A friend of mine was recently wondering, “What’s the difference between being ranked #1 and #2 on Google?”

He guessed that it wouldn’t be very much, maybe like 10% max.

Well, surprisingly it’s much higher than that!

While I haven’t seen any data from Google for the click-through rate averages for each position, there’s data floating around from AOL that could easily be applied to any search engine.

• Ranking #1 gets 42.1 % of clicks
• Ranking #2 gets 11.9 % of clicks
• Ranking #3 gets 8.5 % of clicks
• Ranking #4 gets 6.1 % of clicks
• Ranking #5 gets 4.9 % of clicks
• Ranking #6 gets 4.1 % of clicks
• Ranking #7 gets 3.4 % of clicks
• Ranking #8 gets 3.0 % of clicks
• Ranking #9 gets 2.8 % of clicks
• Ranking #10 gets 3.0 % of clicks

This means that if a keyword gets 100 searches a month, the #1 result will get 42 clicks whereas the #2 result will only get 12!   Pretty big difference.

Great example of why it’s so important to be ranked #1

Even better, if you’re #1 for organic search results, Google Maps listings, AND AdWords, you can completely dominate the competition.

An excellent SEO service I’ve used in the past is Mariah’s SEO Blaster.  She’s very skilled at helping local and global businesses get ranked highly in all 3 of the above categories.

I recently figured out a neat trick for getting a YouTube video to show up on Page 1 of Google search results.  We all know that YouTube = Google, so that makes this technique even more powerful than if it was done with some random video site that may be shut down or Google may someday decide to ignore.

Disclaimer:

This trick used to work great before the YouTube blog was changed to a Blogger platform.  Now there’s a “NOFOLLOW” attribute on the comment hyperlinks, so it’s arguable how effective this is anymore.  But if you want to try it…give ‘er!   Report back if it seems to work.

Here’s what ya gotta do:

1. Create a YouTube profile, if you haven’t already.
2. Upload a video that’s been keyword-optimized for the Google search phrase you’re targeting.  This means the title of the video should be your long-tail keyword.  Like “make money online fast”.
3. Create a Blogger profile (Frank’s is just an example), if you haven’t already.  Add a backlink in the “About Me” section which goes to your YouTube profile URL.  Again, use the keyword you’re targetting.
4. Visit the YouTube Blog.
5. Find a story to comment on.
6. For the “Comment As” field select “Google Account”.
7. Write  a respectful, relevant comment.
8. You should be prompted to log into your Blogger account when you click “Preview” or “Post Comment”
9. Notice a few things,
   • The Blog page has PR of 9…that’s HUGE!
10. Wait for your video to appear in Google search results.
11. ?
12. ?
13. Profit

Done and done.

SocialMarker is a free tool that I use fairly often.  It makes it a heck of a lot easier to submit my sites to social bookmarking services, than if I was to do it manually.

After my negative review of SocialBot yesterday I figured I should discuss what I do find useful for social bookmarking.

So why do I use SocialMarker?

• It helps me get traffic.
• It helps me get a lot of backlinks, some from high PR sites.
• It works with many of the popular social bookmarking services…51 in total!
• It’s free!

Now let me explain how it all works:

1. First I load up whatever page I want to submit in FireFox.  I’ll use im-fun.com as an example.
2. I have a “SocialMarker” bookmark in my Bookmarks Toolbar.  The SocialMarker site explains how to get this setup.
3. I click the “SocialMarker” bookmark.
4. Another tab appears with SocialMarker loaded and the Title and URL of my page auto-populated.
5. I manually enter text (a description of the page) and appropriate tags.
6. I select the social bookmarking services that I want to submit to (I usually choose the “Dofollow” and “Best” ones, not all of them).
7. I click “Submit”
8. SocialMarker loads up a frame that opens up pages for each service, with buttons at the top to navigate between services
   • 
9. I then go from service to service, logging in (often I’m already logged in from a prior session), and submitting my page by dragging and dropping each field from the helpful bar at the bottom of the screen.  Often SocialMarker is smart enough to populate these fields without me having to do anything.
   • 

So, although there’s still some manual effort involved, SocialMarker does make it easer to submit sites to social bookmarking services.  And it sure doesn’t hurt that it’s FREE.  I’ll keep using it until I find something better or win the lottery and can finally afford to spend more money on internet marketing tools.

One last thing I should mention – I also use the Tag Format Converter tool (or the downloadable spreadsheet) that I wrote.  There’s 5 different tag formats that social bookmarking services require; you can’t just use the default comma-separated format for each service.  Yes, it sucks ass.  Hopefully one day those social bookmarking bigwigs will decide on a standard format.  But that’s just wishful thinking

Today I’m going to talk about Free Traffic System, which touts itself as being able to give people “free targeted website traffic in any niche”.

Well first of all, as you probably found out when you were 5 years old, nothing in the world is entirely free (except bad advice and in some cities drinks for ladies on Tuesdays).  So although this site does offer a free service, they also encourage you to become a Pro Member and get additional benefits and features.

That being said…this is what the Free Traffic System is all about:

Article Submission

1. You write a unique article (at least 450 words) that isn’t plagiarized or already posted word-for-word on your own site.
2. You SPIN it, which involves putting [spin][/spin] around synonyms throughout your article.
   • Here’s an example sentence: One day I [spin]went|drove|walked|ran[/spin] to the [spin]store|market|grocery store|drug store|shopping center[/spin].
   • So as you can see, because I spun a phrase 4x and another 5x, that creates 20 (4×5) possible sentences out of a single sentence
   • If you do that once or twice in each paragraph throughout your article, you have turned your single unique article into many unique articles.
3. You determine appropriate keywords for your article (preferably ones you’re targeting in your marketing campaign)
4. You determine appropriate URLs for the keywords which you’ve embedded in your article
5. You enter everything above into Free Traffic System
6. You type in category keywords to find blogs that would be suitable for your article
7. You select 30 of these blogs
8. Over the course of the next few days, your article is automatically submitted to these 30 blogs!
9. The entire process typically takes me about half an hour

Article Reception

Now this is functionality you could use if you want your niche WordPress blog to run on auto-pilot.   It’s basically the inverse of the Article Submission functionality that I described above.  Note that it’s completely optional and my guess is that most folks just do the article submission.

1. You create a new WordPress user that has the “AUTHOR” role
2. You enter details into Free Traffic System about your blog, such as:
   • Title
   • Category
   • URL
   • Username
   • Password
3. You sit back and wait while new articles get posted to your blog on a regular basis (I find the frequency depends on how unique your “Category” / niche is)

Pros of Free Traffic System

• Easy to use once you figure out how spinning and keywords work (they do provide an instructional video)
• A single article gets unique-ifide (yes, that’s definitely a word!) and submitted to 30 blogs for FREE!
• Great for getting traffic
• Great for getting one-way backlinks to your site with anchor-text keywords (in other words…SEO crystal meth)
• Great for getting unique content, on auto-pilot, posted to your blog

Cons of Free Traffic System

• Could be a bit confusing at first
• Article Reception functionality doesn’t allow you to specific WordPress categories for the posts (I’ve had to manually move posts between categories)

Overall, as far as cost/benefit analysis goes, I highly, highly recommend Free Traffic System.  It sure aint perfect, but…come on…it’s FREE!  Plus I don’t know of any other way to get articles unique-ified and submitted to so many blogs without a whole lot of effort.

The more I learn about this new service being developed by StumbleUpon, the more psyched I get.

If you haven’t heard of StumbleUpon, they are one of many social bookmarking websites, but they are unique in the fact that they offer users the ability to just browse or “stumble” through a never-ending list of sites recommended by other users.  Pretty cool idea.

I read about their new product, called SU.PR (pronounced “super”), from the blog of Tim Ferriss (the author of “The 4-Hour Workweek”).

Well apparently SU.PR will allow users to do the following:

• Submit their content to StumbleUpon’s 7.9 million users with each post
• Have their best content showcased in a right-hand sidebar for each page that’s linked to (here’s an example)
• Get suggestions for optimal posting times:  get more traffic per post
• Schedule as many tweets or posts as they want, for any time
• See their click-through statistics in real-time
• See retweets for each post, including the biggest influencers (with rankings)
• Post to Twitter and Facebook at the same time, with more platforms to come…
• Use their own short URL (i.e. www.mysite.com/abc123) instead of something like bit.ly

Dang, that sounds pretty bad-ass.  Apparently Tim said while testing SU.PR he started receiving up to 10% of his unique traffic from it, and got 24,000 visits to a single post in 24 hours.  Holy smokes!

Here’s a sample of the SU.PR dashboard:

Well if you’re excited and want to get in on the action ASAP, they’re giving out free beta testing accounts for the next few weeks.  Here’s how to get one:

1. Go here http://su.pr/
2. Click “request one” if you don’t have an “invite code”
3. Follow StumbleUpon on Twitter to get the code when they periodically release new ones