Tips To Generate Website Traffic

There is only one hard and fast rule in generating money from your website:  A steady flow of website traffic.  If no one goes to your site, it doesn’t really stand a chance of generating any income.  It takes money to maintain a money making site; it also takes money to make money.

BUT, it doesn’t take tons of cash to get website traffic.

Ever wonder how does big hit sites drive traffic top their site? Most of them are spending tons of money to drive the traffic to their sites, investing in many advertising campaigns and different forms of marketing schemes and gimmickries. This is all worthwhile because, well, they are what they are now, high earning, big hitting websites.

You don’t have to do this if you don’t really have their resources. There are many ways to generate low cost website traffic without having to spend what you don’t have or can’t afford. Many people have banked on high cost methods and have ended up losing their shirt over it.

Here I present to you some tips to generate low cost website traffic that could help your site a whole lot. Even if you only get a small percentage of successful visitors in to client ratio it still works especially if you get a high number of website traffic.

• Exchange Links

This is a sure and proven method. Rarely would you see a site where there is no link to another site. Many web masters are willing to exchange links with one another so that they could produce more public awareness about their sites. You’ll soon see and feel the sudden upsurge of the traffic coming in to your site from other sites.

A major prerequisite in exchanging links with other sites is having the same niche or content as the other site. They should share a common subject so that there is continuity in the providing of service and information to what interests your target traffic.

Exchanging links also boosts your chances of getting a high ranking in search engine results. It is common knowledge that search engines ranks high sites that have inbound and outbound theme-related links. With a good ranking position in the search engines, you will generate more traffic in your website without the high costs.

• Write and Submit Articles

There are many e-zines and online encyclopedias in the internet which provides free space for articles to be submitted. If you want to save costs, you can do the articles yourself. There are many freelance writers who are willing to write for you for a small fee, but to save money, it is wise to do those articles yourself.

Write articles that are themed along with the niche of your site. Write something that you have expertise on so that when they read it, they can feel your knowledge about the subject and will be eager to go to your site. Write articles that produce tips and guidelines to the subject or niche your site has.

Include a resource box at the end of your article that can link them to your site. Write a little about yourself and your site. If you provide a light, information-laden and interesting article, they will go to your site for more.

• Create a Newsletter

This may sound like hard work because of all the articles you may need to use to build a newsletter but on the contrary, this is not so. There are many writers and sites that are willing to provide free articles as long as they can get their name in on your newsletter. This will also provide free advertising for them as well.

As your newsletter gets pass around, you can widen your public awareness and build an opt-in list that can regularly visit your site.

• Join Online Communities and Forums

This only requires your time and nothing else. You can share your knowledge and expertise with many online communities as well as your website. You can get free advertising when you go to forums that have the same subject or niche with your site.

Share your two cents and let them see how knowledgeable you are with the subject. As you build your reputation, you also build the reputation of your site, making it a reputable and honest business that could be frequented and trusted by many people.

Hope these tips get you a bit more traffic!

-Michael

5 Important Basic Rules in Website Design

When it comes to your website, extra attention should be paid to every minute detail to make sure it performs optimally to serve its purpose.  Here are five important rules of thumb to observe to make sure your website performs well.

1) Do not use “Splash Pages”

Splash pages are the first pages you see when you arrive at a website. They normally have a very beautiful image with words like “Welcome” or “Click here to enter”.  In fact, they are just that — pretty vases with no real purpose.  Do not let your visitors have a reason to click on the “back” button!  Give them the value of your site up front without the splash page.

2) Do not use excessive banner advertisements

Even the least net savvy people have trained themselves to ignore banner advertisements so you will be wasting valuable website real estate.  Instead, provide more valuable content and weave relevant links into your content, and let your visitors feel compelled to act or buy instead of being pushed.  Think Sherpa not salesperson.

3) Have a simple and clear navigation

You have to provide a simple and very straightforward navigation menu so that even a young child will know how to use it. I have actually employed the help of my kids when testing sites.  Stay away from complicated Flash based menus or multi-tiered dropdown menus.  If your visitors don’t know how to navigate, they will leave your site.

4) Have a clear indication of where the user is

When visitors are deeply engrossed in browsing your site, you will want to make sure they know which part of the site they are in at that moment.  Breadcrumbs are an excellent tool for giving a visitor the “You are here!”  That way, they will be able to browse relevant information or navigate to any section of the site easily.  Don’t confuse your visitors because confusion means “abandon ship”!

5) Avoid using audio on your site

If your visitor is going to stay a long time at your site, reading your content, you will want to make sure they’re not annoyed by some audio looping on and on your website.  If you insist on adding audio, make sure they have some control over it — volume or muting controls are certainly suggested.

These rules are just like any others we only find value in them if we apply them.  If you have any you want to add of course pile them on.  I like to think that with enough good practices out there we build a better looking web community.

-Michael

Duct Tape…it is like “The Force”

    I read once that duct tape is like “The Force” it has a dark side, a light side, and hold the world together.  I don’t know if I mentioned that my favorite use for it is wrapping my head with it so when my head explodes for whatever reason that may be, the EMTs will be able to transport all of my skull with my body for re-attachment.

    Today was a typical Monday in the sense that all the world seemed out to get me.  I even went to work early today hoping that no one would notice my early entrance.  The coffee pot contained a thin film that would pass for not empty, the water cooler was beyond not empty, the creamer was almost a dust in the carton.  IT guy – caffeine = catastrophic failure!  So once I have paid the ferry man and crossed the river Styx, filled my cup with coffee ,I attempt to make way to the desk in the “Puzzle Palace”.

    I make it all the way to the desk and unpack my notebook PC.  I then spend the next nine hours swimming in jello and adding layer upon layer of duct tape to my head.  Bright spot, I did manage to get our ERP software Epicor to run a a 64bit version of XP Pro!  I got web statistics reported and did some time looking over the increase in traffic and getting a visitor to the coveted contact us page.  We have made a few conversions and I continue to map out the next phase of changes.  Mike the owner and I have a few things we have been discussing and drawing up. I keep reading and learning from Jeffery and Bryan Eisenberg’s book Call to Action.

    This is a fairly short post as I need to go soak the tape off my head and go to sleep.  Perhaps tomorrow will be a better day…it at least will be tomorrow and not Monday.

Hey Mambo!!!

    I have spent most of the last few afternoons building a new site in Mambo.  That is a new CMS(content manages solution) for me as I am accustomed to working with DotNetNuke.  Never the less this has been fairly easy to grasp and use.  Some clunky thing to get used to and some navigation to learn, but over all it has been fun.

   I really am excited about the new site and our existing company site over at tuscodisplay.com.  I have started to track changes and updates to that site.  Since the 20th of February we ave started to see some climbs upward in the search engines.  I have also started lookingat not only the “hits” but also the depth of sessions.  I have added links into the pages as using the sessions of client visits to script their steps to conversions.  Jeffery and Bryan Eisenberg suggest that you create a wire map and storyboards to conceptualize the path through your site.  I also had a few folks outside the company “shop” the site, boy that was a surprise!  I am quickly uncovering a number of flaws in some of my own thinking that I have need to correct about designing and building websites.

    Another bit of news on the LinkedIn/Social Networking scene-My boss told me at lunch today that a former client contacted him via LinkedIn and they have set up a meeting at an upcoming trade show to discuss possible business deals in the near future.  Now I am going to count this as a conversion although it didn’t come in via the website, but I have kind of taken the lead on our digital marketing.  I consider this a great bit of news that our efforts to maximize our presence on the web via these tools has been positive.  Some of the same principles of building websites also apply to writing copy for your LinkedIn profile.  Think small act big, 5 to 10 good keywords to sum up your experience, if you are looking to get some push for you company customer concentric job experiance.  There are folks using the searches on LinkedIn to find clients, employees, and even a job.  I can only image that the search engine on LinkedIn is tuned in a similar fashion as Google for quick results.

  Well enough for today, tommorow  will certainly hold plenty of new and exciting things to learn and do.

Breaking Ranks

    Well if you have been following my folly as of late I am in the process of “tuning up” the Tusco Display website.  I went on over to Bryan and Jeffery Eisenberg’s website and got some great tools to further my dissection of our current site.  Was rather fond of the WeWe Monitor , and shocked about what it tells me about us.  I have become a student of “Who do we say we are?”  I have begun asking the question, “Why would people do business with Tusco Display?”  “Who is Tusco Display and what do they offer a potential client?”  These are important questions as I have begun to look at our website from a new point of view.  With my new vision I see our site as a big discount warehouse with aisles and aisles of stuff to look at and see, but there is no “checkout” or an easy way to ask and get answers. 

    So I went to work making some small changes.  Knowing that our content isn’t customer concentric I had to start writing some new copy or at least rearrange some of our current copy.  I also knew we had no links in our site to help guide a vistor to any kind of direction or get any answers.  So here I was like Tim Allen making home improvements and then it happened!  I broke our website!

    I know it isn’t broken, but needs it’s tight well organized but by another author code restored to it’s original condition…or does it?  I have in some stroke of luck put our contact form on EVERY page.  Now I have to get a little deeper into Call to Action and find out if that is too much to ask a contact form on page.

    In the meantime I will read a little more and see if I can get the code straightened out.

The Faster I Run The Behinder I Get

    I had really hoped to get all of the events of the last week in some form of order so there was some fluidity to my story.  Alas as it always is for a one person IT operation I am running out of caffeinated hours in my day to fulfill all of my digital duties.

    So here is last week in a nutshell.  I have had a HUGE amount of success apply the three platforms of social networking.  LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter have become staples in my application arsenal.  I also have started this blog which is going to be followed by colleagues, family, friends, and I suspect a few enemies as well.  I have made new friends like Angela at ShinyDoor, got connected with an old friend on Facebook, reacquainted myself with a former client turned mentor on LinkedIn, and got a good business direction and help from what I consider a giant in the industry of web business via Twitter.

    So now I find myself working on extranet for our external clients including out national account managers at Tusco Display, intranet is an ongoing improvement cycle, and building up our web presence @ www.tuscodisplay.com.  This doesn’t include the day to day duties I perform here at work and at our home based business Technology Workgroup.  Needless to say I forgot to mention integration of a new time and attendance system to our ERP software.

    The biggest purpose of this blogging experience was to illustrate and document my evolution of our company web site www.tuscodisplay.com.  I was fortunate enough to get in touch with Bryan Eisenberg via Twitter.  For those of you who are not familiar with Bryan and his brother Jeffery  they have author several book and white papers about successfully selling and converting visitors into clients.  I have heard words like “the bible” or “gold standard” of web marketing to describe their teaching and methodology.

   So now I feel up to speed and further behind as I write this post, as my wife’s words come to mind as I left this morning, “Don’t forget our 8:00 PM with the Trustees of Dover First Moravian Church“.  This is another project Technology Workgroup is taking on as we are members of that church and this is our gift of service we are offering.  So here is my blogging challenge, I will be writing about what I learn in “Call to Action” by Bryan and Jeffery Eisenberg, and inviting all of my readers to follow the changes on both of these site as in some way we will be working to make visitors into converts.

Digging Holes in Cyberspace

So I’m only at Friday of last week, but as you can see this whole thing has begun to gain momentum.  After a full day of work, LinkedIn, Facebook, and tweetting on Twitter I join my wife and girls for a bit of dinner.  My oldest daughter is amused and somewhat concerned about her mom and dad’s new “hobby”.  She was shoulder surfing with her mother earlier in the day and was quite taken aback by what an old school chum had written on my wall.  She told her mom that she would have posted a comment and her mother reminded her why I had not “friended” her.

So we all finish dinner and my wife and I decide that we will retire to the bedroom with our respective notebook pc’s at about 8:30.  So we settle in and start digging up facts about social networking, SEO techniques, and LinkedIn tools.  I got off on a number of threads to get a better grip on why we weren’t getting conversions on our site.  We both traded links over IM that might help us better help our existing clients.  And we all have been there it is now 4:30AM Saturday!  Must put down this machine.  The black box yields many clues but few answers.  I do feel as if I am on a treasure hunt as each white paper and blog post point me in another fascinating direction.  I keep amassing more answers and questions all at the same time.  I am finding where I have moved off the path of successful conversion rates, but I am too tired to take anymore notes and it is all beginning to look the same.

Eating With the Snow Shovel-Part Two

A few days later (last Thursday) both Mike the owner of Tusco Display and I attend a social networking event held at Kent State Tuscarawas, in New Philadelphia, OH.  Angela Siefer from ShinyDoor.com is going to teach us how to use Facebook, LinkedIn and briefly talk about Twitter.  Oh boy, more time wasting application thanks to Web 2.0!  My daughter gets up 30 minutes early to use Facebook and spends countless hours every night frittering away valuable time to do chores and I have a LinkedIn account that probably doesn’t even work anymore.  Twitter, yeah just what I need another method to instantly tell the world “Look at me!” 

     Modern technology is pretty well wasted on me, I like shiny new things, but working with ASP.Net and DotNetNuke and hardware all day, it all gets a little trite.  Bottom line though is adapt or die, that is the credo in business.  So Mike the Tusco Display Owner and Michael the Network Administrator go to the meeting.  Network Administrator already thinking, “How many of these people can I make into clients for Technology Workgroup?”  Right away I am engaged with Angela, she is excited about her topic and hits the ground running.  She very easily invites all of us there without accounts on LinkedIn to go and set one up and if your neighbor has one help those who don’t.  We begin to examine the profile and the various tools that can most certainly give us a greater chance of being found as businesses.  I am intrigued as I begin to do the math, I have five friends, and they each have five friends… 

    We move over to Facebook and Angela once again has everyone smoothly navigating the functions and features.  She skillfully points out the “do’s and don’ts”, the best practices and even the faux pas of social networking.  Then she talks about Twitter, briefly and with the caveat that we should get comfortable with Face Book and LinkedIn before moving on.  I feel like that guy that gets told he isn’t tough enough to drink the hard stuff.  I’ll just see about that, I can’t wait to get home and sign up!  I’ll show her! She is certainly smart and well educated but I am a well seasoned, trial by fire, burned to a crisp veteran of technology.  I remember using punch cards for Pete sake not some fancy little USB drive.  I go home and sign up for a Twitter account @mmmock along with the wife and start looking for interesting people to follow.  I have 3 before I go to bed…sadly one of those is the wife.  But she and I now are engaged in this need for “street cred” and begin to build our professional and personal networks on Facebook and LinkedIn.  We are becoming better connected to the business world and I am on track to become a social networking evangelist!  I will help others get onboard and learn to use their powers for good not evil.  It is late I really have to put down the notebook and get at least four hours of sleep.

    Mike and I compare notes all day Friday as we build our networks and discuss how we ALL at Tusco Display get set up and start using this new cyber tool for building business, creating better relationship with existing accounts and our own team.  Brainstorms like F5 tornadoes blow through the office, I am looking for the duct tape to wrap my head with so when it explodes the EMT’s will have all the pieces in one spot to transport along with my body!  Can’t wait to get home and compare notes this social network stuff is a powerful drug…what was it Angela said, “Don’t dive in?  Right straight to the deep end of the pool.