Internet Entrepreneurs are collecting different websites to generate traffic back to their site. Platforms such as Facebook and article archives are great resources in promoting sales website on the Internet to specific demographics. However, many of those third-party sites have certain rules. That is where you start to think ways to get around the rules and considering bridge sites as a vital technique to exploit.
Why Blogs Are Ideal Bridge Sites?
Weblogs, a.k.a. “blogs,” are a good way to bridge from an interactive social networking site to a commercial sales page. You can post your daily blogs that are typically informal, casual in tone, and friendly. The casual style is what fits with the social networking style.
This will give you an edge because the major search engines tends to always crawl blogs because of the regular updates which obtains more audience. Additionally, you can also put links on your blogs that will send your audience to different sales pages. And as long as your blogs are informative and entertaining, you can board people into your site and subscribe your blogs.
WordPress Is The Best Standard
WordPress is the best standard to easily implement blogs where you can customize your sites and there are other hosts as well that will put sites for you. The shareware software package of WordPress.org can be used by anyone for free.
But there are guidelines of WordPress that don't allow users to advertise the way other Internet marketing blog does. To be certain, you won't earn from your blog using WordPress.com. So make sure that you are using WordPress.org hosted on a site where the rights to add Google ads to the blog is prohibited. In that way, you can earn money through advertising too.
WordPress Plug-Ins
There is third-party software called “plug-ins" that you can install to add WordPress features. Those plug-ins are beneficial to Internet marketers as numerous developers are enthusiastic about pushing this market forward. Here are the lists of plug-ins:
Akismet
Adsense Deluxe
DoFollow
Email Users
Gregarious
WordPress e-commerce
All In One SEO Pack
Subscribe To Comments
Once you have set up the blog, go over different places where you can start to promote a web presence to grab traffic.
Another way to get more traffic from blogs is to comment on the top profile blogs and leave a link to a blog post that addresses some aspect of the post. You are using the bridge of your website to catch attention, then you can market them on your site once they get to your blog.
Digg.com
Digg is a social news site where users can submit stories and other users will vote on them. The more popular the story becomes, the higher the ranking by Digg.
Delicious.com
Delicious.com is a social bookmarking site that enables you to add different pages of your blog to a certain site where other people can view.
Social Networking Sites
Social Networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace have strict rules about what you can post online on your profiles. But there are ways to grab the users to mingle online. For example, you can make a Facebook page for your business for those people who are trying to use Facebook to market their products. The key to Facebook is to join in the casual atmosphere and structure your way to more contacts. And, since there is a non-commercialism culture on Facebook, the blog is a perfect intermediary step to your sales page eventually.
Social Search Engines
StumbleUpon is a social search engine that is a great way to grab traffic. It doesn't use keywords to assign relevancy. All the pages are submitted by users of the search engine who categorize them and they can even give them a “thumbs up.” To use StumbleUpon, you just need to install the toolbar into your web browser. Then it's too simple to use the thumbs up button to instantly add your submissions to the search engine.
Groups
Yahoo Groups and Google Groups have several categories of groups where you can join to discuss particular topics. The advantage here is that they can have a very large audience that is currently discussing a topic relevant to your market niche. Apart from it, signing up is just free.
Web Forums
Web forums are set up by web masters or niche marketers. Some require a membership fee to get in, but some are free such as Digitalpoint or Sitepoint forums. In case you able to get in, you have to follow the terms and rules of posting on the forum. You can use the blog as a bridge to get their interest and get your products or affiliate programs by showing them the benefits of your blog and how they can earn money from it. The audience for web forums is more high level than just a simple consumer looking for an entertaining product.
How To Bridge Successfully?
Pay Attention To The Audience
Once you have visited some third-party sites, you will start to learn ideas of the type of audience that they attract, and you can write a blog post that is appealing especially to that audience. In that way, your inserted link will go to the permalink with that specific post.
Categorize and Tag Your Posts
Visitors usually like the post that is appealing to them. Then they will check out your other posts in your blog. That is why categorizing is important and you can tag your audience. It will also put up indexes that search engines use to distinguish what your post is about and rank it.
Offer Incentives To Bridge To Website
One way to get an audience is to offer them incentives for clicking on your blog links and let them participate in your affiliate program.
Contests are also a great form of incentive and can motivate people to go from third-party websites to your blog. Any contact that you make as a subscriber and that emails you can become a customer eventually because once you have their email, they have started the slide into your sales funnel already.
