Lesson 2 – Build Your Skills

Lesson 2 – Build Your Skills.

 

When you start out with an Internet business, you can spend a great deal of money on search engine optimization (SEO); PPC (Pay Per Click), Keywords and other methods of directing traffic to your site, sometimes without much success.

 

Learning how to attract traffic without constantly spending hundreds and hundreds of dollars is a key part of having a successful internet business.

 

Alphainventions.com can be a key source of traffic for your blog or site, and it is important that you have some idea of what will make your site attractive to this referral engine.

So, for Lesson 2, we are going to spend some time discussing the analysis we have done on Alphainventions.com

 It is very important to understand that if you are here to make money (as opposed) to having your blog shared and enjoyed), you must have a very good idea of how much traffic comes from a specific source. 

 

As you make sales of product, you will be able to match up the incoming traffic with the product sold and its referral link.  You must start out right – making sure you know where every customer comes from; how much they spend and what they bought.

 

In a later lesson, we will discuss this traffic analysis in more detail.  For this Lesson 2 – let’s focus on Alphainventions.com – because they can be a great source of traffic for you.

 

Summary:  we tracked 200 displays on the site in a two and a half hour period on a Sunday afternoon.

 

 

Segmentation: the displays were categorized by

• Blog Name (34 blogs were displayed, 10 were NOT displayed due to being bumped off by other submitters. A total of 44 blogs participated in the review period of two and a half hours).

 

• Status qualifying for display on traffic site and the number of successful displays (total 165):
  • AIID (paying clients) – 5:165
  • Blog displayed, showing mention of Alphainvention.com as a traffic source – 64:165
  • Blog listed as live on site, showing mention of Alphainvention.com as a traffic source 67:165
  • Blog listed as live on site, confirming blog has been notified. 18:165
  • Blog listed as live on site, confirming blog has an embedded link to Alphainvention.com 4:165
  • Blog listed as live on site and requests YOUR feedback. 7:165
  • Blogs listed as bumped – ONLY by the submitter that was on line at that time. 35

 

• Number of displays for each blog
  • the number of displays for each blog (during this viewing period of 34 blogs by one participant) varied from one to as high as 23 for one single blog, in the 165 page offerings.
  • 10 blogs were not shown at all

 

Any there any specific actions that impact on the likelihood of your blog being shown?

 

 

There are three in particular that need to be clearly understood, so that you can continue to expect to get high levels of traffic from Alphaiventions.com.

 

DO NOT MASK YOUR BLOG NAME

 

During the first half of the time trial, regular submitting was done of this site, Build Your Traffic.  Three different shortened URL’s were employed.  Not one referral of traffic came to the site between 5:30pm and 7:30pm.

 

The next submissions were done using a copy paste of various URLs from the site and 21 referrals were received in the period from 7:30pm to 9:00pm.

 

DO NOT SUBMIT TOO OFTEN

 

As pointed out in Lesson 1, submitting your URL on the site has the effect of “booting” someone else out of the reading cycle.  In several cases, the other submitter eventually did not get a display at all during the testing period and that is a combination of more than one factor. 

 

It appears to be related directly to the number of time the current participant is submitting (being the “booter”) and the strength of the attribution given on the site to Alphainventions.com as a source of traffic.  Not surprising, at all.

 

During the whole testing period, even though the test site was in the reading cycle at least 35 times, by virtue of “booting” other sites, the site itself did not appear in the live section of the site at all.  

 

 

Since masked URL’s were used in the first half of the test, that is not surprising.  In the second half of the test, there were eight (8) sites taken out of the reading cycle by resubmission and of those eight, five did not appear again during the test period. 

 

Indeed, there was no hard evidence during this test that frequent re-submitting was to the advantage of the participant.

 

 

HAVE A WELL WRITTEN, PROMINENT POST ON YOUR OWN SITE THAT SUPPORTS ALPHAINVENTIONS.COM

 

Of 165 listings for displays, 131 of them related to sites that openly support the referral source.  One of the sites that got “booted” three times during this test was Carmen’s Café and this is one of the five sites that didn’t get to be displayed. 

 

But on each of the three occasions that her site was displaced, there was an opportunity to visit the site, which sadly, we did not do during the testing process.

 

Carmen is a participant in the Kiva.org small loans process to help women (in particular) to be successful in small business and it is disappointing that Carmen’s story was not told.  Part of Lesson 2  is to visit her site and leave an encouraging comment for her.

In case her site does not come up in the reading pane during your viewing time, here is a link to Carmen’sCafe (we found it at http://kiva.org)

 

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TWO DIRECT OUTCOMES OF BEING OUSTED FROM THE READING CYCLE

 

What did turn out to be a surprise was the pattern of sites that had been “booted” turning up shortly afterwards (about three or four sites later) in the reading cycle with a “LIVE” rating and a message that YOUR comment is wanted on the site. 

 

Of the seven times this occurred, two sites appeared more than once.  So Alphainventions.com has a compensatory method of putting sites back into the reading cycle to help overcome ‘weaker’ sites being excluded. 

 

 

There was also a clear pattern of bringing a brand new site into the reading cycle immediately AFTER the request for YOUR comment on the previously “booted” site.

 

This allows for fresh views to come into the cycle and again, as in Lesson 1, the more you visit other sites and leave comments, the better for both parties.

 

It’s polite, especially if you have just removed them from the reading cycle

1.    Everyone likes to have the occasional comment, so consider it as a gift of great kindness.

2. You will be amazed and astounded at the beautiful people you will meet.

3. Most will visit you and leave a comment in return and then, you will have both given each other the greatest blogging gift of all, a backlink.

 

 

 

SUMMARY OF LESSON 2

 

 

Alphainventions.com is a highly valuable source of referrals

 

Too frequent resubmitting is more damaging than helpful

 

Leaving comments allows for the creation of back links that strengthens both sites for other search engines.

 

The strongest support comes from Alphinventions.com when you have a well structured post that confirms their ability to deliver high volumes of traffic to your site.

 

From there, it is up to you (and we will look at that in Lesson 3) to make the most of those referral.