Multiple streams of traffic: General TrafficWritten by Eric Koshinsky
Not only do you want to get more traffic, you want to get more unique traffic! In order to achieve this, you need to create multiple streams of traffic for your site. Settling for one source of traffic is simply not enough for most small to mid-size sites, or home-based business sites. This is first of four parts in a mini-series about generating multiple streams of traffic for your website. The remainder will be published here on newbie-guides over next few days.Considering competition most people experience with Search engines, not to mention ever increasing trend towards 'pay for inclusion' with major search engines, it can be a real challenge to get decent traffic from SE's alone (not impossible, just challenging). Likewise, most net advertising and promotion has become much less effective, in particular banner style advertisements are now not really much more use than creating brand awareness, and unless you get massive coverage with your banners, you won't create much awareness. This does not mean that you should skip these forms of traffic. That would be foolish. However, what it does mean is that you need to look for other, alternative, sources of traffic that can fill in gaps, and provide additional traffic to your site. Two very good additional ways of increasing your traffic are 1) to make use of a variety of 'viral' marketing techniques, and 2) to promote your online presence in offline media (print, radio, TV, etc.). 1) Search Engines Search engines are still a fantastic source of traffic - probably most important - because they will simply keep on producing traffic forever once your site has been indexed. The problem is getting a good placement (first page) on good keywords (ones that are relevant to your site and get lots of searches). This is not always easy, especially if you are in a competitive field. Even if you have a poor search engine placement, you will still get some traffic, however, a poor placement will result in very poor traffic flow. I won't go into details of meta tags and search engine optimization here - there are literally dozens of sites that try to teach you how to do that. Check a few of them out. A word of warning however, be very careful with what you choose to believe when you read those sites. Unless they can prove they have produced many top 10 search engine placements on many different keywords, generally what they are telling/selling is rubbish. Remember what you are looking for is HIGHLY TARGETED traffic coming to your site because your site gives them what they need and want. *** side note *** I know from personal experience that techniques taught by Stephan Peirce produce top results every time. After putting information to use, next time my sites were 'spidered', all of results were top 10 for keywords I had focused on! They were not all #1, although a few were, but it didn't matter, my traffic from search engines jumped significantly thanks to information in his book. I also know that he himself uses these techniques to get hundreds of top 10 search engine placements for his own business and is approaching $1,000,000 in profits annually. **** There are two additional things to think about when you consider search engines. Well actually, there are many more things to talk about when it comes to search engines, but I'm only going to talk about two more: mis-spellings, and smaller search engines. Taking advantage of mis-spellings can be a great way to boost your search engine traffic. People frequently type too fast, and submit their search before they realize that they have mis-typed word that they were searching for. As a webmaster, this can be quite good, as far fewer sites actually try to focus on incorrect keywords. Of course total number of searches made on mis-spelled keywords is much fewer than on correctly spelled keywords, but they can still generate a large amount of traffic with FAR less competition. Just as a quick example, as I write this, "web hosting" produces nearly 3.9 MILLION results, while "wbe hosting" produces 10,000!
| | Giveaways That Gratify You, TooWritten by Marcia Yudkin
"Yours free!" It's a rare head that doesn't turn at that news. By offering freebies that zero in on interests and desires of your target market, you can take advantage of this powerful psychological appeal to grow your business. And by choosing giveaways with news value for your audience, you can easily enlist aid of media in spreading word about your offering to prospective customers. Here's how.Great giveaway strategy begins with a wise choice of your free item. You'll be tempted to give away what you sell for a limited time, but according to veteran online publicist Steve O'Keefe, this is a huge mistake, undercutting perceived value of giveaway product. People won't buy what they see being given away or what they know was given away in past. Instead, best giveaway, both for its appeal to your target market and for its newsworthiness to magazines in your industry, is something that people can get only by satisfying conditions of your giveaway. They can't buy it from you and they can't get it from another supplier, either. This could be an industry directory with a novel twist, a cleverly worded T-shirt, a set of third-party product reviews or some sort of corporate toy. Along with maintaining exclusivity of giveaway, make sure item is something wanted mainly by your prospective customers rather than general public. Similarly, be careful how you publicize free offer, because you could find yourself with an enormous number of inappropriate requests if some "best things in life are free" operator passes along news of your freebie to junior high students, retirees who like to collect things or missionaries without any income of their own to do business with you. You might even qualify those asking for your giveaway item by requiring a request faxed on company stationery or an online form filled out. To protect yourself from an endless obligation to fulfill offer, set an expiration date for giveaway.
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