Posts Tagged ‘n’
Generate Website Traffic Or Become Extinct
Posted by Gill A Taylor in Traffic Generation on August 20th, 2009
There is nothing, nothing more important to your business then to generate website traffic. People who get focused traffic to their websites are people who make money online. Without it your business is dead. As simple as that.
Here are 2 example websites: Stacy created a very esthetically pleasing, that means pretty, website and spend a lot of time trying to add pictures and to get her site as user friendly as possible. The question is will Stacy generate website traffic? Well she might, over time, with effort, make a few sales.
Now let’s look at Dave’s website. He set up a basic webpage with some basic, and useful, information on his product. However Dave spends the majority of his efforts solely to generate website traffic. Will Dave strike it rich? I’m betting he will, and he’ll do it much quicker than our first lady friend example.
Online traffic does not just waltz onto your site the moment you open up for business. And that is maybe the number one reason newbies give up or don’t succeed. They never learned how to generate website traffic and then leave it up to chance or luck. We have all heard of the great stories of a new idea or product marketing itself, but in the real world we have to work a little for our caviar.
If you put aside a little time every day or week to start learning what you need to know and then start incorporating that you will strike gold eventually. Remember that even the big boys had to start somewhere and if you get a decent course or join a renowned mentorship program you will be able to generate website traffic at will eventually. So do your business a favour and start today rather than some time in the vague future.
Internet Marketing Consultant -Traffic Facts!
Posted by Hugo Melton in SEO on August 15th, 2009
Posting on forums, if used properly, can be an excellent way to get your name “out there”, and ultimately to build up a heap of traffic to your website.Note the emphasis on the words “if used properly”.
Good, relevant and useful content is the key here.
Let’s cut to the chase, if you expect to join a forum and to post a huge advertisement, and then sit back and wait for the massive amount of web traffic to hit your web site, then your probably going to be disappointed (not to mention waiting for a long time for it to happen).
You don’t spam people with email (hopefully!) and spamming a forum is just as bad (effectively posting a huge advertisement is spam) and will more often than not get you banned from the forum, and your post will get deleted, not to mention you will quickly get a reputation as a forum spammer.
Even though the Internet is a huge place, you might be surprised on just how fast word can get around for things like this. Don’t risk it.
Not spamming is even more important if your trying to become an expert in your niche area, because chances are the forum you just got banned from was a major one for your niche market if you had done your research properly.
So what is the best way to use a forum to get value out of it?
Firstly, find relevant forums for your niche market, and take the time to read the rules generally of the forum, and specifically the rules as they relate to forums posts.
To find forums use the search engine and look for forums and your keyword phrases.
e.g. Forums for car wholesalers, do your search for forum car wholesalers.
Some forums will not allow you to post any form of blatant advertisement, others may allow a signature block at the end of the post that can point to a website, with maybe a brief description of your site, others may not even allow that. Take the time to read up on just what is and isn’t allowed for each forum you sign up with.
Once you’ve done that, actually consider if you’re going to be able to add value to the forum by posting.
Do you have knowledge that can be used to help out other posters? Can you actually add decent content, that is not just along the lines of “Sounds like you need my affiliate-o-matic program, grab it from my website”.
Recognize that you should be able to reply to posts without doing selling of any kind (although hopefully you selected a forum that allowed a signature block in your posts, so that at the bottom of each of your fabulous relevant, and expert, rich in wisdom posts, there is also a link for people to reach you).
This signature should NOT be the focus of the post though; the focus of your posts is to actually help people by solving the particular problem or issue listed in the forum post.
When considering finding out more about targeted website traffic; it pays to listen to professional and do as much research as you can.
You will be astounded how quickly you can build up yourself as an expert in the forum, which adds immense credibility and believability to you on the forum, meaning people will start coming to you for help!
The other huge bonus is that forum posts usually get picked up by the search engines so that over time your answers will get into the search engine results, and low and behold there is a link to your website in them!
Make sure your posts are in a forum that is relevant to your niche market. For example if you have answered questions in a gardening forum, and your signature at the bottom of each of your posts leads people to a sports site, you may be disappointed with the results.
In this case, assuming your site was sports related, you would have been much better off posting in a sports forum, but hopefully a sporting forum that is specific to the exact sports your website focuses on.
The search engines love relevancy, and you will find you will often actually lose points, and valuable rankings if you are just concentrating on getting large numbers of links, and not paying attention to using relevant forums to your niche market.
Remember the golden rule about one way links, a relevant one way link to your website from another site (including forums) is far, far more valuable if both sites have related content.
Make sure you look into posting of forums to get a boost in visitors to your site. This is a very easy way to get free traffic on your web site.
Get Website Traffic -Demand The Best
Blogging can be a fantastic way to get more traffic charging full speed to your website.
The good news is that setting up a Blog for your website is surprisingly easy but there are a few caveats and things you need to change to ensure your blog is setup correctly to get maximum exposure in the search engines.
Before we start discussing what you should and should not do with Blogs, let’s take one step back and define what a Blog is.
A Blog can be thought of as a simple, public online diary where you can write entries (posts) into the diary.
Being public, the posts can be viewed by anyone who happens to surf by your site, and hopefully you have heaps of people reading each post you make, and contributing to your Blog in the form of adding comments, looking at relevant links you add to your blog, watching audio and video, and hopefully linking to your blog from their website, if they have one.
What is particularly attractive about Blogs, is that the entire process of Blogging is very simple to do, mainly due to the great quality of Blog software available that you can install on your website.
Decent Blogging software provides all the functionality you need, the management of posts by yourself (and others), the categorization of posts (something that is essential) and even the process of telling other blogging websites every time you make a new post automatically.
Automatically telling other sites about your posts is a huge plus since it’s getting known on the Internet, without the need for you to be having to manually “submit” your blog in order for people to find out about it.
Now in my opinion, one of the most important things to ensure is that you don’t just use the Blog as a sales page (I recommend you leave the selling of your products and services to your actual sales page on your website).
Obviously you will want to talk about your products and services, and the benefits visitors will get in using them, but I believe it’s important not to have an all out sales pitch, as that will tend to turn off visitors who may be seeing your message for the first time. I also recommend you talk about non-business stuff, information about you, the person, what you like and dislike, things you have found of interest on the Internet, etc.
When considering finding out more about search engine marketing; it pays to visit professionals to help you achieve the best and most rapid results.
When people read these personal posts, they get to know the real you, and form a relationship with a “real person” and not a nameless website, and this can only assist you in future sales with these people.
A Blog also allows (and in fact encourages) participation by visitors, who can post responses to your entries, and this is often a great way to stimulate interesting conversations. Good Blogging software will allow you to remove spam responses (where visitors or programs “write” messages directing people to their site) as well as to moderate conversations that are in appropriate or off-topic.One of the best reasons to use Blogs is to help you rank highly in the search engines. The search engines love Blogs, provided they are providing relevant and quality content.
To give you an idea of how important search engines see Blogs, Google bought one of the largest Blogging sites out there (blogger.com). Having a focused relevant site with interesting and useful content can only help you in your journey to find true search engine love.
If you have read any of the other articles on this website, you’ve probably gathered that I preach relevant useful content. Blogs are no different than other web traffic techniques, you need to ensure it’s relevant, and ensure your separate your posts into logical categories.
For example if you have a website about software development, you may make posts discussing programming generally, other posts about training for software developers, and more posts about a specific computer language like Java.
It’s vitally important that you don’t just lump all posts together for a number of reasons. Firstly, people coming to your Blog may have a specific interest in some of your posts (training for example) and may find it hard and frustrating to easily find all posts you have written on training if you have not clearly defined categories (and allowed posts to be searched/sorted by these categories).
Likewise the search engines may view your Blog as less relevant if you lump all your posts together than another Blog elsewhere that has posts clearly defined in categories. Search engines definitely prefer categorization of information and reward websites that categorise correctly with high search engine rankings.
The most popular open source blogging package is wordpress. Check that out online.
Wordpress is a free blogging package (yes nothing to pay!), and is extremely flexible and easy to use without sacrificing anything in power or flexibility. I use this package and can fully recommend you do as well.
Because of its popularity many Web host’s have it available for installation on their websites for you with “one-click” installs.