If you are a freelance writer or someone who is offering a service online, one of the free platforms you can use to promote your services online is Squidoo.

Squidoo is ranked relatively high in the search engines and by having a link from a Squidoo lens to your main website, you will also be benefiting your website’s search engine rankings.

The good thing about having a Squidoo lens is that it is easy to update and you can capture a lot of visitors which you can re-direct to your own website. I have 2 Squidoo lenses which I capture the visitor’s email address by offering a free report.

With the list I can send re-direct them to my website and tell them of any promotions I have.

Here are some tips on how to use Squidoo for maximum benefit.

1. Choose a good keyword for your lens. If the name is taken, add a word next to it. But it is important that you have the keywords in your lens.

For example, I wanted the lens freelancewriter but it was taken. So I chose freelancewriterarticle which you can see at freelance writer.

2. Update your Squidoo lens regularly. The more you update your lens with good articles, the higher your lens will rank in Squidoo and in the search engines.

3. Have a form right at the top to capture your visitor’s emails. Give them a free report or gift in exchange for their email address.

4. Place pictures and videos in your lens to make it look more interesting and make the reader stay on your lens longer. Just having text will bore your visitors.

5. Have a poll, in your lens. This will give you some good information as to what your market wants.

6. Link to your Squidoo lens. Write articles and have links to your lens in your resource box. This will help the lens in search engine rankings.

7. Post your blog’s rss feed on your Squidoo lens. Whenever you update your blog, it will appear on your lens. This will keep the Squidoo lens updated with fresh information.

Follow these tips and you’ll have a valuable Squidoo lens bringing you targeted traffic for free.

You and I both know that viral traffic makes perfect sense, but amazingly not many online business owners implement it. Here are 5 steps to creating viral traffic so that your traffic building efforts produces the most amount of visitors and subscribers.

1. Create a squeeze page

Get a landing page which does nothing but offer free gifts in exchange for the visitor’s email. This is where you start to build your list.

Hire a good graphics designer and come up with attractive gifts such as valuable reports and/or free software.

2. Create a report to sell

Your next task is to create a report which you’re going to sell. Again, make sure the graphics are eye-catching and pay a good graphics designer to create your website.

Your report has to look fantastic and the information needs to be good. Do the required research and put as much information as possible into this report.

With your website, sell the report for $97. This is a steep price for a report but your objective is not to sell many copies of it. Do the necessary promotion and get the word out about your report. And don’t forget to put links in the report to your website.

3. Free Gift

When people sign up to your list via your squeeze page, send them to a page where you will offer your $97 report as a gift. To claim the gift, the subscriber needs to refer at least 3 of their friends to your squeeze page.

Now when your subscribers see that your gift is worth $97 and that you are currently selling it for that price, it will drive conversions through the roof.

No one can resist a true free gift that is currently selling for $97. This can help you generate viral traffic. Your subscribers’ friends might sign up to your list and repeat the whole process by referring their friends to your squeeze page.

4. Email to list

Now while your squeeze page is building your list virally, you can create a report and continue to send it to your list for free. Of course, they would have to refer 3 or more of their friends to download the free gift.

Using this technique you are training your list to refer their friends in order to get your free reports. You are also testing to see which kind of offers create the best responses.

5. Contest

When you know which type of offers send you the most amount of referrals, you can create a contest and announce it to your list.

For the contest you will need to provide something which is perceived to be a high priced item otherwise it won’t work. The best type of offers are video training with personal coaching from you based on the offer with the most responses.

Offer your prize to 3 winners only. Since you are offering personal coaching and video training, you can set a high price for the prize. Pricing it at $1,000 is not unreasonable.

To win the contest, your list needs to send you traffic to your squeeze page. The top 3 who sends the most subscribers will win the $1000 prize. This is very attractive.

Once they spread the news by telling people about your contest, more and more people will join your list and promote the contest.. This is the viral effect you’re looking for. You can even issue a press release to inform more people about your contest.

Carrying out these 5 steps will ensure unstoppable viral traffic to your website. It needs planning and setting up the system for it to work and creation of the reports, but you are sure to get an avalanche of traffic. Using this viral traffic to get people subscribed to your list, you can promote your information products to them and push those sales figures through the roof.

Generating traffic is the hottest topic for online business owners to talk about. There are countless ways to generate traffic so which method is the best? This article will reveal the one traffic generation technique your company needs to focus on, to maximize sales.

To find out what is the most effective way for generating traffic to your website, consider 3 things:

- Your Market
- Your Interest
- What’s Working

1. Your Market

Ask yourself where your prospects are, where they hang out and what do they read.

This information is very important because it tells you where your prospects are most likely to read your sales message.

If they stay at home most of the time, then you need to sell them via direct mailing. If they read a lot of magazines then you need to place your ad in the magazines they read.

You can use pay per click marketing if you know that the majority of your prospects searches the internet for information.

So understand your prospects first and then work on the traffic generating tasks.

2. Your Interest

This is very important if you’re working alone and don’t have any staff. It is best to work on marketing that you are interested in.

For example, if you hate writing then it’s not advisable for you to write articles daily and submit them to article directories. Your only alternative, if you have the money, is to outsource the task.

This is where a lot of online entrepreneurs make the mistake in trying to generate traffic to their website. They work on their marketing doing tasks which they find boring, don’t like or even hate doing.

If you don’t have any passion in your work, your prospects won’t feel passionate about your products. Your feeling is reflected in the ad you write.

3. What’s Working

The best way to approach traffic generation is to try one method and put your best effort in making it work.

When your marketing is live, you must monitor the results and determine if what you’re doing is effective. Spend a lot of time working on one traffic building technique and decide if it’s working for you, before working on the next method.

If you find that a particular method is effective in driving traffic to your website, put all your effort into it. Do more of it and try to improve the performance.

For example, if you find that placing a particular banner on targeted blogs drives a lot of traffic to your website, then find more targeted blogs and do the same thing. Change a few minor things in your banners and see if it improves the conversion rate.

Once you find something that is working then put all your effort into it and scale it up.

This is how you find out what the best method is to generate traffic to your website. If other people tell you something that works, you can try it out but don’t believe them totally. The reason is, your business and prospects may be different to theirs.

Once your have a traffic generating method that is working well, automate it. Outsource it to freelancers so that you can focus on other traffic generating techniques. Once you find another method which brings you a lot of traffic, try to combine the two methods and leverage off each other and come up with your own traffic generation system. Rinse and repeat.