Although this book focuses primarily on getting your web site itself up and running, I want to give you some basic information on the next few steps, once you are up and running. This is truly basic information, and I highly recommend purchasing some quality information on these topics, if you are serious about becoming extremely effective online.

But this will give you an idea of what I do, and what works for me.

Traffic Generation

Traffic generation is critical to the success of your web site. No matter how great your web site is, and how well it converts, if you do not have traffic, you do not have a web business. I do not recommend buying traffic of any sort, although if you do, I have covered the basics of generating traffic from a number of sources, including paid traffic, in my List Building Manifesto.

The 3 methods I have used to build my highly profitable email list ($2 per subscriber per month by my 3rd month online) are article writing and submission (article marketing), ezine advertising, and JV partnerships. I will describe briefly how I use each of these.

Article Marketing

Article marketing involves writing short articles (300-1000 words each) articles on the topic of your web site or product, adding a link to your web site and a call to action at the end of the article, and submitting the article to online article directories.

The online article directories make the articles available to the search engines, to other article directories, and to ezine publishers who use articles as content for their ezines.

I recommend writing one article per month, and submitting it to all the directories I have listed, and submitting all the other articles you write each month to the first 5 directories on the list.

The purpose of submitting one article per month to multiple directories is that the search engines will see that you have many web sites with links to your web site, and generally will afford you a higher ranking in their search engine results if you have more inbound links.

However, after about the first 5-7 directories on that list, you will find that the direct response rate from the articles themselves is very low, so that is why I recommend submitting the bulk of your articles to just the first few on the list.

Ezine Advertising

Ezine advertising has produced some of my most responsive subscribers on my list. My theory for this is that if someone is on an ezine mailing list, and reads your ad and subscribes to your mailing list, that person is already a highly-responsive subscriber.

I prefer to buy soloads because they generally give me a higher response than classified or sponsor ads.

However, another approach to buying ezine ads would be to buy an inexpensive classified ad in each of several ezines, and the ones that give you a favorable response are candidates for buying soloads.

I do suggest buying at least 3-5 ads in 3-5 different ezines to start with, rather than just trying one. The reason for this is that some ezines will be responsive and some will not. If you just run one ad and get a lousy response, it will simply jade you against ezine advertising. If, however, you run several ads, you should get a good response on one or two of them, an OK response on one or two, and a lousy response on one or two, and then you can start making adjustments. You can either run a different ad in the non-performers, or simply drop them and add new ones, and increase the size of the ad in the ones that gave you a response.

Because it is important to know which ezines are producing a response, you must track each and every ad you run.

I recommend either using an adtracking program, or creating a separate web page for each ezine ad, and track the responses to each page by using a different autoresponder for each ezine ad.

I also recommend evaluating response and effectiveness by looking at the cost per subscriber or hit, versus the number of subscribers or hits you get versus the number of subscribers on the list.

For example, if you advertise in two ezines, one that has 1000 subscribers, and another that has 15,000, and you get exactly the same number of subscribers from each, what does that mean to you? As long as you paid exactly the same price for each ad, those ezines are exactly the same to you. Sure, the responsiveness of the bigger list was much less, but that really does not impact you, unless you paid more for the ad to the bigger list.

When you get started with ezine advertising, I certainly recommend buying several ezine ads in different ezines. In order to do this in a cost effective manner, decide on your budget. For example, you might be willing to spend $100 on ezine advertising. Next, divide that up between a number of ezines. For example you could choose to buy 3 soloads at $20 each, and then by 8 classified ads at $5 each. Then, once you have a return on your investment, you can spend more money, buying more expensive ads. But never spend more on advertising than you can afford to lose, especially when you are getting started and you have no idea what will produce a return for you.

JVs

JVs, or Joint Ventures, can have different meanings to different people, and some people become very adamant about the meaning and the use of the word. For my purposes, a joint venture is anything I do with another marketer that benefits both me and him or her.

For the purposes of building traffic and my list, one effective joint venture method is finding another marketer that has a list, and offering to do a mailing for his list in exchange for him doing a mailing for my list.