Driving Traffic to Your Web Site

By Eric Friese It’s the question so many people ask: how do I bring more users to my web site? It might seem like a simple question, but it is not. Although the answer to this question seems to change on daily basis, there are a few things you can do to boost traffic to your web site.

Search Engine Placement

A big way to increase traffic is making sure you are indexed by the search engines, and then trying to increase your ranking. This is another article all together, but here are a few pointers. Make sure your site is “search engine friendly” and that the search engines can index your site. Check that your META tags are in order and correct. Put together a list of keywords that you would like to key in on and make sure those words/phrases are incorporated into your site. Also try to keep your keywords as specific as possible. It is extremely hard to rank high for broad keywords. Make sure the content you have on your site is quality content and grammatically correct. If writing content is not your strong point, hire a copywriter or web developer to help.

Web Directories

Get your site listed in as many web directories as possible. Web directories are sites that list sites by categories. Try to find some directories that specialize in your industry. For example, if your site is about real estate then try to get your site into as many real estate directories as possible. The Yahoo Directory is probably the best directory, but it’s not free. Getting into these directories can also help with search engine ranking.

Link Exchanges

When you think about it, getting traffic is a numbers game. The more exposure you get the more chances that people will come to your site. The idea behind a link exchange is you find other sites that compliment your site, and then contact the owner to see if they will put a link to your site on their site. In return, you add a link on your site to their web site. This has been an integral part of the internet for years and it is a proven way to increase traffic.

Writing Articles and Newsletters

In order to bring people back your site, you need a good hook. Providing a newsletter or articles on your site that people would be interested in reading is a good start. Once you write these articles you can post them on some article directories to get some traffic to your site. Newsletters are also good for getting residual business from your existing customers. Another good idea is to have a blog. Everyone else has one, so why not you?

Cost Per Click (CPC) Advertising

Cost Per Click advertising has been the money maker for companies like Google, MSN, and Yahoo. Whenever you do a search on Google, you see that box of paid listings on the right. Companies pay for every person that clicks their ad, hence the cost per click name. The weird thing is that Google can somehow see how interested the user is in your site and then charge you more for that click. That might sound retarded, but its great when you pay less for the clicks that only visit your front page and then leave. I highly recommend Google Adwords to all of my clients as a cost effective way to get traffic to your web site.

While there are many other ways to get more traffic to your web site, this should be a good starting point. The key to getting more traffic is getting your site’s name out there. Post it everywhere you can and with every thing you do. It’s a long process, but well worth the effort.

About The Author:
Eric Friese is President of Tiger Web Solutions, a web design firm located in Auburn, Alabama. He can be reached through the Tiger Web Solutions web site at http://www.tigerwebsolutions.com.

All About Off Page SEO

by Mark Flavin

Search Engine Optimization, or SEO, is a science of sorts that would enable you to ensure a favorably prominent position for your website in search engine results pages (SERPs). And since 80% of your traffic would come from the search engines, SEO methods take on a critical importance in the success of your online endeavor.

There are two kinds of SEO, on page and off page. This article will tackle the latter.

Off page SEO is all about the things you could to get a high page rank (PR) for your website after it has already gone live. These are the things which you actually execute outside the pages of your website, hence the name of this type of SEO.

What are these steps?

Well, all of them are concerned with building your link popularity. Your link popularity represents the number of back links your website has. To check you website’s current link popularity, head over to www.linkpopularity.com and use the free tool that can be found there. The higher your link popularity, the higher your PR will be.

Building your link popularity involves increasing the number of websites that will link to yours. This is easier said than done. It’s not a matter of getting reciprocal links like “you link to me and I’ll link to yours.” Google, in particular, despise reciprocal linking. You have to get unilateral links to your website.

The best way to do this is by ensuring that you have unique, highly informative content. Really, this is the number one strategy to invite websites to link to yours. But your content in the realm of on page SEO, and it is assumed that you have made all efforts to ensure great content.

What are the other ways by which you could build your link popularity? Try the following techniques:

Article marketing. There are thousands of article directories on the Internet. You could submit articles to these websites. For every submission, you will be allotted a resource box where you could introduce yourself and share a link to your website. Now, some of these article directories have high page ranks. If your articles are accepted, they will be included in their pages. Having a website with high PR linking to yours would go a long way in increasing your own page rank. Additionally, if you will submit just one article to a thousand directories, you’d have a thousand pages linking to your website! Sounds like a daunting task? There are article directory submission services available. Seek them out. For as low as $25, they could submit your articles to as many as 200 directories.

Forum marketing. There are online communities dedicated to the subject that your website is serving. Seek them out, then join them. You’d be allotted a signature box, which would appear in your every post. In your signature box, you could leave a link to your website. Then post as many significant messages as you could. For every post you will make, you’d have a page linking to your website.

Advertise at www.craigslist.com . Now here’s a novel strategy. The website www.craigslist.com is a well known classifieds website with a PR7 score. A PR7 score is rarely high! To have a link in a website like this would give a tremendous boost to your own website. Simply go to that site and choose the category that your pages belong to, then post your advertisement, with your link of course. It doesn’t matter that no one would get to read it. What matters is that the search engine spiders would find your website as they would come from a PR7 site.

Look for partners who are willing to include your list in their pages. The easiest way to do this is to use the free tool at www.webconfs.com/backlink-builder.php .

Try triangular linking. Google despises reciprocal linking, but triangular linking is one way of going around this limitation. Look for two or more webmasters who are willing to give it a shot. Webmaster A could post a link to Webmaster B’s website in his own pages. Webmaster B can post a link to Webmaster C’s website in his own pages. And webmaster C can post a link to Webmaster A’s website in his own pages. It may enforce the same principle as reciprocal linking, but the search engine spiders are not programmed to figure this out… yet.

About The Author:
Mark Flavin can help you Make Money Online. Mark is an expert on email marketing, affiliate marketing & traffic generation. You can find out all his secrets for free at http://markflavin.com

Direct Email Marketing Made Easy

by Robert Burko

Forget direct email marketing for a second, and tell me if this has ever happened to you. You go outside and open your mailbox. You get the usual: bills, bank statements, maybe a phoney million-dollar offer. But then, in the middle of it all, you see an envelope from your favourite restaurant. "Thanks for being a loyal customer," it says. "Next time you come by, let us treat you to a free dessert."

Now I'm not exactly the coupon-clipping kind of guy, but when I run into an offer that's so relevant to me, I simply can't resist it. Millions of you are like that too. And guess what? Millions of you check your email more often than your actual mailboxes.

That's where direct email marketing comes in. Forget spam. Spam's just the phoney million-dollar offer, and direct email marketing is miles away from that. Direct email marketing is reaching the right customers, with the right offers.

Let's go back to that coupon you received from your favourite restaurant, and let's think about it from the restaurant's point of view. If you clip that coupon and come into the restaurant, their direct marketing efforts were successful.

However, to get that coupon into your hands, the restaurant had to pay for printing, buy and stuff envelopes, address them to you and then pay for postage. And chances are the restaurant hired someone to do the printing, maybe someone else to the design, the envelope stuffing, etc. If you've ever sent flyers or coupons in the mail, you'll know it's both expensive and time-consuming.

Here's the beauty of direct email marketing. First of all, direct email marketing programs are packaged so you can do it yourself. The emails are all pre-designed, and the backend is already taken care of for you. All you have to do is sit on your computer for about 10 minutes and click a few buttons. There's no postage, no stuffing, no expensive printing fees.

And as small business owners have begun to discover the power of email, many direct email marketing programs are now built for non-technical folk. So even if all you can do on your computer is check your email and browse the web, you can still be an expert in these programs right away.

What's more is you'll still get access to the most advanced functionality. Let's get back into the restaurant owner's shoes. We've just sent a Free Dessert email coupon to all the customers who filled out our customer satisfaction survey and gave us their email addresses. We also included a "Forward to a Friend" link, so our customers can email the Free Dessert coupon to their friends.

Now (and here comes my favorite part about direct email marketing), we can go into the Reports and Stats section of our direct email marketing program and get deep into our campaign. We can see exactly who opened our messages, and when they did it. We can even see who forwarded their coupons to their friends.

And we don't have to stop there. We can group all our readers who forwarded their coupons to a friend and offer them an extra incentive (We know they like to tell their friends about us, so why not offer them 25% Off when they bring in two or more friends?).

Information is power, and direct email marketing is one of the most effective ways to gather that information and put it to good use. So next time you get that flyer for your favorite restaurant, think about how much unnecessary money and time that restaurant owner is spending. Think about how much information he's missing out on, and think about how much better things would be if he sent that flyer through direct email marketing.

About The Author:
Robert Burko is president and CEO of direct email marketing service provider Elite Email Marketing. Join the thousands of businesses around the globe that create, send and track their email marketing campaigns with Elite's powerful, self-service direct email marketing program, part of the Elite Business network.

5 Email Marketing Lessons You Can Benefit From

By Debbie LaChusa

Email marketing is not reserved for techies. It's a great small business marketing technique for anyone looking to attract prospects to their business and build relationships with their clients. I started email marketing 8 years ago knowing nothing. I've learned a lot about email marketing since then. Here are 5 lessons to help you make your email marketing more effective.

When I first started my small business marketing consulting business in 1998, I knew cultivating relationships was key to growing my business and getting new clients.

I knew I would need a way to stay in touch with the people I met at networking events, as well as my past clients, friends and business colleagues in order to facilitate referrals.

So I started sending out a monthly text email called "Tips & Trends."

It consisted of a brief "hello" message and a link to a page on my web site with information on a current marketing trend I'd read about and some helpful marketing tips.

This whole process was pretty crude. I managed it out of Microsoft Outlook and my goal was never to build a big list, but rather to stay in touch with people I already knew.

And you know what? It worked.
For five years, 100% of my small business marketing clients came from referrals from people who received those emails. I am confident these are people I would have lost touch with otherwise. That was my first taste of email marketing, and I was hooked.

Fast-forward to 2004 and the launch of my new small business marketing venture, 10 step marketing.

Email marketing was the first marketing tactic I selected. At this point however I realized my goal had to be to build a massive list of prospects. I needed to do more than simply stay in touch with the people I already knew, I needed to attract lots of new prospects.

So I focused much of my marketing on writing and publishing my ezine, and building my list.

I took the same articles I was publishing in my ezine each week and started posting them in free article directories on the web. And I started offering a free gift to encourage my web site visitors to subscribe.

And the rest as they say is history.
Email marketing has been one of my primary marketing vehicles. It has helped me create a presence on the web with little monetary investment. And it has enabled me to build a large following of prospects who are interested in what I have to offer.
So what lessons have I learned in my eight years of email marketing?

Here are 5 of them:
(1) Email marketing is the easiest, cheapest way to stay in touch and generate referrals.
(2) Put an opt-in box on every page of your website to build your list quicker.
(3) Write and post lots of articles on the web to drive traffic and build your list for free.
(4) Offer a free gift to encourage more of your web site visitors to join your list.

(5) Be aware of spam trigger words and avoid them at all costs so your email messages get delivered.

Even with the newer technologies such as RSS, podcasting and blogging, I believe email marketing will continue to be a popular and effective way to generate prospects and build relationships.

After all, relationship marketing isn't new, it's always been effective, and our goal as small business marketers and business owners is to use whatever technology is available to us, and is used by our prospects and clients, to stay in touch with them and to serve them.

About the Author:
Debbie LaChusa created The 10stepmarketing System to make marketing your own business as simple as answering 10 questions. Learn more about this unique, step-by-step system and get a free 10-week Marketing E-Course when you subscribe to the free, weekly 10stepmarketing Ezine at http://www.10stepmarketing.com.

Next Generation Email Marketing

by Mark Quirk

Things go in cycles - we've all heard this. Email marketing isn't new, far from it. It's been through at least one cycle from being leading edge, to being a trend, to being abused. Many thought that spam filters would reduce the applicability of email marketing. Well, read on, because we're in the next generation of email marketing - post learning - and the opt-ins are on the increase!

Why are opt-ins increasing? Well, here's what I've learned from some of the greats...

Clean Templates

When it became normal for email clients to read HTML, email marketing seemed to go a bit mad. Some of the newsletters I received were so over engineered it was difficult to see the actual text though the multi-columned, flashing, pointy lookie here, more headline graphics please, layout. They were comparable to those first web sites that had discovered color - and put it everywhere.

The best use of HTML is to promote clarity and readability. The ability to put ugly web links behind text that explains them; to have bullet points or layout that emphasis the points. Such things that help the time poor reader get through the message quickly - and take action.

My own approach in using email marketing is to keep messages short and

to the point. Use HTML for clear layout. And in early emails, leave out images and other content that might cause an email client application like Microsoft Outlook, to block the content.

Automated & Personalized
One internet duality is that it gives you the ability to address millions of people, yet personal relationships are the most effective sales tool there is. If you have a trusting relationship with a client or customer, they are more likely to buy your products. If you represent a company with huge brand awareness like Nike or Microsoft then the rules get a little skewed, but for most businesses, relationships are key.

Today's modern sequential email autoresponder systems, that support the generation of personalized emails, are perfect for automated relationship building. When I receive an email that isn't personally addressed, it feels old fashioned.

Even though I know perfectly well that personalized email can be automated, I still feel better about receiving it.

Permission Based
Certainly in the world of email marketing, buying lists, has become much less popular. Perhaps it's because of the ease of reporting spam email. But building your own list based on permission marketing is much more 'the norm' in next generation email marketing.

In a permission marketing approach, prospects willingly provide their name and email address through an email opt-in box. It seems obvious that individuals who self select, giving their permission for you to email them, are more likely to be interested in your products and services than those who just 'appear' on your list.

Compelling
Some of the emails I receive are great at compelling me to take action, and I still marvel at their creators. They tend to follow all these next generation email marketing guidelines, including the oldest one - having compelling copy.

We all receive plenty of email, probably too much. So, when your client reads yours, it better be good at delivering its message in way that makes them want to read it.

I like these simple rules:

* The goal of title, is to compel you to open the email
* The goal of the first sentence is to compel you to read the second (and so on, for a short number of sentences)
* The goal of the last sentence is to get you to take action

Global
Not all businesses are global. But many internet based businesses are. If you refer to a TV show or use colloquialism or anything else that assumes the 'local' knowledge of your country, you stand the chance of confusing or even losing a portion of your readers.

This doesn't mean that you can't use local examples - just do it in a way that includes those that aren't familiar with them. Here's a simple example of using a TV personality that introduces the name and the context of the personality for those that aren't familiar with it:
* "There's a well known talk show host here in the UK called Michael Parkinson, last night..."
These five simple guidelines are working in the next generation of email marketing and opt-ins are on the increase. The money, it seems, is still 'in the list.'

You can take a 30 day test drive of our modern permission email marketing system for just US$3.95 or approximately £2.40 or 3.40€. You can also sign-up for our email permission marketing short course, for free!

About The Author:
Mark Quirk is an IT professional with a 35 years of experience in the IT industry. Find out more about keeping your computer under your control at http://www.CareOfWindowsXP.com