I joined http://thetelemarketingforum.com/ yesterday and became one of their paid members. The information around the forum isn’t bad and I learned a little although really don’t see the benefit in becoming a paid member as the paid members section really doesn’t offer anything worth paying for.

I then made a post and answered another members question when all of a sudden a moderator sends me an order, telling me to remove my signature links. Needless to say I took it a little personal and below is the email I sent him. I’ll be canceling my membership and asking for a refund this week. It seems like every time I try and help someone it comes back to bite me.

I want to take a moment of your time to tell you a little about myself. About 9 years ago I started my web design company and used Craig’s list and forums to promote the business.  You see I am Colombian and live in Colombia and nine years ago it was rare to find someone that had the internet (in Colombia) much less to find someone that has or wants a website.

I had to learn a lot of stuff fast and went from trying to wrap my head around how an email works to learning about website designs, the English language, SEO and online marketing. At that time WebProWorld was just getting started and they made me a moderator. I was their number one poster and started some of the biggest threads they ever had on that forum. As I started getting popular a lot of people started trying to get me to become a moderator on their forums. But others decided it was much more fun to make personal attacks and attack me on everything from how I write to where I am from. So I left the forums and started my own forum, thinking I could control the attacks better there.

We had over 1,000 active members the first week but it didn’t take long for the attacks to start again. So I walked away from the whole social media world and focused on running my business, testing different marketing methods and making a living online.

We do about a million US dollars per year, sitting in Colombia with about 98% of our work coming from the US. I want to push the business to around about 5 million this year and decided to start a call center to help in meeting that goal. And that is my reason for joining your forum.  I am not trying to promote my business, sell a service or anything else to you or anyone else on your forum.

I currently rank in the top ten on Google for keywords like website designers, custom website design, custom websites, website design and many other keywords. I really feel like I have a lot to offer as far as knowledge about how to make money online. I get about 10 people per day calling or emailing for prices on web design work. I own over 500 websites and at one time did over $15,000.00 per month with Google AdSense and other type sites.

So…I want to apologize for posting on your forum without reading the rules. As I’ll make it a point to both cancel my membership, as well as to never post on your forum again. Maybe you are correct and I don’t have anything to offer your members but then I guess you’ll never know as your too busy trying to make sure members that pay you don’t make a post with their signature tags in place before they make 50 post, instead of looking at the value that member could bring to the forum.

I am glad I discovered the type of forum you guys were running before I made more post. You see…my post was made to try and help someone with nothing else in mind, so when I am accused of doing so in hopes of being able to drop a link it makes me mad. And if you are so worried about people posting and leaving a signature link then maybe you should set the programming up so it doesn’t allow people to leave signature links until after they have made 50 post.

Then you could do something more constructive then worrying about which members did and didn’t post with a signature tag.

Just my two cents.

 

One of the hardest things to do is to launch a new site and drive traffic to it immediately. Google and the other search engines have been spammed so much in the past that they have gotten really slow about giving enough authority to a new site to allow it to rank for any good keywords.

This means that when launching a new site you will have to look to drive traffic to the site from places other than Google.

There are lots of ways to do this however; I’d like to talk about just one of those ways in this article.
Guest Blogging

A lot of people have nice blogs, with readers, rankings and traffic but lack the time, desire and sometimes the ability to make daily, interesting post. This is where you come in.

My finding a high ranking blog in your industry that is looking for a writer you are able to drive both traffic and links back to your site.

It’s common practice to allow guest posters a place to but their name and a link back to their website with each article that post. This allows you to get some attention to your site not just from visitors but from the search engines as well.

1) Yahoo Answers.

2) Myspace.com

3) Yahoo Groups

4) Stumbleupon.com

5) Forums

6) Craigslist.org

7) Site maps

E-Book Giveaway

9) Website Design

10) Submit To Directories

11) Tell a Friend

12) Search Engine Optimization

13) Squidoo.com

14) Social bookmarking sites

15) Article Promotion

16) Site Explorer

17) Epinion.com

1 Alexa.com

19) Newsletter Box

20) Scribd

21) Get Links from Relevant Websites

22) Increase the Size of Your Site

22) Send out Press Releases

23) Advertise On Online classified Ad Sites

24) Use Firefox Plug-in

25) Add a Forum to Your Site

26) Add a Blog to Your Site

27) Optimize Your Blog for The Search Engines

2 Comment on Other Peoples Blogs

29) MySpace News

30) Digg

31) Banner Exchanges

32) Traffic Exchanges

33) Pop Unders

34) Technorati and ping it when your blog content changes

35) Use a ping service like pingomatic to ping RSS aggregators

36) Submit your blog to all of the RSS directories

37) Link to other blogs in your posts

3 Use Stumbleupon to stumble your posts.

39) Ask your readers to submit your posts to social bookmarking sites (Digg, Reddit, etc.)

40) Start a group blog.

41) Join SpicyPage and promote your blog

42) Join a webring.

43) Sign up for BlogWoods and promote your blog

44) Exchange Ads (not blogroll links) with complementary blogs.

45) Trade blog roll links with related blogs.

46) Use Twitter

47) Publish videos on YouTube

4 Search for Wikis related to your.

49) Join Hub pages and post links to your blog from articles you write.

50) Pray.

51) Create a MySpace Page. Put your blog on it, and get some friends.

52) Tell people you will link back to them if they review your blog

53) Most brands are not well established online, you review related content and it will rank well.

54) Review relevant products on Amazon.com.

55) Create product lists on Amazon.com

56) Review related sites on Alexa

57) Review products and services on shopping search engines.

5 Swap some links.

59) Try to get links from within the content of relevant content pages.

60) Sell items on eBay.

61) Target niche social news sites like DZone, Sphinn or Hugg

62) Whenever you send an email to someone, always add your website url as a signature.

63) Do email signature swaps

64) Tag blog posts at social bookmarking sites

65) Add photos to your blog with appropriate keywords – Google Images generates traffic too.

66) Tag blog photos at Flicker

67) Make a custom 404-error page for your website. You can provide a link back to your main website or even try to monetize it by offering a related affiliate program within your niche.

6 Outsource grunt work.

69) After someone orders from you offer a one-time offer that compliments your product.

70) Participate in Blog Carnivals

71) create a network of blogs in different niches, and then link them together

72) Give away stock images with a wee watermark of your URL

73) Find and discuss memes

74) Create a Yahoo Group in the niche your site sits.

75) Bookmark your site on Del.icio.us and if you’re really keen, add a Del.icio.us button to your homepage.

76) Place a free ad for your company on Gumtree.

77) Syndicate your site’s content by using an RSS feeds.

7 Submit your RSS feeds to aggregator sites.

79) Don’t worry about PageRank – worrying about PageRank is as effective as trying to solve an algebra equation by chewing bubblegum.*

80) Get a custom t-shirt made with your website URL on it, and wear it often.

81) Get a custom t-shirt made with your website URL on it, and wear it often.

82) Send out a newsletter!

83) Giving away an eBook is an excellent way to generate word-of-mouth about your site.

84) Ask bloggers and other Web site owners to review your site and/or products.

85) Add a “Tell a Friend” function to your site, so people can easily recommend you to their mates.

86) Share your banners on banner exchange sites.

87) Create a “lense” for your site on Squidoo

8 Do you have really hot content on your site that geeks would love? If so Slashdot will bring you a mass of traffic.

89) upload a favicon.gif file so that your users have a nice icon when they bookmark your site.

90) Set up a feed on MyYahoo.com so your site gets regularly spidered by the Yahoo search

91) Use Ping-0-matic to ping blog directories. Do this every time you publish.

92) Print your blog URL on your business cards, brochures and flyers.

93) Use Trackback links when you quote or refer to other blog posts.

94) Increase the list you ping

95) Use Facebook

96) Social Networking

97) Micro

9 Email Marketing

99) RSS Feeds

100) Get outside links to internal pages

101) Use free hosting and build sites and link them back to your main site.

What would you try to do with your life right now if you knew that you could not fail?

Well, what’s stopping you?

The neat thing about Guerrilla marketing is that it combines out of the box thinking, design and art as well as the ability to advertise a product without letting anyone know they’ve been advertised to.

Larger-than-life Gillette Fusion Power razors were attached to the backs of Zamboni (ice resurfacer) machines, making it seem as though the razors were giving the ice a smoother “shave”.

I’d call that some pretty darn good use of guerrilla marketing.