Web Traffic 101

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Showing posts from April, 2022

Website Traffic Monitoring Made Easier

Those of you who indulge in website traffic monitoring may remember SEOMoz.org’s useful page strength tool… and while it did nothing to actually increase site traffic in itself, of course, it did at least provide a powerful analysis of where your site needed to be strengthened. Its most important function lay in mirroring the way Google ranked sites. Qualities it rated included the relative value of a page, as well as its internet visibility. It’s been a while now since SEOMoz replaced it with their Trifecta tool. Fans were dubious, and even after the Trifecta tool started to show promising strength, the jury was still whispering behind closed virtual doors. Many felt like Tolkien’s famous wizard, Gandalf, on the subject of breaking things on over-zealous quests to find out what makes them work; and even though Gandalf was no internet marketer, I thought, at first, he did have a point. But I soon forgave SEOMoz, after trying the pleasing selection of (mostly) free SEO tools ...

Web 2.0 Features That Increase FREE Blog Traffic

Social Bookmarking After you set up a blog and start adding some posts, you will want to get the word out. To do that, you can use social bookmarking, which is just a way of tagging that blog post into areas that collect information from all over the web. It works about the same as when you bookmark a site in your web browser for yourself, except for social bookmarking you are doing it to a social storage area where many people can see what you've bookmarked. People who subscribe to these services and are searching for specific content have an easier time finding it then. The nice thing about social bookmarking is that people can comment and rate the bookmarks that you add to a social networking site. In this way, you can have great exposure for a site and allow others to add their own ideas to it too. An example of a social bookmarking site is del.ici.ous. News If your blogs are more about current events, the latest technologies, or even politics, than you will want to us...

The Strategy Of Credibility By Association

As we indicated in the chapter above, you can often sell things through the associations you make with it. In this chapter, we are going to discuss how linking your product to things that are familiar to your customers can help to breed a cozy familiarity that is appealing. For products that are new, it can even be a way to overcome the resistance to buying if you link the product with something they already know. One of the easiest ways to do this type of association is to link your products to some cultural phenomena or fad that is currently in the forefront of the mass consciousness. Once it is associated with some fad, by default your product also gains tremendous popularity along with the fad. However, you do have to be careful that when a trend ends, that your sales don't dwindle too. The positive aspects of linking to a popular subject are obvious, but the negative aspects can sometimes be ignored and impact your sales. So, remain aware that you always have to understand t...

Strategies To Get Social Networking Free Traffic

Of course, your strategies may vary with the policy of each site. Some will allow you to do some limited promotion of your products and businesses and others won't. Some will allow you to bring in external content to help build your profile and others won't. Each have their own unique way to keep in touch with people, some through profiles only, and others through mobile status updates like Twitter. So, it can be a little daunting to give one technical way to use all social networking sites. However, the strategy is still the same for most: Set up a profile with your website links, and develop an online, authentic, personality Invite friends you already know to link to you Look at their friends list and see if you have mutual friends you can invite to link in to you Join in the networking and keep your profile fresh with updates and new content like videos, pictures, and blog postings S...

Squidoo Your Way To Free Brand Recognition

Unlike social networking sites, that we'll discuss later in Chapter 6, social marketing sites allow you to define your brand and market it to make money online. Squidoo.com is the best example of a social marketing site that allows you to create lenses that are like a focal point of interest that you are an expert in. By being part of social marketing site, you will be able to network with other people interested in showing off their expertise too and that can build traffic to your site. One of the many advantages to using Squidoo to help you get noticed is that you can do sales calls for action and it won't get you banned from the site. Squidoo is crawled by the Google spider and so there are many ways to use the power of Google to get your Squidoo lens ranked higher and attract people through the search engine dynamics. Meanwhile, it's perfectly okay to advertise your own products, your affiliate products, or anything else you want to promote on your Squidoo lens. What...

Proving You Can Deliver The Goods

Now, if you make an offer (no matter how incredibly good it may be), you won't attract sales if no one believes you can deliver what you offered. That's because people need to trust you before they will make a purchase from you. And, if the purchase is something that appears too good to be true, and they don't know you, they simply won't believe you are telling the truth. Like any relationship, you have to build trust over time by delivering what you promise. So, what can you do for those that have yet to buy and haven't even entered into a commercial relationship with you? Well, you can flash your credentials! Have you ever noticed that when people find out you are a doctor, they automatically assume you are smarter and richer than the average person? That's because your profession gives you credentials to be a person of integrity and a productive member of society. Education is one way that people flash credentials, by putting the initials to their degrees n...

More Blog Strategies For Free Traffic

There are various strategies to increase your traffic for a blog, with the goal of creating the maximum exposure for each post. You want to use all the features available for that. So, that when you initially write a post, you will want to follow these steps: Identify a topic of major interest to your readers Choose appropriate keywords for SEO or use plug-in Write it up and tag it with relevant tags Categorize it to make it easy to find in your blog Add interesting and helpful content Publish it Bookmark it Submit it to news sites Respond to all comments to generate a discussion Go to other blogs with similar topics and post comment and backlink You also want to research which posts were the most successful and steer your future blog articles in that direction. That's pretty easy to tell beca...

Making Logical Sense To Your Prospects

While an emotional trigger will help to stimulate buying behavior, when it comes time to justify the purchase buyers often seek out logic. No one likes to feel that they've been taken on a deal, and so the end result that even if the emotions have carried them away, they will always give a logical reason why they eventually bought the product. That's because people don't admit that it was an emotional response that instigated the buy, they'd rather admit there was a valid reason for the purchase. Knowing this, that a logical reason may be necessary for some to close a deal, then you want to provide that logical reason just as you would attempt to resolve an objection before it is raised. It doesn't mean that the reason has to really make any sense, it just has to be enough to justify the purchase. It has to answer the question:"Why should I buy this product?" The Strategy Here you are going to aim a very definite reason why a customer should buy your pro...

Is A 100 Percent Guarantee Enough

Everyone remembers the cheesy 100% satisfaction guarantee that old television infomercials would haul out to get people to believe in their products. Well, consumers are much more savvy now and most people understand this to be more of a trial guarantee that after a certain period expires. In other words, the 100% satisfaction guarantee was usually limited to a few weeks or less, and after that you were stuck with the product. So, in all fairness it was more like a free trial than a 100% satisfaction guarantee. After all, if you're not satisfied and the period for returns has ended, aren't you then still a dissatisfied customer? So, in this chapter we're going to tell you how to put in place something that goes beyond the 100% satisfaction guarantee, even though it may seem impossible. Well, it isn't. It is your conviction that the products you offer are of such worth that you can offer a guarantee that goes beyond everyone's expectations and still make money on t...

Increase Site Traffic By Using A Script

Most people are nervous and shy away from using scripts – they don’t even think of the possibility it might increase Site Traffic. But when you add one to your site that provides an invaluable function your niche needs to access, your niche members will return to visit your site, again and again. The best way to make use of a script is to provide one that offers them a simple but handy function. I’ll list a few, and it may start to trigger useful ideas for you. Domain name finders Message boards Free eCards On of my favorite sources for scripts is Hotscripts.com. On it you’ll find both PHP and CGI scripts, to suit which your web host prefers. (One small caution: Do check and ask your web host first! Some web hosting companies don’t like you to install your own script. If this is the case, it’s better to check in advance – and ask them for suggestions to have it set up safely.) If they are adama...

Human Nature Dictates Traffic Building Strategies

Greed is a human trait, and maybe we'd like to ignore it because it's not very pretty, but it is a fact of life. People do get greedy and when they do, they tend to lose all sense of reason. That's actually a pretty good time to use this human weakness to help you trigger the impulse to buy your products. In sales, greed isn't just about charging people the most money you can get out of them, although that is definitely one aspect that marketers use. It's also about providing the trigger so that your buyer believes they are getting a steal, either because of a price differential or the cost versus benefits preview. It's a great way not just to make one sale, but to close on a variety of items. Closeout and bargain hunting are a form of greed even though it's viewed as frugality. It all depends on if the buyer is buying bargains because that's what they practically need in their lives or whether the impulse to buy is spurred more by overactive greed gla...

How Bookmarking And Indexing Works To Get You Free Traffic

We discussed a bit about how you tag Squidoo pages or blog pages. This is a form of indexing to make that information more easily categorized and ranked by search engines. Bookmarking is very similar in that you are storing web page links to interesting sites and most of the time, that bookmark gets added to your web browser to make it easy for you to retrieve that site later. But, what about if you want to share your bookmarks? There are ways to share your bookmarks online, on the WWW, so that what you find interesting can be bookmarked on a social networking site and made available for everyone else to see too. This makes that content highly visible because it isn't being rated as interesting by a search engine, but rather by human beings. If you provide valuable bookmarks then people start to see you as someone who can point them to great content and you become the expert on that topic through pure association. It doesn't even have to be your content you are bookmarking to m...

Groups - Communities Spread Your Influence

With so many new social networking sites, you may be tempted to overlook the older groups and forums that first started this trend online. Don't! These are a goldmine of targeted traffic that usually attracts people who are webmasters, entrepreneurs, and other people who are technically involved in spreading information on the World Wide Web. So, while joining social networks increases your exposure to the ordinary folk, you can usually find some heavy duty movers and shakers on groups. And, that's where you should be too to gather some of that influence for yourself. Not only that, but groups are exquisitely narrowed to specific topics and concerns. Where else can you go to a group that is involved solely in the pursuit of all things that deal with Keanu Reeves, or some other film star? Where else will you find an area solely devoted to composting or raising worms? The number of groups on the web is astounding as so is the degree to which they specialize. Since they are so s...

Group Strategies And More Free Traffic

So, what's the proper way to generate interest in a group without getting banned? How do you attract people back to your website in droves? Join multiple groups targeting your market niche Set up a profile in each one with your website url and RSS feeds Introduce yourself to the group if it's required Read each group for 15 minutes each day for about a week Begin to post comments with a signature line that promotes you or your business products Be helpful, but don't spam Limit your posts so that you don't catch the moderators attention Answer questions that might come about from your posts - join in the discussion Make yourself the expert Create your own group and do steps 1 to 9, promoting your goods on posts too The strategy to get attention on groups is to contribute thoughtful and insightf...

Free Classified Ads Bring Free Traffic

Newspapers are what we typically associate with the standard classified ad. However, Internet classified ads can be far more effective at sales and generating traffic to your website. Classified ads on the web give people instant gratification when they choose to buy or click a link, unlike a newspaper. They can reach people all over the world, and not in a small subscription area. They provide a way to advertise online giving you the option to use affiliates. If you find a way to attach a classified ad to an Internet portal that already has a large audience, your classified ad online has far more power than just a newspaper classified ad, and it can also get you backlinks and point people to your website from larger portals, increasing traffic. How To Write Effective Classified Ads In order for your ad to work online, it has to follow some basic rules of online marketing. You won't have a whole lot of time to capture someone's attention and you will also have stiff competiti...

Featured Social Networks For Free traffic

There are numerable social networks out there. Some have profiles and some don't. Facebook and MySpace are very similar except that Facebook has a wider appeal to professionals. LinkedIn is strictly for connecting via business profiles. Twitter is a social networking site that is unlike the others so deserves a special mention. Facebook This social network began as a way for college students to connect with other college students in their university network. It took its name from the black book that many college students used to keep track of each other. Now, this has outgrown its original roots and allows anyone in, whether you are in a University or not. However, you only have access to the collegiate networks if you are a student attending that particular college or university. Facebook.com follows the pattern of profile, friends, and community groups. It's main advantage is that it also has a marketplace where you can sell your products and places to buy advertisement to ...

Elicit The Right Feelings To Build Traffic

If you think buying is not an emotional experience, you are mistaken! Every word in sales copy is amplified when it triggers an emotional response and can be the difference between copy that excites the imagination of the potential buyer and that which deadens it. When you engage the buyer's imagination they can even begin to imagine what it's like to own the product you are selling and it stirs up the flames of desire for possessing it. It is true that if you want to sell, you want to sell by impacting the emotions of your potential buyer. Even though you know that the final decision may be justified through logic, the initial way to get by the mind that will think up all sorts of objections to the sale is to appeal to the emotions. The Strategy When you are advertising your products or services you will want to pay close attention to the words you choose. Words are powerful tools on the Internet that you can use to frame the way a person perceives not only the value of your...

Do You Really Need To List Your Site In Website Directories?

You’ve probably asked yourself, every time you submit a new site, “Do I really need to spend two weeks submitting it to every website directory? The easy answer to that is simply: “No.” But there are 1 vital directory it really is important to submit your website to. (And one of them isn’t Google!) The reason? If you’ve properly optimized your site with keywords and sound SEO practices, Google will most likely index your site faster than it takes one of their editors (and they do have live editors) to get around to it. And you don’t need to submit your site to every minor directory under the sun. Oh, you might see a few extra visitors… but the truth is, the hours of time you spend investing manual submission would be better spent on another, more urgent aspect of your business. This directory is The Open Directory Project – better known as DMOZ.org. It’s a truly massive project, involving hundreds (or more) of dedicated volunteer editors, with expertise in every single nich...

Does More Website Traffic Continue To Elude You?

You wonder why more website traffic continues to elude you. So you beef up your efforts like never before, in a desperate attempt to bring in more visitors. But perhaps the real problem is not the lack of new faces to your site. Maybe it has more to do with why you’re not taking more care of the potential customers you’ve already got. How do you nurture those who sign up for your list – and why should you do it? Well, apart from being a nice guy who really cares about them, let me remind you what happens, when you start to discuss a TV show you enjoy with your friends… Say you all love fishing; and you discover you all love watching “Fishing the Flats,” with Henry Waschuk. You don’t need any encouragement to agree how great the show is, or how much you enjoy his fishing tips, the recipe the chef provides – and the incredible variety of amazing fish found off the Florida Keys, or further down South. Do you love the show for his obvious skill and the things you learn there? P...

Do Splash Pages Increase Website Traffic?

We’ve all seen them – beautiful introductory pages, containing almost no text, but making up for it with a spectacular graphic or animated Flash movie – but do these Splash pages actually increase your website traffic? Your web designer, who relates to the world visually, would no doubt tell you “yes, of course!” And so would any other artist, or right-brain oriented person. If you’re selling a course on graphic design, or promoting graphics packages, perhaps there’s some merit to having one of these gorgeous displays. But let’s look at the down side… A member of your niche market actually finds your site. He comes to see what you have to offer. Instantly, he finds himself faced by what feels like a brick wall; one that’s stopping him on his focused dash towards finding what hoped to find. Now, if your animated Flash movie is stunningly clever, relevant or beautiful, you might think he’d stay and be dazzled. And a small percentage of your visitors (those with graphic inclinations...

Blogs Capture The Attention Of Free Traffic

The Internet has made it exceedingly easy for anyone to start a web log (blog) and use it to capture attention. Even teenagers and Fortune 500 companies have discovered the magic of writing a blog to attract attention and generate a consistent readership. Blogs are excellent vehicles for communicating news, keeping in touch with many people at one time, highlight your expertise, act as an introduction to a larger website, and keep fresh content constantly available to the search engines and everyone visiting your blog. Familiarize Yourself With Blogs If you've never actually done a blog, you will be surprised at how easy it is to set up an account. You can use any of the blogging portals out there like Wordpress.com or Blogger.com. They allow you to set up a free account and put up a blog simply by registering with them. They offer design templates that you can choose by clicking on your favorite design. They give you an administration panel that makes it easy to add features or ...

Are You Brave Enough For A Litte Website Traffic Promotion?

You’ve applied all the usual rules of website traffic promotion, and you’re getting respectable results… But there’s a product launch (your first) you’ve got looming towards you, a couple of weeks or so from now. What you’d really like to do is create some buzz, and have people sitting up, ears attuned, when they hear your name or see your face. You want them to know who you are. In fact, your whole campaign depends upon it! If you’re outgoing to begin with, and don’t mind making a noisy splash, there’s one strategy you might enjoy trying… You Don’t Have To Fall Out Of Your Limo When comedienne Kathy Griffin arrived in England, nobody there knew her at all. She was quite aware of this, and came up with several strategies to change this, in advance. So what did she do (after making sure the press would be there to see her arrive at her hotel?) She fell out of her limo – and reporters rushed to snap the newsworthy sight! I’m still not sure if she copied it from a movie, or T...

4 Website Promotion Tips You Can Customize To Your Market

You’re always looking for website promotion tips to help you increase interest in – and visitors to – your website. Here are 4 great website promotion tips you may not yet have tried… 1. Create your own calendar of significant days coming up in your niche – and be sure to include offline events, as well as trade shows, marketing conferences and anniversaries. Add these events to your sales funnel, and think up promotions, posts or social media campaigns you can initiate, at the perfect point in advance. For example, if everyone is going to Florida for the Big Bust-Out Bonanza conference, with 52 mega-stars from your industry scheduled to attend and present, set up interviews with as many of the mega-stars as you can. (Even if only one or two say “yes”, you can play it up to your list, social networks and forum buddies, telling them to spread the word. 2. Add that calendar in plain sight on your actual main blog or website – and people will get in the habit of visiting...

3 Simple Ways To Increase Your Website Traffic Ranking And Value

If you’re like most online business owners, you spend a great deal of time trying to think up clever ways to increase your website traffic ranking. But the truth is, sometimes the way to do it is much simpler than we’re used to believing! Here are 3 ways you can instantly and quickly increase the chances of gaining more website drop ins… Ones that may become that most valuable visitor of all – the “regular”. 1. Simply include a call to action to bookmark your site – but be sure to give them a strong, compelling reason to do so! As with your squeeze pages and opt-in boxes, be specific. Tell them what valuable advantage or irresistibly attractive incentive they’ll receive, if they do. 2. Make good use of your cPanel. Check your logfile stats, to find out strong keywords that are regularly attracting traffic. Find out these, and you’ll know the search terms people are using to find you. Take advantage of these, include 2 or 3 keywords (as long as it’s a natural fit...

3 Potent Offline Ways To Help Increase Site Traffic

You already know about putting your signature link on your business card – and sure that might have helped increase site traffic – but there are 3 potent offline methods you may simply have never considered yet. Using A Local Marketing PR Firm Many of them are run by skilled single agents – and although good ones won’t dance for a penny, their services may not be as out of reach (or non-cost-effective) as you might think. A local Marketing Consultant has her pulse on all the buzz. She knows every resource, probably has ideas about where to promote you – and all that even before you’ve taken off your coat and ordered your coffee. A basic rule of business is to expend your energy where your money-making skills lie. So you can be focusing on those areas, leaving your Marketing PR consultant free to do what she does best – promote you and drive people to your sites. Consider Local TV We’ve all been used to thinking of TV and glossy magazine advertising as something only the Big Leagu...