So you got your website up and running. You hired an excellent web designer to craft a perfect home page and satellite pages that will really draw in the visitors and inspire them to buy. You have a beautiful catalog of products with detailed descriptions. You have a section dedicated to the services you provide with praises from past customers. And you have the best online shopping cart service out there so that you customers can buy from you with no hassles and next day shipping. That’s great! Now where are your customers?
Driving traffic to your website is a much discussed and much misunderstood venture. There are a million theories out there that claim to drive tons of new visitors to your site daily. There are services that say they will increase your traffic by an enormous percentage if you will only pay them their small fee over a period of fifty years. There are so-called experts who will place your pages on all the best search engines on the net. They claim that with this kind of blanket exposure, your traffic numbers will explode within days.
But the only sure-fire way to draw productive traffic to your website is through targeted marketing. The important word to notice here is “productive.” You can draw hundreds of thousands of visitors to your site every year by hosting a giveaway of some kind. Services that search the internet for freebies will have people clicking a link to your site like crazy. But these people are not there to buy anything from you … quite the opposite. They are empty clicks. There is nothing productive about this kind of traffic. People looking for free stuff will rarely make you any kind of money. And that’s what you’re after, right?
So target your marketing to the people who really want to buy what you have to offer. How? Start by trying these basic steps…
* Hire an experienced copywriter. The copy that is on your site makes a world of difference in the sales you garner from the internet. Most important to targeted marketing are the keywords found in your title and the metatags in the website’s code. An experienced copywriter will know how to determine the most effective keywords and place them strategically in your site’s copy. If you cannot afford a copywriter, do some research and talk to your web designer about inserting metatags.
* You can enroll in pay per click search engines. Obviously, google.com is one of these, but most of the most popular keywords are already taken. If you can think of some original phrases that people use to search for your products or services, you can post your ad next to the text that comes up when people search for that phrase. Every time someone clicks on your ad to go to your site, you pay google.com a nominal fee.
* Submit articles to free ezine sites. This is especially helpful if you are a service provider. You can write, or hire someone to write, an article for you about your area of expertise. Give some free tips, offer your experience, and be accessible in the text. Then at the bottom of the article, you get a link to your website advertising your services. Every time someone publishes your article in their ezine or newsletter, they must use your web address at the bottom.
These are just a few of the many ways to ensure you get “productive” traffic. Empty clicks are just that … empty… and your wallet will stay that way, too!
Angel’s thoughts: Don”t forget to hire a good SEO ! Cause even if you hire someone to write if your website/blog is not optimized your goind to waste your money!!
Article Source: http://www.articlealley.com/article_1426203_3.html
About the Author: Nial Robbins is the owner and webmaster of http://www.NDR-HomeBiz.com, the site for the best home business opportunities, free Internet home business training, as well as ideas to work from home and earn money online.
Many people ask us whats the best way to get into social media marketing – What shall I do first? Is Twitter relevant to us? How can I do it?… and so on. Of course there are many answers and roads to travel depending on the type of business and where you are now with your internet presence.
However – there is one approach which works well for most companies, and provides a bridge to enable you to evolve into Social Media and at the same time act as a hub and focus for your other online marketing activities.
It involves building a blog. I’m a much bigger fan nowadays of blogs and I really do see them as the epicentre of all your web marketing – even more so than your website. Your website is still essential as the ultimate destination for visitors and a means to convert them to buyers or enquiries, but the blog can be the driving force.
What will your Blog do
Below there’s a summary of the way you can use your blog to drive your social media and other web marketing activities. To set one up is easy – as we’ve discussed before using wordpress or typepad and integrating the blog within your domain is a straightforward process. The bigger issue most people have is deciding what to blog about – but actually there’s no shortage if you consider the volume of information your company publishes:-
-new product information
-industry specific information – new legislation, new trends
-lessons and ‘how to do’s’
-’hints and tips’
-case studies
-press releases
…and so on. In fact everytime your produce any communication content consider your blog a receptacle for it – even your video footage.
The crucial thing of course is to make sure there’s some value added content there – so a ‘good’ blog is really what we should be talking about. You can include all the other stuff but make sure (as we do on this blog) you are giving some valuable information away like lessons and ‘how to do’ guides. This will ensure people link to you (which of course helps with SEO) and sign up to receive info from you automatically – as illustrated on Seth’s blog above.
Your Blog and SEO
You will capture the ‘long tail’ as you blog – further, as we discussed above, you’ll develop backlinks naturally.
Your Blog and Email Marketin
As we do, send a regular newsletter to people with links back to the blog where the detailed relevent content is stored
Your Blog and Social Bookmarking
Give people the opportunity of bookmarking your site to increase your visibility and backlinks – also you might proactively bookmark your own posts in the major sites (Digg, delicious etc) – there’s a full list of around 125 of them here.
Your Blog and your PR
Any press releases you send out can be stored on your blog and linked to via emails and social bookmarking sites. Again this will help increase the value of your blog and the SEO
Your Blog and Social Media
The two everone’s concerned about are Twitter and Facebook. If you dont have time to frequent these phenomena then do as we do and link your blog directly to them. What happens when I blog is that it gets fed directly into Twitter and then to Facebook – saves loads of time.
Your Blog and your Videos
Upload your videos to your blog for greater impact and also to help visibility via search engines – courtesy of Google Universal Search these should show up in search engine results – post them on YouTube too
So, the key message is integrate your blog with your website then use it as the springboard to evolve your online marketing and engage social media. Over time this will increase your visibility via search engines as well as all the important social media sites.
Angel’s thoughts: Good advices in general, but never forget one thing, you must keep your blog alive!! Never stop to add stuff and new posts, to tweet, to comment etc or else your blog will die slowly but surely!
Article Source: http://www.articlealley.com/article_1421663_3.html http://www.janklin.com
Many of us want to make money online. But, unfortunately many people get scammed and lose money instead of making it. I have been in the online money making filed for about 7 years now, and in my experience i have found some things that are common amongst online money making scammers. I hope this will help you avoid scams. Remember, these are just from my own personal experience, they are not facts. But i am sure they will come in handy when trying to avoid scammers.
Big Payout
This is the biggest sign that should raise your red flag. I mean if a site is promising you $5 for a click on a link, or a program promising you make thousands of dollars in a week or while you sleep, of course its a scam. If it was the case why aren’t they doing it themselves, instead of trying to make money selling you this information?..
No Reliable Contact Information
If you can’t find any information as to how and who to contact or who is responsible for the site, turn around and don’t look back. An established business always have its contact info up to date and easy to find, because they are not afraid of people knowing who they are and/or authorities coming after them.
Are They Responding
Before signing up, contact the site/company and ask a question or two. Usually scammers don’t even bother to answer or respond to any email. Even if they do, it takes them a very long time to respond. Ask yourself if they take that long to respond to a question, how long is going take them to pay you (if they are going to pay you at all)?
Too Flashy
Scam sites for some reason tend to use a lot of flashy signs and big bold text (i know i make many internet marketers angry by saying this since they all have those flashy sites, but i believe if you have real information that will help someone make money or what have you, you don’t need to pull people in with over sized and colorful text. If there is big and colorful text about the amount of money you will make, rather than detailed explanation about how you will make that money, there is a good chance its a scam. Legitimate companies usually use a simple but elegant design for their site.
Fake Testimonial
Most businesses use testimonial which is a good way to promote. But, if you pay close attention, you can easily spot the fake ones. For example, a testimonial about a product that helps you make more money with your site says “…with the help of the x program i have made that much money on my site. Regards, X Y xy.com …”. If you check the mentioned site, 9 out of 10 times, either it doesn’t exist or if it does, no body by that name is responsible or have anything to do with the site. Although many scammers try to have everything in place, most scam artistes (if you can call them artists) don’t even take the time to at least make sure the testimonial information is right.
Too Easy
If its telling you “Make $2000 A Week, No experience Required, No Work Involved”, ask your self, what kind of job you can make that much money without any experience or putting any time and effort into it? While there are legitimate ways to make that much money in short amount of time, most of them require some experience and hard work, unless you have millions of dollars to put in bank and make money with its interest.
Ignore Those Emails
If you receive an email from someone you don’t know and its start with “dear friend” or something like that, and starts telling you how he/she knows this is the perfect opportunity for you to make money…. Do i need to say anything about this?.. Most people always look for ways to make more money, but i mean how could a stranger know you are looking for a way to make more money at this time, and how would he even know you? Sometimes email comes from Nigeria and other places as well.
Paying A Fee And Keeping It A Secret
What legitimate company that you have worked for before, required you to pay a fee in order for them to give you more detailed information on how to make money? And why would they be afraid if you told someone about this transaction?…
Your Gut Instinct
The best way to recognize an online money making scam is your ‘gut instinct’. 99% of the time, what your instinct tells you is the truth. Most of us tend to ignore our instinct, but i have found in my experience that most of the time, my initial instinct was right.
There are many ways to make money online, and many great programs and methods, but always make sure you find out about ins and outs of it, before you get into it, after all you want to make money, not lose money. I hope the points made in this article will help you avoid online money making scams.
Angel’s thoughts: If you want a sure way to get money online become an Affiliate on Clickbank, it’s free! ClickBank let you sell other peoples stuff for a commission. You can find digital products like e-books and short reports to promote. And/Or become an Amazon Affiliate, but you’ll win a lot less!
About the author: Satrap is the founder and author of controversial blog, blogstash.com. A blog full of great how-tos and information about making money online. Visit blogstash today to get your share of this valuable information and learn the top ways to make money online.Article Source: http://www.articlealley.com/article_1414651_81.html
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