Zoogony

Traffic Tips To Get People To Your Website

Let’s talk traffic and how to get it. Your website has at most, 10 seconds to grab the attention of your visitor, so you need to have something “interest grabbing” above the fold. That’s a newspaper term for what people see when looking at the top part of a paper. With more than 50 million websites out there, your viewers will demand topic specific information that will make them bookmark you, recommend you to their friends, and make them return over and over.

An easy subscribe method on your site is a must. If must have an easy way for people to subscribe or you are literally throwing away customers; something you can’t afford to do in these competitive times.

Building a list is one of the single most important things you can do to survive and stay alive in business. One of the easiest ways to build a list is to offer something free to all subscribers. Offer value and people will stay with you for a very long time. If you don’t have a large list of your own, then barter or buy advertising with someone who does have a large list with the same target market audience as you.

Take your list, no matter how big or how small and ask your subscribers to refer 2 people to your site. Offer them something of value for helping you. Explain to them that you are trying to build your list so you can improve your site so that it will be more beneficial to them. We are all just ordinary people out there and many of us are happy to help others. Make sure there is a link on your site for people to forward your site to others with one click. Think, how many times has a friend sent you a site to look at. We all do it.

Don’t forget to always include your website at the bottom of every email you send. Make sure you use it in a sig file at any webboard you join. Same for newsgroups. Consider sending funny pictures out to friends and relatives with your sig file in the email. As they forward your email to others and they refer to others it will explode. Make sure you have a very effective sig file. This allows you to keep building and building.

One of the most important things you can do with your website is to make sure any link that goes away from your site is set to open in a new window. This way your visitors do not leave your site and don’t have to try and find a way back once they have finished at the other site. Your site must be as user friendly as possible.

Getting your website link on other websites. Links to your site will affect your search engine rankings. The higher your ranking the more visitors. It’s that simple. But not just any link will do. You need quality links that also relate to your business. Avoid link farms. Search engines will view your site negatively if you are in link farms or god forbid, webrings. Don’t link with just anyone. Go for quality.

A free site that will help you to get and exchange quality links is Ken Evoy’s SiteSell. Free is good and they make it very easy for you. It one reason I return to their site over and over. Have a look http://value-exchange.sitesell.com Consider exchanging banners with these sites. It a benefit for both of you.

Get listed in ezine directories and search engines. Submit by hand and not by some mass program. Many of them don’t work properly and search engines are starting to ignore them. Start with http://www.dmoz.org as they feed a lot of other search engines. Then hit the top five.

Get Google traffic. It’s not that hard. There’s no special trick. Simply go to http://www.google.com/webmasters/ and read their recommendations and then make sure you implement them into your site so that your site is properly optimized. Set aside some time every day…15 minutes to an hour and work on optimizing your site correctly.

Want to get into Yahoo the free way. It’s easy…visit here http://submit.search.yahoo.com/free/request It may take a month or more, but it will save you a lot of money. If you are in a hurry and time is money then used the paid listing. It by no means guarantee that you will get it and they will not refund your money if they reject you, but if you have done things right you should be ok.

If you can write articles do so. If you don’t then put appropriate articles on your site for others to read. Either will bring you traffic. Archived articles that you have written can bring you traffic for years to come. This is an effective long term strategy and will help to establish you and your credentials as well.

A popular ezine directory like http://www.ezinehub.com will give you some insight on what ezines will accept your articles and submitting to ezine article sites will give you even wider distribution. Make sure all your articles include a small footer at the end, about the author. This should be kept to 4-5 lines and has to be as effective as possible in order to bring you new visitors.

Jean Sutherland has successfully run her own ezine for over 6 years and has a subscriber base of 35,000. Her ezine is geared to people doing business online and beside offering free software, it also provides traffic & marketing tips, informative business articles, free ebooks and computer tips for those trying to work online.

http://www.emailpromotions.net
http://www.spasoftheworld.com

How To Analyze Your Website Traffic - PART 1

Analyzing your web traffic statistics can be an invaluable tool for a number of different reasons. But before you can make full use of this tool, you need to understand how to interpret the data.

Most web hosting companies will provide you with basic web traffic information that you then have to interpret and make pertinent use of. However, the data you receive from your host company can be overwhelming if you don’t understand how to apply it to your particular business and website. Let’s start by examining the most basic data - the average visitors to your site on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis.

These figures are the most accurate measure of your website’s activity. It would appear on the surface that the more traffic you see recorded, the better you can assume your website is doing, but this is an inaccurate perception. You must also look at the behavior of your visitors once they come to your website to accurately gauge the effectiveness of your site.

There is often a great misconception about what is commonly known as “hits” and what is really effective, quality traffic to your site. Hits simply means the number of information requests received by the server. If you think about the fact that a hit can simply equate to the number of graphics per page, you will get an idea of how overblown the concept of hits can be. For example, if your homepage has 15 graphics on it, the server records this as 15 hits, when in reality we are talking about a single visitor checking out a single page on your site. As you can see, hits are not useful in analyzing your website traffic.

The more visitors that come to your website, the more accurate your interpretation will become. The greater the traffic is to your website, the more precise your analysis will be of overall trends in visitor behavior. The smaller the number of visitors, the more a few anomalous visitors can distort the analysis.

The aim is to use the web traffic statistics to figure out how well or how poorly your site is working for your visitors. One way to determine this is to find out how long on average your visitors spend on your site. If the time spent is relatively brief, it usually indicates an underlying problem. Then the challenge is to figure out what that problem is.

It could be that your keywords are directing the wrong type of visitors to your website, or that your graphics are confusing or intimidating, causing the visitor to exit rapidly. Use the knowledge of how much time visitors are spending on your site to pinpoint specific problems, and after you fix those problems, continue to use time spent as a gauge of how effective your fix has been.

To continue to PART 2 Click here.

This article may be freely reprinted as long as all links and author information remain.

Mo Bay, My Favorite Beach

We were finally on our way to Jamaica! After weeks of excitement and preparation, we were looking forwarded to our vacation in Jamaica. As the plane prepared to land, I looked out to see miles and miles of sandy beaches and breaking waves. I grinned like the cat that got the cream, thinking of the days lazing in the sun and getting bronzed enough to show off my new curves to advantage. I had sweated it out in the gym for the last three months just to get to this ideal weight that I am now, and I was going to show off this well toned body, you bet!

My partner in the fun, Susan was looking miserable, but I knew that once she reached terra firma and we hit the beaches, she would be in her element. I continued to smile, thinking of the envy I saw in my boss’ eyes and his dismay when he realized how “efficient” my substitute was. I saw how she works. That girl wouldn’t be able to find an elephant in a haystack, forget needles!

Our plan was to hit as many of Jamaica’s beaches as possible, staying for a couple of days each in Negril and Montego Bay. Our hotel was near Doctor’s Cove Beach. Apart from sunbathing on the beaches and swimming, we also went snorkeling in Doctor’s Cove Beach and Scuba diving in Rose Hall Reef.

Seven Mile Beach in Negril was quite disappointing, mainly because of the crowds. It was difficult even to find a suitable spot to just lie down and relax after a long swim. In Ochos Rios, there were pesky little kids with their beach toys or raucous teenagers playing beach volleyball to bother us, wherever we found a nice spot in the sun. Give me Mo Bay, any day !

Google and the Justice Department

Google thinks it has won against the Justice Department, but this is just the start. You see the United States Justice Department and all its little worthless sub-agencies like the FTC are about the most vindictive little persnickety group on the planet.

What am I saying here you ask? Well, I am simply saying that now that the government has been snubbed they are going to go after Google, you watch. Remember Microsoft was unjustly attacked too. But in Google’s case it does have some issues that you can bet the likes of Elliot Spitzer and the SEC will compete with each other just to see who files the biggest government suit first.

Any time the government smells money it wants a piece of it and it will attack. The government agencies are coming up on budget reviews and Elliot Spitzer is coming up for a run at the New York governorship and these agencies will attack because they smell blood and Google’s got it. The money that is and some believe that they have made forward-looking statements that maybe impossible to live up to and in the world of public companies that means trouble.

For those who follow the regulatory scum that attacks free enterprise, causes off shoring and is killing our economy we know. It is only a matter of time until the class action lawsuits, regulators and Elliot Spitzer gang up on Google. This small victory for Google may have really irked some of these regulators and they are quite sensitive when made to look foolish in the media. Consider my predictions on this in 2006.

“Lance Winslow” - Online Think Tank forum board. If you have innovative thoughts and unique perspectives, come think with Lance; http://www.WorldThinkTank.net/wttbbs/

Traffic Generation Basics - Your Marketing Plan

You may already know all of the various traffic generation basics, but still find that your site still isn’t getting the amount of traffic that it deserves. This could be happening for a variety of reasons, and it is important to find out what those reasons are and make the necessary corrections.

The first thing to consider is what you are currently doing in terms of marketing. Are you actually using the traffic generation basics to get traffic? Do you even have a marketing plan? Marketing can be very time consuming, but if you want traffic, it is necessary. The days of ‘build it and they will come’ are over. There are billions of websites in existence, and unless you tell them you’ve built it, they aren’t coming! Don’t wait for them to come - go out and drag them in!

If you do have a marketing plan, and you actually are using the traffic generation basics, and you still aren’t getting the traffic, take a look at your marketing materials. Your signature files, your short ads, your solo ads, your PPC campaign text, and everything else you use in your traffic generation endeavors should be located in one file. Take a long look at it all. Maybe your words aren’t working.

Are you allowing enough time to employ your marketing plan each week? 90% of your working hours should be spent marketing your website and generating traffic. Most successful Internet Marketers make sure that they are working enough hours, and putting in the marketing time needed to make the income that they desire. Are you doing this? If not, you need to take a look at your schedule and make some changes.

If you are involved in joint venture deals, and you aren’t getting traffic, that is a real problem. It is time to take a look at those deals and see if you are in fact benefiting from them. If not, maybe it is time to find new JV partners who can get you the traffic that you need. It may also be a simple question of reworking an existing deal that you have with your current JV partners.

Take a look at your links as well. Do this by looking at your website statistics. Are the sites that are linking to you sending you any traffic? If not, you need to start a new linking campaign that will enable you to find sites that will send you the traffic you need. What about the forums that you are posting in? Are they as active as they once were? Start searching for new communities to hang out in to employ some traffic generation basics.

Take a long hard look at your marketing plan, and note what is working and what is not working. Try to determine what the problem is with the marketing actions that are not working, and do a little research to determine ways that you can improve what is working. If you don’t have a written marketing plan, now is the time to make one. You should write down what you are marketing, how you will market it, the marketing materials that you will use, and the amount of time you will spend on each marketing task each day or week.

Traffic is everything. If you’ve tried everything that you can think of and nothing is working to your satisfaction, maybe it is time to bring in some hired guns for traffic generation basics. Visit http://www.TheIMconnection.com to find more information on getting the help that you need right away! Traffic generation is an ongoing process. There is no end in site. Think about the big sites like Yahoo - even Yahoo still uses traffic generation basics!

Jason frequently gives tips like this to the subscribers to his newsletter. Visit JasonDeVelvis.com and subscribe to his newsletter today!

Maximizing The True Value Of Your Traffic

You may be shocked to hear this.

You DON’T need a lot of traffic to make your website a screaming success.

Many new marketers are led to believe the key to profits lies in throwing as much traffic as possible at their sites. Hence increasing the popularity of traffic blasting programs which are inevitably money-drainers for the honest marketers.

If only it was that easy.

The truth of the matter is, there’re only two basic ways to increase the profitability of any website, and in turn maximize the true value of your traffic.

One is by targeting the traffic you get, the other is by generating a call to action from that traffic.

Lets look at each one in more detail:

(1) Targeting your traffic

What you need is the right kind of traffic. To put it another way - what you need to make more money right now is highly targeted traffic.

As mentioned, the true value of traffic is in how you can maximize it to achieve certain positive outcomes you desire - be it higher sales or more quality subscribers.

Such outcomes are only possible if the traffic is highly targeted to what you are offering.

The question is in how you can receive such targeted visitors quickly and easily.

You can do this by using certain proven traffic generation strategies such as writing articles, joint ventures with targeted marketers/e-zine publishers, search engines, your own affiliate programs, etc.

Side note:

“Autopilot Traffic Streams” reveals hidden ways to generate your own automatic streams of targeted traffic quickly and easily. You can download this $37 ebook here free, simply right click and choose ’save target as..’ from this link: http://TurnkeyMoney.com/AutopilotTrafficStreams.pdf

These highly effective methods attract pre-qualified visitors who are mostly ‘pre-sold’ before arriving at your site.

(2) Generating positive responses

The hands down easiest way to maximize any traffic is by increasing your website’s conversion rates.

You can achieve double, triple or even 10X more profits by converting more visitors into customers.

Let us look at a very basic example:

If your current website converts at 1% (meaning 1 sale for every 100 visitors), you would make 5 sales for every 500 targeted visitors you sent there.

Lets say you managed to increase this conversion rate to 3%, the same 500 visitors will give you 15 sales, an addition of 10 sales from just a 2% increase in the conversion rate!

While this sounds every ideal, how do you heighten your site’s conversion rates and maximize each visitor’s value?

There are many ways to achieve this, some of which include:

Faster loading time; Easier navigation; Easier reading; Flexible payment options; Packaging of unique offers; Increasing product value and of course creation of more effective copy, etc.

In summary, generating highly targeted traffic and then motivating positive calls to action from it is the way to achieving more profits quicker and easier.

It’s a powerful and synergic strategy you can’t afford to ignore as an internet marketer - so start maximizing the true value of your traffic today!

(c) 2004 Ewen Chia

Discover The Profit-Pulling Marketing Secrets Of The Gurus To Instantly Skyrocket Your Profits And Turn Your Website Into A 24/7 Cash Vault Quickly And Easily…Guaranteed! FREE eCourse worth $297: http://www.InstantMarketingSecrets.com

About The Author

Ewen is the editor of “Web Marketing Exposed” which reveals specific techniques you can use to get more traffic, subscribers and sales to your websites quickly and easily!

Proven Traffic Generating Techniques

What good is a website without traffic? A website without traffic is like a mall without customers. No visitors means no prospects, no prospects means no sales, no sales means your internet business will not survive as a result. This is why generating traffic to your website is important. Without traffic, you cannot build an email list, and cannot test and track your results.

Let’s take a look at some strategies used to generate traffic. As a matter of fact, if you stick to these strategies you will get more than enough traffic to your website to create a pretty healthy income.

Placing ads in high-circulation Ezines

This strategy is pretty simple but highly effective. You can easily jump-start your business the very same day the ad is run, by bringing in large amounts of pre-qualified targeted traffic to your web site. Placing ads in high-circulation ezines that target your niche will do the trick.

Pay per click advertising

Pay per click advertising is where you pay a search engine (Yahoo!) to display your ad whenever someone searches on a specific keyword on which you have bid on. Many search engines today sell pay per click advertising. The largest of these services are Google’s Adwords and Yahoo!’s Overture. Be sure to spend small amounts of money to test keywords and their effectiveness. You do want to minimize risk, right?

Viral Marketing

The best freebies you can give are special reports or E-books that you have written that provide useful information to the user. Giving freebies away is one really great and effective way to generate traffic. Firstly, existing visitors always come back for more. Secondly, a good E-book or report (which contains links back to your website) will be circulated by happy readers, giving you new visitors.

Reciprocal Links

This is a process of getting other websites to exchange links with you for the purpose of generating more traffic to your site. This way, both will mutually benefit from each other’s traffic.

Marketing with ezine articles

You probably know that there are thousands of ezines on the internet. But what you might not know is that few of these publishers write their own articles. You can submit your own informative article to ezine publishers. If your article is written well, chances are they’ll use it in their ezines. Remember to include a “resource box” at the end of the article which is an ad for your website. Tests have proven that readers click on links provided in the “resource box”

Publishing your own Ezine

Publishing your own ezine involves writing or finding informative articles on a particular subject, then building a list of subscribers who want that information. There are many sites that you can submit your ezines to and if you can come up with really good articles week after week, you will definitely pick up some readers on the way.

Join and participate in discussion groups

You can generate traffic by participating in discussion groups. www.howtocorp.com/forum and www.ablake.net/forum are really good discussion forums with lots of active members and visitors. Because of the large amounts of traffic these forums receive, posts will be viewed many times, and curious people will always click on links provided in the message.

Copyright © Michael Tee

Find out how you can FULLY set up and run your own internet business within a week at http://www.ebizmodelsyoucancopy.com/

Visit E-Biz Wiz Blog for proven ideas, tips and information on starting your own Internet Business and subscribe to the 12 Day Internet Marketing Success Course. http://ebizmodelsyoucancopy.blogspot.com/

Power Packed Linking Strategies - Part One

This is the first in a series of three articles showing you how to find a suitable linking strategy for your website and put it to work for you.

If you’ve been sitting and wondering why the traffic to your website is trickling in to your website ever so slowly then this article is intended to help you add some much needed oomph to your marketing campaign by using a linking strategy.

You may have heard that linking to other websites can benefit your website. Here are the three main reasons:

Traffic . By linking to sites with similar themes to your own you can develop a hub of traffic that will always remain constant. There’s an old saying that “a link lasts for all time” and it’s essentially true. There are short termers, shysters and hucksters that try to tilt the playing field but ultimately they are the biggest losers in the link strategy game.

Once links have been placed they generally remain for years to come, feeding your site with a steady stream of reliable traffic. In fact it often happens that some domains which have been given up by their previous owners have thousands of links still pointing to them after many, many years. It may be a slog in the beginning to set up a linking exchange program but you will be rewarded with quality traffic which lasts well into the future.

Popularity. When search engines look at how highly to rank a site on their search engine results pages (serps) they follow an in house algorithm which determines where your site gets placed in the results page. On page factors such as page titles, headings, Meta tags etc all have a bearing on how your page gets ranked but also important is the “popularity” of your website.

The popularity of your site is determined by the links that point to your site. Not just any old links either. The type and quality of the link is also under scrutiny here and so there is no point rushing off and trying to get as many links as possible, you need to track down quality links to your site to gain the best benefit from a linking campaign.

Partnerships. Growing your business in the wired world has many similar facets to establishing a business in a traditional manner.

You need to cultivate and establish your partnerships with other sites to enable growth. Trying to do everything in an insular manner by relying on one method (for example “pay per click”) is certain to end your hopes of building a successful website prematurely. It’s essential that you seek out like minded businesses and work with them to satisfy your customer.

It’s unlikely that you will have all of the necessary requirements in place to satisfy every customer, so just as in the high street, it makes sense to partner with other businesses that can provide the missing components to the overall solution.

Viewed in this way it makes complete sense to seek links with related sites.

For example. A site that specialises in tailored suits would be in a particularly niche market. Saville row tailors are much in demand these days but who would they partner with online?

Traditional linking strategies would have you seeking out similar tailors, maybe from other parts of the country so that you were not in direct competition.

However, thinking laterally, it makes complete sense that someone doing a search on Google for “tailor” would want to see other tailor related sites so that they could compare services.

So an improved linking strategy would be to provide links to related services. For example, one of the most common reasons for getting a new suit is a wedding. So wedding organisers and marquee companies would be good to approach. High class catering services and wedding limousine companies would be other good avenues to explore.

The strategy should be to link with partners who will actually be able to provide a service to your website visitors rather than just linking to a site because you can. As well as the value of the link in your popularity stakes you will also benefit from the increased traffic that the related links provide.

In the next article I examine some practical methods you can use to gain link popularity and traffic

About The Author

Tony Cooper is the Internet Marketing manager at http://www.keywordmarketing.com Building web sites that achieve tangible and accountable results.

tony@storebuilder.co.uk

Suggestions for Organising Ski Transfers for Your Luxury Ski Holiday

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With the up to date fully equipped eleven men fleet of buses and Roewe, Audi, koda, or MG vehicles we can drive up to 18, or twenty plus should you and your group ask this. Moreover the staff are extremely handy in adverse driving conditions for you and your groups piece of mind. Of course we are fully covered and have licenses.

The company provide mountain bike airport transfers from Mar to Nov and provide locations like the most popular: Auron, Courchevel, Montgenevre, La Tania, Chatel, Bessans, Montroc, Les Trois Vallees, Les Deux Alpes, Serre Chevalier, Flegere, Les Orres.

Getting to Chamonix village, Les Arcs or Les Houches from your flight has never been so simple. For luxury Geneva airport pick up and drop offs from your plane to you and your groups skiing chalet in Chamonix France phone Ski Holiday Transfers now, then chill out and relish in your snowboard holidy.

So You Want to Trade Links

We see them everyday in our in box. “I would like to link to your site”.
I suggest you choose your links and create your links pages with as much care as you would your homepage.
Go to the web site requesting to link with you. Using the Google toolbar check for the following:
(If you don’t have the Google toolbar you should. Go the www.Google.com and search Google toolbar)

1. Has the homepage been indexed by Google?

2. When were they last indexed?
3. Is the link page where they placed your web site hyperlink been indexed by Google?
4. How many links are on the links page? Less than 100 or over 100?
5. Are the links relevant to your business or are they mixed?
6. Finally - Pretending for a moment that search engines do not exist. Now ask yourself,

‘Is this a useful place or resource for a web site visitor’?

You might also want to download the Alexa toolbar. I use both Alexa’s and Google’s tool bar. When you are looking at web sites requesting links you can see if their web site is listed in the top 100 ~100, 000 ~ 500,000 ~ 1,000,000 and so on. With the number of web sites numbering in the billions this can be a useful metric of determining whether or not to link with a particular web site.

Too many link pages are built for search engines and not human visitors.

The new Google update detects this. This probably will not get your web site banned, but it certainly won’t help your rankings. I’m not trying to tell you how to run your link campaign, but I am very careful not to link to a page built for search engines versus a page built for humans. In light of this update and feedback from other SEO pros I have lightened my link load, added heavy descriptions for each link and removed links not (closely related) to my business. When time permits I may even add thumbnails of my link partner web sites. I want my links page to be a resource for users not spider food for search engines.

The Google Jagger Update

Google has made some major changes to their search engine algorithms. However, the Google updates have not fully run the course. Some of the most widely discussed elements for this Google update include:

• Hidden text, especially text that is hidden in CSS or DIV layers
• Paid linking or reciprocal linking that is considered outside of “Google Quality Guidelines”
• Using internal links or anchor text as one’s sole source of optimization

THE BOTTOM LINE IS BUILDING YOUR LINKS PAGES FOR PEOPLE NOT SEARCH ENGINES! This should improve your position. Create thoughtful pages with links and detailed link descriptions. “Build it for the user” not the “spiders”.

See my link partners page: http://www.visionefx.net/partners.htm.
It’s not perfect, but I’m striving to create a better page that will interest a casual or professional visitor who visits. It’s all about content for people not search engines!

About the Author Ricardo Vidallon Site Owner and Creative Director for http://www.visionefx.net