11. 12.
If you own a website, one important question that you should ask yourself is: Does your Website attract a steady flow of targeted website traffic, build an opt-in list, supply you leads and income from sales of products and services?
If it doesn’t, then you need to examine your Website content, design and structure.
In most cases, Websites are designed and built first. Then the business owners try to figure out how to attract visitors. This approach is backwards.
Before you have a single web page built or content written you should have clearly identified your strategy for attracting visitors and converting them to leads or clients. Using the web to market your product or services requires a web marketing plan.
The web has the potential to be a powerful communication tool, but your Website needs to be designed in order for you to achieve your marketing goals. These goals also have to be measurable.
A Website built and managed without a clear marketing plan is usually a waste of time and money. Many Website are nothing more than web billboards. These sites generally do not attract clients and provide little marketing benefit.
What should you measure?
The most obvious category that can be measured is the amount of website traffic that your Website is generating. The key value is the number of unique visitors that come to the Website. There are other values that are important, such as page views and average length of stay.
As you measure these values over time the goal would be to have a steady increase in all of these values.
Of course, if these visitors are not doing anything when they are on your Website they are of little value.
Do you have a call to action?
Your Website should be designed in such a way that your visitors are presented with a call to action. This call to action should be obvious to the visitor. Your call to action is another element that can be measured. How many visitors perform the call to action?
The call to action can take many forms. It may be opting in to a email newsletter list, or filling out a lead form. The ideal action is the purchase of a product or service.
When a site visitor performs the call to action, you have a conversion. The number of conversions divided by the number of Website visitors is the conversion rate.
One of the goals of the Website should be to increase the conversion rate.
Testing
Once you have your measurable elements, traffic and conversions, you can test various ways to make your Website work. You can test various techniques for increasing traffic. Options here include search engine optimization of your Website, pay per click advertising, press releases and article writing.
Then you will also want to increase your conversion rates. Split testing is used to determine how various elements within the web page affect the visitor. You can change the elements on the page such as the headline or color of text and graphics, to measure the affect on the visitor.
Website Goals
You now have the understanding that your business Website should be working for you with a marketing plan. You need a call to action. You need to measure website traffic and conversions, and then test to improve the results.
With these measurements in hand, you can now set goals for your Website. This will give you a sense of direction and it will allow you the weigh the methods that could be initiated to gain success in your online business.
10. 12.
You set up your website, added your RSS feed and started a monthly submission routine. Now what is the next thing to do?
Well, let’s compare this to an off-line business. What you have done is set up your business “store” and put the open sign in the window. Now its time to start bringing in some potential customers. If you opened your store in a busy mall then you could naturally expect to receive traffic from mall foot traffic. But wait, what if you opened your store on a quiet back street? You may have a great product and great parking but no one will find you. This is the situation you are in with your website, no one knows where your website is and therefore there is no website traffic and no conversions.
An important concept to keep in mind about website traffic generation is to go where the traffic is and where you can redirect the traffic to you. Let’s look at some ways an offline business would generate traffic that we could apply to our online business.
Offline, business owners will network, join the local chamber of commerce, and other networking organizations to get the word out about them and their business. You will find them with small kiosks in malls and display booths at trade shows and community events.
Now how would we apply this concept online? Online this would be comparable to:
(1) Joining social networking sites. Creating profiles and adding your website url on social networking sites gets you in front of the traffic these sites generate.
(2) Building your own satellite sites. These are high PR (page ranked)sites such as Hub Pages or Squidoo that allows you to add your own content to their site. Creating these satellite sites are much like the kiosks at the mall, all directing traffic back to your website through the content and the links you have placed on your profile and satellite sites.
As an online business owner, you will need to create profiles at high pr social networking sites and create satellite pages directing traffic to your website. Sounds, good so far, but creating, maintaining and updating these off page traffic generation sources, while beneficial to your business can be labor intensive without the right tools.
Use the free tools listed below to redirect website traffic from high page ranked sites to your site.
Google Gmail:
Create a Google Gmail account. It is fast and easy to set up. Keep it separate from your regular email. You will need it to confirm emails from the social networking sites and to “dump” the occasional or regular emails they send you.
Firefox Browser:
Next download the Firefox browser. It’s free. It does not interfere with internet explorer. And best of all, it has many add-ons that you will find useful. You will need its multiple tab feature to jump back and forth between opened tabs to make your online business more efficient.
Go to http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/
Roboform:
Roboform is a password manager. The trial version is free. You will need this to save you logins and passwords to all the social networking sites you create.
Go to: http://www.roboform.com
HelloTXT:
HelloTXT is a micro-blogging and social networking status updating site. Join the site. There is 28 different sites to sign up with inside. Join each one and make sure to confirm the link inside each email you will receive from each site. Add each site to your HelloTXT profile. Now you will be able to update all your social networking profiles from one interface. Fast and easy. Over time you will build up your website presence and receive traffic, both, from the links inside your profiles and also from the search engines because of the page rank juice of the links leading to your website.
Go to http://www.hellotxt.com
Follow the process above. Do not put this off, schedule it. This kind of traffic is time consuming to set up but very easy to maintain with the tools above and following this traffic generation process will prepare you for the next step. It takes patience and persistence.
In the next article we will be discussing how to multiply the power of the website traffic you will generate by using bookmarking and pinging. Apply what you’ve learned here and expect to receive more traffic and buying customers soon. This will improve the effectiveness of your online business.
