1. Try to make your signature links arouse curiosity. Simply stating ‘Click here to read my blog’ won’t get you many clicks. Rather hint at what they may find if they click the link.

2. Avoid pimping yourself in your posts. Add value to the forum first and try to make friends and build relationships with other members. Once people are listening to what you are saying, you won’t have to promote your links, people will want to find out more about you anyway.

3. If you start a new thread, try to make the title unique and stand out. Again, try to arouse curiosity. If your title is similar to many others then people are unlikelyy to even look at it.

4. The content of your thread should make the readers think. Try to write to provoke other members to react to your points, debate them even. The more thought provoking a thread, the more replies you will get.

5. When your thread gets a reply, answer that person in the thread to keep the thread alive and growing. And to maximise the exposure of your signature. But make sure you are posting content, just posting ‘thanks for your reply’ or ‘thats a good point’ is no good to anyone and people will stop following your thread.

6. Do the same as above on threads by other people that you have subscribed to.

7. Subscribe to all the threads that you create and post in, so that you can maintain the flow of conversation and keep the thread going.

8. Do not sign up multiple accounts and attempt to have a conversatin with yourself to promote your sites.

They’re all pretty obvious when you think about them, but I hope you found these tips on my signature campaign useful.

I have just finished going through the first set of training videos. There is a lot to take in but I am already excited by the potential for traffic here. This isn’t just a sit back and see the traffic flood in kind of system, you have to put the work in and spend a few hours a day but some of the tools and resources at your disposal look amazing.

It’s a pretty hefty price tag on it, which in a way ensures that I will take action to get the most out of it. I will be posting again about Traffic Kahuna when I have started to implement the strategies and started using the tools, and hopefully seeing the results.

Anybody else use this, or have any comments about it?

I will quickly go through how I set up my campaign. I am not using the google content network at the moment as that needs to be set up in a different way.

At this point you should already have your keywords, I showed you how I found keywords to target in this post.

Each keyword should go in it’s own adgroup. And within that adgroup I will have all 3 match types, broad, phrase and exact, for that keyword phrase.

Each adgroup runs 2 different ads so that you can continually split test the ads in your campaign as it runs.

When writing your ads, it’s a good idea to include your keyword in the ad. It can help with your quality score and it also shows up in bold in the ad, which will naturally draw the eye of the person searching.

If your domain name is short enough you can also put the keyword in front of the display URL in this format: KeywordPhrase.YourDomain.com so your keyword will appear again and be bolded.

You should also capitalize the first letter of every word in your ad. There has been much testing on this topic and although some people disagree, most will tell you that it helps to draw the eye to the ad. Another way of drawing the eye is using symbols like ?, %, TM symbol, and numbers.

Emotional response words are good to use in your ads, like ‘free’, ‘tips’, ‘tricks’, ‘secret’, ‘facts’, ‘learn’ and many more.

During my keyword research I came up with an estimate of cost per click to get in the top 3 positions. I typically set my broad match keyword bid to 50-100% of this estimate, depending on how low the estimate was. This is because the broad match is typically less targeted so I want to pay less for my clicks. I will then set exact and phrase match to 2x my original estimate. I prefer to start higher and reduce the bids than the other way around.

Other settings I use are to show the ads as quickly as possible, and rotate the 2 ads evenly so you can split test them properly.

Finally I set up conversion tracking within adwords. I’m not going to go in to detail here how I set all that up, it’s pretty straight forward if you look at it in adwords. But it is very important to know which keywords are getting clicks, sign-ups and sales.

I am allowed to include brief quotations in a review, so here is my review of what you can learn in this ebook.

The book starts off with an example of a video to which he applied his 7 step formula and drove 1000′s of unique visitors to his site with no promotion at all. He then invites you to watch the video on youtube.

Then we get the 7 C’s as he calls them, these are his 7 killer tactics. They are as follows:

1. Compel Your Viewers To Click.
2. Curiosity.
3. Cliffhanger.
4. Call To Action.
5. Controversy.
6. Copy.
7. Create, Convert, And Turn Clicks Into Cash.

You can get a general idea of what he recommends here, but in the eBook he explains how he does this in his videos with examples from his own videos.

The book finishes with a few tools that may help (one of which I looked at and doesn’t appear to work anymore). If you are struggling a bit with your videos converting into clicks this is well worth a read.

Hope you find it useful. Fill in the form below to get the download link.

To be frank, I’m not really going all out to win the 2 week traffic competition. I see traffic generation as a long term plan and we’ll all go at a different pace, what i will be spending this 2 weeks doing is setting the foundations for a good steady traffic stream in the coming months.

If anyone really wanted to just go out and win the competition they could probably spend $200 in traffic exchanges and get 10,000+ hits over the next 2 weeks. These hits would be largely useless and would in no way help the business or long term traffic plan.

Anyway, I came across this handy little cheat sheet that maps lots of different link building strategies. You can download it here. It’s now pinned to my wall. The sheet was provided by ProspectMX.

So anyway, this week I signed up to 10 of the top Internet Marketing forums out there and made one or two posts on them all. I intend to try and get involved in these communities as much as possible. Both helping others out and getting help myself.

I signed up for Twitter and Squidoo and had a bit of a play around. Started following a few people, and read some of the tweets. I noticed a lot of people already have hundreds of follows, is there a way to speed up this process, or do you have to follow everyone automatically? I must admit I’m a twitter newbie.

I submitted my site to some of the more reputable directories, but this is unlikely to have any immediate affect, just part of the long term plan. In any case a lot of people are saying link directories are dead now. But it can’t hurt anyway.

I’ve actually outsourced for someone to sign me up with accounts on the major social media sites, and post about my blog on them. 50 sites in all for $10 which seemed reasonable seeing as it would probably take me a day to do myself. That should be done by next week some time.

My next steps will be to get another, more personalised video done and get that out to as many video sites as possible. I was going to do it this week but I have a rotten cold and didn’t want to be blowing my nose all the way through it.

And finally I want to spend a day getting round as many fellow students blogs as possible, seeing what they are up to, commenting on their blogs and getting everyone on my blogroll.

So thats it! Hope you all have a wonderful holiday!

Carl.