(Of course the only reason is to get even more sales, but who cares? Discounts are good!).

Ittybiz has several great value products, yet I don’t own all of them. In fact I only own one: the SEO School eBook. And I recommend it for anyone serious about starting an online business that could use a nice steady flow of search engine traffic.

I learned quite some things from the book and I applied it to my other blog and for my ebook (have work to do on this blog though). My ebook definitely would’ve sold better if I had read this SEO School before writing it. Anyway, you can get it now for just $19 which is great value for the money.

I decided not to enroll in the Online Business School or the Marketing 101 course, for two reasons. The main reason being the lack of time due to my wife’s difficult pregnancy. And in case you would like to use some one-on-one time with Naomi, that’s on discount too.

To sum it all up:

• SEO School – $39 now $19. Use discount code “wood” (without the quotes).
• Online Business School – $397 now $197. Use discount code “wood” (without the quotes).
• Marketing 101 – $188 now $94.
• Consultancy / Brainstorming – $250 now $150 an hour.

The offer is valid until February 5, so if you want to get the discount, you’ve got about a week to make up your mind.

P.S. Yeah, I’ll write posts with real content soon. But you know…discounts are good. Especially on products I own and recommend

P.S.S. Yes there are affiliate links in there, they don’t hurt your discount (the discount does hurt my affiliate cut though…). Read about how and why I hide the affiliate links.

In this article I’m going to discuss tactics to get incoming links.

1. Get connected with others

The best way to get links, quality links, is by connecting to other bloggers and build friendships. The most powerful link to your blog is one that’s coming from a real person, endorsing your content.

There’s nothing that beats it in both quality of links and quality of new visitors. Get networking on twitter, by leaving comments and sending the odd email. Don’t spam! Everybody hates spammers!

2. Participate in blog carnivals

Blog carnivals are blogging events where one blog hosts a carnival and links to articles on other blogs that cover a similar topic. You can find an overview of all active carnivals at the Blog Carnival homepage. You need to register for a free account and you can submit your articles from that site. For almost every topic there are carnivals to be found.

My experience is that the volatility of active carnivals is quite high. Carnivals are started and discontinued all the time, some are pretty high quality where the hosting blogger really digs into the articles (expect visitors) and some are simply link farms that get hosted on seperate blog carnival blogs (expect nothing).

It takes quite some time to really sort through the carnivals and can be annoying as the user interface is not that great. But it will get you links that get picked up by the search engines and Technorati.

3. Host a blog carnival

Besides participating you can also choose to host a blog carnival. While incoming links are not guaranteed, other blogs will link back to the carnival. The more effort you put into the carnival, the more likely others are to link back to it. And if they do so, leaving a comment thanking them for the link back and a remark about the submitted article makes sure that your name gets remembered by the blogger in question. And it also increases the likelihood of readers to click through.

Sign up at the Blog Carnival homepage.

4. Blog directories

There are a lot of blog directories on the net. A lot of the blog directories are simply link farms, that don’t have a lot of traffic because hardly anyone uses them. And other directories are pretty valuable, check this list to see 20 of the more valuable blog directories to be listed in.

There are basically three types of links that you can get from blog directories:

• Free links
  Free links are just that, free. It usually takes a very long time before your blog gets approved for these links.
• Reciprocal links
  Some blog directories require that you link back to them, when they take your link in the directory for free. Choose carefully whether and with whom you want to do this. Linking out to blacklisted sites is not appreciated by search engines and they can take your blog out of the search results if they find those links.
• Paid links
  This the kind of link that simply costs you money. Almost all the directories have them in one form or another. Again be careful about with whom you want to do business.

5. Signatures

If you use forums you know that there is often the possibility to use signatures when you post topics or replies. You can put a link back to your blog in the signature, notifying readers of these topics that they can find more about you there.

Not all forums treat these links as standard links, but add the rel=nofollow attribute to them. This means that they are not counted as incoming links by search engines. But there are a lot of forums that don’t do this.

6. Comments

One of the other ways to get links to your site is by leaving comments. This will get you exposure on other blogs, especially if you leave valuable and insightful comments. You’ll get a link that will send visitors. Not vast quantities, but a handful every week or every day if you’re exceptionally valuable. The early positions in a comment thread send more visitors than the other positions, so being one of the first to comment counts.

Like in the forum signatures, they’re hardly all links that are counted as such by search engines, but there are blogs that remove the nofollow link from their comments to encourage more comments. Don’t fall in the pitfall of leaving very short comments only to gather links. Most of these bloggers will simply delete the links from people who do just that. They will reward only people who genuinely contribute to their blog.

Pitfalls

Using social bookmarking and social media sites like del.icio.us, simpy, stumbleupon, digg, propeller and sphinn is very helpful in getting more links, visitors and visibility. These sites are pretty keen on preventing people from spamming their sites, so they take measures to discourage people from submitting links just to get incoming links. Obviously there is a link to your blog on these sites as soon as you or someone else submits it, but they will prevent search engines from counting it as a real link, by adding the rel=nofollow attribute to the link.

Using semi-automated bookmarking services like Onlywire is not helping at all. For some sites that is even a red flag that could lead to a ban on links to your site for all of their members.

Final thought

The most valuable incoming link is a link initiated by someone else, because they value what you write. These tips are to help your rankings a little in the early stages, they are pretty useless as soon as your blog gets some momentum. But whatever you do, don’t spam blogs, forums, social media sites or whomever to splash your links over the internet! People will notice and in time search engines and advertisers will notice too. And turn their back on you.

There are many more tactics to getting incoming links, but for the early stages working with these will keep you busy for now.

Traffic comes from various sources:

• Referral Traffic
• Search Engines
• Social Media
• Direct Traffic
• Ad Traffic

I’ll cover each of these sources in this article.

Referral Traffic

Refferal traffic are visitors that found your site, because another site linked to you and they used that link to visit you. One of the best links to get is when someone else talks about you and recommends you. That way they are actively promoting you. But there are various ways of getting links to you on other sites. And as they are important for search engines and advertisement networks too, I will cover them in another article in the Early Stage Strategy series.

Search Engines

Search Engines sent targetted traffic. Someone entered keywords in that little search engine box, and they suggested your site. So the people who come to you in this way are more likely to like what you offer, because it fits what they were looking for in the first place.

Search Engines can be a major source of traffic! So much so, that an entire industry evolved around them. It’s called SEO, Search Engine Optimization. The subject is way too elaborate to fully cover here, but it involves both technical aspects (being friendly to the search engine spiders) as the content aspects (making sure the right keywords score).

The biggest factor in a high ranking in the Search Engines are incoming links, and it’s hard to get those in the early stages. But as I said before, I will talk about those in another article in this series. Two good places to investigate the subject further are the SEO Book by Aaron Wall and SEOMoz.

Social Media

There are a lot of Social Media sites around. Social Media in short are people sharing content with other people (read more about it at wikipedia). Some of these sites can really cause a large influx of visitors when an article gets popular.

The better known sites are StumbleUpon, Del.icio.us and Digg. But there are a lot of other sites out there as well.

Having a strong profile on any of these sites is not necessarily to be used to stumble, digg or vote for your own articles on these sites. But, as they are all about making friends, it’s about building a community (or a pack) to rely on to submit them for you. Although every once in a while it’s not a problem to do it yourself.

Actions you can take right now:

• Make an account on StumbleUpon and start stumbling. There are many strategies to build your account, read more about this on DoshDosh.
• Make an account on Digg and start digging. Read here how you can become a power digger.
• Make an account on Twitter and start building a network. Add me as a friend and send me an @ message so we can talk. Read more about how to build a twitter presence.

This is a strategy I’ll be using for Scraping Pennies as well. I do have a headstart, because I’ve build profiles already on some sites. They’re not nearly as strong as they can be, when you use the tips in the articles I linked to, but it will help.

Direct Traffic

Direct Traffic are visitors who key in your address into the address bar of their internet browser. They knew your address beforehand, either because they’ve been to your site before or because they heard about it somewhere on- or offline.

These people are best helped by having an address that’s easy to remember. For Scraping Pennies I have already set this up. It’s easy to remember, because it’s an existing expression, only two words, regular spelling, no dashes and on a .com domain. If you don’t have a domain yet, and need some help figuring domains out (it can be very frustrating), you might be interested in Daniel Scocco’s e-book Killer Domains. I haven’t read it myself, but I hear it’s helpful.

To increase your direct traffic you need to get your address out there. People need to know about it. This may not be your biggest source of traffic, or the one you can grow the fastest, but it in the beginning of a blog or website getting any traffic is welcome. And you are definitely reaching different audiences, than the other methods will.

Actions you can take right now:

• Set a signature under your email messages with the address for your blog.
• Tell your friends and family about your new blog.
• Print (free) business cards with the address and pass them along.
• Print (free) stickers with the address and put them up around the city.
• Place (free) ads in a local (door-to-door) newspaper.

Ad Traffic

You can buy advertisement space on other blogs, websites or even search engines. When used effectively this can be a good source of targeted traffic as well. There are various forms you can choose to advertise, varying from Adwords at Google to banner buttons at similar blogs.

At this point I’m undecided whether to go ahead with buying advertisements. After all the budget is tight, but on the other hand traffic is necessary for monetizing Scraping Pennies.

One thing you can factor in is the benefits of choosing a host that offers credit for advertisements when you sign up. I host Scraping Pennies at GoDaddy and they offer a $25 value of credits for Google Adwords. I’m going to use those soon and report back here, on how to set them up and on the results.

Next article in the series will be about getting links to your blog.