Stock promotion often affords traders an opportunity to make a quick buck on a short-term play. Stock promotion in the micro caps is inherently very short term yet many traders because of EMOTION treat the quick trade like a lifetime investment.

The language in promotional pieces put out by stock promoters and other entities often promise an incredible opportunity to get wealthy on a particular stock. The stock may be trading at .10 but the promo pieces are making a case for a $2 stock. Then they give you all the reasons why.

The problem comes in when novice traders believe the outlandish price targets and other things written into promo pieces. This is especially a problem when a stock performs for a few days or a few weeks instead of one day. Many novice traders begin to drink the “kool aid” and get sucked into buying more and more shares as the stock advances.

How do I know this? It happened to me a fair amount of times. I too have been a bag holder on many occasions. When it comes right down to it, the best lessons are the ones learned firsthand.

Here are a few of the guidelines I use and which have served me well:

1. Never marry a stock. What goes up will come down and usually will come down so fast you will not be able to get out. You will join many other bagholders…
2. Trade OTCBB and Pink Sheet stocks. I would suggest getting out of at least a good portion of your position in the first day IF IN PROFIT. If you are not in profit, something is wrong and get out of all of it and find another play.
3. With the exception of very, very few stocks, it takes trading many stocks over a period of time and being right at least 30% of the time to make a significant amount of money in the micro caps. Trying to get wealthy on one stock will usually have the opposite effect.
4. Develop a system for trading and follow the rules. Every time I lost a significant amount of money is because I let emotion take over.

There is nothing wrong with penny stock promos… just remember that the promo is usually only for a day and with only a few exceptions, the stock will play out in one day.

There are a lot of things that go into being a dominant investor relations, stock promotion, stock community and stock related site. A lot of people think a big email list is the primary reason… There are some correct assumptions about these heavyweights and a lot of assumptions that are not correct when looking at who is doing well and making money and who is not and are struggling. Once you realize what the magic potion is, you can achieve a great deal with your own site, make it more valuable and make more money…

Let’s look at our first heavyweight: QualityStocks.net

QualityStocks.net has a staff of talented people that know what they are doing; and they have been working at it for years. Their desire has been fulfilled to be a dominant player by working not only hard, but smart too. The folks at QualityStocks.net know that it is important to have a commanding web presence.

Website Score: 99.3, they have a blog (which means they have new content all the time which is attractive and scores points with search engines). Over the years they have amassed nearly 7600 pages on their site. But here is the most important stat: QualityStocks.net has 5,655 inbound links.

Most IR and promotional entities don’t realize the importance and value of inbound links for their website.

Finally, their Alexa Rank is 207,750 which puts them ahead of most other stock related sites on the web. So where does this high rank come from? Again, I will go back to inbound links. The more inbound links you have, the higher your site ranks – which means it gets more traffic and as a result, even more inbound links. QualityStocks.net also uses news releases and social media to drive traffic to their site as well. But, they do not blast out news releases all day, every day like some sites; they don’t have to. QualityStocks.net traffic is also driven by being a content rich site.

Everything I have discussed above is what is known as organic marketing. Things like advertising and Pay-per-Click (PPC) are very short term and expensive solutions that do not provide lasting benefits. This is not to say that those with deep pockets cannot get results through advertising and PPC though…

BeaconEquity.com

Though BeaconEquity.com is not considered a stock promotional entity in the traditional sense, they do have the highest website grade of any of the sites I have found: 99.6. They even have a couple of onsite SEO issues that if fixed, they could conceivably score 100. BE is a community based platform with a lot of participation and has a very savvy management team. BeaconEquity has an Alexa Rank of 136,412 which puts them right near, if not at the top of the heap when it comes to micro and small cap sites. BE has 4,095 inbound links and is active on social media platforms as well.

Here is where I think BE excels: They allow users to be contributors and publish articles on their site; what a concept! This is how BE adds value to the users of their site. At the same time, the contributors are building content for BE; it’s a win-win situation for everyone.

Users of websites feel valued if they can contribute. This is why SeekingAlpha is so successful on a huge scale and why BE is so successful at the small and micro cap level. Aside from being a popular platform BE issues press releases, is active in social media and clearly understands the value of a platform on today’s web.

PennyStockPickAlert.com

As the name implies, PennyStockPickAlert is an email alert service. They do have financial news feeds on the site but this site is all about signing up for their alert service. While there is no real original content on the site, the owners are getting what they want though. PennyStockPickAlert is ranked #262.967 on Alexa making it one of the highest ranked sites on the web… Bear in mind, there are over 21 BILLION websites on the net.

How do they rank so high? News Releases… PennyStockPickAlert uses multiple news services to disseminate news on stocks. They have been so successful with this that they have accumulated over 12,000 inbound links. So you see, inbound links are important no matter how you get them. While PPC and Advertising provide temporary links to your site, if the money runs out, you are done. News releases build organic and long-lasting links that last for months and in most cases, years.

hototc.com:

hototc has a staggering 20,000+ inbound links to their site. They enjoy a huge reputation within the micro and small cap community. They also do PPC and lots of advertising on high traffic sites. hototc is primarily an alert service for micro cap traders and they certainly accomplish their objectives with an Alexa Rank of 249,612 and a website score of 96.

What is the common thread with these three sites? Their Alexa Rankings are high but what else? INBOUND LINKS. If you do not accumulate inbound links to your site, you will never enjoy the success that these sites do if that is what you aspire to.

Another consideration is that of the four entities covered here, there are 3 different business models at work. There are several ways to become a dominant player in small and micro cap stocks but the path to that success is through traffic to your website. Without website traffic (which in itself generates more traffic), it doesn’t matter how good your ideas are.

I find it interesting that people “trash” promotional sites and entities. If you read closely, people have much more of a problem with the amount of money that the sites above make and not the business they are in… There is no doubt that the owners of these sites worked their butts off to build their online and business presence. Rather than envy them, why not go to work on your own plan to compete with them? You can, you just have to decide to do it.

There are many ways to build your site’s presence on the Internet, generate more traffic and increase the value of your site.

For most stock promoters, the cost of buying large, effective email lists is becoming prohibitive. I know of some entities that are spending tens of thousands of dollars a week to refresh their email lists for promotion. Another thing about buying lists and using them is unless you have a really good source, most email lists are ineffective for stock promotion.

If you don’t have 20 thousand dollars lying around, then I have some ideas for you…

It all started about a year ago when I basically reverse-engineered how many of the big promoters build email lists. There is nothing overly complex about how they do it. I have used the same methodology here at HotStockChat.com for years. Granted, my efforts have not been as big as some but it is effective nonetheless.

The Process:

It is a given that you have to have a website for people to sign up for your email list. So the problem is: How do you get people to come to your site and sign up?

I will guarantee you that this is an important part of the puzzle. The fact of the matter is that about 95% of stock promotion sites have little or no traffic. I used the search term “stock promotion” on Google yesterday and found that there were 9,900,000 results and out of those results only a small number have websites that are inside Alexa’s top million sites.

The reason most of these sites perform poorly is because they are “unfindable”. So we have a chicken and egg situation here: A site can’t be found because there is nothing on the site to get it found.

Your site has to be easily found; you can increase the “findability” of your site in the following ways:

1. Make sure your on page (or onsite) SEO parameters are in good shape such as, descriptive page title, good description and alt-text in place for each image or graphic.
2. Design a news release campaign; this is a great way to get people onto your site and build your offsite SEO as well. The more inbound links to your site, the higher it ranks which makes it easier to find. There are many low cost and free news release services.
3. More complex but effective as well is setting up a blog on your site. All things being equal, a site with engaging content will get more visitors than one without a blog. A few stock promotion sites have blogs but they are nothing more than copy/paste of client news releases. Some blogs even have their comments closed so it’s really not a blog at all…
4. Articles; if you have specialized knowledge about your business, you can write 250-600 word articles. If the article is approved you will get a nice, high authority inbound link to your site. One, high authority link is worth more than many low authority link. Many promoters band together and put links to each other’s sites but if none of the sites have any traffic, what are you accomplishing?

A good thing to do is when people do sign up for your email list; make sure you have a nice auto-responder set up to thank them for signing up. A lot of people ignore this. Remember, it’s not the big thing that you do with your site that gets people to sign up, it’s all the little, value-added things you do that will make the difference.

Advertising and Pay-per-Click

If you do not have a big budget, this sort of thing is really outside of your abilities to do on a big scale. I also know that there is a limit to the quality of pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns because of PPC fraud. One stock promoter’s horror story. Another problem with advertising and PPC is that once your campaign is over with, your site and links disappear. PPC is like crack cocaine, once you go down that path, it’s hard to get off of it. What provided a few hundred visitors a day now disappears unless you renew the campaign. Advertising and PPC campaigns do not build inbound links to your site. So, you may only be on page 1 of Google while you are paying for it; once your money runs out you return to oblivion. An organic campaign of building legitimate inbound links to your site lasts for months and years.

If you want more information on our services such as help with your website, news releases or anything else covered here, see our services page.

I have posted by first white paper on Increasing Your News Release Distribution and Syndication.

The reason companies disseminate news releases is to get exposure for their company, their products and services. If your company is publicly traded, you want as many people in the investment community as possible to see your news releases as well.

Free White Paper

Using New Technologies that are by in large, FREE and by following a few guidelines and techniques, your news releases will obtain:

• More readers
• More website visitors
• The more readers and website visitors you obtain, the more likely you are to sell your products and/or services
• If you are publicly traded, you stand a much better chance of obtaining new shareholders…

Any feedback, comments, criticism is most welcomed!

Those of us using Twitter for posting hot penny stocks, promotions, and other stuff, here is a quick video on using free tools to see how many people are clicking on your links. Over time, you will be able to see what sort of tweets are working best and improve the quality of your tweets. It stands to reason: If you have better tweets, you will have more readers and more followers. Right?

Build your own email lists and engage website visitors in as many as 5 ways!