• Write an article that links back to my site, and publish it in one of my blogs
• Post a tweet about the article on Twitter
• Ask a friends, colleagues and clients to retweet

Of course, it’s a little more involved than that. I’m not interested in sending random traffic to my site’s homepage. My goal is to generate targeted traffic for a specific landing page on my site.

The purpose of the landing page is to generate leads for a specific product or service. For example, let’s say I’m looking to pick up a new SEO client. I might create the following offer…

• A 3 month SEO campaign for £250 per month
• I’ll achieve a specific agreed SEO objective
• I’ll give a full refund if I don’t achieve the agreed objective

I then create a landing page based on this offer. At the bottom of the page I include a web form that allows prospective clients to indicate their interest by filling out the form to find out more.

I’ll then contact anybody who fills out the form.

What I now have to do is get people to visit the page. And not just anybody, but people interested in hiring an SEO guy to optimise their site.

The Traffic Triangle I outlined above says that I must now write an article and publish it on my Blog. This article should appeal to people interested in hiring an SEO guy.

The big mistake I see self-proclaimed web-marketers make is to write informational articles about SEO. This isn’t the right approach to take (in this situation), because it will deliver the wrong people to my landing page. A much more effective approach is to write an article that explains how to go about employing an SEO guy.

Naturally, the article must be compelling to my target market, and has to convey an obvious benefit. In this case, I’m offering a low-cost way to get achieve a specific SEO objective. So the article should be designed to appeal to this type of prospect. For example, it might be headed “5 ways to save thousands on Search Engine Optimisation”

The article can then disclose 5 ways, one of which is to take advantage of exactly the sort of offer described on my landing page.

It’s important to understand the purpose of the article. It isn’t to sell my service. Instead, it’s purpose is to filter out people unlikely to be interested in my offer. Put another way, the article is a targeting tool.

Once the article is in place, I need to find ways to send visitors to the article. There are numerous ways I can do this. For example, I might use some of these 66 ways to get visitors to my site.

In the case of the Traffic Triangle, I’ll use Twitter as a way to generate traffic. I can do that by simply tweeting about the article. For example, I might say…

5 ways to save thousands on Search Engine Optimisation (#SEO): http://link-to-article

NOTE: I’ve placed a hash (#) character in front of the keyword ‘SEO’. This ensures the tweet shows up in prepared keyword searches, such as custom columns in Twitter utilities such as TweetDeck.

This tweet will appear in searches for ‘SEO’ and ‘Search Engine Optimisation’. It will appear for as little as a few minutes though to as much as half an hour. It depends on the amount of activity there is at the time I post.

As you can see, a single tweet simply isn’t enough to achieve the result I’m looking for.

As I’m keen to ensure plenty of people get the chance to see my tweet, I’ll ask friends, colleagues and clients to retweet my tweet. This ensures the tweet gets a much wider circulation.

Each of the people who retweets sends my tweet to their followers. This has 3 benefits…

1. A wider group of people get to see my tweet – people who aren’t currently aware of me
2. The tweet lives on, allowing more people to find it through Twitter’s own search tools
3. The tweet lives on, increasing the chance that somebody unknown to me will retweet it (i.e. organic retweets)

I may also pick up extra followers as a result, thus increasing the chance of getting organic retweets in future.

As you can see, the combination of a landing page, Blog article and Twitter make for a powerful traffic generation tool.

In my opinion, it comes down to one or more of these 3 factors…

1. What is the #1 purpose of the site (the actual rather than intended purpose)
2. Who is attracted to the site and why do they visit?
3. What happens when those people arrive at the site?

The Site’s Purpose

A business website that sets out to make money must have one of the following objectives…

1. Generate a targeted business enquiry (i.e. lead generation)
2. Generate a sale direct from the site (e.g. shopping cart)

Most business sites achieve neither objective, even if they set out to do so. Instead they seek to inform, educate or otherwise satisfy some in-house need to boast.

A business website can’t afford to fart around with the latest design fad, or rave on endlessly about the site-owner’s knowledge, experience, qualifications or skill.

If the site’s purpose is to generate leads, the owner must make sure it starts doing that immediately. Right there on the home page. If you have a need to boast, start a blog and use it build PageRank. Then let it flow to the main site and help get it ranked in search engines.

If the site’s purpose is to generate sales, find out what the visitor is looking to buy and take him/her right to it. Immediately.

Who Visits and Why?

The site’s objective provides the owner with focus, and that helps him/her determine what needs to go on the homepage. To make use of that focus, the owner needs to understand who visits the site and why?

One simple way to find out is to ask visitors to complete a short survey. You can set up a free online survey here.

Once this is understood, s/he must ask whether the site’s visitors and their reason for visiting are consistent with the site’s objective. If they’re not, then it’s time to rethink…

• What you’re doing to get people to visit your site
• The site’s content

It’s often necessary to rebuild a business site to reflect the actual market required to achieve specific objectives (e.g. a specific sales target, or to attract the right kind of prospects from which to generate leads).

This process needn’t happen overnight. Allow yourself the luxury of moving toward your goal over time. In my opinion, site development works better when it occurs over time and toward a specific objective.

What Happens when People arrive at the Site?

What do visitors to your site see when they arrive? If the site has a sales focus, do they get immediate access to a method of finding the product or service they’re looking for? They should do.

If the site is meant to turn visitors into leads, how is information being collected? What is being said or offered that will make the right kind of visitor want you to contact him/her?

Whatever your site’s objective, it’s essential that the entire site contribute to the goal. This includes the site’s homepage. If your site’s homepage consists of nothing more than a fancy flash movie, get rid of it. If the design doesn’t allow you to say everything you need to say, change the design.

Let the site’s objective determine everything about the site, and consign pointless distractions (and uncooperative web designers) to the dustbin.

Link bait can only work if people find it useful. In particular, it works best when people who write blogs, “how to” guides and resource sites think it will help their readers. As such, link bait tends to have these features…

• The benefit of having it is easily understood by others
• There is a well-defined target market that will find it useful
• 3rd party blog authors will link to it because it’s useful to their audience
• It’s the sort of thing people will click on if you tweet about it
• It’s not too long, wordy or involved

Examples of link bait include The DIY Guide to SEO, the Web Marketing Process Campaign Plan, and the Lead Generation Campaign Calculator. Each of these tools provides a specific service likely to be of use to the people they’re aimed at.

You can create your own link bait, and make it available for download via your site. Your link bait might take any of the following forms…

• Video
• Audio
• Text
• Slideshow/Presentation
• Flash application
• Ebook
• Top 10 list
• Web utility/application

In addition to the bait itself, you’ll also need a landing page. And if you have a landing page, you might as well collect an email address before making the item available (i.e. for future marketing communications).

Once your landing page is up, it’s time to start promoting it. This can be done via Twitter, Facebook, a Squidoo page, directories, classified sites, forums, and blogs. In particular, find those blogs, forums, etc that deal with your target market. Write to the blog owner, and make him/her aware of your item. With a bit of luck, s/he will spread the word to thousands of people and you’ll pick up lots of powerful inbound links very quickly.

You shouldn’t limit yourself to a single application. Always be on the look out for new ideas, because you never know what people will find attractive. Any given idea might turn out to be the one that gets you right to the top of Google.

Its purpose is to get ever closer to the truth.

While certain people*** with an axe to grind may well criticise the scientific method, nobody with working grey matter denies that everything useful we know about the world (including the device you’re using to read this blog) is a gift of science.

Marketing is not a Science. Marketing isn’t concerned with understanding the truth about something, and has other objectives. However, there is a branch of marketing that is concerned with measurement, repeatability and falsification.

Direct marketing attempts to borrow those aspects of Science that help it get closer to the truth about certain things. In particular…

• Who is more likely to buy a particular product?
• Which ad headline delivers the most visitors to a website?
• Which offer produces the most sales?
• Which price produces the most sales?

And any other question a business owner might ask. Such testing is sometimes called split testing, or A/B testing. It works like this…

• Create 2 versions of something and put them in front of a statistically significant number of people (usually at least 500 unique individuals)
• Make sure you know specifically what you’re testing. For example, if you’re testing one headline against another, everything else must be identical
• It is possible to test more than one thing, but you must be able to show a statistically significant sample for each thing. For example, if you’re testing one headline against another, and one free gift against another in the same sales copy, you’re actually running 4 tests…

1. Headline A – Offer 1
2. Headline A – Offer 2
3. Headline B – Offer 1
4. Headline B – Offer 2

• Measurement is the key to finding out what works. In the above example, you’d need to know the number of sales for each of the 4 categories. You can then report on which of the 4 combinations delivered the most sales.

This approach to marketing gets close to Science. In theory, anybody could rerun the above test and will generate the same result as you. In practise, that probably won’t happen because there is always a random variable beyond our control – the audience. This is especially so for web marketing.

I might test 2 headlines and 2 offers on one of my websites. You might do the same on yours. As your site gets different visitors to my site, there’s no guarantee our results will match. And in fact, if I run the same headline/offer combination several times throughout the year, I’ll be reaching different people each time.

We can never really know whether one headline is always more powerful than another. What we can do, is get closer and closer to a powerful ad. Or a wildly successful offer. That’s still more reliable than somebody’s intuition, or their experience (i.e. their preconceptions).

* If my simplified definition bothers you, please don’t take the time to let me know.

** Yes, and other things too. But this article has a point to make about marketing.

*** People who fall into 2 camps: Those with a financial incentive (e.g. floggers of ‘alternative’ medicine), and those with a tenuous grip on reality.

Let’s the get the ball rolling with the first Internet Marketing secret…drum roll please…

SEO Quake:

SEO Quake is a brilliant plug-in that runs in the Firefox web browser. If you plan to do any SEO work at all, get SEO Quake. I use it every day.

I’ve included a screen capture of SEO Quake in action. You can see it to the right of this text. Let’s take a quick look at the information it can tell you…

• PR: Google’s PageRank score for the web page being viewed
• Google I: The number of pages from the site that Google has indexed
• Bing I: The number of pages from the site that Bing has indexed
• Rank: The Alexa rank of this website
• Age: The age of the domain
• Links: On the left is the number of internal (to the site) links to this page, with the number of external (to the site) domains that link to the page displayed on the right
• Density: Click to see a keyword density report on the current web page

SEO Quake is a collection of very useful SEO tools and information – combined in a single browser plug in. You even can switch it on and off at will, so it never makes a nuisance of itself.

If you’re doing any SEO work at all, make sure you first get SEO Quake and install it in your browser. And stay tuned for more Internet Marketing secrets.