Michael Cheney's Traffic Videos Review: Part 2

This is part 2 of Michael Cheney's Traffic Videos! review. Please make sure to read the part 1.

Blogging Traffic

In this Traffic Videos series you will learn how to harness the power of blogging to get a massive amount of traffic into your site, and also building a community, which creates better credibility.

Total run-time: about 50 minutes

• How To Blast A Blog Online In Minutes

  Blogging is probably the easiest way to create good content, rather quickly and also have a two way dialogue via the comments from the visitors, so that you don't write in void. For the purpose of demonstration Michael Cheney chooses WordPress (http://wordpress.com), one of the most popular blogging applications, which is also free.

  Michael takes you in a step-by-step fashion through download, installation and configuration processes, which will allow you to have your own WP blog setup on your website (rather than a hosted one). The installation process should take about 5-20 minutes. By the end of this video you should be able to start adding new blogs.

• Bling Your Blog For Ballistic Impact

  Once you have the first blog set up, you get the default text everywhere. Now you want to make your blog unique, before you start blogging. Michael suggests choosing a theme (template), that will suit your taste and style. WordPress has a directory with hundreds of free templates that you can choose from. (some of them are not free). Once you have the theme chosen, you can then download it and tell WordPress where to find it (you might need to use ftp to accomplish that).

  Now it's the time to customize the blog itself: title, tagline, address, etc. It might be a good idea to add your own photo, to make the blog look more personal. And when you are happy with the new looks, it's the time to install links to sites and products that you want to promote (obviously Michael shows you how to accomplish that). You may want to consider adding a that create a mailing list form, as lists help you to further promote your products.

• Unleash The Traffic Power Of Your Blog

  Once you're ready, you want to configure the pinging feature, which allows you to announce to the world every time you have new content (which is done automatically for you). Don't just leave the default configuration -- the more sites you ping, the more traffic your blog will get. Michael shows how to do that.

  The next stage is very important: It's the permalink feature configuration. It's important to choose the right way, that will be search engine-friendly (SEO). The other very important feature is categories, which helps the site navigation.

  Now you are ready to start posting, and interact with people. If you write interesting material, you will attract visitors, and if they like you they may want to buy products through your site. Don't worry to much about being perfect, just be yourself. Michael concludes with various ideas for content to be used in your blog writing.

Visitor Traffic

In this Traffic Videos series Michael talks about harnessing the power of your visitors to create a repeat traffic.

Total run-time: about 15 minutes

• How To Harness The Power Of Your Visitors To Get Repeat Traffic

  So you spend a lot of resources on getting the people to their site, but most visitors never come back again. So question is: can you make them come back? Michael gives the answers to that question in this video.

  Repeat traffic is all about community. You need to realize that the site isn't yours, but it belongs to your visitors. So rather than doing things that are I, I, I -- give the visitors a way to decide what should be on the site, what they want to discuss, what questions they want to ask and what answers they want to give. Michael discusses several existing sites that do that very successfully. He walks through mbuk.com (http://www.mbuk.com/), and shows what are the great things on that site that create repeat traffic - including forums, blog, mailing list, videos, classified ads, polls, etc. This is clearly a community site to learn from. And it's all about the repeat traffic.

Pay Per Click Traffic

Why PPC is important for getting a day-to-day traffic. It's very very quick - you can get instant traffic within 30 minutes or so. Of course this is if you can make it cost-effective. This Traffic Videos series teaches you how to accomplish that.

Total run-time: about 35 minutes

• How To Master The Art of Pay Per Click Traffic

  One of the keys to cost-effective PPC is designing a good ad. The ad should attract the attention of the searcher, so matching your ad and the keywords is very important. You don't want to mislead people with titles that don't match your offer, since otherwise people will click on your ad, but it'll be wasted on you, since they will leave your site immediately. So you need to design ads so that if people click on them they will be really relevant to the search terms.

• How To Get More Clicks For Less Money From PPC

  In this video Michael Cheney gives tips on how to get the most out of Pay Per Click campaign, saving you a small fortune. He goes to Google search, searches for items like "buy house" and then discusses the ads that show up - which ads are good and which are not quite as good. Then he goes into the details on explaining the need to create a diversity of ads, that match the best each search phrase. He mentions that most people are lazy, and that's why PPC is not very productive for most.

  The next key is testing. Again most people are too lazy to do that. You really want to create several ads, which are similar but with minor differences, so that you could test which one works better. Pick the one that works better (watching statistics page of course). And then repeat the process again. This is called a split test. As you do more and more of this you should get a dramatic improvement in the click-through rates (CTR).

• How To Get The Best Possible Response From Your Ads

  In this video Michael gives power tips on writing powerful ads. He starts talking about verbs, that always work better than any other words. The more powerful the verb (buy, get, achieve, etc.) the higher are the chances that the ad will work.

  Some of the techniques that Michael Cheney suggests to make powerful ads are: Capitalizing Words, Question marks, Smart URLs, qualifying content. He then presents the concept of AIDA [Attention, Interest, Desire, Action], which you should keep in your mind when creating ads. But of course you need to conform with the guidelines (e.g. normally you can't you "click here" in the ads)

  Michael reviews a list of ads and explains which ad conform with AIDA and probably work really well for their owners, and which are just a drain on their owner's wallets.

See How To Make Money Blogging: How I Replaced My Day-Job With My Blog and How You Can Start A Blog Today

See also the part 1 and part 3 of this review.