Why You Should List Your Site On Ask.com

There are several good reasons why you should list your site on Ask.com.

The main reason being that Ask.com has been slowly making a comeback and is now worth your marketing time and effort.

Although Google is always the primary focus for traffic generation; submitting your website to Ask.com is an excellent way to broaden your horizons and gain more traffic from sources other than Google.

After all, it always pays to diversify and not put all your eggs in one basket; even if that one basket happens to be the biggest of them all!

Regardless of that, it's always a good idea to create traffic pulling strategies from multiple sources and to wisely invest your time where it may benefit you.

What if you should happen to lose Google?

Do you have any other sources to fall back on, or will your website take a huge hit from a loss of traffic?

Since you have the reasons WHY to submit your site to Ask.com, now you will learn HOW to submit it.

Because Ask.com requires an XML sitemap; the first thing you need before you can submit your site, is to have a sitemap.xml.

If you use Blogger, you won't have any problems. Blogger automatically creates an XML sitemap for you.

Blogger's default sitemap URLs are listed by feed below. All you need to do is insert your blog's name in the appropriate spot.
http://www.blogname.blogpost.com/atom.xml http://www.blogname.blogpost.com/rss.xml

If you are using WordPress as your blog platform, Google XML Sitemaps Generator for WordPress will give you all the information you need about your sitemap.xml.

After your sitemap.xml file is completed, you can easily submit your sitemap to Ask.com by "pinging" the following address in your web browser.

http://submissions.ask.com/ping?sitemap=http%3A//www.yoursite.com/yourmap.xml

Just substitute your website for "yoursite" and your map for "yourmap" and you're finished with the submission process.

If there were no errors, Ask.com will immediately report a successful submission.

It's not that complicated and by creating a sitemap and directing your browser to the "ping" address above; your sitemap will be automatically submitted into their database.

The SEO benefits of a sitemap should not be underestimated and by listing your site on Ask.com, along with the other lesser used search engines; your web traffic and backlinks are sure to increase.

You can never have enough traffic or backlinks to your website!

Google AdWords: Using Google AdWords To Target Your Competitors

Using Google AdWords to target your competitors and get a leg up on the market, is not an entirely new technique.

As you probably already know, the world of online marketing is an extremely cut throat business to be in; so in order to be competitive and get an edge on your competition, you need to play a little dirty at times.

Although this technique is not "black hat" per se; it falls just short of that.

A good way to compete with the big boys, is to target them using Google AdWords, and then undermine their marketing efforts by using promotional messages of your own.

This strategy only works if the site your are targeting is already running Google AdSense advertising.

All you have to do is create about four or five different campaigns, with variations in graphic designs on each one, for four or five different websites.

Create some Flash advertisements or have a graphics designer create them for you, that mentions the website you are targeting by name and that explains how the customer can get a much better price, for the same product, somewhere else.

Include somewhere in the text, the lower price that the competing website is offering, along with the cheaper price tag.

Your Flash ads should be interactive and immediately able to grab the attention of your readers.

Advertise on individual websites, as opposed to paying for a list of keywords that can fluctuate according to demand. This is much more cost effective.

By targeting a specific web site, you have exclusivity and the ability to access and carry out your campaign any way that works in your favor.

Generally, the sites you target are not likely to notice your ad campaigns for quite some time, and as your traffic increases from week to week; so will your sales.

Why not start using Google AdWords to target your competitors and get in on the action?

Twitter - Tools For Productive Twittering

Here are some tools for productive Twittering that you can use, to improve the quality and quantity of your followers.

It seems like everybody from our President down has begun using Twitter for a variety of commercial, marketing, and lately political applications.

John Edwards, Obama, the BBC, Apple Computer, JetBlue, and a conglomeration of online retailers post to Twitter daily.

From a personal brand building and networking standpoint, Twitter itself is probably the most productive tool on the Internet.

However in order to become more effective, you will probably find these tools for productive Twittering extremely useful:

Twitter and Twitt Groups

Among other features, Twitter Groups allows you to tag your followers into different groups or categories. Instead of sending messages to each person individually; you can easily send a single message to the entire group.

With TwittGroups you can easily find people on Twitter that share what you share!

TwittGroups brings together people from Twitter, FaceBook, MySpace, Friend Connect, LinkedIn, and other social networks to form groups with like minded interests.

With TwittGroups you can find an existing group of people to follow, join a group that interest you, or start a new group for your organization, business, school, or club and invite your friends on Twitter to join you.

By sharing links, tags, and allowing peeps to follow you or join your group; you will virally expand your Twitter following.

TweetVolume

TweetVolume is a frequency search tool, that scans and counts the number of times a word or phrase publicly appears on Twitter. It's a great way to discover what is currently the "hot" topic of the day.

Twitter Tools

Twitter Tools is a plugin that creates a complete integration between your WordPress blog and your Twitter account.

TwitterTools on the other hand, is a huge conglomeration of Twitter tools sorted by platform, plug ins, widgets, and web services. It has many useful tools for productive Twittering free for the asking.

Twittown

Twittown is an unofficial Twitter community that includes Twitter Forge, a large list of Twitter plugins, widgets, Ttools, mashups and other tools for productive Twittering.

You Can Learn How To Make Twitter Work For Your Business Here.

And here's to productive Twittering; Tweet On!

Traffic Exchanges: What Are Traffic Exchanges And Their Benefits

Traffic exchanges are services that you can join and use to generate free traffic to your website.

There are several types of traffic exchanges that generally work using the same principal.
Members of the traffic exchange view other members websites, in exchange for having your website viewed by other members of the exchange.

For every set period of time that you view another members web page; you receive a number of credits which increases your balance. The more web pages you view, the more credits you accumulate from the traffic exchange.

When someone else in the traffic exchange views your web pages for the same period of time; the credit balance in your account is decreased by the same number of credits.

Generally there are two different types of traffic exchanges:

• Manual Exchanges
• Auto Exchanges

Manual exchanges require a real human being to physically view each web page, and click on a link to move on to the next web page. Manual traffic exchanges are much more likely to bring hits to your website from people who are genuinely interested in reading your content.

Auto exchanges can be set up to be continuously running in your web browser. They automatically refresh to a new web page after a set period of time expires. Although both types of traffic exchanges generate hits to your website; the auto exchange users who leave their computers running all night surfing websites, are not likely to purchase any of your products.

Here are some of the benefits of traffic exchanges you should know about.

• Most traffic exchanges are an inexpensive way to generate targeted traffic to your website. Many are free to join.
  
  
• Unlike SEO and other more conventional methods; you will enjoy seeing an almost immediate increase in web traffic. You will not have to wait for weeks or months to see tangible results.
  
  
• Traffic exchanges can be used to test advertising copy for PPC or other more expensive types of advertising campaigns.
  
  
• By referring others to your traffic exchange, you can build a down line that will allow you to earn credits more quickly. With enough referrals, your traffic can be generated entirely by the efforts of your referrals.

Traffic exchanges will give you plenty of exposure to your competition. You will be able to get some great ideas for promoting your website, by checking out your competition's products and services and then capitalizing on them.

For More Free Traffic Generating Strategies, Click Here.