One of the ways to protect oneself against network sniffing when using a public network (maybe work, school, coffee shop or airport for example) is to tunnel your web browsing through SSL (Secure Socket Layer) by way of SSH (Secure Shell).  With an SSH tunnel not only are you nearly fully protected against a network sniffing attack, you can also bypass website blocking policies.

The first step to setting up an SSH tunnel is to have an SSH server installed on a home computer.  If you use OSX or Linux, you likely have an SSH server already installed.  On Windows machines, it’s simply a matter of installing OpenSSH or I prefer MobaSSH. I’ve had far better experiences with it and it works quite well on Windows 7.

However, for an SSH server, I’ve found my Atom based Hackintosh to be an incredibly reliable system.  In fact, I’ve removed the chipset fan and it just stays on and is incredibly quiet.

If you have OSX and want to use if for your SSH server, click the Apple icon in the top left of your desktop and go to your preferences->Sharing window and then simply enable Remote Login.

Once you have an SSH server going, make sure that it is accessible from outside your LAN.  For my setup, in order to make something accessible from the outside, I have to open up a port on my router’s firewall (and if applicable, on my computer’s firewall).

Open port 22 on your firewall(s).

Now you’re ready to get your laptop or netbook or whatever you’re using setup with putty.

Download Putty from here.

When you first open Putty, make sure that:

1. Port 22 is set
2. SSH is selected

In the Category list, select Connection -> SSH -> Tunnels

In the Tunnels configuration:

1. Enter Source port 80 (Note that you can use whatever port you want here). If you run a webserver, for example, use a different port.  I like 8080.  Remember this port number.  You will need it when you setup Firefox.
2. Select Dynamic

Click the Add button

Go back to the Session screen

Type in your home SSH server ip address or domain name if
you have one.

At this point you can click the “Save” button to save this
setup (if you’d like).

Click the “Open” button and login.

Now, open Firefox, and go to the Options menu.

In the advanced -> Network tab of the options menu,

Click “Settings…”

Now in the Connection Settings dialog:

1. Select Manual configuration
2. In SOCKS Host, enter your loopback ip address (always 127.0.0.1)
3. Use the port you chose above (80, or 8080 or whatever if you don’t want to use 80)
4. Make sure SOCKS v5 is chosen
5. If you don’t want to proxy some addresses (maybe localhost or something) enter those addresses\domains in the “No Proxy for:” text box
6. Click OK.

To verify that your ip address is that of your home machine now, I usually go to http://www.whatismyip.org

Done!  You are now securely surfing through SSL via your
home SSH server, bypassing any policies setup on the local network.

Putty Tip

If your linux shell is /sbin/nologin, by default Putty will close the connection immediately once it is established. In Putty, under Connection -> SSH, set “Don’t start a shell or command at all.”

Putty Alternatives

Using OSX, Linux or running some sort of Cygwin toolkit, you can skip Putty altogether and simply use the command line.  To setup an SSH tunnel via the ssh terminal command, simply type the following in a terminal window:

ssh -D 127.0.0.1:8080 <ssh_server_ip_address>

The above command sets up an SSH tunnel via port 8080 to the SSH server host.  I would then use 8080 as the SOCKS host port in Firefox network configuration.

Other SSH Tunneling software includes

• Plink
• Bitvise Tunnelier

A more fundamental question, probably, is what do I want in a smartphone? So I started listing off features that I am looking for in a smartphone and came up with a semi-random list. I then made it less random and sorted the features in order of importance (to me) and marked which of the three main platforms (sorry Pre) have what I am looking for. Here’s the table that I came up with.

Just a note – although I don’t own an Android device, I do have two iOS devices and develop apps for iOS. Absorb those details as you will.

Now perhaps I’m biased because I do like RIM and I like BlackBerries, but more than the top 10 items on my list score perfectly for the flaming berry and not so much for the other devices. Although HD video is something that I’d definitely like, it is not as important to me as chatting, voice quality, social networking, the integrated inbox, a good browser and battery life. By chatting, I’m of course referring to BBM (other IM apps or SMS just don’t even come close to that level of message communication). Video is just something that I don’t use enough. Same with most of the other features near the bottom of the list. Those features are neat, novel, slick for sure, but just not things I use on a daily basis.

Side note – last week my father’s Yahoo email account got hacked. Password changed. Emails were sent out to contacts asking them to send him money to a location in London where he was apparently stranded. He wasn’t in London, but he uses an iPhone… Just sayin…

back on track…

It turns out that with a smartphone, I really just care about being social – talking, messaging, tweeting, facebooking, etc… I like reading my news feeds; I like staying on top of things. In these categories, I really believe that the BlackBerry platform shines. And the level of integration between the BlackBerry’s social features is beyond anything that I’ve seen elsewhere.

Isn’t that what a communication device should focus on? Shouldn’t social networking be a core and integral part of a communication device’s operating system? I think so. Maybe this is whyI’m a BlackBerry addict… But maybe you just have to buy into the BlackBerry platform to really get it.

Oh look! Red led blinking…

I bought an iPad. I don’t live in the US. Therefore, I’m stuck with a limited selection of iBooks content, and a selection that unfortunately doesn’t include any of the books that I’d otherwise be interested in. I’m not suggesting it’s a bad selection – Canadian content is great… just that it doesn’t necessarily interest me.

And I don’t have a Kindle or other ebook reader and the books that I want to read are new releases and as such don’t seem to be found as an ebook through less legitimate means. Not that I’d do that anyway, although GoodReader is easily the best app I have on my iPad.

So I decided to download the Kindle app.

It isn’t spectacular at first glance. Certainly doesn’t have the fancy-pants page turning animations that iBooks has (although on a positive note, the Kindle app is free of that dreadful faux bookshelf graphic that iBooks has). Despite the lack of fancy-pants-ness, however, I must say that I truly like the Kindle app.

I busted through a few sample chapters from various books that were magically sent to my iPad through the Amazon “whispernet” after I clicked the “send to kindle” button on the Amazon website. Then I decided to purchase Rework from 37Signals’ Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson and this is where the awesomeness of the Kindle app really hit me.

First, I can create notes and highlight parts of the book with ease. Going back to those highlights and page notes is super easy too.

But I can also see other people’s highlighted text. This really blew me away. If enough people highlight the same text, it shows up unobtrusively underlined in everyone else’s copy (can be turned off). Wow! It’s like social networking meets reading! Absolutely brilliant. I’m sure this is also a feature on the physical Kindle and hardly news to many, but seeing it with my own Kindle rookie eyes made me all giddy inside.

Bookmarking is easy; navigating around the book is easy; pics show up nicely on the iPad screen; book downloads are quick and small.

And then I decided to load Kindle on my iPod Touch. As soon as that completed, I was able to read my collection on that as well!
Then I decided to download Kindle for my BlackBerry. Shwing! Yep, I can read my book on there too.

Suddenly I can read my book wherever I am. In bed, on the couch: iPad. On a bus or on the can: iPod version. In line at Timmy’s: BlackBerry is great too. And best of all, Kindle picks up in the book right where I left off on the other device.

Yes, this makes me very happy.

Oh, and Rework is an absolutely fantastic book.

I came across this article about how to use Twitter oAuth with .Net (via Twitter API documentation) and used the extended oAuth code for my own project.

Unfortunately in all examples of desktop apps that I can find, they all involve opening up Twitter.com in a web browser control to get the user’s PIN for the app. Of course, this makes sense, but I wanted to short circuit this process. I wanted to be able to enter a userid and password and go straight into my account.

Here’s a quick snip of my code in case you’re interested in doing the same. The code uses HTTPWebRequest and HTTPWebResponse to automate the PIN request procedure so a web browser control is not needed.

This code uses Twitter oAuth for .Net from here, which itself extends .Net oAuth from here. The code is probably not complete as I simply took the code snippets from a larger project and as such, some variables may not be declared or initialized properly.

//Assumes these vars are populated before below code.
private string _consumerKey = "";
private string _consumerSecret = "";
private string _userid = "";
private string _password = "";

//These get populated by below code
private string _token="";
private Uri AuthUri = null;
private oAuthTwitter oAuth;
private string _pin = "";

public void authenticate()
{
    oAuth = new oAuthTwitter();
    oAuth.ConsumerKey = _consumerKey;
    oAuth.ConsumerSecret = _consumerSecret;

    Uri AuthUri = new Uri(oAuth.AuthorizationLinkGet());
    _token = HttpUtility.ParseQueryString(AuthUri.Query)["oauth_token"];
    CookieContainer cookies = null;
    string content = getContent(AuthUri.ToString(), null, "", null, ref cookies);
    string authenticity_token = Regex.Match(content, "twttr\\.form_authenticity_token = '([^']+)';", RegexOptions.IgnoreCase).Groups[1].Value;

    string post = ue("authenticity_token", authenticity_token) +
                    "&" + ue("oauth_token", _token) +
                    "&" + ue("session[username_or_email]", _userid) +
                    "&" + ue("session[password]", _password) + "&Allow=allow";

    content = getContent(oAuthTwitter.AUTHORIZE, post, "https://www.twitter.com/", cookies, ref cookies);
    Match m = Regex.Match(content, "oauth_pin\\\">\\s*([0-9]+)", RegexOptions.IgnoreCase);
    _pin = "";
    if (m != null)
    {
        _pin = m.Groups[1].Value;
    }

    oAuth.Token = _token;
    oAuth.AccessTokenGet(_token, _pin);
    if (oAuth.TokenSecret.Length > 0)
    {
        string xml = oAuth.oAuthWebRequest(oAuthTwitter.Method.GET, "http://twitter.com/account/verify_credentials.xml", String.Empty);
    }
}
private string ue(string parm, string val)
{
    return HttpUtility.UrlEncode(parm) + "=" + HttpUtility.UrlEncode(val);
}

public static string getContent(string url, string requestBody, string referrer, CookieContainer cookies, ref CookieContainer retCookies)
{
    ServicePointManager.CertificatePolicy = new trustedCertificatePolicy();
    HttpWebRequest request = (HttpWebRequest)HttpWebRequest.Create(url);
    request.Method = (requestBody == null) ? "GET" : "POST";
    request.UserAgent = "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9.2.6) Gecko/20100625 Firefox/3.6.6 (.NET CLR 3.5.30729)";
    request.Accept = "text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,*/*;q=0.8";
    request.Referer = referrer;
    request.CookieContainer = cookies;

    if (requestBody != null)
    {
        request.ContentType = "application/x-www-form-urlencoded";
        request.ContentLength = System.Text.Encoding.UTF8.GetByteCount(requestBody);
        Stream requestStream = request.GetRequestStream();
        StreamWriter writer = new StreamWriter(requestStream);
        writer.Write(requestBody);
        writer.Flush();
    }
    HttpWebResponse response = (HttpWebResponse)request.GetResponse();
    Stream stream = response.GetResponseStream();
    StreamReader reader = new StreamReader(stream);
    string content = reader.ReadToEnd();

    CookieContainer rc = new CookieContainer();

    UriBuilder ubuilder = new UriBuilder();
    Uri u = new Uri("https://www.twitter.com");

    rc.SetCookies(u, response.Headers["Set-Cookie"]);
    rc.Add(response.Cookies);
    retCookies = rc;

    return content;
}

<?php
$doc = new DOMDocument();
@$doc->loadHTMLFile("http://www.flickr.com/explore/interesting/7days/");
$xpath = new DOMXpath($doc);
if($xpath){
   $url = $xpath->query("//td[@class='Photo']/span/a/@href");

   @$doc->loadHTMLFile("http://www.flickr.com".$url->item(0)->nodeValue);
   $xpath = new DOMXpath($doc);

   if($xpath){
      $url = $xpath->query("//div[@class='photoImgDiv']/img/@src");
      $im = @imagecreatefromjpeg($url->item(0)->nodeValue);
      if($im){
         header('content-type: image/jpeg');
         imagejpeg($im);
      }else
         echo "error";
   }
}
?>

The term “Social Networking” isn’t necessarily easy to describe. In the context of the web, technically I suppose it could be defined as building and interacting with individuals online. But by this definition, social networking isn’t something recently new. Blogging, forums, IRC could all be considered social networking. Some of these I discussed as traffic generation sources in part 1 of this series about creating backlinks.  But when we think of “Social Networking”, these days that encompases things like Facebook and Twitter.  Perhaps Youtube or Google Wave even (Google wha?). These are the “social networking” sources that I will discuss in this post – part 2 in a series about website traffic generation.

Social Bookmarking

In the last few years, hundreds of “Social Bookmarking” websites have sprung up. Social bookmarking sites are sites that share links to resources which are seen by the thousands of readers of the bookmarking site. Generally users can vote a link up and down. The popularity of the link affects the link’s position in lists of “most viewed”, “most popular, “highest rated” or “most commented on”.

Slashdot and Digg.com were arguably the first sites that did this sort of link submission and ranking.  Furl, Reddit, del.ic.io.us, Newsvine and a host of others have since followed.

On some of these sites, a high ranking link has driven massive amounts of traffic to websites, ultimately bringing down the host web servers. The terms, “Slashdotted“, the “Slashdot effect” and the “Digg effect” were all coined for server outages due to links becoming popular on the respecitve sites.

Using social bookmarking in an attempt to gain website traffic may seem spammy, but you could say the same for any other traffic generation technique outside the scope of basic SEO and ultimately for the vast majority of content publishers and website owners, traffic generation techniques such as exploiting social bookmarking are necessity in order to be competetive.

Compared to the effort involved in social bookmarking, the benefit is indeed minimal. However, there are some tools available to assist in littering the web with your social bookmarks making the process marginally less effortful.  I’ve used a couple, including socialposter and socialmarker.  Both do relatively the same thing – attempting to make the social bookmarking process a tiny bit less painstaking.

Facebook Fan Pages

Facebook is quickly becoming the Web within the Web. Amazingly enough, Already, loads of commercials (from big companies) display their Facebook Fan Page along with their logo. Building a Facebook Fan Page isn’t enough though.  You also need to get people to “Like” it. If you already have a Facebook account, then you can at least start there by “Liking” your own Fan Page. Your friends will probably see that you’ve “Liked” it and there’s a possibility that they may as well.  On your website, include a link to the Fan Page.  People who visit your site may then “Like” the Fan Page and their friends will in turn see the “Like” notification and could possibly “Like” it themselves and the snowball effect continues.

You can also use your Facebook account (or create a new account) to gain fan page “followers”.  You can do this by finding Facebook people with a thousand or more Friends.  Friend them, yourself, and they will likely confirm your friendship.  Anyone with a thousand “Friends” indicates that in reality they just confirm whomever Friends them.  Once you amass a large following, you can post links to your Fan Page, or even better, hook your Twitter feed up to your Facebook profile and Fan Page and whenever you post to Twitter, you create content on your Facebook profile/Fan Page.

Your Fan Page is more or less a gateway to your website. Content is still King, of course, but you want your Fan Page to generate leads and hits to your website (and then hopefully generate a conversion and the sound of coins dropping into your piggy bank).

Facebook recently released the iLike button that can be used with blog posts.  Make sure to add this button to your blog posts.

Twitter

Although I’m fairly certain that 99% of Twitter users are marketers in one form or another, it doesn’t mean that Twitter isn’t a goldmine for targeted website traffic. A key Twitter technique for building up website traffic from scratch is to take advantage of Twitter’s huge visibility. It is incredibly easy to build up a group of Twitter accounts. Use one of the accounts to tweet links (with good descriptions) to your website.  Use the other accounts to “retweet” the tweet.  Use an application such as Twitterel (http://www.twitterel.com) to find Twitter users that have specific interests and therefore could turn into potential leads and follow those individuals.  Comment on their tweets as well.

To make Twitter a successful tool, two way interaction is required. Nobody on Twitter gains followers by making only one way tweets.  You need to engage your community. Make replies often to individuals who share the same interests.

Ultimately to take full advantage of Twitter, you need to build your follower list.  There are many ways to do this, but you’re best off if your follower list is made up of quality targeted individuals (rather than a bunch of other Twitters simply looking for reciprical followers – an odd waste of time imho).  Treat your Twitter account like you would a website. Build up traffic to your Twitter account by placing backlinks to your Twitter profile on various websites – again, forums, blog comments, your websites etc…  Guaranteed that if you make a good comment on a forum or blog post and use your Twitter account as your website, you will get good Twitter followers.

For a quick following on a new account, I recommend the HitFollow service.  You can get an easy 100 followers for free, or for a small fee, get thousands.  No work on your part required.  Note, however, that people who have only 1 or 2 tweets but thousands of followers (and are, themselves, following thousands of tweeps) have a low Twitter clout.  In other words, although you have a huge following, you probably have a low likelihood of getting website hits from Twitter posts.

Something else that Twitter has that is waiting to be taken advantage of is the vast number of Twitter supplemental websites.  TwitPic, for example, has a huge amount of visibility.  Place an interesting pic on TwitPic (or any of the Twitter photo uploading sites) and you’re bound to get followers and a high number of views.  The associated tweets are also a goldmine for targeted website hits.

Youtube

Youtube can be a great resource for targeted website traffic.  Create an account, upload some clips.  Customize your channel so that it looks semi-professional with a custom background.  Make sure that you have an interesting avatar or profile pic (this is huge).  Also make sure that the thumbnail for your videos is an interesting part of the video clip.

Ultimately, the quality of your presentation is only half the activity of Youtube.  The other half is attracting subscribers, friends and hits.  Make loads of comments on related video content.  Subscribe to other related channels and Friend the users as well.  Making video responses to related content that receives high view counts is also gold for getting channel and profile views and increasing your Youtube subscriber count. All of this is work that results in more views on your own Youtube channel or profile.  Make sure that your website link is visible on your channel and profile in order to turn those views into website hits and leads.

This was part 2 in my Website Traffic Generation series of articles.  Stay tuned for part 3 where I will discuss traffic generation through widget or app creation.

The show was currently in the final stage of choosing the top 48 contestants to go on to Hollywood. I was actually really impressed with some of the talent, but what really caught my attention is the passion and drive that many of the contestants have.  More often than not, their emotions seemed to be on overdrive, like they were literally putting their lives on the line.

One act, in particular, really drew me in. Jeremy does mountain bike tricks – hops and stalls and stuff.  His first audition of small bike hops over people lying on the ground impressed the judges enough to send him on to Vegas for audition number 2.  But doing the same routine again in the second audition probably wouldn’t have been enough to propel him to the top of his category.  He knew he needed to up his game.  So Jeremy decides to jump two feet in. He quits his job and goes broke building a better obstacle course for the stage.  He gives up everything to focus on training for his next audition, in an attempt to make it to the top of a talent show with what is little more than a novelty act!!

Jeremy has a determination that I will possibly never know.

What he does that many of us fail to do is to not only dream, not only set a goal, but to actually put things on the line to reach that goal, and take action, full bore, in a big way.  He knows that if he fails, he has no money or job to go back to.  Despite everything that he pours into his act, he knows that he’s up against big competition and there’s a good chance that he won’t be put through to the finals.  He knows this but there’s no questioning him – he is dead serious – he is going for it.

It made me realize that some of the things I want in life I probably will not achieve, or succeed as well as I could if I were only willing to put the necessary things on the line – take the risks; realize that some of the things that I would otherwise see as a means to an end are also possibly obstacles in the way of me attaining some of my dreams.

Have fun.

Personally, I have yet to solve a puzzle.

Link to PHP Code to load random Flickr images.

This is the first article in a series about website traffic generation techniques.

If you’re reading this, you are probably well aware that backlinks are one of the best techniques to increase traffic to your website. The more links from other websites to yours, the higher Google (or other search engines) will rank your website. Also, if your link is strategically placed, people will click on it. Fortunately many (if not all) of ways to create backlinks to your website are completely free (speaking in financial terms, of course – it does take lots of time and effort). In this first part of my traffic generation article series, I’m going to cover a few key ways to create backlinks to your website.

Blog Comments

Making comments on blogs was at one point a great way to create massive numbers of backlinks that search engines like Google would see and therfore increase your google rating. Simply make a bunch of comment posts on various websites and include your link (without being overly spamy). However, most blogging applications these days (like WordPress) tag links embedded in comments with the “nofollow” attribute and as such, most comment links will do relatively nothing to increase your search ranking. There are blogs out there, however, that do not include the “nofollow” attribute on comment links.
Here’s the approach that I use to find quality blogs that don’t have “nofollow” links on their comments: First find a competing website.

The easiest way to do this is to simply search for your keywords in Google and pick off the top few sites. I find it best to use blogsearch.google.com so that your results are all blogs. The sites at or near the top of the list will have many backlinks to them. Use an application like Open Link Explorer from seomoz.org to see what kind of backlinks exist for those sites. If you’re looking to compete in search rankings with top sites, you need to aim for a similar number of backlinks from similar quality sites.

Links in comments aren’t only good for SEO. Strategically placing links in comments on targeted pages that have high volumes of traffec will get you lots of direct traffic as well. It’s amazing how much traffic I see from other blogs simply because of this reason – people see my comment in a post on some other site and then click on my link and end up on my site. The key is to be subtle however. You don’t want the blog owner to see a blatant marketing attempt and delete your comment. The best links tend to be from related content as well. So if I write a blog post on my site about interval training, for example, I’d make sure to comment on blog articles covering the same topic. “Hey, great article! I have trouble keeping track of interval sprints too. I have to agree that they are fantastic for metabolic training. There’s a great interval timer available for your iPhone at…”

Another suggestion with respect to commenting on other blogs to increase traffic – use an form auto fill plugin on your web browser. I use Firefox and the “Autofill Forms” addon. You can create profiles and define specific rules for them. So if I’m commenting on sites for iPad backgrounds and want to backlink to my iPad backgrounds website, I have a profile ready to go with some pre-written content for the comment text area and my link, name and contact info for those fields. Click the autofill button and 90% of the comment is done.

Forum Posts

Forum posts are virtually the same tactic as making blog comments. Typically for any topic you write about, there will be forums already available online, where people regularly go and read and contribute to. I find that if I place a bunch of posts strategically on these forums, with decent comments (again without being spammy), I can get a load of visitors from the forums and typically the links are follow links which are a bonus for search engine ranking.

The key is to find forums that have topics related to your website which also allow hyper-links in your signature. Register and create a profile on the forum. Use a good avatar. This is huge! If you use a default avatar, people are more likely to skip your post – you lose possible readers and possible conversions. You also want an avatar that is interesting, which will increase the attractiveness of your forum posts – make people stop while scrolling through a forum thread and say, “hey – wtf?” And just like posting blog comments, be subtle about your intention (to generate traffic back to your website). Post relevant and interesting replies. Post additional questions. You know your material since you write about it, so play the role of the expert. Expect some criticism from other forum members. In many forums there are posters that read and post religiously. They like to pick on newbies. Also, make sure to read the rules in sticky topics as you could unintentionally make a thread reply that is against the forum rules and face potential banning from the forum.

Top Lists and Link Exchanges

Here’s a great google search: “add link” OR “add site” OR “link exchange” “”

It will return a list of websites that should allow you to submit your link, to be listed on their site, usually in exchange for a listing of their site on yours. This is called reciprocal linking. Quid pro quo. “I’ll list yours if you list mine”. There are literally thousands of link lists for any topic out there. Unfortunately many of those list sites aren’t necessarily high ranking and as such will add little to your own link rating, but it’s free, easy low hanging fruit.

Taking a step beyond top lists and automated link exchanges is setting up link exchanges manually with website owners of higher PR sites. Again, using Google, find the sites that top the searches for keywords that you’re using. Find an eligible site that’s high in the list. Then look to see if they have a contact form or something. All good sites (your site too) should have a contact form. Contact them through that. If they don’t have a contact form, you can bet on the website using a catch-all email address in which case you can send an email to “something”@websitename.com or whatever. Suppose the website I want to setup a link exchange with is www.website.com. I could try to send an email to admin@website.com, webmaster@website.com, contact@website.com and see what happens.

Regardless if you go the contact form or email route, always let them know that they have a great website and that you would be interested in a link exchange. Give them your website details and ask them to reply either way. I’ve also tried putting their link up before sending the request and letting them know that “Hey – you have a fantastic website! I’ve added link to blahblah.com from my website yadayada.com. My site is a high ranking site about yadayada and will likely provide you with some extra traffic as well as increase your traffic rating. Would you be able to add a link back to yadayada.com from your website? Let me know either way. Thanks!”

Setting up link exchanges manually is a hit or miss kind of thing. Out of 20 requests you might only get a couple that will oblige. But these websites may have higher value to Google or other search engines and a link from them might be worth 20 links from other sites. So the work definitely pays off.

Article Writing

Imagine you could put some of your best content on a high ranking website and include links back to your website in the article. Well you can. In the last few years a load of websites have been created that let so called “experts” write articles for their massive article database. These sites typically have good search ranking. Write good, related content (that isn’t a copy of something you already wrote on your website). Include a couple of links back to your website in the article. Distribute it to some of the top article sites such as Ezine Articles or Squidoo.

These are just a few ways of creating backlinks to your website. But I guarantee you that any site that sits higher than yours in a google search uses techniques such as these. So why aren’t you??

In part 2 of this series, I will look at exploiting social networking for website traffic.
Part 3 will continue with the social networking theme and discuss traffic generation through widget or app creation.
Part 4 will examine paid traffic generation – Adsense, Facebook ads and skimmed traffic included.
Finally, part 4 will look more at some blackhat type traffic generation techniques.