How to Increase Website Traffic

There are many ways to build a customer base and drive more traffic and visitors to your website. Both paid and unpaid methods can be used effectively and are equally valid in different circumstances. Here we look at some of the ‘free’ methods you can use to help increase your web site traffic:

Fresh Content

Fresh, regularly updated content is one of the best ways to drive traffic to your site. Search engines and humans alike appreciate regularly updated content as it is likely to be of more interest than tired, old content.

Ultimately, websites are all about the exchange of information therefore if you can communicate information well to your audience, then you should have no trouble at all attracting traffic to your site.

Interesting Content

It stands to reason, but your content needs to interest the viewers of your site, and not just yourself! Too many companies write from a corporate point of view using internal jargon and phrasing that means nothing to the customer.

Write about topics that will affect and are relevant to your potential visitors and you will stand yourself in good stead of increasing your traffic.

Interactive Content

Content that the audience can participate with is a great way to draw them into the site and get them truly involved. For instance forums and message boards can encourage interaction and repeat visits, and drive up traffic as a result. You could also think about featuring some puzzles or games for your visitors to enjoy.

Search engine optimisation

If you want traffic to your site, then you need to ensure that you perform well for your target searches in search engines. If you have the best site in the world on a certain topic but no presence in search engines then it will be very hard for visitors to find your site.

Clear coding and layout

You will need a well designed and maintained site to encourage visitors to come in the first place and then to visit you and even refer you to their friends. If it hard to find what you want on a site then you will know that you quickly leave and don’t come back. Therefore ensure that you get it right first time.

Link exchange

Many companies engage in link exchange, whereby they swap links with other relevant companies, in order to gain more presence across the net. This works well for some and not so well for others, so think carefully as to whether it might work for you.

Affiliate Schemes

If you have a product or service for sale, then a great way to increase sales and traffic to your site is through an affiliate scheme. Here you offer others a commission or percentage (you set the terms) for referring either traffic or sales to your site. A good program from a popular company can really boost sales and traffic,so this is definitely something that is worth thinking about

Dan Moore is Director of Clarity Media Limited, a web design company and puzzle supplier of such smash hit puzzles as sudoku, kakuro, hanjie and codewords

Did you realize that there are easy ways to get free quality traffic to you website? Most webmasters do not realize that some of the best website traffic that they can receive won’t cost them a dime.

In fact, one of my websites receives hundreds of newsletter subscriptions a month without me having to spend a dime on advertising.

Most Internet marketers will tell you how to write good ads and pay the write amount per click at Google and Yahoo, but what they won’t tell you (usually because they don’t know) is how to get free traffic that will actually convert into more revenue than the paid traffic!

There is only one catch - these traffic generating techniques will cost you your time instead of your money. Now you could easily make it cost you money instead by hiring someone else to do it for you, but that is your prerogative.

If you apply these simple techniques you will get more target traffic to your website.

Here are six easy ways to get quality targeted traffic to your website free of charge.

1. Participate in popular online forums.

One of the easiest ways to gain exposure to your website for free is to become a member of a few popular forums that are related to your niche market. For example, if you run a website about making money from affiliate marketing, a good place to go might be a forum about affiliate marketing.

The key here is not to blatantly advertise, but instead actually participate in the discussions and become a respected member of the forums. You can place your website with a few keywords in your signature, or even post links to articles that you have created that might be of interest.

Basically the more you participate and help others with their problems on these forums the more respected you will become and the more people will follow the link to your website.

One of my first successful websites received close to 2000 visitors per day simply from a couple of forums that were in my market. All I had to do was participate. I then told them about my website that would help them as a free resource. Before I knew it I was receiving a ton of visitors and my traffic grew simply from this one technique.

However, do not openly advertise without first participating, as this will get you nowhere.

2. Submit your articles to article directories.

You should already have articles published on your website (and if don’t start writing some!). If all they are doing is sitting on your website then you are only using 1% of their potential!

You should visit the popular article directories (such as http://www.ezinearticles.com) and submit your articles to these directories.

When you submit your articles be sure to include a good resource box. It should contain three of four lines about yourself and a good call to action (such as “Get your free report on…” or “Find out more at…”). Resource boxes should always be written in the third-person.

3. Submit your articles to ezine publishers.

You should also start searching for other ezine publishers in your niche market. Do extensive Google searches and also pay attention on the forums where you are advertising.

Sign up first for these newsletters and then start a correspondence with the ezine list owner. Let them know that you have some articles that would interest their readers (and make sure that your articles would!). Ask if he or she would publish them along with the resource box.

You will be surprised at how many publishers will willingly agree to this. Webmasters spend a lot of time looking for good content for their websites and for their ezines. If you are able to provide them with this resource, and your articles are good quality and not just sales letters, they will gladly accept!

To be continued…

This is part one of two articles. You can look for the next article that will contain three other tips that will help you to create viral traffic that will spread like fire!

Matthew Glanfield is an Internet marketing veteran of 3 years. Receive his free email course on how to start your own Internet business by visiting http://www.internetbusinessformula.com.

Although the topic of keyword strategy and selection may appear to have been beaten to death already, it remains critical to the success of your website. Choosing the best keywords is only “Phase One” of the process. You must also make the most of the keywords you have.

Traffic to my log furniture site has doubled and nearly tripled in the past month and a half. Much of the credit for that success lies directly with better keyword selection and management. When I realized there was a problem with my keywords, I read every article I could find on the topic and made a number of changes to my website. And voila! Increased traffic (and sales) are the proof of the pudding for me.

Following is an overview of keyword-related steps that can send traffic to your site spiraling steadily upward:

1. Set Your Sights on Attainable Keywords

If my log furniture site was competing for the word “furniture”, I would be competing with the “big boys”. While I hope to compete with major furniture sites someday, there is plenty of payoff to be found in niche marketing.

Overture includes a keyword suggestion tool that gives a good indication of just how competitive a keyword is. Using this tool and a general rule-of-thumb, you can target keywords that are attainable.

The number “5000″ next to a keyword in Overture’s search term suggestion tool means that 5000 visitors on Overture powered searches look for that term each month. Because the most popular terms are more difficult to achieve top ranking for, my website is targeting keywords in the 1000-10,000 range at the moment.

For example, the term “log bed” is searched for 4673 times per month on Overture-powered sites, while the term “log furniture” is searched for 16,909 times. My site has been hovering between the #1 and #7 spots on Google for “log bed” for the past month, but “log furniture” has been a harder nut to crack. As of this writing I am number #18 for “log furniture”, which is not where we want to be but a whole lot better than where we used to be.

2. Choose the Best Keywords for Targeted Traffic

As I mentioned in an earlier article, my site was originally (and accidentally) optimized so that more people searching for “log cabin” were finding the site than those who were looking for “log furniture” or “log beds”. We re-optimized the site in December for log beds, log furniture and Amish log furniture. After an initial drop in traffic, we have double or triple the visitors we had beforenot to mention a much better conversion rate.

What search terms are the most likely buyers of your product using to scour the web? This is the million dollar question. A tool included in the live help service known as Liveperson has been helpful to us in figuring this out, as it allows us to see what search terms people are using to find us.

You may be surprised at the terms people are using to find your site. Information is power. If you find an invaluable search term that your site should be optimized for, or one that is most likely to produce a buyer, the fees you pay for a visitor tracking service such as the one included in Liveperson will be well worth the money.

3. Optimize Keywords Within Your Website

Once you have evaluated the best keywords for your website, your site must be optimized for those terms. We tried for a 5% keyword density on our website, bold-faced some of the keywords, and set them as links whenever we could.

You’ll also need to revisit your title, meta and alt tags to make sure they highlight your keywords. Many SEO experts believe that the first few sentences of the text on a page should include your top keywords. These might seem like very simple steps to take, but the payoff can make the difference between being on the first pageor secondfor your desired terms.

4. Reap Good Results with Resource Boxes

This fourth step is about links as much as keywords. Our log furniture site would not be receiving the traffic it is without a link trading and article submission campaign. We give our link partners the top terms that we want to achieve ranking for. As a result, links pointing back to our site have our top terms either right by or in the links. Take it from the voice of experiencethis matters. You’ll also want your top terms in the resource boxes for any articles you post on the Internet.

5. Rotate Your Keywords When You Reach the Top

When you reach top status for a given keyword, go after another by changing the link or article resource text for your new set of coveted terms. That’s what we plan to do for Log Cabin Rustics. Once we solidify our standing for “log beds” and get to the top for “log furniture” on Google, we plan to focus on “rustic furniture”a term with 17760 Overture-powered searches per month.

Only Part of the Story

We do not mean to imply that keyword selection and management is the only thing you should do to promote your site. A solid link strategy, article publicity campaign, and overall site optimization are also important factors in any successful SEO strategy.

But the importance of choosing the right terms and optimizing for them should not be underestimated. You might also want to check out Marketleap’s free keyword verification tool, which reports where your website is placing on the different search engines for your keywords of choice.

Copyright 2005 Log Cabin Rustics

Cari Haus has been successfully selling rustic log furniture and beds on the Internet since the late 1990’s. Copyright 2005 by Cari Haus, website http://www.logcabinrustics.com/

Permission is granted to reprint this article, either online or in written publications, as long as the copyright information, this paragraph, and a link address or a link to the Log Cabin Rustics website is attached at the end of the article.

The Tale of Mr Newbie and The Truth About Total Failure

If you are new to Internet marketing and your web business makes
no money, or worse still a loss, you needn’t worry about looking
a fool - chances are nobody will ever know!

Explain?

Well, if you really fail that dismally, chances are no-one
visited your site anyway. It’s a fact that most people new to
Internet marketing, “newbies” as they are affectionately
referred, very often follow a very similar pattern of evolution.

Firstly, Mr Newbie gets enticed to the “easy” money and vast
riches that the Internet offers. He can see that people are
making big money on the web, so what’s the obvious step - that’s
right, get a website!

And what is the theme of Mr Newbies website? How to make money
on the Internet, of course! So why does he choose to tell other
people how to make money on the Internet BEFORE he has made even
one dollar himself?

Well, he finds the biggest array of ready-made products to sell
that he could ever wish for - ebooks, courses, affiliate
programs etc.,etc. and lots (and lots) of well designed ads that
tell him that to resell this product, or represent this program
will bring him huge (and instant) rewards.

The smart choice would have been to have taken one of his
hobbies, or an area of specialist knowledge that he may possess,
and built a niche website around that theme. Promotion would
have been easier and potential customers may have even come
looking for HIM. He could even have started building a
newsletter list before he had a website.

But hey, Mr Newbie has heard you can make cash in Internet
marketing in 30 days! Why bother doing any work?

Instead he decides to enter one of the most competitive arenas
of the modern business era - not just marketing on the Internet,
but marketing products ABOUT Internet Marketing.

He is competing against huge amounts of savvy marketers who use
every trick in the book (and some that aren’t) to wring every
last drop of spare money out of that other man - “Mr. Average
Web Surfer With A Credit Card”.

So what does our friend do?

He buys an ebook that tells him what to do, he can’t go wrong
with this one. Heck - the “expert” who wrote it, is even going
to let him sell it as his first product. (Mr Newbie new that the
platinum package was worth those few extra dollars!)

>From here on, it is often the same story - a lovely website, a
clever domain name, and lots of evenings at the computer in the
spare bedroom staring at the screen when the kids have gone to
bed pondering one major aspect of Internet marketing that is
quite vital to the ongoing profitability and feasibility of the
whole project while twiddling his thumbs -

WHERE ARE THE VISITORS!

Mr Newbie gives up.

Since I was a kid, I’ve always hated sad endings.

So let’s assume Mr N. decides to give it one last chance - what
should he do?

Well money can be earned in the competitive field of Internet
marketing, but he obviously needs visitors to his website - more
than just throwing a bit of money at banner ads, or
pay-per-click search engines.

Both can be fine, but what he really needs is a traffic plan.

Firstly, he realizes that there are two main types of traffic -
paid for and free.

He makes a list of all of the free traffic generating systems he
knows, and researches a few more.

He is amazed at how many good traffic generating programs there
are, and how many are so easily implemented. One involves
setting his start page differently. With one he has to add an
exit pop-up, and with another he has to surf looking at webpages
to earn hits to his own.

Mr Newbie gets an immediate increase in visitors to his website.
What’s more, because of the viral effect of some of these plans,
his traffic grows on a daily basis. He also gets a lot more
subscribers to his newsletter.

Secondly, he gets a vital component; he gets an ad tracking
service for tracking his ads, so that he knows which are pulling
in visitors and which ones aren’t. He is now ready to tackle
paid advertising.

Now that he can measure the success of each individual ad, he is
astonished at how he can make money. Even though he gets a
terrible response rate to one ad, it turns out that he still
makes a profit from it. He wouldn’t have known this before
getting his ad tracker. He doubles the size of this campaign and
makes more money!

Mr Newbie gets amazing amounts of visitors from his traffic
plan, from his list of free traffic generators, and from his
list of places that are profitable for his paid ads - his
business is a success!!

Last I’d heard of Mr.N he was sipping cocktails and sunning
himself on a white sand beach someplace. Oh, and he’d changed
his name to Mr.G - or Mr Guru, to give him his full title.

Who says you need to spend tons of money to market your business?? Well those are the old school of thoughts. Welcome to the new Internet marketing strategy.

The basic idea started of with the algorithm of the search engine. In order to rank well in the World Wide Web, you need to have lots of website putting a link to point to your website and its called Link popularity.

Why should the site owner do you a favor if he does not benefit from it? Unless both parties benefits from this mutual agreement, if not the party seeking a link from the established website might need to pay an advertising fee! This is not really a bad idea if with this arrangement; you have a promised stream of traffics.

However, if you are new in the Internet business and don’t have much budget for such advertising, submitting an article about your business is the best idea! And the more the merrier!

Writing an article about your business is the best and most effective way to market your business on the Internet. Best of all, its FREE. Yes everybody is doing it and why shouldn’t you?

Some pointers when submitting your article to a directory:

1) Pick the right category

A search on the site will generate a few articles and you have a clue where your business belongs.

2) Key worded content

What is that? Basically if you are selling gifts in your business, litter sparingly your article with the word “gifts”. Chances of it being search by the search engine for “gifts” will be higher.

3) Length of article

The viewer reading your article might not have much patience and it is best to convey your message in the shortest possible time. Very often I read articles that beat around the bush that is very bad for marketing. The viewer might get agitated and skip your article for the next one unless your article is very well written. My suggested length will be between 300-600 words.

4) Don’t forget to add your URL

I have seen article very well written and yet they are doing themselves a disservice by now putting an URL to their website!

Getting all excited?? Why not? Put on your thinking cap and start to write your article for your business. Don’t forget, it must be key worded content to promote your business.

Webmaster of http://www.content-city.com and http://www.corporate-gift-ideas-guide.com

There is one golden rule, which is inherent in this free and extremely effective internet marketing strategy. First GIVE, and then TAKE. It’s as simple as that. Especially if it’s done properly the results could be tremendous. You provide valuable information regarding to your special field of knowledge but before that you must start a specific process.

What is that process? First focus on what you now best. Write what inspires and motivates you. If you are an artist, for instance share a tip or secret that your readers will not find it anywhere else. Then you will become valuable and an expert to your readers. Your article could be placed to many ezines, article directories, article announcement lists. There are thousands resources on the internet. Imagine if it’s posted to 5 ezines of 10.000 subscribers. That’s an amazing free exposure.

In time, you will start gaining credibility and trust, which leads to sales. No one is going to give you money unless you overcome his doubts, fear of deceit or fear of a wrong choice.

However, that’s not only the case. Search engines will index the pages containing your articles. That means huge link popularity and top ranking in the search engines game. Therefore, you will have traffic from the articles and the search engines too. All this free!

Many people claim that they are not writers. They can’t write. If you can talk, you CAN write. You don’t have to go for literature price, your intention is to inform ordinary people who talk and act everyday like you and me.

Research a topic you know very well. Start writing down your ideas and points and focus on your strongest point. Around that strong point, you will create your headline. It must be a killer title, for example start with the phrase “How to…” Next place sub headings to each point you have written. You have already created the structure of your article! Don’t make the mistake of editing at first. Just write every idea you have coming. You can edit it later in the end.

Then start writing the first paragraph. Always have clear solutions and conclusions in any paragraph. Keep your sentences short and the paragraphs too. Lengthy text is tiring and people don’t have much time. Keep your article between 500-1000 words. These are the standards today. Then follow the publisher’s guidelines, do not extemporize.

Use your signature line the publisher permits you to do. It shouldn’t be more than 4-6 lines of your bio. Finally revise your article for grammar mistakes and typos. Check it and recheck it again using your spell checker and with more tools if you have. Typos make you amateur and unprofessional. You should keep your lines to 60-65 characters. That’s what ezines accept.

Here are some of the best-checked article directories you can find on the net. You can submit your article there and have free exposure for your web site. They have big page rank and great alexa ranking.

• http://ideamarketers.com

• http://www.articlecity.com

• http://www.stickysauce.com

• http://www.mikes-marketing-tools.com

• http://www.ezinearticles.com

• http://www.goarticles.com

• http://www.123webmaster.com

• http://www.web-source.net/article-announce.htm

• http://successdoctor.com/free/archive.htm

• http://articles.siteowners.com

If you want to automate your article submission tasks, this is the best software you can find. It is the www.ezineannouncer.com . It automates the submission process and provides great tools. It is a must.

However if you want to automate your article submission task even more you can use this service. It’s amazing, it posts your article to thousands of publishers. Go to www.submityourarticle.com

If you feel that you can’t write an article at all you can use this revolutionary software: www.ezine-article-creator.com It creates articles for you! You just push some buttons and answer questions!

Excellent tools you can use as a writer are the above:

1. dictionary toolbar: http://dictionary.reference.com/tools/toolbar

2. Spell checker: http://aspell.sourceforge.net/suggest

3. Acronym finder: http://www.acronymfinder.com

4. Thesaurus: http://www.thesaurus.com

5. Another dictionary: http://www.rhymer.com

6. Excellent free text editor: http://www.notetab.com/download.php

7. Article, ad , text formatter : http://www.fwointl.com/FWOFormatter.html

Copyright 2004 Christos Varsamis

About The Author

Christos Varsamis is an internet marketing consultant and the owner of the exclusive internet-marketing club www.internetmarketingsuccesstips.com. Get his knowledge at your desktop! Subscribe to ims-tips@aweber.com.

Many of you may have heard of website promotion using press releases, but unfortunately this topic is still totally underestimated. If you are one of the persons that have heard of it but never really used it, then you might start knocking your head on the table after you’ve read my story…

I built a health related website about a year ago which basically consisted of product reviews. Putting the site together took me quite a while as I set myself the goal to produce only high quality content. There are simply too many sites out there that only have scraped content from various sources on the internet that can be found everywhere. I wanted to give my visitors something special, something for what it would be worth to visit my site and of course come back in the future. It took me most of the time to write the reviews as I actually tried all of the products.

When my website finally went online, I wanted nothing more but the world to see my work and to get the product sales going. There were different options available for site promotion including articles, link exchanges and directory submissions. And let’s not forget the press releases! In former times I put a lot of effort in writing articles because they always provided me with long term traffic and lots of backlinks that helped my sites to get ranked very high in the various search engines. Therefore I started to write some articles but was too tired because of the work that I did during the past weeks and decided to take the weekend off and visit some friends.

But one thing I did before I left was to write a press release. It was the first time that I wrote one and therefore I wasn’t quite sure how to structure it and what to write. I spent a few minutes on browsing through some press releases at prweb.com to get an idea of how they look like. OK, time was ticking away and I wanted to leave soon. So I started to write my first press release ever about my new cool website that contains original health product reviews from someone who actually bought and used the products. It didn’t take me too long until it was finally ready to be published.

At first I wanted to use the free press release publishing service at PRWeb, but then decided to pay some money for an extended service which guaranteed me same-day distribution. I hesitated a little bit because of the cost of $119 which I could have easily invested in some weekend activity, but as I was already too late I whipped out my credit card and did it. Everything went fine and there I was on the road for my weekend trip.

I came back late at Sunday night and didn’t want to turn on my computer at first. But I was just too curious to see if the press release resulted in some visitors to my website and even product purchases through my affiliate links. I logged into my website control panel and clicked on the stats icon. Let me tell you that I almost fell off my chair when I saw that I had received hundreds of visitors within the first few hours that my press release was distributed. This resulted in a few thousand visitors for only the weekend time-frame. I was shocked!

Can you imagine that I almost bursted because I couldn’t wait to see if those visitors had produced any sales? I must have had a typo in my Clickbank password three or four times, but then I finally saw the results. Believe it or not, but the hard work resulted in cold hard cash. The Clickbank statistics showed me 2 sales on Friday night, almost 20 sales on Saturday and another 15 on Sunday which summed up to a total $1065. Now that’s a nice hourly rate.

The next few days my traffic dropped a little bit but still produced lots of sales. I even got contacted by some publishers that wanted to print my press release in a magazine and newspaper. As my press release containing the link to my website was featured on some high pagerank websites, I had the search engine spiders knocking at my door in less than 24 hours. The high traffic from the press release declined during the days, but as I got ranked very high in the search engines for some great keywords the search engine traffic started to grow very fast. It’s easy to tell that I fell in love with press releases at first sight!

Today I use press releases as one of my main strategies for driving lots of traffic and targeted visitors to my websites and for getting indexed in the search engines and being ranked in no time. One thing that I changed was the distribution method. I didn’t want to pay $119 for every press release and therefore I decided to submit the releases by hand. They would usually not get picked up in 24 hours, but the saved money is worth the few days wait. For my press releases I’m using a very powerful and comfortable software which enables me to do the submission in no time. I’m even able to go on vacation and schedule the press releases so that the sales keep coming in while I relax at the beach. That’s the way life is meant to be!

John Glover uses Press Equalizer for all of his press release submissions which enables him to submit press releases in no time and without having to spend money for a distribution service. To find out more visit: press-equalizer.cash2day.com

You are fighting some tough obstacles to get a website visitor to respond to your company. These include the short attention span of the web, you being one of hundreds of websites they can visit, and the visitors having seen thousands of websites already.

In analyzing the 25 most successful websites we’ve written for our clients, here are the 9 big-picture secrets to having a website that gets you maximum conversions, leads, sales and profits.

1. Your website needs a headline that is very specific, unique, remarkable and features a mouth-watering customer-benefit.

Generalities in your headline and website will kill your response. People have heard general statements hundreds of times before, so they have no power:

“lowest prices” … click away;
“great services” … click away;
“industry leader” … click away.

2. Develop instant credibility on the first page of your website by using logos of well-known customers, membership associations, years in business, etc.

The internet is a phenomenal tool because it literally puts the world at your fingertips. The problem is that there are a lot of crooks, cheats and nuts in the world who could all have web sites.

You need to make sure your visitors instantly know that yours is a legitimate, professional business. This not only puts their minds at ease, but it removes a huge obstacle they might otherwise have to doing business with you.

3. Get to the point on the first VISIBLE screen.

The key here is VISIBLE. This means make sure your visitors know EXACTLY how you will solve their problems and meet their needs BEFORE they ever touch a scroll bar. There is nothing more aggravating than a site that forces you to link and scroll before you can even figure out if they can meet your needs.

Think about it: do you take the time to dig through one web site when you can GOOGLE thousands or millions of other sites that also claim to have what you need? Neither will your prospects. If people have to go hunting, they will simply move on.

Two other important tools that can help turn visitors into buyers are a site search, and easy-to-find contact information. You want to make sure no one visits your site without INSTANTLY knowing you WANT to help them and YOU can solve their problems.

4. Make a free or special introductory offer.

You need to get the website visitor to DO SOMETHING NOW … IMMEDIATELY! Because if they don’t, they’re gone … and you’ve lost your opportunity. (When we added a free evaluation offer to our Profit Boosters Copywriting website, our response rate tripled.)

5. Offer a free eNewsletter sign-up.

This is a must. Give it a good name, offer free special reports along with it and push your privacy policy. You must capture your visitor emails and follow up with helpful information to them on a regular basis.

And don’t worry about writing your eNewsletter. You obviously have a passion and expertise for your business, or you wouldn’t be in it. Just write about what you know, using your own words.

Here’s another important related tip: don’t try and impress anyone with technical jargon and flowery language. Pretend you’re writing a letter to help out a good friend. That’s the perfect tone for your eNewsletter.

6. Focus on the message, not the technology.

With a media as technology-driven as the internet, it’s unbelievably easy to get caught up in all the latest bells and whistles.

But remember, people are visiting your site because they WANT something … NOT because they want to be impressed by how much technology you’ve packed onto your site.

Your headline is still the key (see tip number 1 again) to driving business. And whether you use the latest technology, or plain old text, EVERYTHING on your site should point your prospect to a BENEFIT only YOU can provide.

Here’s another good reason to hold back on the tech stuff a bit: not all new technology is ACCESSIBLE or ACCEPTED by most users right away, or even at all. To reach the largest audience, wait until a technology is generally accepted by users and developers so they’ll already have, or be willing to download the necessary components to view your site. Some examples of this are:

• java applets
• activex controls
• shockwave objects
• tools that require plug-ins
• specialized document formats

7. Keep it simple.

One common mistake is to overdo the graphics. Web design programs make it so easy to add graphic elements that they’re sometimes hard to resist. Remember, just because you CAN do something, doesn’t mean you SHOULD.
Try the “Squint Test”. Look at your web page and kind of squint your eyes. Do you see a main thought and graphic … or do you just see a bunch of colors, shapes, patterns, boxes and flashes?
As a rule of thumb, anything that diverts your attention to ITSELF as a graphic element and AWAY from the MESSAGE of your main benefits, is probably overdone.

Some common things that get overused are:
• excessive graphics
• frames
• background images
• bevels and other graphic tricks

Keep in mind that overdoing it can be more than just a visual problem. Too many graphics and frames can bog down a page or make it too difficult to navigate. Either way, you’ve lost your prospect for good.

8. Give prospects a reason to visit your site.

The #1 reason people visit web sites is for information. So, in addition to making sure they know you can solve their problems, give them some information.

Good examples of things you can easily “give away” on your site include free marketing tips, a how-to section, or tips for buying your product or service. You don’t have to give away the farm. Just give some helpful tidbits that show people you know what you’re talking about. All of these things will build your credibility and generate business for you.

9. Give both customers and prospects a reason to want to visit your web site again.

Studies show that people usually won’t buy from you until they visit your site four to five times. You can help that process along tremendously by giving people a reason to return to your site.

Some ways to do this include updating product or service information, timely/seasonal how-to tips, changing your offer, changing your free premium, upgrading or updating samples and demos. These are all good reasons for people to return to your site or maybe even bookmark it.

A good rule of thumb would be to update your site in some way at least once a month, even if the changes are minimal. Not only will it give your visitors a reason to return, it will help drive new visitors to your site since search engines re-index/re-catalog changed pages.

For a FREE, no obligation evaluation and recommendations to improve sales from your website, call Mike Pavlish at (330) 963-0330 or click here: www.ProfitBoostersCopy.com

Establishing your own E-commerce site is not what it used to be. There are thousands of competitors that are competing for a bigger share of the market. Every method you can find to augment your sales will be beneficial.

Let’s face facts we are in this for the money. Altruism is not the primary motivation to put a website on the Internet to provide information for the world. Albeit there are some that provide information for the sake of providing free information to others. I have just started to provide free information sites on a variety of topics that are near and dear to me, just for the sake of providing information to others. There is no monetary gain. For the most part though the majority of my websites are commercial in nature and are profitable. The majority of sites though are out there to turn a profit. I don’t think that profit is a dirty word either.

It is common knowledge that without traffic we have no business. Like any business, without any customers you will not have any sales. No sales, no money and no site. Traffic represents all the people that get a chance to see what you have to offer. The more people who see your products the more people there are to buy them.

No one puts up an E-commerce site and doesn’t expect a profit. We have startup capital that needs to be recouped. With consistent traffic, we at least have a fighting chance to achieve that probability. Monetizing your traffic would optimize your chances of making the best out of it.

Traffic Types

The internet has proven to be a very reliable source in finding what was deemed to be non-existent. The internet has made the world a smaller place; you can advertise a product from Asia and find a buyer from North America in an instant. This has made the Internet the most desirable place to do business, in my opinion.

Generating traffic however is not an easy task on the Internet. You have to contend with a great number of sites to generate decent traffic flow. However, if done successfully this opens up a plethora of possibilities. Of course one of those benefits is monetizing your traffic flow.

Therefore, to get to the core of it the creating more traffic you need to understand the types of traffic available.

I break down traffic into two basic categories: Organic and Paid.

Organic traffic is homegrown so to speak. It’s the traffic that comes from non-paid sources. This is search engine traffic or link traffic from sites of which you have reciprocal links. Search engine traffic, although free, is a time consuming process for the patient and assiduous. Link traffic is an arduous task as well, but quite rewarding.

The best method of obtaining a good and constant flow of traffic is the organic method. The only issue is that it does take time to accomplish, but the rewards are great and of course inexpensive. The traffic itself is free, however the time and energy expended and perhaps software used may cost something. There are many different sources of organic traffic:

• Search engine listings

• Reciprocal links
• Writing and submitting articles
• Free classified ads.

• Self promotion

All of these sources take time but can be implemented for free.
Paid traffic comes in many forms. Pay per click being the most popular today, due to its instant results. Advertising takes on many forms and probably the best and most widely used is banner advertising. There are many that argue that banner advertising is a waste of time and money, as you will either pay for impressions( the number of times the banner is shown) or for clicks (the number of times someone clicks on your banner.)

Honestly, unless you have a good bankroll, don’t jump into advertising as a first method of getting traffic to your site and product.

The argument for pay per click advertising is you will find out quickly if your product has a market, and if it does, pay per click can be very rewarding. Do the math ahead of time by estimating your cost and the number of clicks on your ad and how many convert to sales. This is very important, as you may have a very decent click through rate but a poor conversion to sales rate. This equates to losing money over the long run.

The argument for organic traffic is strong but not instantly rewarding. It’s your call as how you will proceed.

Rick Carbone is the owner/webmaster of Home Business Research a web site devoted to starting and running a home based business. In adition to hundreds of articles and information on start up, management and business opportunities Home Business Research offers digital products for home businesses. Visit our site for tons of free information.

So we gather in all the relevant information we can possibly find, and include it in all the right places, taking great care in linking our pages properly, optimise each page in turn with a list of ‘keywords’ - and making sure that the most relevant keywords are reflected in each pages ’title tags’..

After having done everything we can possibly think of ‘at home’, - we become aware of the importance of having ‘inbound links’ from other websites, especially from ones of a similar nature to our own little masterpiece, - how a multitude of other sites referring to our site can ultimately make our site look more important to a search engines ‘spider’, and therefore gain in stature within the index of the search engine and move closer to the top of the list of results presented.

At this point we’ll probably come to the conclusion, that the least time consuming way to achieve these ‘inbound links’ is by joining one of the many links exchange programs available on the internet, - such as LinkMarket or InfoWizards – to find other like-minded souls, who are also looking for fresh links into their websites.

These are free to join – although they promote paid options as well – and on the whole work well by letting you (and other webmasters) peruse a list of sites that actively engage in one-for-one exchanges of links with their sites. – You look at the classified listings in their directory, decide which sites you would like to ‘partner with’, tick a box to apply for an exchange, - which will automatically then be ‘proposed’ to the other sites owner for them to decide whether to ‘partner’ with you or not, and if they accept your proposal you’ll be notified and asked to put up a link from your site to theirs.

At this point one could easily get carried away thinking: - YES! Recognition at last.
And - sadly - it appears that many webmasters – especially of commercial sites – factor this into their thinking. Knowing that – as the proposer – you must link to them first, they’ll either take a very long time to put up a link for your site - (months) – or simply not bother at all, hoping that you’ll forget about it as you’re busily chasing after more sites to exchange with.

Well – you’ve now been warned – DO NOT forget about it. Having put your link up to their sites, - give them SOME time – say a couple of weeks – to respond.

But - remember: all the time you’re waiting, your links to them are likely to be producing benefits for their sites, - and if enough suckers do this, they will - in total – have many hundreds of inbound links, for which they are not providing any return benefits at all, - thereby gaining much in Page Rank for no loss of their own!

Keep your wits about you. Before proposing or accepting a trade of links visit their site and check if there is a link from their Main Page to wherever they have their out going links. Then visit the links pages – be sure to keep an eye on the address bar in your browser – many, many sites are now engaged in the practice of having their links on a different site to the one you’re linking to, which again - usually - is an attempt to gain an unfair advantage on you.

One exception would be, where they are engaging in a proper 3 way exchange simply in order for the search-engines not to detect the fact that links are being reciprocated, - which is a good idea as long as both sites on offer are ‘proper’ sites, - but they should be honest and tell you about this up front! All too often you’ll find sites that are nothing but a device for providing ‘cheap’ return links to the likes of you and me.

Also on the increase are sites that will put up your link pretty smartly, often from a well rated page, but then after a week or two, - having allowed you to verify that your link is where you were told it would be – guess what? It disappears again. What a surprise!

A possible tell-tale sign for you to beware of, would be sites showing a high Google PR, whilst having a very few outbound links on their links pages. I have seen quite a few sites with PR[6] or more and less than 50 outbound links in their directory!

One must ask hard questions like: Are they really that good, that thousands of sites would be linking to them without a return link??
- or: Is the content that good and original, that it would warrant that high a rating simply for quality reasons, - considering that most sites struggle to achieve PR[3] or PR [4]??

All this having been said, don’t be put off, - just keep your wits about you and ask yourself pertinent questions, and – most importantly: check, check and check again . .
The ‘smarter’ Google gets, - the harder some people will be trying to con you.

- just an afterthought:

Although we are told that the Google search engine increasingly tend to ‘discount’ – (for Page Rank purposes) - links that are reciprocated in this way, they should nevertheless be worthwhile for another reason: - they guide the search engine’s spider back into your site for another quick scan each time that page is visited, thereby helping any new content added or any changes to your site to be discovered and indexed that much quicker than if left to it’s own devices.

Per Dindorp created and maintains a number of popular tourism orientated sites in and about Somerset, - UK including