6Star.net - Vertical Portal "How to" Guide

Vertical Portal "How to" Guide

This is part of a Multi-Part Marketing plan to layout a step-by-step system of building FREE and/or Low Cost traffic to your site. There are many ways to drive traffic to your web site for little or no money. You should use ALL of the parts of this plan together in order to maximize the sales effectiveness of your web site. All of these marketing plans will produce almost instantaneous results, but should be refined over a period of time for maximum profits.

Vertical Portals have been on the web since the beginning. They are basically web sites which are an index to other web sites within a related subject. This makes them a good source of highly targeted traffic from people who are looking for something that you have at your web site.

In this section you will learn:

		What is a Vertical Portal?
		How do I find Vertical Portals?
		How do I exploit them for my web site?

What is a Vertical Portal?

A Vertical Portal is any web site which provides a list of links to other web sites which contain information, products, etc that are related to the subject theme of the portal site. For instance, a web site that lists links to the best web sites with Electronic Books would be a Vertical Portal for E-books. Another example would be one which lists links to computer hardware web sites.

There are Vertical Portals for almost any type of product or information that you can search for on the Internet. Some of these sites will provide ratings of various web sites or products. Also, many of them are database driven which will allow you to select specific things such as: exact brand of product, price range, colors, etc.

Obviously, if your web site is listed on one of these portals and someone does a search for a product there, they will be a highly qualified visitor for a sale if they click through to your web site. Almost all of these listings are FREE, however, a few of them have started charging a small "click thru" fee lately. Even if you pay the click-thru fee, it would be much cheaper than a pay-per-click search engine, but the "sales to click-thru" results would be just as good since that person is already looking for your product.

How do I find Vertical Portals

Finding these portals is very easy. Go to each major search engine and do a search on every search term that is related to your product(s). Within the results, you will find many web sites that are Vertical Portals for the product(s) that you are selling. Each search engine will come up with different results, so do this with at least every major search engine to find the best ones.

The best ones will be the ones which show up on the first three pages of search results. Most people will never see anything past the third page, so by covering the first three pages on each major search engine, you'll be covering the Vertical Portals that will get you the most traffic.

How do I exploit them for my web site?

This part is self explanatory. Just look for a link to fill out the online form to list your web site in the portal. If they have a back end database that searches for web sites based on certain criteria, then make sure to fill in that info so that your site will show up in the most searches. Most of them, the better ones at least, will have an approval process where someone will look at you web site before it goes active in their system. This may take a day or two, then they will notify you via email that your link has been approved.

As aforementioned, some of them have started charging for listing your site at the top of the list. Since this cost is very small and these click-thrus to your web site are highly targeted traffic, it would be a good idea to utilize this pay-per-click system to increase your sales.

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