they continually push?

Once you’ve figured out what your market really wants, you can then write an eBook around that topic and know you have a fairly good chance of hitting it out of the park.

Writing the eBook

Creating an eBook is quite a mission. An eBook is typically at least 20,000 words, often a lot more. That means a lot of time in front of the computer.

At times you may question whether or not you’re really committed. At times you might wonder if the eBook will sell, and whether you’re just putting all this effort into something that might just go down the drain.

Staying motivated is a big part of success when it comes to writing an eBook.

Perhaps the best way to write an eBook is to set a daily goal. Instead of trying to write it all at once, just set a goal for yourself. That goal might be 500 words a day, it might be 1,000 words a day. It might be one page a day or three pages a day. Whatever the case may be, just set a daily goal and try to stick to that goal.

At 3 pages a day, in 30 days you’ll have a 90 page eBook. It might not seem like much progress at first, but it very quickly snowballs.

Launching & Selling Your eBook

If you already have an audience, start by launching your book there. Announce your new eBook to your blog, your email list, your Facebook friends and your Twitter followers.

If you don’t already have an email list, the going gets a little bit harder. First, start by seeing if you can find other people who have an audience to promote your book. If you’ve been in the industry for a while, chances are you know some other people who might have some influence.

You can also try paid marketing. Using tools like Google AdWords, Microsoft AdCenter or Facebook Ads can be a powerful way to make an impact.

Finally, try SEO. Create an informative website about your subject and create top notch content about that topic. This method takes more time, but can generate consistent traffic.

Getting an eBook off the ground takes dedication. Once it’s off the ground however, it can generate a lot of revenue for years to come.

Guest posting allows you to get in front of an existing blog’s audience. Unlike just a standard backlink you actually get an entire page to demonstrate that you know your topic.

How do you guest post on someone else’s blog? Let’s take a look.

Finding and Selecting Blogs to Approach

The first step is to find blogs that you’d like to guest post on and approach them about doing the post.

There are two main ways you can do this. First, through getting to know all the relevant blogs in your sphere. Use, Google, Technorati and blogrolls to find relevant blogs and figure out which ones you’d like to appear on.

Alternatively, you can use MyBlogGuest.com’s forums to find blog owners who are actively looking for guest bloggers.

Once you’ve chosen a blog to approach, how do you pitch the blog post?

Making the Pitch

There are two different trains of thought when it comes to pitching posts: Either email the website owner first with a list of potential topics; or just write an entire guest blog and email it to them.

If you’re emailing them a list of potential topics, make sure you include a brief bio and a link to your blog so they can learn more about you. Make it short, or you risk your email not being read.

Make sure each topic suggestion is compelling and targeted specifically towards their audience.

If you’re sending an entire written article already, just send a brief intro in your email. Your whole email should be no more than two or three short paragraphs long. Let your article speak for itself.

How to Write a Successful Post

There are a few things to keep in mind when it comes to writing posts that other people’s audience will love.

First of all, spend some time on their site and get to know their audience. Know what kinds of topics they like and what writing styles they respond to. Write your guest post so that their audience feels like you’re talking directly to them.

Make sure your blog post answers a burning question in their mind or answers a popular question. If you can take a unique angle to something that’s been discussed in the past, so much the better.

Spend as much time on a guest blog post as you would on a post that goes on your own website.

After The Post Goes Live

A lot of the work in guest posting actually comes after the post has actually been published.

The first thing you want to do is help promote the post. Use Twitter, Facebook and your own email list to promote the post.

Why? Because if the post is successful, you’ll have a very good chance of having another chance to guest blog in the future. Also, if more people see your post, that’s more people who’re going to end up learning about you and seeing your content in action.

Also, having many successful blog posts on different sites will help build your reputation among the blogerati, further increasing your chances of getting more guest blogging gigs in the future.

Another thing you should do after the post is live is check the comments section religiously.

Remember: The people who read and post in the comment section are the site’s most loyal and active readers. If you win these readers over, they’re likely going to turn into active fans of your site as well.

Make sure to respond to every single comment that was posted in response to your article.

That’s the long and short of how to succeed in using guest blogging to promote your blog. Guest blogging can be an incredibly powerful way to get in front of audiences of people who may end up loving your content. It’s not the easiest link building method on the planet, but it’s very, very effective.

So what is SMO, what is engagement and how are they different?

What is Social Media Optimization?

Social media optimization is the more quantitative side of the social media equation. It’s what allows marketers to tackle social media in a systematic and scientific manner.

Let’s say you’re trying to get a certain fan page to go viral. One way you can measure this in SMO terms is through what percentage of people repost your posts.

So if you post something on your wall and it’s “shared” by 1.5% of your fans, that gives you a benchmark metric to measure against. If you track this number whenever you post status updates, you can very quickly start to get a sense for what kinds of things get passed along and what kinds of things don’t.

This is just one example of SMO in action. SMO can track visitors to a page, the number of shares, number of likes, peak traffic times, best days to post and a whole slew of other statistics that you can use to optimize your campaign.

In other words, SMO is the systematic and scientific approach to getting more people to like your page, more shares and overall a more powerful brand effect.

What is Engagement?

Engagement on the other hand is a completely different ballgame. Engagement is the qualitative side of the social media equation.

It’s how engaged your fans are with your work. It’s how emotionally vested they are in your brand. It’s how excited they get about your product when they tell their friends about it. It’s how much they think you care about them.

Fostering engagement doesn’t come from statistics and calculations. Instead, it comes from regularly connecting with your audience in an engaging dialogue.

If you want to foster more engagement, make it a regular goal of yours to foster more activity from your users.

Ask them questions. Get them talking to you and to one another. Host contests that get them involved. Create games for your users. Ask for their feedback.

Pull them into your brand experience. Your users should feel like they’re part of your community.

Two Sides of the Same Coin

It’s important to realize that if you want to succeed on social media, you need to use both optimization and engagement.

If you only have optimization, you’ll have a very technically well run campaign, but it just won’t have that “buzz.” That “buzz” is what causes social media campaigns to take off like wildfire. It’s what gets people to stick around. It’s what people remember.

On the other hand, if you only have engagement, you’re probably not getting as many people to your pages as you could. If you’re not posting your updates at optimal times, if you’re not tracking what kinds of content your visitors like, if you’re not using systematic testing to determine what really works, you’re probably going to have a hard time succeeding in the long run.

In order for you to have a vibrant social media campaign that engages a lot of people, you need to have both optimization and engagement.

Start out in the area where you’re weakest. If you already have an engaged community but haven’t been tracking your metrics, work on your metrics first. On the other hand, if you already have a scientifically well optimized campaign but your user base lacks passion, start out by increasing engagement.

That’s the long and short of what SMO is and what engagement is. In the long run, you want to master both to get your campaigns to really take off. Your campaigns must make scientific sense, but they also need to capture the heart of your fans.

Here are seven practical & easy to execute methods on getting backlinks today.

Tip #1: Do Guest Blogging

Go to MyBlogGuest.com and sign up for an account. This is the #1 forum for people who want guest posters on their website.

If you’re an expert on a certain topic and want to get more traffic, guest blogging is truly the way to go about it.
Not only do you get high quality, high PageRank backlinks but you also get quality visitors from other websites coming to your site.

Tip #2: Analyze Your Competitor’s Strategy and Copy It

Better yet, improve on it and push them out of their position.

Use backlink checking tools to figure out what kind of places your top competitors are getting their backlinks from.

Are they using guest posting? Or are they using article submissions? Perhaps they’re paying for backlinks?

Whatever strategy they’re using, you’ll know it’s working in their industry for sure. Copy it and you’ll see similar results.

Tip #3: Contact Journalists on HARO

HARO or “Help a Reporter Out” is an online newsletter mailed once or twice a day to people who’re interested in getting interviewed.Getting interviewed for a publication is a great way to get exposure and get at least one backlink, provided you can get them to link back to your website.

Often time’s all you need to do is have a phone conversation with the reporter for them to place you in the newspaper, online publication or magazine. You don’t even need to write anything.

Tip #4: Generating Your Own Links

Generating your own links is still a very valid strategy. Although the Panda update has penalized these links somewhat, they can still be a significant part of your overall link profile.

These links include article submission links, links from sites like Squidoo or HubPages and profile backlinks.
Remember not to overdo it on any one link source, or you risk looking like you’re getting spammy links.

Tip #5: Don’t Be Afraid to Pay

Don’t be afraid to pay for either links or manpower for building links.

Buying links outright is considered blackhat and could get you penalized by Google. However, the realistic chances of you being found out are quite slim. That said, it may or may not be worth the risk.

However, paying for someone to post on forums for you or create social media profiles for you is completely within the ballpark.

Learning to outsource effectively is a big part of successfully running an online business. Don’t spend your time on work that could be farmed out for $3 an hour.

Tip #6: The Real Way to Use Blog Commenting
Blog commenting used to be a big source of backlinks. Today it’s not considered a solid source at all.

However, it’s important to realize that blog commenting’s real power doesn’t necessarily come from getting one link from the blog comment itself.

Instead, you can often get a lot of people to look at your site by writing intelligent replies. If the people who land on your site like your content, they’ll start commenting on your site as well and potentially link back to you.

In other words, there’s a lot of indirect backlinking power that comes from writing good blog comments.

Tip #7: Don’t Neglect Internal Linking

Finally, don’t neglect the power of your own web pages. Remember that Google doesn’t rank “websites,” they rank “web pages.” You already have a huge and easily accessible source of high quality backlinks: Your own pages.

Each and every page or post on your site should link to 3-5 other related pages on your site. This is easy to do with a “related pages” type of plugin in WordPress.

As you can tell, there is a really wide range of different ways you can build backlinks. Some take longer and can get you higher quality links, while others are much easier but get low quality links. Your best bet is usually a mixture of different link types of with links of differing quality.
 

A great landing page will instantly grab a reader’s attention and get them interested in what you’re offering.

The following infographic sums up all the points discussed below and mastering these will help you craft an absolutely phenomenal landing page with off-the-roof conversions.

Tip #1 – The “Reader Callout” Headline

Your headline needs get your readers to feel like you’re talking to them directly. They should feel pulled towards the screen. They should instantly get the sense that their life can improve if they read your page and learned a bit more about what you’re offering.

Spend as much time as necessary on your headline. Most top copywriters write 50+ headlines and choose the best one, rather than just writing one headline.

Tip #2 – Play Up the Problem

Describe the problem and try to turn up the dial on the pain. If you can get the reader in the emotional state of being angry, frustrated or fed up with their current situation, you have a much better chance of getting them to take action to change it.

Tip #3 – Use the “You Perspective”

Write your copy from the perspective of your user’s benefits, rather than what makes your product or service great. For example, it’s much better to say “By using X, you’ll get A, B, and C benefit, solving your Z issue” than to say “Product X has E, F, G features.”

Tip #4 – Use Proof Elements

Why should someone believe the claims you’re making? Can you actually prove that you can deliver on the promises you made? Proof elements include before and after photos, celebrity endorsements, testimonials, video and audio proof and so on. The more the better.

Tip #5 – Reduce the Action Commitment

Try to make the first action you ask someone to take as easy as possible. For example, it’s much easier to just fill out a name and email than it is to fill out name, email, phone number and address.

You might get 20% of your readers to fill out the former and only 2% to fill out the latter. Make the first commitment as light as possible.

Tip #6 – Remove the Navigation

Don’t have navigation on your landing page. That directs the reader’s eyes to only the copy and the call to action that you want them to take. Pages with no navigation usually have significantly higher conversion rates than pages with navigation.

Tip #7 – Professional Design

Having good design isn’t essential for a landing page, but having unprofessional looking design will kill your landing page. If a page looks like it was built in 1995, your users aren’t going to feel comfortable typing in their credit card or even their email address.

Tip #8 – One Clear Call to Action

Don’t try to get people to take more than one action at a time. Your landing page should have just one thing you want your users to do, no more. Choices tend to reduce conversions.

Tip #9 – Use an Attention Catching Image

A before after image, an image of a celebrity using your product, or even an image of an attractive woman can often increase conversions.

The image must be relevant to your product and it should be attention catching. If it does these two things, it’s worth testing it to see how it affects your response rate.

Tip #10 – Split Test

To build a great landing page, you’ll need to test several different versions to see which converts the best. Often time’s a small change to a landing page can result in huge differences. The only way to really figure out what’s best for your landing page is to test, test, test.

There are two main ways to use videos: To bring in moore traffic to your website, or to build relationships and credibility with existing vistors.
 

Using Video Marketing to Bring in New Traffic

Websites like YouTube, DailyMotion, MetaCafe and many more have millions and millions of visitors visiting them every day. A good video can easily get a few hundred thousand visitors; and a great video can even get several million.

In addition to the “going viral” effect, you can also bring in traffic to your website simply by creating videos that people in your industry want to share.

For example, if you’re in the weight loss industry and you did a top notch video on what scientists say about the top 5 diets in the world, it’ll probably get passed around. It’ll be “shared” on Facebook, “tweeted” on Twitter and reposted on message boards all over the world.

Videos spread, whether it’s through viral marketing or through individual shares.

Using Video to Improve Brands, Relationships and Sales

Another place where videos can come in handy is in communicating with your existing customers. Using a video allows you to convey a lot more than if you were just using text.

Videos where you’re actually on camera talking to the audience can do a lot to build trust. People now actually have a face they can put to the brand. They have someone they can relate to.

When it comes time to make a decision on which product to buy, they’re much more likely to buy from someone who they feel like they know than someone who they’ve only interacted with over text.

Even if you’re only using PowerPoint-style presentations, videos can be very powerful. It allows you to communicate in images, audio, sub-videos and more.

How to Create an Effective Video

The most important part of getting good video is to get good audio. If you produce a video where the image is a little fuzzy, it won’t kill the video. However, if the audio is fuzzy and people can’t hear what you’re saying, your whole video goes down the drain.

Invest in a good set of microphones. If you’re appearing on camera, consider investing in wireless mics.
Filming the video can be as easy as creating a PowerPoint presentation or using other presentation software to create the video while you do a voiceover. You can also have someone film you speaking from one or more angles.

The whole production can be done for under $500.

Editing can be done on high end software like Final Cut Pro or Adobe Premier by a professional editor, or using free software like iMovie or Windows Movie Maker. For simple videos, the quality difference won’t be big, though it’ll make a big difference for more complex projects.

Once you’ve filmed and edited the video, the final step is to launch your video with a kickoff. Send it off to your email list, as well as your Twitter feed and Facebook page. If you have a blog, post it on there as well.

Are you using videos in your business yet? If not, now might be a good time to look into it. Video marketing is an exciting way to both bring in new traffic, as well as to build a relationship with your existing fans.

Press Release

A well-written press release is a good way to spread the news about your site. A press release is simply an announcement of sorts which is related to your website and which is written for the media. You can hire a freelancer writer with experience in writing professional press releases to write your press release for you. You could easily find a writer online who will write you a 500 word or so press release for around $20 to $25. You then can submit it to PR websites. The search engines look favorably upon press release sites which means that your keyword rich, well-written press release will be indexed quickly, giving your website or blog a nice temporary boost.

Pay Per Click (PPC) Advertising

Another inexpensive internet marketing technique to use is pay per click (PPC) advertising. The beauty of PPC is the fact that you can spend as much or as little as you want and that you can purchase traffic that is very targeted. While Google Adwords is the largest PPC program online it is also one of the most expensive. A good alternative to Adwords is to use second-tiered PPC programs. Among the best of these is 7Search as they have good traffic which converts quite well. The key to succeeding with 7Search is using very broad keywords. It costs just $25.00 to set up an account and with a minimum bid of just one penny, you can count on a lower cost per visit and more affordable overall costs than with higher profile programs such as Adwords.

Blogging

Another option is blogging. You can blog your way to the top as blogging is a highly effective method to use for achieving high search engine rankings. Use one of the free blogging platforms and then buy an inexpensive domain to park it at. WordPress is a top choice as it features plug-ins which automate many of the processes and which integrates pinging to drive traffic to your blog. The trick with blogging is to do it regularly and to choose your tags carefully. The content must be deemed useful and informational for readers. If you become lucky with your blog an owner of a high ranking website or blog will link to you, giving you a nice source of highly targeted traffic.

Social Bookmarking

Social bookmarking is another proven tool. Millions of internet users are using social bookmarking sites to store, organize and manage websites that interest them on public bookmarking sites instead of storing it on their computers. When you bookmark your sites with social bookmarking sites, you will automatically obtain access to potentially large numbers of people which visits sites like StumbleUpon, Reddit and Digg. Social bookmarking can be very time-consuming task. You have to create accounts at each site before manually submitting your page to them. This is good reason to use a service like Social Maximizer as the social bookmarking will be done for you. 100 submissions would cost you less than $20.

Directory Submission

Finally, do not overlook submitting your site to directories. Google, MSN and Yahoo put a high value on the number of incoming links which point to your site when deciding where your site will rank. Submitting your website to directories is easy to do. However, you will have to have quite a bit of time available as you’ll need to find a good list of directories and then have the details about yours site submitted properly to each of them. For a low cost you can easily hire a directory submission service like Directory Maximizer which will do the work for you and in the most effective way. Expect to pay under $20 for having 100 submissions done.

Tightwads and misers can successfully market online without the need for huge budgets. The internet does offer some great low cost opportunities for the most frugal among us and it it also allows you the chance to market for free. By all means, take advantage of these low cost and free internet marketing options so that you can drive traffic to your website without busting your budget.