1) Converting those who visit your website or interact with you somewhere else on the web to taking action with you

2) Enabling yourself to be not just “found” or “stumbled upon” but ever present

3) Maximizing your sales potential by either making or creating something to sell on your own or promoting someone else’s product.

Stay tuned for Thursday’s launch, which will be ONLY between the hours of 10am and 3pm. Sign-up for the Tuesday Triplet where we’re describing the product launch process one step at a time while we’re actually doing it.

Today I need to deviate from that and tell you what someone else did to get herself on CNN.

First, click this link or copy and paste this link to your browser: http://tinyurl.com/na7adu to see the video that was shown on CNN last Wednesday morning, made by someone who identifies herself only as Adriana.

Here are three reasons why I believe she got featured:

1) Her Video is About a HOT and STEAMY SEXY Topic: Health Care Reform – She “attended” a town meeting where the health care plan was discussed. CNN is looking for town meeting attendees right now to hear their “real people” opinions.

2) She Looks Like a “Regular” Person – I don’t mean that as an insult. It’s just what CNN is looking for right now; people who represent the people. Adriana is articulate, but not a polished and rehearsed professional speaker. She could be a professional speaker for all we know, but she just doesn’t come off as being one on the video. But, she’s certainly good enough with words to the point where CNN thought she wouldn’t fall to pieces on national television. So, the producers are getting ahold of her as I write this to invite her LIVE on CNN.

3) Her Video is Self-Produced and Casual – This video is NOT made in a studio or with professional grade equipment. She probably didn’t even have someone recording the video for her. It’s unedited, has no music intro or outro, no fancy graphics. It’s just plain conversation. And, that’s what CNN is looking for too right now…common conversations on video.

So, you have an interesting opportunity right now. You too could plop yourself down in front of a video camera and start speaking your mind. When you do, create an account at IReport.com and submit your 5-minute-or-less video. Who knows, you might find yourself getting a phone call from CNN!

I plan to do just that over the coming month and will be applying the health care debates to how they will impact my business. Just about any product or service you offer will be impacted by the health care bill positively or negatively. Share what you know and let’s all get on CNN!

People who hate writing…simply love writing white papers because they’re so easy and fast to produce. Subscribers love them because they have (or should have) exceptional value in a small package, usually 3-20 pages.

For those reasons, I believe every Web site should have a few whitepapers to give away as incentive for a subscription to a list. And here are three steps to get you started.

1. Choose a HOT Topic for Your White Paper

No matter what industry you’re in, there is a hot topic out there somewhere. You need to choose one that appeals to a broad audience. My 101TrafficMethods.com whitepaper is a good example. Everyone in the Internet marketing industry wants more traffic to their Web site, right?

But, you have to have a little intrigue, a little edge to your topic. That’s why the document had “taboos” in it. Just to give a little feeling of “oooo, what’s that?”

2. Format Your Whitepaper with Purpose

You can’t just haphazzardly throw together a bunch of text for a white paper. You do want people to actually read what you’ve painstakenly written.

-Choose a format that allows for simple reading and fast writing, trebuchet font or verdana are best.

-Use short paragraphs, highlighed titles and sub-titles

-Present 15 to 25 steps or points or more….anything less is just an article.

-The first point should address the most common expectation.

-The last point or step should be the most important toward getting people to do something next.

-Print the document to a PDF (using Adobe’s full version or some other PDF creator) and post the PDF to your website where you will direct people to the url such as mywebsite.com/mywhitepaper.pdf

3. Send more emails to reinforce the Whitepaper

When I first released a white paper to my subscriber list, I had them go sign-up for it. Yes, even though they were on my list already, I had them sign-up to be on another list. A segmented list.

Once they received the first email providing them with a link to get the white paper, they were invited to check out a few follow-up emails that would help them more with the topic that was discussed in the white paper.

But, I encouraged them to read the white paper first so that the follow-up emails would make sense.

So, create short educational messages about how to put the information in the white paper to best use and to get people to actually take the actions you’re suggesting.

When you create any page of your website, you have two options. You can make a page that YOU want or you can make a page that people are already looking for.

By first visiting the Overture Keyword Search Tool, you could search for a keyword phrase of your choice. The tool would not only display the visitation number for that exact keyword phrase but also for any related keyword phrases.

You can get the same results using WordTracker’s free search tool.

If you are thinking of putting the time and energy into creating a webpage and discover no one is searching for that keyword phrase, you’ve just saved yourself some time.

So, bookmark this page. If we ever come across a better solution or WordTracker moves the location of this tool, we will be the first to know about it as we use this tool daily.

>> Click Here for WordTracker’s Keyword Search Tool<<

We don’t just want traffic of any kind, we want “targeted traffic” too. And, it seems like something that’s harder to attain than this time last year.

BLOGs, RSS, SEO, CPC, CTR, it all means the same thing, more traffic. But, few are willing to show you exactly “how” to make these work for your business. They’re only willing to tell you “that” they will.

Here are three things you can do right now to set the stage for increasing targeted traffic to your website for the upcoming year:

1. Automate the updating of your navigation on each page – If you have a traditional Web site where your designer used Dreamweaver or some other HTML editor to construct your pages one by one, it will be a fairly big chore to change your navigation buttons and links every time you add a new page to your site. Convert all of your manual pages into something that updates your navigation links automatically throughout all of your pages when a change is made. Use of PHP or ASP “includes” is good for this as you only have to change links and images in a single file, a file used by each page of the site. So then when you add a page and change that single file by adding a new link, that new link will appear instantly on all the pages of your site.

Another way to accomplish this is to convert your traditional site to using a Content Management System (CMS). Joomla and Drupal are some rather complex cms systems that are very popular in the CMS world. But, we’ve most success using WordPress software for full Web sites. You may have become familiar with the term “WordPress blog.” It’s the same thing, but we’ve been using the WordPress blog format for full client Web sites and even converted our entire HereNextYear Web site into WordPress format. Now, every time I add a post to this area or a page to the main portion of the site, all my links and navs are updated in an instant.

2. Plan to stand in the way of traffic that’s already there -This phrase I picked up at Tom Antion’s Butt Camp years ago where he said, “Why force your website on society when there is plenty of traffic already out there? All you have to do is stand in front of it.”

Simply search the free keyword search tool for a broad keyword phrase related to your business and see how much traffic there is for related terms.

Multiply those numbers by 5 or 6 and you’ll have a semi accurate feel for how many are searching all the search engines for such terms.

3. Create a sub-page to target one keyword phrase and write some content that includes that keyword phrase a few times.

Use all of the components in my Getting Brutal With Google SEO Manual when creating the sub-page. But, once you have one completed, go back to the keyword search utility and find another keyword phrase to write about. Nothing too lengthy, just 400-600 words.

In summary. . .

I could spend 2 hours on this topic alone because there are several strategies to each step. At the minimum, prepare your site for tons of traffic now so that you will save hours of time later. And, check out the next level of this topic where I talk about building content pages for even more extreme website traffic.