Do you use either the WP Greet Box or WWSGD (What Would Seth Godin Do?) plugins on your WordPress blogs?

Have you placed them to show at the top of your posts and/or pages?

If so, you might be losing some valuable free traffic from the search engines.

Take a look at the screenshot above to the right. The “if you are new here” text shown in bold shows up in the Google search results description when bloggers allow the code from those two plugins to render at the top of their posts.

By result they lose the space alotted for a proper description — which when written correctly can generate LOTS of extra traffic.

This problem can be solved in one of 2 ways:

1. Have the plugin set to render at the bottom of the post.
2. A better alternative is to enter a proper meta description either through your Custom Fields or by using a plugin like the Platinum SEO Pack.

Your choice.

Do one or the other, but please don’t waste valuable free search engine traffic — it hurts my head when I see you doing that!

BTW, if you liked this post, you might also be interested in reading “WordPress Plugins and How I Use Them“.

Need Traffic Now? Here are 3 Quick Ways to Get Visitors to Your Site

After working long and hard to get your new web site up and running, you probably have little patience left to wait months and months to start getting traffic to your site and start making sales!

But those search engine submissions are taking a lot of time to bring in traffic. You’ve also discovered that link trading, joining web rings and posting free-for-all classifieds are time-consuming activities that produce just a trickle of traffic, IF you’re lucky.

Moreover, you don’t want to blow huge amounts of money on advertising just in case your site doesn’t convert visitors into buyers at a rate that nets a fair profit.

You want lots of traffic and you want it now! So, what do you do?

Well, here are my 3 favorite ways to bring visitors to my sites quickly and easily.

1. Blogging for Free Search Engine Traffic

Last but not least, to keep the search engines on my side, I post entries to my blogs.

Search engines like Google reward sites that provide fresh content for their visitors on a regular basis.

Of course, your regular visitors love it too, so blogging has the added benefit of bringing visitors back to your site, as well as generating new traffic.

Furthermore, blog content can then be used and revised to create new articles that is placed on article directories… see the next item.

2. Article Marketing

Articles aren’t much different or any more difficult to write than all those product endorsements for your site. You DID write product reviews, didn’t you?

If your site is about beer, and promotes a variety of products related to home brewing, write an article called “10 Secrets to Your Best Batch Ever”. Include a resource box below your article that gives your name, a brief description of your site and its URL.

Now start submitting those articles to article directories such as GoArticles.com and EzineArticles.com. You can do this manually or save time by using Jason Potash’s “Article Announcer” software to automatically broadcast your article to all the major directories in just minutes.

To learn more about the importance of article marketing, read Jason’s article “Google is Watching You” and Jim Edwards’ “Increase Sales By Flying Under Your Prospects’ “Radar Defenses” listed in the Related Articles section below.

3. Pay Per Click Search Engine Advertising

The fastest way to get traffic to your site is to buy keywords and keyword phrases at PPC’s (pay per click search engines) such as Yahoo! Search Marketing (formerly Overture), Google Adwords and MSN AdCenter.

Google is definitely the fastest PPC account to set up. Simply write your title and description, choose your keywords, make a deposit and you’re up and running. Set a daily maximum budget, and check your income and expenses frequently until you ensure that the former consistently exceeds the latter.

You will know within the week how well your site will convert visitors to buyers, which beats the heck out of waiting months for feedback!

You can drive tons of highly targeted traffic to your site in a very short period of time, sometimes doing a great test with as little as $20 bucks. Calculate your conversions, ‘tweak’ your site, then re-invest your earnings to drive even more traffic and gain even more sales.

Be sure to check out my “Get FREE Traffic from the Pay Per Click Search Engines“

Stick with the plan, and in no time at all, you’ll get to sit back and enjoy one of those home brews while watching your sales numbers climb.

I’ve listed 3 ways to bring traffic to your sites in this article.

However, you’ll learn 31 ways to bring free and paid traffic to your sites in the “Super Affiliate Handbook: How I Made $436,797 in One Year Selling Other People’s Stuff Online”.

Used in business as a marketing or sales tool, a white paper is a fancy name for a report that addresses specific issues or problems and educates readers on how to solve them.

Business white papers are typically written to advocate a specific solution for a particular problem and are used to generate interest in a product and influence the decision-making processes of prospective customers.

Many online businesses use white papers or free reports as incentive to generate leads and get people into their sales funnel.

For example, as someone interested in Internet business opportunities, you’ve probably already signed up for a large number of these ‘reports’ or white papers that promise to answer your questions regarding some aspect of Internet marketing.

But you can also create your own downloadable white papers / reports to generate leads and promote products as an affiliate for hard goods such as beauty supplies, electronics, cameras and almost any other product that you sell.

However, making sure that your white paper doesn’t come across sounding like a sales pitch takes skill. To learn how to generate sustaining, long-term sales by using white papers, I recommend that you read Attracting Leads with White Papers – which is a FREE chapter from Michael Stelzner’s new bestselling book, “Writing White Papers: How to Capture Readers and Keep Them Engaged“. Please note that this is available only to residents of Canada and the U.S.

In “Attracting Leads with White Papers” you’ll learn to:

• Generate a steady stream of quality leads with white papers
• Soft-sell by educating readers
• Write white papers that engage readers
• Stand out from the crowd
• Grab eyeballs with words

“Attracting Leads with White Papers” is made available through NetLine Corporation, a premier online lead generation services provider for B2B marketers. Netline is offering this excerpt in partnership with the book’s author, Michael Stelzner.

Browse Netline’s extensive list of FREE Small & Medium Business magazines, white papers, downloads and podcasts to find the titles that best match your skills and interests. Topics include SMB technology, small business management, entrepreneurship and franchising. All are absolutely free to professionals who qualify.

Flickr, the digital photo management and sharing site turns 4 years old today and I just wanted to say “Happy Birthday” to one of my favorite online services.

I have 2 Flickr Pro accounts, one for my business-related pics and another that Ed and I share for our travel and personal pictures.

I love Flickr and the more I use the service, the greater my adoration. The mapping feature as depicted in the graphic below is especially neat.

For example, I took the picture of the CF-116A Freedom Fighter shown above left in Kamloops, B.C. However, because many folks won’t know where that is, I added it to the map for their quick reference and it even gives you latitude and longitude coordinates. I absolutely love when others do the same as it improves my overall mental map of an area.

Of course, I also appreciate that Flickr drives traffic to my blog from links placed in relevant photo descriptions… much like the resource box used in article marketing.

We all want more traffic to our sites…

Here are 10 phrases that will help you boost traffic and bring visitors back to your sites, time after time.

1. “Subscribe / Sign Up”
   Tell your visitors to subscribe to your newsletter, and when they subscribe you’ll capture their e-mail address. Each time they receive a copy of your newsletter containing snippets of articles recently posted, they will be prompted to visit your site. Watch your Analytics go nuts on those days!

2. “Free”
   Freebies are always a good incentive to encourage folks to sign up for your newsletters. Too, you may allow visitors to use some of your articles on their own web site. Just ask them to include your resource box at the end of the article. This is a free way to advertise your site all over the internet.

3. “Bookmark Now”
   Make it easy for your visitors to bookmark your web site, and give them a good reason to do so.  For example, promise fresh content daily or weekly.

4. “Like us on Facebook”
   To expand your reach exponentially, your sidebar should incorporate links to all the major social media sites, such as Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, etc.

5. “Take our Survey”
   Ask your visitors and newsletter subscribers to fill out your online survey or questionnaire. This brings people back to your site. Use the feedback on ways to improve your web site to increase traffic and visitor retention.

6. “Enter Our Contest”
   Give your visitors a chance to enter an online contest or sweepstakes. People love to win stuff, and they will come back to your site again and again to see if you have new contest offerings.

7. “Join Our Forum”
   Ask your visitors to participate on your online discussion board. By participating they will meet other people, and they will  return to your web site on a regular basis to stay in contact with their new friends.

8. “Join Our Affiliate Program”
   Allow your visitors to make money selling your products or services. This will increase your traffic (and revenues) when they link back to your web site.