As promised, here’s a post exclusively on Traffic Geyser for your enjoyment. (Having said that, I hope you enjoy it!).

For those of you unfamiliar with Traffic Geyser, it is a really cool bit of software that allows you to submit a video clip to over 40 popular video sharing sites. It also strips out the audio and submits that to podcast directories. You can then attach keywords and a description to the video, and the idea is that it very quickly gains top rankings in the search engines, piggy backing on the popularity of the major social networking sites. Ideally, you target low traffic keywords, so you still really need to do your keyword research.

I signed up for Traffic Geyser a few months ago, and here’s my experience with it so far.

I didn’t have a product of my own to promote, so I simply picked an affiliate offer I was promoting to use as a guinea pig. I made a short (1:30 min) video about the product (its a financial product). The video was literally the cheesiest thing you’ve ever seen; I basically went to the their application form online and did a Camtasia screen capture of it while talking the viewer through a few key points. I then told them to go to my website, where I’d setup a special landing page for the video so they could then apply for themselves. It was the same landing page I’ve used in PPC campaigns promoting this product, just tagged with a different SID. At the end of the video I simply put my URL on the screen for a few seconds.

Now, I submitted this video about three months ago. Within a day or two, I already had one or two first page hits. I think DailyMotion.com was the first up. Anyways, just to check on this, to make sure it is current and good info for you, I just typed in my keywords while writing this post, and today, three months later, I own positions number 3, 4, 5, and 9 on the first page for my money making keyword. Interestingly, DailyMotion is no longer on the first page (I didn’t look past page 1) but YouTube is now in #4, and Technorati has scraped the video from YouTube and is #3. Also, some blogger has scraped my YouTube video and posted it on his site, so it is gaining even more exposure. His page is #5. How fun is that? My own page is number 9.

Anyways, Traffic Geyser costs around $100 a month, but I’ve been watching it closely and this short video has pretty much covered my costs for the last three months. In fact last month left me with a few bucks leftover. Now all I need to do is start creating more videos!!! (Don’t ask why I haven’t done that yet, I haven’t figured it out either.)

All that to say that Traffic Geyser is well worth the money, and if you only put a tiny bit of effort into it, you will reap the rewards.

The cool thing is that you really don’t need your own product to benefit from this. It applies just as much to affiliate marketing as it does to marketing your own products online. It is basically a great way to drive targeted, interested traffic to your site, for free.

Oh, I should mention that the biggest drag about using this software is you have to create accounts for yourself for all the video sharing sites. I only created accounts for about half of the sites, the ones I knew best and figured had the most starpower. It took me a couple hours. Alternatively, you can pay to get a complete set of accounts made for you by Traffic Geyser. It’s probably almost worth it. Once your accounts are created though, you can save the profile so you never have to enter that info again.

I’m planning on creating more videos pretty soon, I’ll keep you posted on their success!

In three days I have nearly quadrupled my inbound links (110 to 482 on Yahoo), and it all came from 30 minutes of easy work. More to the point, all of these links are linked to my homepage with the keyword phrase “Affiliate Marketing Tips.” Wanna know how I did it? I used a remarkably fresh new method by Michelle MacPhearson, called “30 Minute Backlinks.”

So now you’re wondering what kind of black-hat stuff I’ve managed to dig myself into right? SEO is grueling, hard work right? Nobody gets quick results with a puny amount of work, right? Well I can tell you the whole thing is completely legitimate. The basic idea is to take advantage of web directories that have high PR, yet are virtually unknown to the majority of webmasters! How can this be you ask? They are software directories!

Software directories… I can hear you laughing already. Like what is a software directory going to do for me? Well what if I told you that Michelle lays out no less than 5 different ways you can create your own customized, branded, software in less than 30 minutes? The beauty of this system is it doesn’t even really matter too much if nobody ever uses your software… though it would be nice of course. The trick here is that you’re getting your software placed in the directories with the keywords you choose as the linking term, coming back directly to your site. These are all one way links coming from good PR sites!

I’ve only used one of the five examples that Michelle discusses - so far I’ve made myself a toolbar for FireFox and Internet Explorer. You can check it out here if you want - it’s got some cool tools on it for affiliate marketers. The best part was, I didn’t need to know a single line of code to produce this toolbar. If you can spell your name and type in your internet address, you can be a programmer!! Well, not quite, but you get the point.

So basically she lays out five different ways to make a cool bit of software, targeted to your niche, which you can then upload to hundreds of sites around the internet - sites that want your listing- even crave your listings! You see these guys want to have the biggest, hugest link directories out there because that is their reason for existence.

The best part is, it is completely free and takes very little time to implement. (The video series itself costs a bit, but it is very reasonable). Anyways, I don’t want to make this too “salesy” - really I’m just kind of stoked that I managed to triple my backlinks with so little effort, and I wanted to share that tip with you. Check it out, and let me know how it works for you!

(UPDATE) As of today (April 9) this domain is up to 631 inbound on Yahoo. I’ve done nothing additional since this posting aside from leaving 3-5 comments on some other blogs.

(UPDATE) April 10 - Yahoo now shows 785 inbound. This is the gift that keeps on giving!

(UPDATE) April 19 - My backlink tool appears to be dead, I now have 0 inbound from each of the big 3! Can anyone recommend a better link checking tool? Argh.

In my ongoing quest to achieve SEO for this blog I’ve started looking at the number of inbound links I have. The more inbound links you have, especially one way links, the better your ranking on the search engines. That’s the theory anyways. Ideally, you want inbound links from sites/pages with high PR as well.

This inbound links tool shows all the inbound links to your site registered by the Big Three: Google, Yahoo, and MSN. Punch in your site and try it out. When you click on the button it will bring you to the SEOChat website where your results will be displayed.

Alternatively, you can have a look at the Google Webmaster Tools for your site, or go to alltheweb.com and punch in link:www.yoursitename.com to see the results.

Link Popularity Tool © SEO Chat™ URL Valid URL to check Enter Captcha To Continue To prevent spamming, please enter in the numbers and letters in the box below Report Problem with Tool.

I posted on March 20th that I would start tracking my traffic on this blog, as a means of measuring my success at driving free traffic here. Anyways, here are the stats - either for the month of March or as of today, April 3. Please note that I only got Analytics happening around this time, and I didn’t do any promotion prior to this.

Popularity Indicators
Alexa: 6,181,254 (up from 13,952,743!)
Google PR: 0
Technorati Authority: 0
RSS Subscribers: 0

The Golden Rule
March 2008 Absolute Unique Visitors: 143 (last month I had 1!)

Inbound Links
Another metric I’m going to start tracking is inbound links. I’ll assume that I had 0 at the beginning of March, and as I didn’t measure this at the end of March I’ll assume I had about 30 on March 31. I recently started a new tactic which is going to greatly increase my inbound links (Apr 4 - Yahoo:113, Google:0, MSN:0) which I’ll post about soon. I’m using the link popularity tool at SEOChat.com.

By far the greatest part of my visitors (approx 110) came from one comment I made on Digg one day where I also included the link to my blog. I actually made $1.22 on Adsense that day (from this site). So a few more days like that and I’ll have recovered my costs on the domain anyways. LOL. Good thing I’ve got other things to rely on!

The rest of the visitors mostly came from other sites where I’ve been posting comments, getting involved in the community. This is a slow way of developing traffic, but hopefully it will prove to be higher quality, in terms of finding people that will come and read more than one post, hopefully find something of value here and leave a comment or something.

I’m going to start tracking my progress in ranking for certain terms. This site happens to be #5 on Google for “Jonathan Boettcher” which by most measures is a completely useless term at the moment, so I’ve decided to pick “Affiliate Marketing Tips” as my target phrase for April. I don’t rank at all on any of the engines for this phrase so we’ll see how quickly I can get registered. Initially I thought of “internet marketing” but this is too broad a keyword and there is too much competition for that. Mind you, there will be good competition for this keyword as well, however it is a bit more “niche” so we’ll give that a shot. In addition, I’m planning on putting up some more resources directed towards affiliate marketing in particular.

In other news, last night I upgraded to Wordpress 2.5, which went well, and I am excited about some of the new features that are available. Apparently you can get a live traffic chart on your admin panel now. Then all I have to do is get some more traffic!

Until next month…