Your website is just one of the billion sites parked on the World Wide Web. Chances are, you don’t think yours will ever get noticed.
We hear your cries for cyber attention. Here are five ways to get people clicking on to your site.
1.) Make sure it’s professional looking.
No one likes looking at website that reminds them of a book report they wrote back in school. Invest in learning a good web design program (Dreamweaver MX and Microsoft Frontpage are good picks), and let your creative juices flow. Make sure it’s compelling, well-designed, and organized. People don’t exactly find it fun to weed through haystacks of cyber files to get the information that they want.
On that note, don’t make it a heavy site. Putting up some flash intros may be great eye candy, but the average internet surfer only waits 10 seconds for a page to load, and then they’re off to the next.
The webmaster’s biggest job is to get their traffic up and keep customers/visitors coming back. Building the site is one thing, but simply building and posting a website does not guarantee traffic. In fact, a website could be beautiful and an example of all the latest technology and still not attract a single visitor if not promoted correctly. Here are 10 tips to guide you to success with your website.
(1) The internet is a new medium.
At least compared to print, it is. A website is a waste if it simply re-hashes something which could easily be put into print. Don’t have the site be just an online brochure. Put up features which take advantage of the internet as a medium of communication. Filter information for them. Provide search capability. Provide interactivity with features like forums, quizzes and tools. Web visitors like to interact.
I don’t know about you, but when I first entered the world of internet marketing I thought I could just submit my newly finished website to a few search engines, then sit back as the visitors flocked to my site. I imagined that people would arrive on my website, as if by magic, purchase goods, and perhaps come back again for more.
A week or so later I came down to earth with a big bump.
I realized that it would take a bit of time and effort to see the results that I was dreaming about!
Critical Mass Website Promotion is the elite goal rarely attained by website marketers in any industry. Reaching critical mass and getting targeted website traffic on autopilot (meaning you don’t have to promote your site for 6 months and the traffic NEVER declines) is the Holy Grail of internet marketing.
When you hit critical mass in your market, things change drastically for you and your business. Your marketing efforts go down in direct proportion to your customer support and sales going up. It sounds awesome. It IS awesome. But only a tiny fraction of websites on the net every achieve critical mass. Here’s a nutshell version of what it takes.
It is worth looking at some values and strengths of a few technical and promotional elements of your website that will help you to lay a foundation in building profitable online success. Once you have decided on your market and have chosen a relevant domain name for your online business, you need simple and effective tools and methods to put and keep your business on a profitable track. Ideally you will want to make use of easy-to-use methods that keeps visitors coming to your website. Lets look at a few practical ideas.
Here’s a fact for you, 85 to 95% of websites are found through a search engine. You may have the most incredible website on the Internet, but it will receive little or no traffic without search engine visibility and ranking. Can you imagine a billboard in the Sahara desert? Who sees it?
So, how will searchers find your website? What types of search engines could they use?
Search engines fall into two categories. The first is referred to as natural, organic or standard. The second is called pay-per-click, paid inclusion or paid placement.
Understanding what your visitors do on your site is crucial information. If your visitors proceed to purchase a product but then a large majority leaves the site when they get to a specific page in the order process, you need to know about it. It could be that this page is confusing or hard to use. Fixing it could increase your sales by 200%. This is just an example; there are many reasons why you want a detailed analysis of your site visitors.
Most website hosting services offer a stats package that you can study. If you’re not sure where this is, call up your hosting service and ask them. Statistics are a vital part of tracking your marketing progress. If you don’t have access to website statistics get a package that can help you in this area. Do not get a counter that simply shows how many visitors you’ve had. You’ll be missing out on vital information that can help strengthen weaknesses in your site.
Traffic is essential for every ecommerce entrepreneur and website owner. The best way of getting traffic is by achieving a top 10 or top 20 position in a famous search engine as Google. There are billions of websites indexed by Google. Only a small fraction of them get a high ranking.
It is not difficult to generate a lot of internet traffic with a high advertising budget. Big companies can afford millions of Dollars for advertising. Some brands only get traffic because of their famous name.
If you own your own website or have a page supplied by a program, growing website traffic will be one of the keys to your success. You need a growing, self-generating stream of website traffic and plenty of it. Preferably free and preferably preconditioned to buy your product of service.
This article provides some ideas for growing website traffic.
(1) Directories
Directories are website listings. The trick is to find a directory which receives huge volumes of website traffic. Start by applying for listings in Yahoo, DMOZ and Looksmart. These are huge portals with significant website traffic. Getting listed isn’t easy but once achieved you will see a significant lift in your website traffic. Look at other directories but make sure they have a good traffic rating (use Alexa).
(2) Traffic Exchanges
Every website you view in a traffic exchange generates credits which are exchanged for views of your site. This website traffic is free and can be generated almost instantly. The more sites you view the more people visit your website and the more your website traffic grows.
(3) Article Writing
One of the most effective methods of generating website traffic. Best of all its free. Magazines, Ezines and Webmasters are always looking for fresh content. Just write an article on any topic which interests you, optimize it for keywords and be sure to include your website URL in the bio line at the bottom of the article. Then submit it to ezine directories on the web. This will generate website traffic and create backlinks to your site, which in turn helps with search engine rankings.
How can you drive “free” traffic to your blog? You can’t. But that’s only because nothing is really free. In the end you can either buy traffic with money or you can buy traffic by investing time. Time IS money, hence my statement that there’s no free traffic.
If your goal is to drive traffic to your blog and pay for it with an investment of your time, instead of with gold or coin of the realm, then you’re in luck because that is entirely possible if you are ingenious enough to figure out the best ways to do it.
