Open Journalism For All - News, Documentaries And Information Services

Traffic. A source of income and motivation for some and frustration and annoyance for others. For me, traffic is like some kind of Nirvava: something you always want but can never get. Not anymore!

I am sick of trying to get people to read my work, my masterpieces. From this moment on I will post only for myself.

Before I made this decision I tried every possible method to attract visitors to this site. I put my blog in dozens of directories, I became a member of several forums, I linked to other blogs, I commented on other blogs, and I joined traffic exchange sites (Blog Explosion). These in particular became a place that I now direct my anger. To get one visitor you have to visit two other sites. And the visitors that you do get are more concerned with moving on to the next site so that they get their own visitors!

The one thing that really annoys me above all else is blogs that actually do get traffic (Good old Australian tall poppy syndrome). They seemingly do nothing and yet, they reap the rewards for it.

After reading many ‘How to get traffic’ articles and failing, I have decided to go the opposite direction, away from the popular path. In a phrase: ‘You can all get stuffed!’

Russ Egan
http://s-bend.blogspot.com

Checking your search engine placement progress can be a tedious
job, and quite time consuming.

Most articles and information on the subject will lead you to
use a service like position agent at bcentral, or another tool
that will take a keyword from you and let you know how your site
is doing in the top engines under that keyword or keyword
phrase. In most cases they only bring back results for the top
forty pages of the top 7 engines.

This is a common practice by many and often times it leads to
search engine frustration and lack of tracking. Many people fail
to find their sites in worthy positioning and constantly rework
and resubmit. This is very self defeating and can get you thrown
out as a spammer.

People give up and move on to other ways of promoting their
sites and leave the hope of Front Page placement behind. Front
Page search engine placement to them seems like a waste of time
and is often compared to winning the lottery.

I track a little differently. It is much more revealing than any
of the usually prescribed methods. It is my goal to help you see
the difference, between where you “can be found” and where you
are “being found”.

Trying to find out where you *can be* found is the needle inthe
haystack approach I outlined above. This involves hours of
guessing at what you think the possible keyword combinations are
that you may be found under and submitting to the position
agents and waiting for a good results. The more indexes you
build the more time you can lose with these methods.

There’s even more effort you have to put into inputting keywords
to check the progress of your possible placement. If no results
yielded yet, then plan on several sessions trying to track down
where you can be found. They just don’t index them the as fast
as they used to. This is a major pain and you can miss so many
keyword phrases that it is an empty approach to finding out
anything about your efforts.

Finding out where you *are being* found is a much more effective
plan. It tells you what’s working, results come to you, and it
tells you how people are thinking to find you. You’re not
guessing how you think they should be finding you. You’re
learning how your clients think and how they already found you.

Okay, so how do I find out how my visitors find me? I use a
simplestatistics tracker on my sites. Your hosting company may
provide stats for you check into it. They should include a
section for referrers or top referrers. If so your all set. Find
a way to access those stats. Check the referrers section and
they will tell you how you were found. If it was through a
search engine, click on the link and it should bring you to the
page you were found on, complete with the keywords used, listed
right there. You can check your progress every week and find out
where you are popping up.

If your host does not have tracking software go to
www.goldstats.com or some other FREE stats place and get
yourself a statistics tracker on your site right away!

For me, marketing without referrer stats is like…

…trying to catch a fly in the dark.

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

A successful business owner, whether in e-commerce or a mom and pop
store, has usually found some way to be of service to their customer.
Not only does helping your customer build and strengthen your customer
relationships but it also can truly help your customers meet their
goals. Free downloads or freebies is just a digital manifestation of
what business pioneers have long ago understood. Helping your customer
is good business!

The files you offer that are related to your service or industry can do
many things for your online business. It can increase your visibility
to a target base, make your site memorable, and it can potentially
increase your site’s traffic. For instance, a programmer may offer free
open-source applications to potential customers (which many of them do)
in hopes the visitors will share the application (more traffic or
visibility), and ultimately the visitors will return to the site when
they want to customize or enhance the program. Consumers are more
likely to buy from someone with whom they have already built a
relationship.

Free downloads can vary from e-books, templates of various kinds,
software, screensavers, or others. To make each download effective, you
have to let others know they are available. There are many sites
dedicated to offering freebies. Submit your download or a link to your
download page to those sites. Use your favorite search engine to gather
a listing of these freebie sites.

It may seem obvious, but don’t forget to include references to your
product or service and your site address within your download.

You should see dramatic increase in your traffic but not just to the
download page. Many visitors will become genuinely interested in your
company and what you to have offer. Keep you site updated and offer
incentives to those who download in your freebies. In addition to
obtaining traffic, you should see an increase in your contact database
and new business. So continuously submit your freebie links to other
sites and eventually your efforts will pay off.

Understanding what your visitors do on your site is crucial information, not to mention interesting. If a large majority of your visitors who proceed to purchase a product leave the site when they get to a specific page in the order process, you need to know about it. It could be that the page in question is confusing or hard to use. Fixing it could increase your sales exponentially. In fact, it is not uncommon for small website changes in headlines and order processes to result in a 200%-300% increase in sales. This is just an example; there are many reasons why you want a detailed analysis of your site visitors.

Most website hosting services offer a stats package that you can study. If you’re not sure where this is, call up your hosting service and ask them. Statistics are a vital part of tracking your marketing progress. If you don’t have access to website statistics get a package that can help you in this area. Do not get a counter that just shows how many visitors you’ve had. You’ll be missing out on vital information that can help strengthen weaknesses in your site. A good website hosting service would offer traffic logs that provide an invaluable insight into the traffic being referred to a web site from various sources such as search engines, directories and other links.

Unfortunately, traffic tracking provided by web hosting services is often in the form of raw traffic log files or other hard-to-comprehend, cryptic formats. These log files are basically text files that describe actions on the site. It is literally impossible to use the raw log files to understand what your visitors are doing. If you do not have the patience to go through these huge traffic logs, opting for a trafficlogging
package would be a good idea.

Basically two options are available to you and these are: using a log analysis package or subscribing to a remotely hosted trafficlogging service. A remotely hosted traffic logging service may be easy to use and is generally the cheaper option of the two. In fact, you can get a powerful free tracking tool at: StatCounter.com. Other reliable tracking programs include WebTrends.com and HitsLink.com. These services do not use your log files. Typically a small section of code is placed on any page you want to track. When the page is viewed, information is stored on the remote server and available in real time to view in charts and tables form.

A good traffic logging service provides detailed statistics pertaining to the following:

• How many people visit your site?
• Where are they from?
• How are visitors finding your site?
• What traffic is coming from search engines, links from other sites, and other sources?

• What keyword search phrases are they using to find your site?
• What pages are frequented the most - what information are visitors most interested in?
• How do visitors navigate within your web site?

Knowing the answers to these and other fundamental questions is essential for making informed decisions that maximize the return on
investment (ROI) of your website investment.

The most important aspect of tracking visitors to your website is analyzing all the statistics you get from your tracking software. The three main statistics that will show your overall progress are hits, visitors and page views. Hits are tracked when any picture or page loads from your server on to a visitor’ss browser. Hits, however, can be very misleading. It is quite an irrelevant statistic for your website.

The statistic that is probably the most important for a website is Page Views/Visitors. This gives you a good indication of two things. First, how many people are coming to your site, and secondly how long are they staying on your site. If you have 250 visitors and 300 page views you can figure that most visitors view one page on your site and then leave. Generally, if you’re not getting 2 page views per visitor then you should consider upgrading your site’s content so your visitors will stay around longer.

If you see the number of visitors you have increasing as well as the number of page views per visitor increasing then keep up the good work! Always look for this stat as an overall barometer of how your site design is going and if your marketing campaigns are taking hold. Also, a good stat to look for is unique visitors. Once a person visits your site they will not be added to the unique visitors category if they visit again. This is a good way to track new visitors to your website. Page views are a good indication of how “sticky” your website is. A good statistic to keep is Page Views divided by the number of Visitors you have. This statistic will give you a good idea if your content is interesting and if your visitors are staying on your site for a long time and surfing.

Some people are intimidated by web traffic statistics (mostly because of the sheer volume of data available), but they shouldn’t be. While there are many highly specialized statistics that can be used for more in-depth web traffic analysis, the above areas alone can provide invaluable information on your visitors and your website performance. Remember, this data is available for a reason. It’s up to you to use it.

About the Author

Ravikiran Thummalapenta is a professional software Develper who blogs about technology and entrepreneurship his recent blog is ZillionBits is about How to Make Money Online - ZB is about learning skills, sharing information and providing tips on how to make money online Online.

It is quite obvious that even the best optimised site with the best copy written sales page will not make a dime without one very necessary addition. That ‘addition’ is Traffic.

Whilst there are many ways to generate traffic most of them cost money with no guarantees that a profit will be made once you have parted with your cash. However, there are also many ways to generate good targeted traffic which need not cost the earth and, in some cases, are even free. Here are five of the best ways to generate low cost traffic; they do involve some input but are well worth the effort.

1. Exchange Links

This is a proven way to generate traffic and a careful study of the top ranking sites on the search engines will show all of them with considerable numbers of links. It is to your advantage to ensure that all sites to which you link operate within a similar niche or theme as your own site. If you share a similar subject you will be more likely to get traffic as your site will be seen as a recommendation by the site they are on.

Another benefit to linking in this way is that your site will increase its chances of a higher ranking with the search engines. This, in turn, can help with eventually getting traffic from the search engines in addition to that from the linking site.

2. Writing Articles

There are many sites on the internet where you may submit articles (newsletters, directories, etc.) Many of these are free of cost so if cash is tight you can start submitting to these initially. If you want to save costs, you can write the articles yourself. There are many freelance writers who are willing to write for you for a small fee, but to save money, it is wise to do the articles yourself if you can.

You should write articles that closely match the theme of your site. Try to write about something you know well. Give tips and guidance learned from your own experiences. In this way you will come across as an ‘expert’ in your field and this, in turn, can encourage your readers to then visit your site. Always include a resource box at the end of your articles which should be a short bio about yourself and include the URL to your website.

3. Traffic Exchanges

This is a form of link exchange except that members of a traffic exchange view each others pages by surfing. Each time you view a page you gain a credit so the more pages you view the more credits you receive. Your own page is then shown to other members normally using one credit per show. Once you have exhausted your credits you may earn more by again surfing. You also have the option to purchase credits if you wish.

Traffic from exchanges is not generally well targeted and does not produce many sales but it can be used quite successfully to capture names for your subscriber list with the use of a ’squeeze’ page.

4. Your Own Newsletter

Once you have subscribers (via the traffic exchanges or other means) will need to send out your newsletter on a regular basis either weekly, monthly etc. This may sound a little daunting in view of the fact that you will need to write many articles on a consistent basis. However, this should present no problem as there a many writers and sites that are more than willing to provide you with free articles so long as their resource box remains at the end of the article. Any promotions you make in your newsletter will inevitably bring traffic to that promoted site and as your list of subscriber grows so, too, will your traffic.

5. Forums

Online forums and communities abound in just about any subject you can imagine. Find several forums that relate to whatever site you wish to promote and, after joining, you should carefully study the topics under discussion and then submit your own offerings by way of answers to published questions or even a question of your own. Make sure that the forum allows you to append your resource box at the end of your posting as this is where your traffic will come from. It is important to know that you are not permitted to blatantly advertise on these forums and to do so will usually mean you will be barred.
So it is important that you are allowed your bio at the foot of your posting. Do not bother with any forum where your resource box is not permitted.

Each of these methods can generate a great deal of traffic and, with the exception of the traffic exchanges, the traffic will be very targeted. The method of using articles can, over time, build traffic to really large numbers. However it is important to remember that there are no free lunches in this world. If you do not pay with money then you must substitute with time. The great thing about these five methods is that you will never waste your time - they all get results, proven time after time.

Brian Hunter has been active on the internet since 2002 and works from home promoting one of the largest traffic building information centers on the net at: http://www.clicksilo.com

Does anyone really enjoy the tedium of spending hours upon
hours searching for quality link partners? I know I don’t.
That’s why I’ve devised a free and incredibly easy method
for generating thousands of incoming links to websites that
takes the hassle out of getting other sites to link to you.

The number of incoming links you will be able to generate is
directly proportional to the number of hits on your website.
The good news is that even if you have only a small handful
of visitors coming to your site daily, you still have the
potential to generate a substantial amount of links pointed
your way.

Here are the two simple steps required to start generating
your free incoming links:

1. Carry this article on your website and feature it prominently. The more people who see it, the more incoming
links you’ll potentially receive.

2. Create a “featured site” link that creates a new window when clicked on. This “featured site” will be the website where you originally viewed this article. The original window containing your website will stay open, so your visitor will eventually return to view your page.

That’s it! Now compare that to conventional methods of finding sites that will link to you. A quick word to the wise: I recommend that you only link to sites with themes similar to yours. If you own a fishing website, for example, and link to a music website, you may potentially damage your Google page ranking. At the same time, by linking to websites with similar content, in many cases you will improve your Google page rank.

If you don’t have a “featured site” link on your website, people will be less likely to link to you. Do the person who put this article in front of you a favor and send them some traffic, and you will be rewarded more than you can possibly imagine, provided you have a website that generates a decent amount of traffic.

If your website receives ten hits a day, or 5000 hits a month, you stand to gain mightily by using this innovative incoming link-generating tool. Even better, this article does 90% of the work for you! Have fun, and enjoy your extra traffic!

**Attn Ezine editors/Site owners**
Feel free to reprint this article in its entirety in your ezine or on your site so long as you leave all links in place, do not modify the content and include our resource box as listed below. Feel free to substitute your referral link in place of ours in the resource box. Thanks!

Wanna learn how to generate thousands of highly targeted visitors, absolutely free? => http://www.iwantchoices.com

If you have to part with your hard-earned money for some goods or services, who would you rather trust: a novice provider or an expert one? The answer to that question is what makes branding so much important.

Branding is the process, nay, the art, of stamping a seal of professionalism and reliability on products or services that are related to you. It’s the core of every business and the heart of every successful trade. Donald Trump has made a living out of branding. He has established for himself a reputation for producing quality goods. Since his name has been attached to this perception, he has extended the same to all his products.

Today, people choose his offerings because of the Trump name. The same principle can be applied online. Brand yourself as an expert in a certain field and people would go to you whenever they’ll have needs relevant to your specialization. It’s the best advertisement there is: a public perception of your expertise.

The Internet has taken this a step further with the formulation of a strategy called viral branding. The trick here is to allow the spread of your expertise is such a way that the number of people who would view you as a bankable provider would grow exponentially.

Contrary to popular belief, this is quite easy to pull off. Here are some ways to brand yourself and allow the word to spread like wildfire. Soon enough, your reputation would be synonymous with excellence.

Write about something you know by heart. Words convey your expertise, so you better use this avenue well.

Write an e-book, or a special report, or an article even. Make sure it is informative and helpful for anyone who chances upon it.

If you don’t have the time to write, hire a ghostwriter. There are a lot of them on the net. Some charge high, while there are those who have reasonable rates. Find someone you could trust, and who would be able to present the topic you have in mind in the most interesting way possible.

If you have written, or have caused the writing, of an e-book or a special report, you have to distribute it with enough incentive for the reader to spread it in his network. Usually, a quality work would do the trick. But to be sure, give it away for free, or bundle it with other products. Explicitly state that the reader can give it away to his friends and family members. This would make your work go viral.

If you have written, or have caused the writing, of an article, submit it to as many free articles sites on the web, with your name and website prominently displayed in the resource box. Encourage the readers to republish the article for as long as they maintain the resource box.

Publish your own eZine. An eZine, or electronic magazine, would be a consistent venue you could use to show your subscribers your reliable business plan. Encourage them to ask questions, and answer these queries in your eZine. One person’s question would then become everyone’s concern, and broadcasting your answer to all of them could only reinforce your good reputation.

Provide excellent after purchase service. No matter how good your product is, the buyer won’t remember your name unless you give him something extra. A good post-purchase service, i.e. technical support, eligibility for freebies, etc., would assure you that your clients will remember you instead of merely remembering the product.

Establish relationships. Treat people well and chances are they will treat you just as nice. Every online acquaintance is one person more to your network, and that one person has a separate network of hundreds more. Having good relationships with the people you deal with is the best way of getting the word out that your name means good business.

Paul Duxbury runs a number of successful membership sites alongside his other income generating websites. He has recently launched http://www.web-success.co.uk which provides free information on running an online or home based business.

Viral marketing is one of the newest and most powerful ways to market your product or your Internet service. With Viral marketing strategies you can increase your web traffic tremendously with minimal effort.

I am going to show you several ways to market your product virally.

Viral marketing is all about giving away your own free product, ebook, article, software, or service along with your ad copy. Then your website or affiliate links are embeded into the content and take the visitor back to your website.

In turn, recipients of your free product are allowed to pass it along to their own clients, prospects, visitors and others as a freebie. This multiplies your marketing with less effort.

Here are some VIRAL MARKETING techniques you can start using right away.

Give a way a free ebook to your website visitors. Include a nice full-color ad for your most popular product line with links to your website and email. Tell your visitors to share copies of the ebook with their own site visitors and other contacts. Do a search for viral ebook compilers and you can find one quickly.

Many affiliate programs will give you free viral ebooks that you can use to insert your own affiliate links into. When your web surfers download, read these ebooks, click on the links, and make purchases, you make cash.

Provide a trial or “lite” version of your software with your website visitors as a freebie. Don’t forget to include that ad for your most popular product line with links to your website and email.

And tell recipients to share copies of the software with their own site visitors and other contacts. For help creating software, hire help from online bid sites like Elance.com.

Offer to host small business web sites on your server at no charge. In exchange, place your own banner ad at the top of the site for viral marketing. You can setup a fold for their site and they can choose their own domain name and have it redirected to that folder.

Design your own website or other templates, include your own marketing information on them and give them away as free downloads or as an electronic package. Grant permission for recipients to pass them along. Encourage them to do so.

Write articles about your industry. Include your website and contact information in the byline and grant permission for others to publish as long as they keep the byline in tact.

You can also use article submission service to do this as well.

Then people can use your contact on websites, in ezines, newsletters and other places where once again, viral marketing will speed the spread of information about your business.

Set up a Discussion Board on your website with your banner ad attached at the top. And invite others to link to it and use it for their own sites. Make sure that you will maintain the discussion. You can also post on other boards with a link back to your board.

In summary, by using viral marketing strategies, you can reach out all over the Internet with much less effort. See which methods work best for you and repeat them as often as needed. Keep persevering.

Jeff Flow will provide you with expert coaching, residual income opportunities, viral affiliate programs, free viral e-books, free articles, the absolute best online marketing resources and services, and your very own ready-made *modular* website. http://viral-ebooks.jeff-flow.com/

I cannot stress the importance of targeted traffic for the survival and prosperity of any web site and the importance increases when this web site is an ecommerce web site. But getting more and more traffic is not always the answer to increase your profits, I am not saying to stop working at increasing your traffic but I am saying that you must also focus on your ‘traffic to sales conversion rate’.

Let me illustrate this using an example:

You sell a £50 product, and convert 1% of your visitors to sales. 100 visitors would earn you £50 and if it costs you £40 to get these visitors, you’re making a profit of just £10. Therefore, if you wanted to make £1000 a month profit you would need 10,000 visitors/month

Now, if you raise your conversion rate from 1% to 2% for every 100 visitors you would get two sales, so now your sales are £100, but the cost of your traffic remains constant at £40. Your profit is now £60. So without spending any more money you have increased your profits by 500%. Continuing, if you raise your conversion rate from 1% to 3% means your profits have risen by 1000%.

So now if you want $1000/month in profits, you only need 910 visitors, instead of 10,000 which is slightly easier to obtain as you can imagine.

Raising your conversion rate has to be a focus for any web site and the only way to achieve an increase in conversion rate is to offer your customers exactly (or as near to it as possible) what they are looking for when they arrive at your web site. The majority of the work is done for you because these targeted visitors are already interested in the subject of your web site you just have to lcok them into your site using your layout, sales copy, prices etc.

It is hard to say ‘do this and do that’ and offer a definitive guide to raising your conversion rate because different products offer different opportunities to lock customers in but one of the key factors is to make sure your site is easy to navigate and has good search function support so that your visitors can easily find what they are looking for. The easier customers can find the product, and complimentary products, the greater the chance that they are likely to buy.

Don’t put barriers in place to prevent your customers from buying, the easiest way to do this is to conduct usability analysis by communicating directly with your site users and use the feedback to optimise your site for ease of use. This also has the added advantage because it not only allows you to learn about how the users view your site but it can also build loyalty and awareness from customers because you are seen to be caring for the customer.

The best approach to converting visitors into customers is to provide them with all the information they need to make an informed decision which in turn will encourage them to act (ie. buy), with this in mind think about where you are going to send your visitors when they click on a specific link to your web site. It has to be structured so as to maintain the conversion process, for example, when you are ‘touting for traffic’ you may be advertising a specific discount that is available via your site and when the visitor clicks on the relevant link they should be taken to a specific page that will educate them about the discount and entice them to sign up for your service. If the link takes people to a page without the information they need odds are you’ll lose the customer.

Mike - webmaster at Online Auction Trader

Visit Business Resources at Online Auction Trader for comprehensive information on developing a sustainable online income stream.