The last two days have been pretty intense on the work front. We had our second marathon webcast on Friday evening in which Alex discussed in great detail the various methods of driving traffic to our respective sites.

The one thing Alex did refer to quite pointedly was, when trying to drive traffic to you own site by posting comments on other sites ´´DO NOT PIMP YOURSELF´´ This statement was brought to light by a comment that was placed on another students blog. The commentor was again a fellow student who felt quite strongly that including your own sites url underneath your comment was tantamount to spamming.

I have to admit that I have up until last night been guilty of this heinous act. Thinking about it logically there is no reason to include a second url because if you format your url in the comment bio box using the http format your name will be clickable anyway. Obviously if people read your comment and it is of interest to them, they will have the opportunity to click on your name and then go to your site.

The comment in question was left on was on Gary Simpson´s blog, go across and find it. Gary has a great blog so stick around for a while.

Obviously before you even think of driving an avalanche of visitors to your site you must have something that will hold their attention, so make interesting posts. They don´t just have to be relevant to your particular niche, make some posts about you, but make it light. I never stay on a blog longer than 30 seconds if the first post is as dry as dust.

The only thing I would say though is keep the posts coming thick and fast. Today I went on walkabout around a a lot of my fellow students blogs and I was very surprised and saddened to see that quite a high proportion of them seemed to be dormant.. if you don´t post on a regular basis why would your prospective readers have a reason to stay, and don´t forget these people could one day turn into a paying customer, surly reason enough to try and hold their attention !

The phenomenon that is Twitter was spoken about in great detail last night. Again one of the biggest mistakes you could make on the big T is to twitspam. Like all those crappy sales pitches that you are constantly deleting from your inbox, spamtwits have exactly the same effect, people will dismiss you very quickly as a spammer, so don´t do it.

The whole idea behind Twitter is to build casual relationships, did you hear that CASUAL. Don´t go and make a twit of yourself by twittering on about how great your blog is or how fantastic you new product is. Give your fellow twiters a chance to get to know you, and if you say something funny or interesting then maybe if you are lucky they may want to find out more about you and what you have to offer.

Alex was raving about a comment that Maria Andros had made about her own profile page. You normally see people linking back to their respective blogs, not Maria she links straight to a squeeze page for her video marketing course, GENIUS !!

Maria is getting a hell of a lot of optins per day using this method, it does not take a mastermind to work out how very lucrative this simple but very clever action will be.

Alex then went on to talk about how to use Google for searching out your competition. If you type into the search bar allintitle: (then place the websites name that you want to investigate), you will be able to find out such details as who´s linking to them, very useful ! The other technique is to type in allinanchor:(then the sites name) again a lot of very useful information can be gleaned by using this simple search technique.

There where lots of other free tools spoken about that are freely available to use. I read an article that spoke about 11 of them that you can use for traffic and seo purposes, please read below.

11 of the Best (Free) SEO Tools and How to Use Them — Isnare.com …

Google Adwords Traffic Estimator – this is a free tool provided by Google, which provides Adwords advertisers with an estimated cost of running a PPC campaign using specific keyword phrases. Use it like this: export the exact match …

As I mentioned earlier in the post don´t get into the bad habit of spam posting because you are not only wasting your time you also run the risk of getting a bad rep. The other point is try to keep your blog evergreen with regular posts, and then as kevin Kostner was told ¨they will come¨