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.
11. 12.
A website owner aims to have more website traffic. One helpful tip is using traffic exchange. A traffic exchange is a membership website where the members can promote their own web pages by earning or buying “credits”. Credits can be earned by viewing other members’ web pages - otherwise known as “surfing for credits”.
To surf for credits all you need to do is to log in to the traffic exchange and hit the “Start Surfing” button. You will then be shown a member’s web page and a countdown timer. How long you will have to view the page varies from traffic exchange to traffic exchange and also depends on your membership status, but typically the timer takes 10 seconds to run down. When it hits zero you will have earned a credit and will be able to view a new web page. To do that you usually have to complete a simple “icon matching” task with a click of your mouse.
The more you surf, the more credits you will earn. And with some traffic exchanges you will also stand the chance of winning bonus credits and even cash prizes.
As your credits accumulate you can allocate them to your web pages, which will then be shown to other members of the traffic exchange.
Most traffic exchanges operate a “surf ratio” policy. This simply means that you need to surf more than one page in order to generate enough credit to have your page viewed in the system. Some traffic exchanges offer a 2:1 ratio, 3:1 or a 3:2 ratio, with a 1:1 ratio reserved for members who upgrade.
Another option for traffic exchange members is simply to buy credits. Traffic exchanges often hit you with “One Time Offers” where you can get a lot of credits at discounted rates if you buy straightaway.
As well as page viewing credits, traffic exchanges also offer “banner ad” and “text ad” impressions. Banners and text ads are shown above or below pages that you view when you surf for credits. You can get these impressions at a much cheaper rate than standard page-viewing credits. On the other hand, click-through rates are typically quite low.
Typically, a website traffic exchange is free to join and has several “upgrade” options where you must pay a small monthly fee to secure the benefits.
So what are the benefits of upgrading?
It could be all or any of these benefits:
1. You get several hundred credits added to your account each month.
2. Your “surf ratio” improves.
3. The countdown time decreases.
4. You get new members randomly added to your “downline”.
5. You earn more in credits or commission whenever you recruit a new member for the traffic exchange.
Yes, traffic exchanges are also online affiliate businesses and when you join one you are allocated an affiliate number. If you check your member’s area you will see that there is a section devoted to promoting the traffic exchange. You can go there and get banners for your website or blog, and other promotional material such as email letters and so on.
Since you will be given free credits whenever you recruit someone to the traffic exchange, it makes sense to devote some space on your website or blog to promoting the traffic exchange.
You will also be encouraged to promote the traffic exchange on other traffic exchanges.
A lot of people join several traffic exchanges to gain extra exposure for their web pages, and also cross-promote their traffic exchanges in order to generate a lot of credits in the form of commission when people join traffic exchanges through their links.
When you use a traffic exchange to promote your website, here are a few common pitfalls that you will want to avoid:
1. Don’t promote pages that take a long time to download.
2. Don’t try to promote your main product with a long sales page. Keep your pages clean and simple with a basic message and either a sign up form for more info, or a “click here” button that will open up your main promotional page in a new browser window.
3. If you use a video promotion, don’t take more than ten seconds getting to your main message.
4. Make sure you do not run out of bandwidth - it is amazing how many times you see a “bandwidth limit expired” message instead of a member’s page when surfing traffic exchanges.
5. Do NOT promote XYZ traffic exchange on XYZ traffic exchange!! This sounds unbelievable, but a number of clueless people try to get traffic exchange members to join the traffic exchange that they are surfing on and are therefore already members of! Duh!
Website traffic exchanges offer website owners a cheap and cheerful method of promoting their website pages and can be very effective if you know how to work them. Being able to learn and applying these techniques will greatly improve a person’s online business.
5. 05.
Choosing an efficient and economical method of advertising or service no longer is difficult. Just prepare articles for directory submission and increase your visibility on the internet.
Directory submission, or the placing of various articles related to your business or website on article directory sites is an easy and effective way of getting your web site noticed, thus increasing the traffic flow to your business site and bringing a steady flow of customers who are purchasing your product or service. Furthermore, there is no cost for this plan unless you are paying for the writing of the articles themselves.
Search Engine Spider Magnet
Search engine spiders are those tools that look for keywords and links on the internet. They are the process of collecting and identifying on the individual websites that help those searching the internet for a specific term to be able to know the web page where the term is located. By directory submission, you can add many keyword rich articles that are then linked to your website through the description and especially through the resource information. The major search engines each have ways of tracking and quantifying the value of the keywords you use as well as the links to your site. Visitors to your site strengthen the importance of your web site, thus bringing even more visitors and by extension - customers for your product or service.
Web Site Index
Indexing your web site is a process of ranking it or listing it so that it is noticed by the search engines. Directory submission makes it possible to speed up the indexing process and once indexed, to improve the rankings in the indexes. Each search engine have different algorithms to measure the level at which the web page meets the defined standards for quality. You can improve your chances of an effective index for your web site by using a service that specialize in preparing and submitting articles to various directories.
Economics
Sites where directory submission is available are either free to use or can require payment of a fee to post your articles. Depending upon your budget, you can use either type of directory website effectively. It may seem obvious that using the site where there is no fee for articles inclusion would be the best deal for you. After all, free is a pretty good price. However, you may find that paying a fee to get your articles posted may actually be a more sensible financial decision, because web sites that require a submission fee often have a higher page ranking from the search engines and thus end up higher on the search engine results page (SERP). This means that your articles will also end up higher on the search results when someone submits a query that uses keywords you have included in your article.
Beating the competition
If you have been concerned about the fact that your competitors seems to be doing better than you in pulling customers into their websites or selling their products or services, using directory submission is a way to get one up on the competition. Revamping your web site helps ensure that you are presenting an image of your business that will attract customers to your site. Presenting information to articles directories is also going to help get you noticed on the internet.
