Every blogger and every website owner on planet Earth knows that getting a constant flow of traffic is the key to making money online. The world wide web attracts such a massive number of readers/buyers/customers that regardless of what you offer/publish/sell, you will make some really good money when you have lots of traffic.
Internet marketers are on the forefront when it comes to creating new and increasingly crazier ways to expand their reach across the Internet because no website can survive without enough specific traffic. In their quest to obtain more of the elusive traffic, the website marketers have come up with some rather creative ways to bring in greater amounts of traffic in a short period of time and with little effort.
My email inbox has been flooded with sales letters promoting some automated software or seldom used secret that promises an explosion of website visitors within a few days or weeks. The disturbing part of all this is that it goes against the teaching of our early years; that nothing good comes easy and there is no quick path to building a successful blog/website/business. As a result of these promises of abundant website traffic and exploding sales figures, many have abandoned those time tested methods of attracting real targeted website visitors that are prepared to take some kind of action. Keep in mind that website traffic isn't something that you can just get; visitors will come to your website when you have something to provide, enticing them to click on your link.
Too many people are cashing in on a person's desire to get to the top without much effort by offering some really useless website marketing techniques that could in fact kill their search engine rankings. The fact is that these are nothing more than „Marketing Fads“, that may produce some huge results in the beginning, but as soon as the newness wears off their effectiveness will fade away forever just like the telephone booth.
Remember when pop-up and pop-under advertising came out years ago? This was the hottest marketing tool since the time of placing fliers on cars in parking lots. However, when people around the world started using pop-ups to promote their websites there were windows popping up every time you visited and exited a website. Internet users worldwide got so sick of all those pop-up windows that someone invented pop-up killer software. The search engines even started penalizing websites that were using pop-up scripts and soon after that method of website promotion faded away.
I will attempt to identify and explain some of these useless blog/website promotion techniques that should be avoided at all cost. Using some of these bad, bad Blog/website marketing techniques could certainly kill your search engine rankings.
Automatic Search Engine Submission Services
These free search engine submission websites allow you to put in your URL, a couple (usually 5- 10) keywords and a description of your website. You then click Submit believing that your website is on its way to being indexed on thousands of search engines. Not so! First of all, the major search engines require manual submission and even implement coding script to prevent auto submission. Secondly, when you click on that Submit button you have no idea where your website link will end up going. Your website link could be automatically posted to illegal or international directory websites that are nothing but a colony of spam links. If Google crawls your website and finds out that you have links to your website coming from other websites with rotten content, then your website will pay the price in low rankings.
There is absolutely no substitute for manually forwarding your bslog/websites to the search engines. You will have complete control over where your link is going, and the search engines will automatically crawl your website to get your title and description.
Auto Submission to Directories and FFA sites
You may have seen those places that claim you can blast your blog/website to over 2 million websites and directories. As a general rule, please stay away from anyone that uses the word „Blast“ because this is just another way of saying Spam. It sounds like you are literally placing your link on millions of other websites and getting tons of instant backlinks to your website. Those FFA or Free For All websites are nothing but a link farm containing links from sites with bad or irrelevant content. The search engines won't ever see your website as being respectable enough to rank high in the search results if it is affiliated with that type of environment.
Lead Generation Software
I once got an email that said, „Hello Webmaster, My name is James. I have been searching the Internet for some business opportunities and came across your website. I just wanted to know if you are still in business today. Please email me at this_email@emailaddress.com and let me know. Thank you.“
I replied to the person giving them more information about one of our websites. That particular email was forgotten until I got a few other emails with the same content from different names and email addresses. This matter sparked my curiosity and prompted me to do some further investigation to find out why these emails turned up so frequently.
I discovered that this was the work of lead generation software that extracts website links and email addresses from the Internet for any category. You just type the keyword in the search box and the software literally pulls in millions of email addresses. The software even allows you to email all those addresses. On the surface it appears to be the perfect way to put your website link in front of millions of people in the same industry as you.
This has the look and smell of spam, but because the one sending the email does not attempt to sell you anything, it's not quite spam. This marketing technique is not very effective because the email is generic, impersonal and did not give the reader a reason to respond. Your emails should speak to a person's needs and not just at them. Readers respond to emails if you find a way to reach their interests, giving them a reason to take action.
Backlink Generating Software
Google loves websites that have lots of quality backlinks, considering such links votes on the importance of those sites. Somebody got this crazy idea to automate the link building that Google loves, hoping to get huge numbers of valuable links and move to the top of the search engine results. Google has now gotten smart and has found to way to detect how you are getting your backlinks and even the speed at which you are getting them. So, if you are still buying links or using software to get instant backlinks, then chances are Google will find out and penalize your website. Nothing can substitute for writing valuable content that will automatically attract quality backlinks.
Automated Article Submission and Article Spinning
Writing high quality articles is a great way to attract targeted visitors to your website. Again, someone invented a way to automate this process as well. They came out with article submission software that they claim will automatically send your written articles to hundreds or even thousands of dírectories. There is even software that will take one written article, spin the title and words around, and send them to more directories. This software sells like hotcakes because people don't want to do the hard and time-consuming work of writing their own articles and sending them manually to article dírectories.
The real, authentic article directories that can syndicate your articles are getting smart and have installed a special code that disallows auto submission of articles. They have also installed a special script that can detect articles that have been spun off from the original. Most of them manually approve articles before they are published in their directory and can easily detect duplicate and spinned content.
Conclusion
Widespread use of these automated blog/website marketing techniques has taken away the need to apply really genuine blog/website promotion that gets real results and replaced it with push-button marketing. You may see some quick and positive results, but only for a short period of time. Treat your blog or website like an infant; give it lots of attention, feed it some healthy content, protect it from dangerous spam activity and let it grow naturally over time.
