There is a myth that traffic is hard to get. It is not. Traffic is traffic. It is just a click on a computer. However, good web traffic is hard to get, good web traffic that has a fair proportion of credit card wielding, want what you have got, eager buyers, well that's another story. Here are my top 7 ways to attract some of those eager beavers over to your place:
1. Advertise - No surprises here, but the opportunities on the net are pretty much limitless. Get some expert help if you don't know what you're doing, but Google Adwords is a great place to start.
Then there's banner advertising, classified ads, ads on blog networks, ads on individual sites and blogs, offline advertising in newspapers and magazines, ebay classifieds, trust me, I could on and on. This is another good place to start your advertising campaign.
The important thing to remember when buying advertising is to 'buy relevant' i.e. it is far better to have 1 visitor who wants what you have against 100 visitors who just drift on by, without so much as clicking on one of your 'call to actions' (such as your newsletter sign up, buy button etc.)
2. Buy traffic - Yep, you can buy traffic. 100,000 visitors for so much. Buyer beware. Pop under traffic needs specific offers to make it work and a lot of other 'network' traffic is a lot of rubbish.
As always, when purchasing traffic or advertising, make sure that you have adequate tracking codes in place to make sure you know where your visitors and revenue are coming from (otherwise you will make some bad judgment calls later on).
The other big tip is to buy small and test. Then if it works and only then, scale up. Last word of advice (I promise): Visitor numbers are vanity, profit is sanity.
3. Forums, comments, articles, Press releases, newsletters, tell a friend - I think I've covered most of these options elsewhere but do not underestimate the power of these strategies.
If you have Google Analytics or Fruity Plugins installed you will soon see where your traffic is coming from. One well placed forum post can do wonders for your sagging washing line of a visitor graph! Get someone to sign up to your weekly newsletter and you've got 52 opportunities to get them back to your site.
Give them a reason to do so. Don't forget one of my personal favorites, the tell a friend option. Do you have one on your site?
4. Buy existing website - Too simple really. Buy an existing web-site or a recently expired domain. Make sure they have PR, back links and existing visitors. Then either add a mini site with a link to your target site or put a 301 (permanent redirect) to your target site.
5. Recruit the best SEO expertise you can afford - Search engine optimization is a maze. A big one. Unless you're going to make a career out of it, hire someone in. It will be a heap cheaper in the long run, especially when you put your learning and 'making mistakes' time, along with the lost opportunity costs into the overall equation.
6. Build and or join a blog network - Yep, they are out there. The long way is to build your own, effectively a group of niche related blogs, all making incestuous link love to each other. Their sole purpose in life is to target your 'money site'.
Shorter routes including a buying a blog network and or joining a group of like minded blog owners, who will happily swap semi automated posts with each other.
7. Distribute link bait - This is very powerful and when done right will create riches from rags. The simple concept is to create (or buy) an ebook or piece of software that other people are then incentivized to distribute on your behalf, usually through an affiliate scheme such as Clickbank or the like.
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Showing posts with label web promotions. Show all posts
Showing posts with label web promotions. Show all posts
Thursday, January 22, 2009
Saturday, January 3, 2009
The Future Of Search Marketing In 2009
The experts are gazing into their crystal balls and sharing their visions for 2009 in terms of search, social, online, mobile and marketing in general.
Google will cull non-revenue generating services in an effort to exceed analyst expectations. The share price will not recover to its $600USD high.
Google will also face a massive legal challenge in 2009 from a non US country regarding its business practices.
The Web 2.0 bubble will burst with many companies entering the "dead pool". The only companies which will survive will be those who have a sustainable business model.
Twitter will be bought by a major internet player and whilst will remain free to use for basic version, a premium service offering will emerge. Will continue to be plagued by reliability issues whilst seriously challenging mainstream media and blogs in breaking news.
Yahoo! value will drop considerably, forcing even further reduction in forces worldwide. Their search market share will continue to decline at the benefit of Google and Microsoft. Microsoft will over take Yahoo! in terms of search share within the US, forcing Yahoo! to reconsider its search options.
Search spending growth will slow considerably in the first half of the year but still grow (single digits). Growth will accelerate to double digits by end of 2009.
2009 will be known as the year that SaaS becomes mainstream, with fortune 500 companies adopting it to reduce costs. Amazon will loose its place as the number one provider of cloud services to start ups, with major IT vendors all offering competiting products but with a far superior development interface i.e. merging of cloud services into traditional desktop development tools.
Read More..
Google will cull non-revenue generating services in an effort to exceed analyst expectations. The share price will not recover to its $600USD high.
Google will also face a massive legal challenge in 2009 from a non US country regarding its business practices.
The Web 2.0 bubble will burst with many companies entering the "dead pool". The only companies which will survive will be those who have a sustainable business model.
Twitter will be bought by a major internet player and whilst will remain free to use for basic version, a premium service offering will emerge. Will continue to be plagued by reliability issues whilst seriously challenging mainstream media and blogs in breaking news.
Yahoo! value will drop considerably, forcing even further reduction in forces worldwide. Their search market share will continue to decline at the benefit of Google and Microsoft. Microsoft will over take Yahoo! in terms of search share within the US, forcing Yahoo! to reconsider its search options.
Search spending growth will slow considerably in the first half of the year but still grow (single digits). Growth will accelerate to double digits by end of 2009.
2009 will be known as the year that SaaS becomes mainstream, with fortune 500 companies adopting it to reduce costs. Amazon will loose its place as the number one provider of cloud services to start ups, with major IT vendors all offering competiting products but with a far superior development interface i.e. merging of cloud services into traditional desktop development tools.
Read More..
Wednesday, December 24, 2008
10 Reasons Why Your Website Looks Like Spam
1. You use the default WordPress theme.
It’s not illegal or anything, but using the default WordPress theme shows the sort of laziness generally displayed by MFA spammers with dirty, dirty splogs. Because they buy up hundreds of domains that do nothing but scrape content and slap on some AdWords, they don’t care what the pages actually look like. In fact, they want to be so unattractive that people want to click on ads just to get away from the ugliness. You’re not a dirty splogger? Congratulate yourself for not being sleazy! Then kick yourself for not taking more pride in your website, and take five minutes to find and install a free WordPress theme that doesn’t suck.
2. Too. Many. Ads.
Okay, I can’t fault you for wanting to monetize your website. My own sites are monetized. But seriously, when you have more ads than content, you put the MFA sites to shame. And people like me might be looking extra hard to make sure you have some sort of valuable content that separates you from the real spammers. It’s a fine line, so you have to be very careful you don’t cross it and actually become a spam site.
3. The spammiest-domain-in-the-world.com
You can have a beautiful website that is easy to navigate and is very user friendly, but people may not ever get there if they see you’ve got five keywords in your domain name separated by hyphens. Sure, hyphens are not inherently evil. But too many hyphens makes you look cheap and untrustworthy. And that’s before you even get off the SERP. Just don’t do it. If the good non-spammy keyword rich domain names are taken, then find a brandable domain name. (Think Zillow. Expedia.)
4. Link Pages
You may call it your “resource page.” How many of those are resources are affiliate links or reciprocal links you traded back in 2003? Link pages tend to be suspect even if you’re really just trying to give your visitors a list of resources for which you receive no form of compensation. It’s really looks better to make your links contextual, interwoven throughout your site content. If you absolutely must have a link page, you need to be absolutely sure it has real value for your users, relevant to your site content.
5. You don’t look “real.”
Do you have an About Us page? Contact page? Copyright notice? Privacy policy? If you sell stuff, do you have a shopping cart? Customer service information? Shipping info? If you don’t, you look suspiciously like a thin affiliate site.
6. Too many redirects.
It’s good to use a redirect when you shake up your site navigation, so that users following otherwise dead incoming links can be led to the new home of the proper landing page. But have you ever clicked on a link and seen more than three URLs switch out in the address bar before ending up on an actual page? If you’ve moved things around several times, you need to tidy up your redirects, or else people (your competitors, who are going to be trigger happy on the spam report button) might wonder what you were cloaking and hiding on those interim pages that never loaded.
7. You bought the .info
It’s unfair, but so many spammers have bought up the .info domains that it’s truly unusual to find a legitimate .info page. That’s all I have to say about that.
8. Your title tags look like
Your title tag should be readable. You can be descriptive without a comma separated list of your targeted keywords. The title tag is what people see on the SERP. Make it user friendly. A list of keywords is not user friendly. You look like you have nothing better to offer than a list of keywords, and that’s not good. Pick a keyword phrase or two and put it in sentence form.
9. Barely unique content
As the head of the WBP writing team, it makes me sad to see barely unique content out there. The less-evil cousin of the MFA site doesn’t scrape content from other sources. The articles you read there will pass Copyscape. Why? Because they paid someone (likely overseas) a dollar or two to re-write someone else’s content to become “unique,” even when the resulting rephrasing leads to some awkward reading. So okay, they may pass a cursory plagiarism test, but these sites have a “look,” very similar to the default WP theme sites.
10. RSS Feeds
If you have a web page essentially one big blog or news feed, you have the burden of proof that says your feed is valuable to users. If you have ads on that feed, you may not be able to avoid the spam label for scraping. Make sure you add value to the feed by adding some form of narrative or editorial. You need to provide some kind of unique content, or else you’re no better than the sploggers.
11. Sales letter sites
You’ve got this AMAZING product with PROVEN results and TRUSTED testimonials. See the pictures of these happy customers? You have a LIMITED TIME offer to get the SPECIAL price. You use lots of BOLD TEXT in PRETTY COLORS to drive the point home. Users have to scroll down the page for 45 seconds to find the obligatory lead generator contact form where they must provide their email address to LEARN MORE. Affiliate site? Legitimate offer? You be the judge, but it sure looks like spam to me.
Read More..
It’s not illegal or anything, but using the default WordPress theme shows the sort of laziness generally displayed by MFA spammers with dirty, dirty splogs. Because they buy up hundreds of domains that do nothing but scrape content and slap on some AdWords, they don’t care what the pages actually look like. In fact, they want to be so unattractive that people want to click on ads just to get away from the ugliness. You’re not a dirty splogger? Congratulate yourself for not being sleazy! Then kick yourself for not taking more pride in your website, and take five minutes to find and install a free WordPress theme that doesn’t suck.
2. Too. Many. Ads.
Okay, I can’t fault you for wanting to monetize your website. My own sites are monetized. But seriously, when you have more ads than content, you put the MFA sites to shame. And people like me might be looking extra hard to make sure you have some sort of valuable content that separates you from the real spammers. It’s a fine line, so you have to be very careful you don’t cross it and actually become a spam site.
3. The spammiest-domain-in-the-world.com
You can have a beautiful website that is easy to navigate and is very user friendly, but people may not ever get there if they see you’ve got five keywords in your domain name separated by hyphens. Sure, hyphens are not inherently evil. But too many hyphens makes you look cheap and untrustworthy. And that’s before you even get off the SERP. Just don’t do it. If the good non-spammy keyword rich domain names are taken, then find a brandable domain name. (Think Zillow. Expedia.)
4. Link Pages
You may call it your “resource page.” How many of those are resources are affiliate links or reciprocal links you traded back in 2003? Link pages tend to be suspect even if you’re really just trying to give your visitors a list of resources for which you receive no form of compensation. It’s really looks better to make your links contextual, interwoven throughout your site content. If you absolutely must have a link page, you need to be absolutely sure it has real value for your users, relevant to your site content.
5. You don’t look “real.”
Do you have an About Us page? Contact page? Copyright notice? Privacy policy? If you sell stuff, do you have a shopping cart? Customer service information? Shipping info? If you don’t, you look suspiciously like a thin affiliate site.
6. Too many redirects.
It’s good to use a redirect when you shake up your site navigation, so that users following otherwise dead incoming links can be led to the new home of the proper landing page. But have you ever clicked on a link and seen more than three URLs switch out in the address bar before ending up on an actual page? If you’ve moved things around several times, you need to tidy up your redirects, or else people (your competitors, who are going to be trigger happy on the spam report button) might wonder what you were cloaking and hiding on those interim pages that never loaded.
7. You bought the .info
It’s unfair, but so many spammers have bought up the .info domains that it’s truly unusual to find a legitimate .info page. That’s all I have to say about that.
8. Your title tags look like
Your title tag should be readable. You can be descriptive without a comma separated list of your targeted keywords. The title tag is what people see on the SERP. Make it user friendly. A list of keywords is not user friendly. You look like you have nothing better to offer than a list of keywords, and that’s not good. Pick a keyword phrase or two and put it in sentence form.
9. Barely unique content
As the head of the WBP writing team, it makes me sad to see barely unique content out there. The less-evil cousin of the MFA site doesn’t scrape content from other sources. The articles you read there will pass Copyscape. Why? Because they paid someone (likely overseas) a dollar or two to re-write someone else’s content to become “unique,” even when the resulting rephrasing leads to some awkward reading. So okay, they may pass a cursory plagiarism test, but these sites have a “look,” very similar to the default WP theme sites.
10. RSS Feeds
If you have a web page essentially one big blog or news feed, you have the burden of proof that says your feed is valuable to users. If you have ads on that feed, you may not be able to avoid the spam label for scraping. Make sure you add value to the feed by adding some form of narrative or editorial. You need to provide some kind of unique content, or else you’re no better than the sploggers.
11. Sales letter sites
You’ve got this AMAZING product with PROVEN results and TRUSTED testimonials. See the pictures of these happy customers? You have a LIMITED TIME offer to get the SPECIAL price. You use lots of BOLD TEXT in PRETTY COLORS to drive the point home. Users have to scroll down the page for 45 seconds to find the obligatory lead generator contact form where they must provide their email address to LEARN MORE. Affiliate site? Legitimate offer? You be the judge, but it sure looks like spam to me.
Read More..
Worst SEO Mistakes
Worst SEO Mistakes
In this article we cover some of the worst SEO mistakes. Some of these will cause the search engines to ignore you; others will cause potential visitors to ignore you; still others may make your site disappear from the search engine results pages entirely. We'll go over each practice and explain why you shouldn't do it. We'll even tell you what you should be doing.
Flash
If you're making a new website and thinking of using Flash - stop. Though Adobe made Flash crawlable and shared technology with Google and Yahoo (leaving out Microsoft), Flash is still a bad choice.
If you don't show much content to the search engines, you will have to invest more in links. Not only does a Flash site cost more to make, but you'll need more money to optimize it. If there is no real reason to use Flash, don't. If you want cool movies and features, consider embedding Flash videos and using cool CSS styles.
No Use of Title Tags
"The most powerful HTML tag you have at your disposal" - Ross Jones, Search Engine Ranking Factors. Put keywords you target the page for into the tag. This is the part that shows up in search results as a big blue link, so make it count.
Another mistake webmasters make is to put something like "Welcome To...." in the title tag. Aaron Wall calls this "Welcome to low rankings."
Title Tag Duplication
Many designers create a site design without much regard for SEO, using one title tag for an entire website. Make sure to vary the title tags on your pages.
Messed up Robots.txt
It's a good idea to have a file to keep your error log clean of robot.txt requests, but if you can mess up a lot if you use it incorrectly. Here's how it looks, assuming you don't want to block ANY pages:
Read More...
In this article we cover some of the worst SEO mistakes. Some of these will cause the search engines to ignore you; others will cause potential visitors to ignore you; still others may make your site disappear from the search engine results pages entirely. We'll go over each practice and explain why you shouldn't do it. We'll even tell you what you should be doing.
Flash
If you're making a new website and thinking of using Flash - stop. Though Adobe made Flash crawlable and shared technology with Google and Yahoo (leaving out Microsoft), Flash is still a bad choice.
If you don't show much content to the search engines, you will have to invest more in links. Not only does a Flash site cost more to make, but you'll need more money to optimize it. If there is no real reason to use Flash, don't. If you want cool movies and features, consider embedding Flash videos and using cool CSS styles.
No Use of Title Tags
"The most powerful HTML tag you have at your disposal" - Ross Jones, Search Engine Ranking Factors. Put keywords you target the page for into the tag. This is the part that shows up in search results as a big blue link, so make it count.
Another mistake webmasters make is to put something like "Welcome To...." in the title tag. Aaron Wall calls this "Welcome to low rankings."
Title Tag Duplication
Many designers create a site design without much regard for SEO, using one title tag for an entire website. Make sure to vary the title tags on your pages.
Messed up Robots.txt
It's a good idea to have a file to keep your error log clean of robot.txt requests, but if you can mess up a lot if you use it incorrectly. Here's how it looks, assuming you don't want to block ANY pages:
Read More...
Search Trends To Watch In 2009
Between the economy affecting stock prices and the potential mergers and acquisitions discussed among several of the major search engines, there is a lot of uncertainty as we head into 2009. Yet we can anticipate several shifts in search based on what we've seen over the past decade and other signs in the media ecosystem. Here are some major changes to anticipate:
Holistic -- In Every Sense
The word "holistic" should play out in a number of ways:
First, any significant media campaign or offline event drives search volume, so marketers must capture that demand by integrating search with other media planning.
Next, paid search and SEO should be planned in tandem for the best results. Several studies show that by integrating search engine marketing with search engine optimization, results are greater than the sum of its parts.
Lastly, expect the major search engines and others to push forward with new ways to infuse paid search listings with display and video media. This will make search also about engagement and not just clicks and conversions. To some degree, these new search engine offerings will be motivated by more concentrated efforts to attract large brand marketers . Additionally, given how effective search engine marketing is, the engines and portals will want to have a steady stream of upsell options. In the coming year, consumers may experience the most dramatic shift in the format of search engine results pages since the basic template was established roughly a decade ago.
Search Fragmentation
While the search engine landscape continues to be dominated by one player, new complexities keep emerging as search migrates far beyond the traditional engines.
This fall, comScore and Ad Age reported that YouTube surpassed Yahoo as the second-largest search engine; within days, YouTube announced its new search advertising platform. What's more, MySpace (563 million U.S. queries in October 2008, according to comScore) is a bigger search engine than both AOL (424 million) and Ask.com (362 million). Queries on eBay, Craigslist, and Amazon combined (980 million) nearly rival MSN.com (1.04 billion).
What does all of this mean for marketers?
It's true that not all queries are created equally. A searcher on a social network or video sharing site often wants something different than what they’re looking for on a standard search engine. But given the volume of consumer search activity (among other interactions) on these nontraditional search sources, it's important for marketers to be positioned the best way possible where those searches are happening.
New Models for SEO
These other search sources don't just operate in a vacuum; they impact the major search engines, too. Search engine optimization is shifting, from a focus of entirely maximizing a site's rank in the engines, to maximizing a site's reach across all the top-ranked listings on a search engine's results page. While many consumers go directly to a marketers' site, which should be positioned as prominently as possible in search engine results pages, many more consumers reach marketers through intermediary properties. These include blogs, social networks, photo sharing sites, Twitter, Wikipedia, and countless other social sites that tend to rank increasingly well in search engines. That means marketers have to shift their mindset from optimizing their Web site to optimizing their Web presence.
Your Car Engine's Your Search Engine
The biggest change in 2009 and beyond is that the device consumers search from will start to matter even more than which engine they use.
The most obvious manifestation of this is mobile consumption. New mobile devices and platforms such as the iPhone and Google Android are focused on improving the search and Web experience. This will fuel searches from mobile devices; iPhone users enter a disproportionate number of mobile search queries, though other devices are catching up.
Marketers need to adapt their strategies to reach their target audiences on these devices, such as by optimizing messaging and landing pages, and providing more consumer value by leveraging the unique features of these devices. For instance, mobile devices support integration with SMS (text messaging), click-to-call, mobile couponing, and location-based services, all of which take advantage of the mobile platform in ways that aren't as natural for PC-based Web advertising.
Read More..
Holistic -- In Every Sense
The word "holistic" should play out in a number of ways:
First, any significant media campaign or offline event drives search volume, so marketers must capture that demand by integrating search with other media planning.
Next, paid search and SEO should be planned in tandem for the best results. Several studies show that by integrating search engine marketing with search engine optimization, results are greater than the sum of its parts.
Lastly, expect the major search engines and others to push forward with new ways to infuse paid search listings with display and video media. This will make search also about engagement and not just clicks and conversions. To some degree, these new search engine offerings will be motivated by more concentrated efforts to attract large brand marketers . Additionally, given how effective search engine marketing is, the engines and portals will want to have a steady stream of upsell options. In the coming year, consumers may experience the most dramatic shift in the format of search engine results pages since the basic template was established roughly a decade ago.
Search Fragmentation
While the search engine landscape continues to be dominated by one player, new complexities keep emerging as search migrates far beyond the traditional engines.
This fall, comScore and Ad Age reported that YouTube surpassed Yahoo as the second-largest search engine; within days, YouTube announced its new search advertising platform. What's more, MySpace (563 million U.S. queries in October 2008, according to comScore) is a bigger search engine than both AOL (424 million) and Ask.com (362 million). Queries on eBay, Craigslist, and Amazon combined (980 million) nearly rival MSN.com (1.04 billion).
What does all of this mean for marketers?
It's true that not all queries are created equally. A searcher on a social network or video sharing site often wants something different than what they’re looking for on a standard search engine. But given the volume of consumer search activity (among other interactions) on these nontraditional search sources, it's important for marketers to be positioned the best way possible where those searches are happening.
New Models for SEO
These other search sources don't just operate in a vacuum; they impact the major search engines, too. Search engine optimization is shifting, from a focus of entirely maximizing a site's rank in the engines, to maximizing a site's reach across all the top-ranked listings on a search engine's results page. While many consumers go directly to a marketers' site, which should be positioned as prominently as possible in search engine results pages, many more consumers reach marketers through intermediary properties. These include blogs, social networks, photo sharing sites, Twitter, Wikipedia, and countless other social sites that tend to rank increasingly well in search engines. That means marketers have to shift their mindset from optimizing their Web site to optimizing their Web presence.
Your Car Engine's Your Search Engine
The biggest change in 2009 and beyond is that the device consumers search from will start to matter even more than which engine they use.
The most obvious manifestation of this is mobile consumption. New mobile devices and platforms such as the iPhone and Google Android are focused on improving the search and Web experience. This will fuel searches from mobile devices; iPhone users enter a disproportionate number of mobile search queries, though other devices are catching up.
Marketers need to adapt their strategies to reach their target audiences on these devices, such as by optimizing messaging and landing pages, and providing more consumer value by leveraging the unique features of these devices. For instance, mobile devices support integration with SMS (text messaging), click-to-call, mobile couponing, and location-based services, all of which take advantage of the mobile platform in ways that aren't as natural for PC-based Web advertising.
Read More..
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