We have been using this method to promote our niche sites and can tell you, if you do it, it will work. You will start seeing an increase in your traffic (of course that depends on how well you’ve done your keyword research and there are searches for your keywords)

Here are the 6 steps you will be learning how to do on this site:

1. Website traffic promotion ~ getting your site indexed and building some links

2. Building links with RSS

3. Affiliate Article Marketing

4. Starting a Blog and other free ways to build links

5. More Link building with RSS

6. Online bookmark link building

Once you have finished reading this site you will have a good idea of how to create a flow of traffic that you can monetize in whatever way will best suit your site.

Let’s make sure we are all starting at the same point now. Here’s what we assume you have already done before getting to this site and being ready to create your niche website marketing strategy.

• Your have created a niche website.
• You have installed plugins and set your settings in an SEO friendly way.
• You have created and published content on that site
• You have optimized your pages with well researched keywords
• You have burned your RSS feed with feedburner.com

If you have all of those things done you are ready to begin the adventure of creating a niche website marketing strategy and learning how to get traffic to your site. This can be the most frustrating part for internet marketing beginners. It can seem complicated, but if you follow along you will have a solid foundation by the time you get to the end of this site.

Website Traffic Promotion

There are a few parts to this step ~ the more you do the better off you’ll be, so let’s get started.

1. Tweet your site ~ if you have a twitter account make sure you tweet your new site ~ if it’s something that your twitter readers are going to be interested in.

2. Clip your site ~  Clipmarks is what I use, but there are a few sites like this. Clipmarks lets you grab a paragraph from your site (or any other site) and add it to your clipmarks site. It’s kind of like a bookmark of the content of your site instead of just the url.

3. Stumble your homepage ~ Make sure you have a few posts on your site before you do this.

4. Add your site to Zimbio ~ Zimbio is a great site to use for this process. It’s easy to do and your submission may rank in the search engine on its own. I have had this happen pretty often.

5. Submit your site RSS feed ~ I have found RSS submission to be a very effective way to get traffic to my site. It also helps you build backlinks to your site, which is always good. Each time you post to the site you will have another link from each RSS aggregator or directory you have submitted to. This is a good thing to do when you first start your site so you can take advantage of the new links for each post.

6. Free ad blogs ~ Free ad blogs are becoming more popular as well. They are an easy way to create good anchor text links back to your site. All you do is go to these sites and sign up. They are generally done on a wordpress platform, so you basically make a blog post. In this blog post make sure you link back to your site using your keywords as the anchor text.

Here are a few free ad blogs to get your started:

3 step ads

Unique Article Database

Free Classified Ad Blog

That’s it for the website traffic promotion step. It’s time to move on to step 2 building links now ~ this is what we will be doing the rest of the time in one way or another.

Building Links

Building links is one of the most, if not the most, important things you can do for your site. We’ve already started the process in the last step but this step is going to take it yet another step further.  Once you have a site completed your main task is to start building links. You will keep building links until you get the search engine ranking you want/need to get the traffic you want.

Today we are going to use your RSS feed to help you build backlinks and get some traffic to your site. In the introduction to this site I assumed one task you had already accomplished was getting your feed burned with feedburner.com.

If you haven’t done that already you should probably go do it. It’s not difficult, just sign up and put the url for your blog in the space provided. Feedburner will do the rest for you.  Feedburner makes it easier to keep track of all your blog subscribers. They combine all the possible RSS feeds for your site into one feedburner feed. They will also keep track of how many people subscribe to your feed and a ton of other stats about your feed.

Once you have a feedburner feed for your site you will need to download the feedburner plugin and upload and activate  it on your site.  When you have all that take care of it is time to start using your feed to drive some traffic.

You are going to submit your feed to RSS directories and aggregators. This will do a couple things. It will link back to your site for every post you create. It will also help people find your site. Many people search these RSS directories looking for interesting blogs.

Make sure when you can you add keywords to the submission, and when there’s a chance to choose a category, choose the one that matches your site the closest. This will help people find your site.

There are tons of these RSS submission sites, and more are cropping up every day. You can submit your RSS feed to as many of these directories as you can find.  I’ll give you a couple things to get you started.

Here’s my favorite directory: RSS Mountain It’s very easy to do, you don’t have to sign up or anything. Just fill in the form on the page and hit go.

Here’s a great lens that will help you understand RSS a little better. It will also give you some more directories to start with.

Affiliate article marketing

This is really no different than any other kind of article marketing. The main thing you need to know is when linking back to your site within your resource box you MUST use the proper anchor text. This means you must use your keywords to link to your site.

There are a couple different ways to do affiliate article marketing ~ you can and should submit your articles to ezinearticles.com You will be using ezinearticles for direct traffic as well as for anchor text backlinks. Ezinearticles.com is in good favor with google. If you have chosen your keywords well you may find your ezinearticles post on the front page of google. If this happens you will probably get some good traffic. That is if your author’s box is written well and makes people click through to your niche site.

A couple tips of what NOT to do when writing a reference box.  Do not write

Joe Shmo is a leading expert on such and such go to his website for more information.

This will NOT work ~ I guarantee you.

You should know what the benefits of your product/service you are promoting are. Use those benefits to entice your reader to move to your site to get more information. Make them curious, make them laugh - that will get you the click.

Don’t make the same mistakes I did when I was [keyword anchor text link].  For 7 more tips guaranteed to make it all move a whole lot faster so you can get on with [keyword anchor text link] ASAP, be sure and grab my “saved-my-hiney-more-times-than-I-care-to-remember” list and save yourself a big fat headache.

You get the idea.

The second part of affiliate article marketing is submitting to many many article directories. This can be tedious and seriously boring ~ and that is why, unless you have a tool, most people won’t do it.

We have used many article  submission tools in the past. We are  currently using Unique Article Wizard and are very happy with the results we are getting using it. It has some special features that make it totally worth the price. It will not only submit your articles to directories, it will also submit your articles to blogs that have requested free content. (this is a super good thing) It also created unique versions of your article to send to each directory and blog. This gives you unique content spread all over the web with YOUR name on it. This will really bring you “expert” status on your topic.

Unique article wizard will also help you create varied resource boxes, so you can change your keywords and send out unique resource boxes with each of your articles as well. This gives you a distinct advantage because you will be creating varied links back to your site ~ all using your keywords as the anchor text. Google likes this very much. It’s not often that many different people create the exact same link back to a site, so having the varied anchor text makes it look more natural in the eyes of google ~ which is always a good thing. It will also give you the ability to link to different specific pages within your site ~ all from one article resource box.

How many articles you do will completely depend on how competitive your niche is.  If you are in a low competition niche or using keywords with minimal competition you can start with a couple articles at EZA and a couple articles through Unique Article Wizard and you may find yourself at the top of the search engine listing. If you are in a more competitive niche you may find you need to send out more articles through unique article wizard to create enough links to get you to the top of the search engine results page.

If you don’t have unique article wizard you can certainly submit your articles by hand as well. Here’s a list of 50 article directories.

PR: wait… I: wait… L: wait… LD: wait… I: wait… wait… Rank: wait… Traffic: wait… Price: wait… C: wait…

Starting a Blog

We are not only starting a blog today, but we are going to create content/webpages across the internet. We call these our “top level sites” as they are not money sites ~ but are built to create a place to link back to your money site. Since we are writing them we can be sure the links will have the exact anchor text we want them to have.

This part of the process can also be very boring and frustrating. Writing content on the same thing, trying to say it in a different way all over the place can be difficult. I used to find myself very frustrated, and not doing as much as I should on this step.

That is until we got unique article wizard. Not only does unique article wizard send out unique versions of your articles to the directories and blogs, it also gives YOU access to all these unique versions.

Now creating content is a snap. You just go to unique article wizard and grab  a unique version of your article and find some place you can put your content.

Where are you going to put this content? Good question. I suggest starting a blog at blogger.com. It is a free platform where you can put information about just about anything.  On our blog we have a quick video on starting a blog with blogger.com.

There are tons and tons of other places you can also create content online for free. The place I recommend highly is Squidoo. It is a free platform as well. It also does quite well in google,  so not only do you build a quality link back to your site, you may find your squidoo lens ranking in google as well. If you need step by step help on how to use squidoo, there is a One Week Marketing module at LearnItStepbyStep.com that will walk you through how to build a squidoo lens, as well as how to market it and make money with squidoo.

Those two are great, but there are literally thousands of places for starting a blog, and putting your content online. Here are a few more options:

Wetpaint

Weebly.com

Gather

Clearblogs

IF you look you will find there are literally hundreds of places to use to build top level sites where you can put links to your main money sites. I suggest using different places ~ you don’t want to have all your link building on any one free platform, in case there is an issue with your account. You don’t want to lose everything in one fell swoop. It also leaves less of a footprint for google to follow.

Link Building to Top Level Sites

You may ask, “Now why would I build links to these little sites I have built?” It’s a fair question and here’s the answer. Those are the sites that send “juice” to your site. The more “juice” they have the more “juice” they can send your way.

You want to build some links to these sites so build a little authority for them so the links they send back to your money site will have a little more umph and count a little more. We are going to do this by following the same process we followed in step 2.

This time you don’t have to use feedburner though. You just want to grab the RSS feed from wherever you have put content linking back to your site. When you start noticing RSS feeds you will be amazingly surprised by how many places they are.

If you go back to step 1 you will find there is an RSS feed for your zimbio account, your posts on 3stepads, your stumbleupon account. There are a couple ways to use RSS feeds from Squidoo. You can use your lensmaster feed ~ which shows all the lenses you have created. You can also grab the RSS feed from each of the lenses you create. Every blog, or site you build on a blog platform will have an rss feed. All of these can be submitted to the RSS directories ~ and should be.

You can also create a combined RSS feed using Yahoo Pipes. You can put some of your feeds together and create a totally new feed which you can then submit to RSS directories.

Remember, each time you submit an RSS feed you don’t have to do it again ~ each time you update your site it will automatically update in all the places you submit, because that’s what RSS is all about.

If you use one main account at hubpages, or knol, or squidoo and you submit it to directories you don’t have to keep submitting it each time you create a new page on that site ~ it will update on its own.

Grab your RSS feeds and start submitting. This is going to be long and boring, but it will be worth it I assure you. Grab a podcast from Itunes and listen to something you don’t usually have time for while you are copy/pasting your RSS urls into the proper boxes.

The Online Bookmark

This is the last step in your niche website marketing strategy.  In the last step you submitted your top level sites’ RSS feeds to directories. This step is going to involve your top level sites as well.  Building links to the sites that point to your site helps make those links stronger, which gives your main niche site a little more authority.

What is an online bookmark?

Remember when people used to bookmark a page on their computer so they could find it again? If you did this, you probably ended up with a long list of sites that you never used because you could never find anything again when you went to look for it ~ well at least that’s how it happened for me.

The online bookmark is the same thing ~ except instead of being on your computer it’s online and everyone can see it. These bookmarking sites also give you the option to add tags to your bookmarks so you can find them later.  There are tons of bookmarking sites available for you to use.

The first thing you will have to do is sign up for an account at each one of these bookmarking sites.  Yes, it’s boring, but it’s worth it. You can find a great list of bookmarking sites at Social Marker. You will see the option to choose “dofollow” bookmarking sites. I suggest starting there. The dofollow tag means google will follow your bookmark back to your site, and will give you credit as it being a backlink to your site.  Once you’ve signed up for the dofollow sites, you can click the “best” option and sign up for those.

You don’t want to submit all of your top level sites to the same bookmarking sites. This will look kind of spammy ~ having  a bunch of bookmarks all pointing to information about the same thing. It’s better to break up your list of bookmarking sites. You have a list now of sites you have  created accounts at, just break it down into as many lists of 10 as you can and bookmark each of your top level sites to one of those groups of 10 bookmarking sites.

If you are using social marker you will need to download the bookmarklet. Then go to your site and click it. Social marker will then grab your site information and will put it in each of the bookmarking sites for you. You still need to click through each one, but it will save you some time.

Time to head back to itunes for another podcast and get busy bookmarking.