Business websites are a necessity in today’s society and the internet is only as good as its links. Without links, the internet simply would not be able to exist. To ensure a quality World Wide Web continues, you must provide links that your customers might be interested in. Linking to other sites helps tell the customers which products you use and trust. It also forms a bond of trust between you and other sites. Moreover, it can improve your own site by associating with other products that customers both know and trust and by giving you an increased level of visibility. There are two kinds of links you should include in your site. You should include a general links section for the benefit of your customers, and you should include a reciprocal links section to help you and other businesses as well as your customers.
There are several ways to decide which general links to include in your site. You might start by visiting competitor’s web sites. Check out their links section to understand what sites they provide links for. This might help you figure out what your customers are looking for. It might also provide you with a good base for a reciprocal linking system, which will be discussed in the next lesson.
Another way to decide what general links to include in your site is to consult with your customers. Internet-savvy customers will be able to tell you what they look for in a professional site and what they like and do not like about your links. This can help you control the quality of your links section. You could do this through a survey or by simply informally interviewing your clientele.
Be sure to provide general links that have a high page rank with internet search engines. This will increase your web traffic. You can do this by typing a key phrase in a search engine and look at the highest ranked pages that match your results.
General links are great, but reciprocal links are an essential part to the promotion of your website. You have a strong site that offers your quality product and you want people to know about your site. To make sure that you get the traffic you need, you must have other sites directed toward yours with links.
This process is fairly simply, but there are many ways to engage in reciprocal linking.
First, research the sites you might want to link to. You might start this process by making two lists. First, list the sites you think your customers might be interested in. For now, just write, you can consider narrowing your list down at a later time. Next, create a list of sites that would benefit your site. You can then compare the two lists and see what they have in common. Compile a list of common subjects, and list out three key words to fit with each subject.
After the research phase, it is time to go online. Find a Meta search engine and input all three words for each subject. Any site that comes back with all three keywords should be high on your priority list.
Once you’ve done that, it is time to start sifting through your results. Bookmark any sites that look promising.
When you’ve made your final choices, it is time to draft a letter to the webmaster of each site you’re considering. Get to the point quickly and sell your site to them. Do not follow up if your original letter was not responded to.
The final step in this process is to negotiate the link and location in terms of both sites. As soon as possible, get their link on your site and send them a note letting them now you have a live link to their site. Check their site frequently to ensure they are upholding their promise to you as well.
The entire process of choosing links and reciprocal links increases your visibility to customers. Not only will they be able to find you through the use of a search engine, they will now be able to find you through the use of other websites. This can mean nothing but good things for you and your website.
Sometimes you come up with a great blog story. You know it will drive you a lot of traffic but you have a problem. None knows about your great blog post. In order to get maximum attention you need to spread the word around. This is where the social / bookmark networks come handy.
What is a social / bookmark network?
It’s a place where you can share your stories or bookmarks with others. Take blog reporter for example. You submit your blog story to the network, allowing other members to vote and comment on it. More popular stories that receive a certain number of votes get promoted to the front page. Most social networks are different. Some even allow you to export a large number of bookmarks straight from your browser.
Why social networks?
1) Social networks get a lot of traffic due to their nature. Users often return to read the latest stories and share their own.
2) Readers are usually only one click away from your blog. A popular submission can bring you thousands of daily visitors.
3) Most social networks are free and take seconds to register and submit your first entry.
4) You will be surprised when you see the amount of other websites that use feeds from various social networks. A good story can spread across the network like wild fire.
5) If your story will not get to the front page you can always submit another one. In most cases there is no limit on the amount of stories you can submit.
6) Most social networks are search engine friendly. Not only your story will be picked up by major search engines in no time, in most cases you will also get a reciprocal link. Some social networks have very good google page rank (PR)
Tips and tricks:
1) An interesting, catchy story is often a must. Your main target is to get promoted to the front page by getting enough votes. You need to convince other readers to vote for your story. Strange, shocking and controversial stories often do well.
2) You can always ask your friends to join and vote for you in order to get more votes. Don’t create fake accounts because you will simply get banned.
3) The more stories you submit the better. If you want a steady flow of traffic you will need a steady flow of submissions.
4) Just enjoy your experience. I certainly find it more interesting compared to other methods of blog promotion, such as link development.
There are a lot of various social networks around. Simple search on google should do the trick. I personally recommend blog reporter because it is the first personal publishing network designed especially for blogs.
This article will cover one of the unique methods of getting traffic to a blog that doesn’t work for regular sites. Remember that every blog is a web-site, but not every web-site is a blog. My top methods of getting traffic to a web-site are still my top methods of getting traffic to a blog. Those include: article marketing, link building and content creation/ranking factors.
But blogs are a special breed of web-site. There are additional methods of getting new visitors to your blog that are very effective. The first one I played with was linking to others. For your blog marketing efforts to work, you must understand that bloggers are part of a community. Those of us old-timers on the ‘net remember when the entire ‘net was a small, close-knit community… when it was OK to send an email telling others in your topic area that you just set up a site and would like a link on their site.
That isn’t what I’m suggesting with the blog community. The days of sending even a personal email to someone you haven’t met are nearly over. The spam problem has made that more and more difficult. However, it is still OK and still rather expected that you introduce yourself when you come into a community. It is also a good idea to let your new community know that you are a friendly guy and are willing to help out in the community.
This post will tell about one way to do that when you enter the blogosphere. First, you should find your neighbors. The Alexa toolbar is going to help you find out who the leaders are in your new community. Start by searching for “______ blog” on Google, Yahoo or your favorite search engine. Fill in the blank with the topic of your blog. Take a look at the blogs you see.
Do you like them? Good; these are leaders in your new community. Link to them in your blog roll. Read them daily to find out what is going on in your community. Do you not like them? No problem. Don’t link to them then. Don’t read them. Don’t introduce your visitors to them. It isn’t required that you like everyone in your new community, but you do want to be a part of the community you now live in…
Now as you read those blogs daily, notice their blog rolls (links they have to other blogs in your community). Go visit them. This is where the Alexa toolbar comes in. You will find some new leaders (those with blogs showing less than 100,000 on your Alexa toolbar). Check out their blog and if you like it… add it to your own blog roll.
I recently moved to a town of about 300 way up in the top of the Utah mountains. It was a new community. I had never lived in a rural area before, so it was critical for me to go through this exact same exercise as I became a part of my new community up here in the mountains. Sure; it didn’t involve Alexa or linking to others… but the concept is the same. When you enter a community and want to be a part of that community, get out there and get to know people. This is one way to do that in the blogging community.
I now have a hundred or so links from those in the blogging community after just a couple of months. From those links, I have over 600 daily visits and over 100 loyal readers who come to read my blog almost every day.
Did I ask for any of those links? Nope. Just like they didn’t ask me for the links I gave them. Do I have 100 outbound links? Nope. A lot of those links came in without me linking to them. As I get the chance, I go and check out their blog and if I like it… I give them a link. If I don’t like that blog for whatever reason; I don’t include it in my blog roll. It’s not always a tit for tat link exchange.
Some of you may be confused at this point about how my outbound links became inbound links without any other action. You may be confused about why I called this article “Getting Blog Visitors” when I have only talked about how to send my visitors to others by linking to them. OK; let me go into why this uniquely works very well on blogs, but not on other web-sites.
First, of all… I use Wordpress. It is the fastest growing blogging software out there. I’m not sure of the features of other blogging software, but I know the follow applies to Wordpress. When I log in to my control panel to write a blog post, I am given a page that shows a number of blog stats. One of the most prominent parts of those stats is the number of inbound links… AND a list of those who recently linked to me.
When you see that a blog called “Mattress Cleaners” just linked to you… can you ignore that? I can’t. I’m immediately distracted… and what do I do? I click on it. I go and check out that Mattress Cleaner blog. They just got another reader (at least for that day). If they were a quality blog that was actually relevant to the blog community of my own blog (and they aren’t)… they would get a link in my blog roll so that I could check them out periodically.
The same thing is possible with non-blog web-sites. When you link to a site and send them traffic, that shows up in their referrer logs. However, a lot of webmasters don’t look at their logs or stats. Those who do may use stat software that doesn’t even show referrers. They may only focus on traffic and not where it comes from.
However, most bloggers DO see when someone links to them. It is right in their face when they login to make a new post. All you need to do to let someone know that you have moved into their blog community is to link to them. BTW, it not only introduces you… it lets them know that you are friendly and you like their part of the blog community you just entered. Don’t be surprised when they link back or even write a post about your blog.
It’s that simple.
Internet marketing is all about hard results, not generic concepts of branding. Still, there are ways to go about branding your product or service on the net without spending a fortune.
Is Branding a Legitimate Internet Marketing Strategy
Branding refers to the vague notion of creating an identity for a product, service or name with consumers. The classic example, of course, is Coca Cola. Being first on the scene, the company has been able to create such a strong name brand that most people use the word “coke” instead of soda when ordering. This is true even when they prefer Pepsi. In the world of marketing, we all bow before the marketing team that accomplished this branding. The Internet, however, is a different beast. That same marketing team would be crushed if they went after a similar strategy on the net.
The Internet is so large that branding is an expensive and difficult goal unless you are the first major presence in a niche. Sites like EBay and Amazon were the first major money players in their fields, giving them a huge advantage over subsequent competitors. Unless you are coming to a field with a lot of money and no current dominant site, your branding efforts are going to meet with failure or limited success at best. If you want to stick with it, the only cost effective and ultimately successful strategy is to pursue a width search engine optimization campaign.
Search engine optimization is simply an effort to get pages on your site ranked high in search results on the three big search engines &ndash Google, Yahoo and MSN. To establish your brand, the best Internet marketing strategy is to identify every single phrase your prospects use to find services or products in your business area. You then build optimized pages for every single phrase and get them ranked.
This strategy has two benefits. First, it will produce free traffic to your site. If you build 200 pages and each gets 50 visitors a day, your site will receive 10,000 visitors a day. The second benefit is your brand becomes established. Regardless of what the prospect searches for, they keep seeing your site. This creates both recognition and credibility with the prospect as they tend to equate high rankings with quality. As they visit your site over and over, they will also become readily familiar with your unique selling position as presented on the site.
If you want to establish a brand, avoid wasting your money on banners and such unless you are in a niche that isn’t dominated by any single site. Instead, use the width search engine optimization tactic to establish your site and pick up free traffic.
There are ways around promoting your site. And it isn’t even going to cost you a cent (only a bit of your time). There are what we call web directories and article directories. Web directories, simply, are directories of various categories containing website listings. On the other hand, article directories are directories also containing various categories where you can publish your articles. Why mention the two? You’ll soon find out.
First off, are web directories. Did you know that there hundreds of web directories exist all across the net? What you do is you submit your site to these directories, and there you go &ndash instant links to your site! Did you also know that most of those web directories are free? That’s right, they won’t charge you anything (maybe just some occasional link backs to their site &ndash “reciprocal linking”). What matters is that a site is linking back to your site. If you do this with hundreds of other web directories (thousands, if you have the time and perseverance), you would have that many sites linking back to you. By doing so, your link popularity will increase. Link popularity is the number of links pointing back to your site (the more links, and the higher their PR, the better). It also the basis on how search engines would rank your site. If a search engine sees that you have high link popularity, they would see your site to be important, and rank you accordingly.
Next are article directories. I know what you’re thinking. How would articles help your site get traffic? First reason &ndash by submitting to article directories, you will have the chance to promote your site through the resource box or author’s biography. Like web directories, several hundred article directories exist. And again, they are also free. What you want are directories that let you submit and use their other articles for free. Why use free articles? Second reason &ndash if your site is lacking content and you want people to regularly visit you, use these free articles as your web content (always include the author and source). With your site having more content, more traffic will eventually come to you.
These are two ways of boosting your link popularity, page rank, and of course, traffic. Other than these, you can try getting inbound links through forum participation and link partnership with sites that are related to yours (but that’s another story). I hope you would find this useful, so enlist to web directories and write your articles now.
More and more webmasters have the recurring dilemma on how to increase the flow of traffic in the websites. During the past few years many methods that been developed to solve this predicament. While most of them would work there are those that would not make even a small impact.
One of the methods that have spawned many success stories in driving traffic into websites is viral marketing. Viral marketing makes use of the tendency of a person to share something to find informative, entertaining or amazing.
Many companies bank on this behavior to spread their products and increase the popularity of their company or their website. Viral marketing makes use of many mediums in enticing this behavior. It might be in the form of an interesting story, an addicting flash game, an amusing video and many others that may catch a person’s fancy.
This ingenious form of marketing is typically low cost and is a wonderful tool for any company to utilize. The benefit greatly overshadows the cost or efforts to initialize this marketing scheme. Any website would greatly benefit that viral marketing.
Tell A Friend Script
One of the easiest methods in viral marketing is using a tell a friend script. This is a simple programming script that you can attach to the programming of your website. Generally, tell a friends script are installed in pages where a media is placed so that a person can easily send the media to any of his friends or his family members.
The basic concept of a tell a friend script is a script wherein a person may input his name, e-mail address, the recipient’s e-mail address and send the media to the intended recipient much like an e-mail with an attachment. As the recipient receives the e-mail he wouldn’t think of the mail a spam mail because he would see the sender’s name as someone he or she knows and trust.
Tell a friend script eliminates greatly the chances of being blocked because they use the information inputted by the sender. This allows for wider spreading of this marketing method. It can be quite sneaky but it is very effective.
With the e-mail sent and opened the sent media will either be read, viewed or played. Also along with the mail would be a brief description of the company or site that sponsors the media sent. This allows for the introduction of either the site, company name or its products. The along with it is another tell a friend script.
Then the process begins again. As more people use the tell a friend script, more and more people will know of the existence of the sponsoring company or site. People who read the ads inside the mail who liked what they see would go and click on the link and visit the site. This drives traffic into the site resulting to great number of potential customers.
Tell A Friend Script Availability
A tell a friend script is very simple and does not require a complicated method of programming. In fact, you can copy paste a script and simply put it on an intended page. Finding one is even simpler. All you have to do is go to a search engine and type in the search box “tell a friend script” then press enter or click go.
In the search results page you will see many links that will direct you to a site where you can get a tell a friend script. It would just be a simple matter of looking and searching for the script and copying it to your intended web page.
With a tell a friend script viral marketing strategy you can drive traffic into your site which could potentially spell profits. This is a simple harmless script that offers great benefits for low cost paired with great creativity and foresight.
It is imperative that you have patience in using a tell a friend script. If your chosen media doesn’t get the mileage that is expected of it, it may take some time before it gets spread or shared. But surely many people will see your ads and there is great probability that they will visit your site increasing your traffic flow.
Blogs are a very popular ways of promoting your product or service. They are easy to install, easy to administer and easy to update. And search engines love them too. But what is a blog without traffic?Exactly. Here are five quick ways to boost traffic to your blog and start seeing those big sales.
1.Build a list of blog services to ping
There are a lot of blog services you can ping. This means that you notify this service, that you’ve updated your blog. These services then list your new posts and you get the traffic from them. I’ve made a list of 50+ blog services you can ping on my site. These list are also available if you search google or any other search engine for it. That should be enough to give an initial boost to your traffic.
2.Add buttons to popular news readers
What does this mean? Well there are sites like yahoo or google or bloglines etc, which have a members area where you can select sites with RSS feeds to fetch the latest updates from different blogs. That way you can have the latest updates from let’s say 50 blogs listed on one page. I have a list of these popular pages on my website plus the buttons which link to them. Users can then easily add my blog to their news reader members area.
3.Update your content regulary
Search engines and blog services love regular updates. It’s very likely that you will get targeted traffic from search engines if you post regulary. That means you should make a new post to your blog at least once per day. But be careful. Too many updates per day can harm your search engines position and hits. What’s too many? 10 or more.
4.Post in forums
Post in forums, but don’t spam them. Post something fresh and interesting and put a link to your blog in your signature. Don’t just post in any forum. For example if you’re selling cds, post in forums that are about music and cds. Don’t post in car forums if you’re selling furniture. By posting in forums you will get one-way links which are good for search engine position in search engines like google or msn or yahoo.
5.Submit to blog search engines
There are masses of search engines available, that list only blogs. Just google for
When you have a website, one of your most difficult tasks is to figure out a way to get people to come visit your site. If you are selling something, it becomes vital for your business that people will come and take a look at what you have built. The easiest way you can get more traffic to your website is to promote. Promoting a website is not a difficult task. In fact, it doesn’t even have to cost any money. Take a look at these ideas of promoting a website and bring more traffic to your site right away.
The first thing you can do to start promoting your website is start trading space with other websites. You can find websites and offer them space on your website to advertise their site. In return, you would get a free space on their website. Many times you will be able to earn more money if you make deals with sites who offer products that are related to yours, without being in competition. You might have to talk to fifty website owners to get a few to agree, but if you can do this for free, it will be worth it.
Another way you can go about promoting a website for free is by utilizing blogs and message boards to your advantage. When you post thoughtful comments on random blogs and message boards that somewhat relate to your website, you will be reaching more potential consumers. For example, if you have a fish hook website, you could post about your website on a fishing blog or message board. Those who came there would be most likely your targeted consumers and you could earn more money this way.
So, as you can see, to earn money online you do need to learn how to promote your website. However, you don’t have to pay an ad company a ton of money to do it for you. You may have to put in some time and effort, but you will be able to take on the task yourself.
Blogging: the act of writing in one’s weblog. To blog something is to write about something in one’s weblog. This usually involves linking to something the author finds interesting on the internet.
A weblog is a public web site where users post informal journals of their thoughts, comments, and philosophies. So basically, a blog is an online journal. A blog could be set up to no cost at all, and can be used for just for the fun of it or for business reasons.
Blogging itself isn’t new at all, it’s populary is. Thousants of teenagers all around the world see blogging as an outlet for their emotions, their opinions and interests. Smart marketers however, have discovered that blogging is one of the best Internet marketing methods that won’t cost you a cent.
Blogging for your Internet business is one surefire way to boost the visibility of your products and services.
Find some tips to boost your internet advertising with the help of a blog below:
* Keep your customers informed about changes to your website. Important updates, like your new products and affiliate sites, could also be announced through your blog
* Use your blog as an archive: keep track of your business objectives and plans through open writing. What could be better than searchable information that could be easily accessed by anyone browsing the web, right?
* Write reviews, give your opinion or advice on on specific services or products that are related to your business.
* Be sure to include links that will fetch back links and subsequently improve your ranking on search engines. Affiliate links in the form of advertisement banners could also be included in your blog to earn more extra income.
* Add fresh and quality content to your weblog on a regular basis: search engines like fresh content.
*Post quality content articles to your blog. Allow your visitors to reprint those articles on condition that the author by-lines remain unchanged, and the link url’s are left intact. This way, links to your website will spread around the net.
* Encourage your visitors to leave comments and feedback. It’s the best way to learn and improve your products/services.
* Exchange links with other bloggers.
In fact, when it comes to blogging, the sky is the limit. Once you’re comfortable using a weblog, it’s up to you to get creative. Add sound, video, eBooks, pictures, advertisements, … and give your website the boost it deserves!
You’ve put loads of effort in designing a site. You’ve added eye catchers and promotions to grab your visitor’s attention. And now you’re waiting… waiting for those visitors to come.
There are many ways to attract visitors to your site. You could of course spend a lot of money buying advertisements and promotion tools… Why not try it the FREE way first? You have absolutely nothing to lose and everything to gain!
First thing first: when promoting your site, always keep these tips in mind:
TIP 1: Persist
Keep your site promotion constant &ndash if you promote your site with persistence, it will catch your audience’s attention.
TIP 2: Be patient!
As you know, Rome wasn’t build in one day, neither is a continuous traffic stream… Try each method to decide what (combination) works best for your site.
TIP 3:
Never put all your efforts into only one kind of advertising &ndash you don’t want to reach the same potential visitors over and over again.
There are numerous ways to get your web site seen around the net without spending a dime. Listing them all would probably take hours. I’ve narrowed it down to the ones I think are the most important:
* Get your site listed in search engines en directories. Make sure to check your web site’s ranking to know whether or not this type of free promotion is right for you.
* Trade links with other web sites. Make your link description as attractive as possible. You’ll want people to click it! It’s a good idea to design an button and/or banner for your site to offer to your potential link partners.
* Use free classified ads: post them all around the web. They’ll attract non-targeted visitors to your site.
* Design an attention-grabbing banner and spread it all around the web. There are loads of free banner-exchange services on the net.
Like I said, listing them all would take hours, that’s why I’m not going to.
The above ones will be a good start. Just give them a try, and you’ll be amazed.
(Use an ad tracker to find out which free traffic generating system works best for you.)
And remember… the best thing in life are free!!