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When it comes to getting traffic to your site, there are pros and cons associated with every traffic generation method.

There are also costs. Some are obvious, such as the monetary cost of paying to run an ad in a newsletter or on a search engine. Some are not so obvious, such as the time and possibly monetary cost of harnessing search engine optimization or viral marketing.

As discussed in yesterday’s feature article, it’s important to be aware of all the relevant costs and make choices accordingly. Otherwise you could end up paying much, much more for something than you first expected.

In particular, there is often a large, yet not-so-obvious cost, associated with relying on seemingly free traffic generation methods such as search engine optimization (SEO) and article marketing. Many Internet marketers are attracted to these methods because they don’t necessarily involve any hard costs (unless you hire people to help you). But, apart from the time taken to do them – for example, the time taken to optimize your website, write articles, seek back-links, etc – there is another significant cost.

It’s the opportunity cost associated with not knowing how appealing your product or service offer is, or how effective your conversion tactics are.

There is often a lag between when you begin SEO and article marketing and when you start generating significant traffic. That being so, days, weeks, months – even years – could go by while you wait for enough traffic to be able to assess how appealing is your offer and effective are your conversion tactics.

Given that you didn’t pay anything while you waited, you might be content with that. But what if, after all those days, weeks or months go by, you discover that no-one wants to buy your product, or that your current conversion mechanism is an abject failure?

Not only did you waste time on doing SEO or article marketing… but you missed the opportunity to spend time on alternative offers or conversion tactics that WOULD have generated results.

So what’s the alternative? It’s to aim for FAST rather than FREE. It’s to pony up some money to invest in advertising – such as (but not just) pay-per-click advertising with the objective of TESTING your product or service, your offer, and your conversion mechanism (e.g. landing page).

Sure, this may cost a few hundred or even a few thousand dollars. That may sound scary… but if it ends up SAVING you weeks, months (or more) of wasted time and ignorance about what does and doesn’t work… it’s actually very cost-effective.

None of this is to say that you should neglect SEO, article marketing or other (seemingly) free traffic generation methods, or that you should just focus on paid advertising to test what does and does not work. It should be noted that there ARE ways to generate substantial search engine traffic in a relatively short amount of time WITHOUT paying for advertising… In this case, it may be possible to generate traffic FAST and (somewhat) FREE.

The point is, however, to fully assess the costs AND opportunities involved in each traffic generation method available to you BEFORE choosing one or the other.

Have you found yourself thinking (or shouting) those words? Or do you know someone in this situation? You might be shocked at how often I have heard this from beginning Internet marketers and - more worryingly, those who have been involved in Internet marketing for several years.

While it’s impossible for me to advise someone about what they should do in this situation (without knowing their individual circumstances) let me offer a perspective on this predicament: having hundreds of private label rights (PLR) ebooks, software scripts, etc is about as useful as having a garage full of books, toys, laundry products or ANY kind of product. It’s the same as having a supply of any kind of inventory… without having a store (online or offline) to sell it in or customers to sell it to.

Unless you have a means of attracting customers, you don’t have a business. And unless you have something valuable to offer your target market, you don’t have much chance of converting people into customers.

What’s more, even if you are able to generate traffic to your site… if you’re simply offering the same PLR products that everyone else is offering - with no, unique or better point of difference - you’re unlikely to convert any traffic you do get into customers.

My suggestion? Put those PLR products to one side and work out what kind of business you want to be in, who you want to sell to, and how you can deliver what they want in a different and better way than everyone else.

If, after doing that, you find that some or all of those PLR products fit into your business model, then by all means give them the attention required. Otherwise, forget about them.

According to data from Hitwise, Yahoo News was the news site with the most election day traffic, followed by CNN, MSNBC, Google News, Fox News and the Drudge report.

Here’s a list of the top 10 election news sites, in terms of Hitwise’s estimate of market share:

1. Yahoo News
2. CNN
3. MSNBC
4. Google News
5. FOXNews
6. Drudge Report
7. The New York Times
8. FOXNews.com Elections
9. USA Today
10. ABCnews.com

Source: Erick Schonfeld, “Hitwise Ranks Election Traffic To News Sites,” TechCrunch, November 5, 2008

In its recent case study profiling H&R Block, MarketingSherpa revealed a cool idea you might want to test to generate buzz (traffic and ultimately conversions) for your online business:invite people to submit YouTube videos in return for a prize.

In H&R Block’s case, the company invited people to submit 3 minute videos describing how they would use their tax refund.

The winner, as voted by viewers, would win $5,000 and have their video displayed on the home page of the H&R website. The initiative resulted in 130 people submitting entries and the YouTube videos getting more than 1.6 million views. Nice.

Source: Case Study, “H&R Block Gets Big Buzz Through Social Media For Digital Products: How To Test and Pick Channels”, MarketingSherpa, October 30, 2008

There are at least two myths circulating in the Internet marketing and search engine optimization communities that frustrate me no end. They frustrate me for two chief reasons:

1. These myths cause real DAMAGE to people’s businesses by inciting them to devote time, resources and money to the WRONG things; and
2. They allow wannabe experts to continue selling their B.S. at others’ expense.

The first myth is the ‘duplicate content penalty’ myth - the idea that the search engines will ‘penalize’ you e.g. remove your site from the index or lower your ranking - if you publish the same content more than once on the Internet.

This is JUST NOT TRUE.

There are sooo many examples of duplicate content being routinely indexed by the search engines. Just do a search on the title of an article syndicated by Reuters or the Associated Press. Up will come results for the same article on lots of different news sites.

Let’s face it. If the search engines de-indexed sites for publishing the same articles… there would be NO news sites listed in the search engines at all!

And that’s just one example.

But if you don’t believe me when I say the duplicate content penalty is a myth, hear it from the horse’s mouth. This is what Susan Moskwa said in a recent post to the Official Google Blog:

“There’s no such thing as a duplicate content penalty.”

Couldn’t be clearer than that.

Okay, so why do concerns about publishing duplicate content - either on your own site or on others’ sites – persist? Two reasons.

Source: Susan Moskwa, “Demystifying the ‘duplicate content penalty’”, The Official Google Blog, September 12, 2008