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Developing A Steady Stream Of Web Site Traffic

7 December, 2007 (15:07) | Increasing Traffic | By: clive

Developing A Steady Stream Of Web Site Traffic

by Shelley Lowery

If you're doing business on the Internet, developing a steady stream of web site traffic is an essential part of your success. However, as the Internet contains a wealth of information, you may be feeling a bit overwhelmed and not sure where to start.

Although there are many ways you can promote your web site and develop traffic, this article will focus on the most effective marketing and promotional techniques.

Writing and Publishing Articles

Writing and publishing articles in the area of your expertise is one of the most effective ways to promote your business online. What's more, if you have the ability to write, it won't cost you a dime!

The concept is simple. You write an informative article and allow it to be freely published on the Internet with your resource box and a link to your web site included.

Writing and publishing articles has a number of benefits:

* You will develop a steady stream of web site traffic from those who read your articles.
* You will receive inbound links to your web site, which will assist you in increasing your search engine ranking.
* You will build trust and credibility, as your article will promote you as an expert in your field.
* You can promote yourself, your business and your web site completely free.

There are many email article announcement groups and directories on the Internet that will enable you to post your article completely free. What's more, most of these resources will enable publishers to publish your article in their ezine and/or on their web site, which can provide you with massive free promotion and traffic.

Even if you aren't confident in your ability to write your own articles, there are many writers online you can hire to write your articles for you.

Visit any of the following web sites to find a writer for your project:

http://www.guru.com
http://www.rentacoder.com
http://www.scriptlance.com

For additional information, read the article titled, 'Write for Publicity.'
http://www.web-source.net/write.htm

Internet Forums

Participating in forums that target your market is another effective way to promote your business. No matter what type of business you're promoting, chances are, there are online forums with people who share your interest.

You can find suitable forums by using any search engine and typing in your topic with the word 'discussion' behind it. Ideally, you should look for forums that are spam free, moderated, and have a lot of active members.

Prior to posting to any forum, please ensure that you read the rules and fully understand them. Although blatant advertising will be prohibited, most forums will allow a signature file.

Participating in forums has a number of benefits:

* You will receive traffic from those who read your posts.
* You will receive inbound links to your web site, which will assist you in increasing your search engine ranking.
* You will build trust and credibility, as your posts will promote you as an expert in your field.
* You can promote your business completely free.

For best results, try to participate in three to five forums, making at least one post per day in each.

Google AdWords (Pay-Per-Click)

Google AdWords provides a simple way to purchase highly targeted text ads that are displayed with the search results, regardless of your budget.

Studies have shown that highly targeted keyword advertising produces an average of four times the industry standard clickthrough rate.

Google AdWords enables you to have complete control over your ad and how much you'd like to spend. You can open an account with a credit card and with no minimum deposit required. Once you place your ad, it can begin running almost immediately.

Google AdWords provides Internet marketers with a cost-effective advertising solution.

For further information, read the article titled, 'Increase Your Sales with a Highly Targeted Advertising Campaign.'
http://www.web-source.net/ad_camp.htm

Ezine Advertising

Ezine Advertising is an effective form of online advertising. Not only is it effective, but it can also be very inexpensive depending upon the size of the publication.

The key to using ezine advertising effectively is to target your audience and track your response. You must test the effectiveness of both your ad and the publication in which you're advertising. This will enable you to determine which ads are pulling the most response and which publications are providing you with a high response rate.

When selecting an ezine to buy advertising, make sure you select an ezine that targets your potential customer. In other words, if you were selling health products you wouldn't want to advertise in a 'marketing' ezine. You would want to advertise in an ezine that focuses on health.

The Directory of Ezines (http://www.directoryofezines.com) provides a complete online searchable database of ezines that accept advertising. This directory contains all of the information you'll need to know to effectively place your ads. However, please note, there is a small fee.

Although this list of promotional strategies is far from complete, they will provide you with a great place to start and assist you in quickly obtaining a steady stream of targeted traffic to your web site.

Shelley Lowery is the author of Web Design Mastery www.WebDesignMastery.com and eBook Starter www.eBookStarter.com. Visit Web-Source.net, to sign up for a complimentary subscription to eTips and receive a copy of Shelley's popular ebook, 'Killer Internet Marketing Strategies.' www.Web-Source.net

Article Source: High Quality RSS Feeds and Articles on 350+ Topics

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12 Steps For Better Blogging

6 December, 2007 (19:15) | Blogging, Increasing Traffic | By: clive

12 Steps For Better Blogging

by Jason Tarasi

If you are blogging to attract new customers and prospects to your business, it is important that you have a successful blueprint to follow.

With that in mind I created my step by step Blogging Blueprint, which you can find below:

1 While writing a blog, think like a visitor, as this helps immensely. If a blogger dons the visitor's thinking cap, there is more likelihood the words a visitor will use to query search engines will be present in the blog.

2. Add a good layout and catchy adverts to a blog. This helps because the visitor might want to stay longer reading the blog, rather than scooting away to another site.

3. Once the blog is published, it is a good idea to 'visit' the blog assuming to be a visitor. Going over links and various pages can give a feeling of how a visitor will react to the blog.

4. Inspect the site regularly, as this can uncover any broken links. Likewise, it is also a good opportunity to do some site maintenance as well. Jotting down points like what can be added to augment site appeal and what else could be added to the FAQ page can be of immense advantage.

5. Use key words that are more likely to be used by visitors to search for your blogs. If there are individuals who want to read about, lets say, power gardening tools, then missing out key words like power or gardening can be a huge mistake. This is because search engines will give the blog a go-by and opt it out of the listings.

Further, the visitor may even chance upon the blog in the listings, but may choose to avoid the site, because the keywords were not highlighted in the large search engine listing.

6. Posting articles about 700 words in length is considered good if taking into account search engine indexing tactics. You can make the post search engine friendly by inserting relevant keywords and links at the right places.

7. You can incorporate specific key words, which are adored by search engines. Integrate keywords into title, meta and alt tags to entice the search engine spider to give the blog a higher page rank.

8. Listening to feedbacks and visitor complaints can be a blessing for you. Despite a lot of effort, a blog might contain obvious technical glitches or perhaps the content might require further elaboration or alterations.

9. Spamming can sometimes be disguised as intelligent comments, which might include further links or invitations to a spammer's website. Niche blogs might wish to opt out of the custom of inviting comments.

10. If you are into business blogging, picking up good categories like skin care, dry skin care, skin care specials, exclusive skin care products, etc can be particularly rewarding. A good post on niche products can improve keyword density while providing wholesome reading material for visitors.

11. Many bloggers give up after publishing a few blogs. Although there is no right answer to how often you should blog, the secret of profitable blogging is to publish regularly and as frequently as necessary while avoiding both extremes.

12. Use permalinks (permanent links) where servers allow their use. Permalinks allow the use of words as path names, unlike regular links to articles that may contain percentage signs or shorter cryptic pathnames. The secret is to use key words as path names on servers where the use of permalinks is allowed. This makes the site more appealing to those search engines that also look at links for indexing.

Jason Tarasi publishes the "Marketer's Protection Newsletter". Subscribe now and DISCOVER the insider secrets you MUST know to protect yourself from fraud, lawsuits and other potential risks that could permanently harm your online business. Protect Your Online Business By Clicking Here Now!

Article Source: High Quality RSS Feeds and Articles on 350+ Topics

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Social bookmarking services: Using social bookmarking services to increase your traffic and to get back links.

29 November, 2007 (21:00) | Increasing Traffic | By: clive

Social Bookmarking Services: Leveraging Social Bookmarking Sites for Traffic and Back links
by: Guna Seelan

Social Bookmarking websites rely on the democratic nature of the web to structure information in such a way that is easily digestible and requires less effort than before. Such sites, including reddit.com, netscape.com and digg.com allow their massive user base to vote on web pages and as those web pages gain more votes, their position in the site increases. As a marketing tool, the power of such websites is threefold. On one level you gain direct traffic from the sites that are linking to you, on another level you gain brand exposure and acknowledgment that you are an accredited website, while on the third level you increase your websites position in the search engines through the links that you attain from the social bookmarking and other sites that may link to your webpage after seeing it there. The linking part is the most important bi-product of social bookmarking services; the other advantages are just ancillary.

A social bookmarking company will work with you to identify the most important pages on your website, then they will gain links for those pages from social bookmarking websites. They will ensure that your content gets submitted with appropriate anchor text to your website, and inside the correct category of the social bookmarking site, ensuring that you gain maximum exposure and optimum benefit from the links that they attain. A social bookmarking service provider will also maintain a list of social bookmarking sites through which to submit your website, and they will most likely update this regularly to ensure that your website and internal pages are always being submitted to the sites that pass the most link equity and that have large enough user bases to add value to your website.

When working with a social bookmarking provider, it is imperative that the company employs only manual techniques in promoting your website. Should you work with a provider that uses software as part of their process of promoting your site, then not only will your links be removed from the sites, your domain will also be banned; meaning that your chances of being able to leverage bookmarking sites will be removed indefinitely: giving your competitors a clear competitive advantage going into the future. Professional bookmarking companies will have registered and trusted accounts on bookmarking sites, and will not attempt to provide multiple votes from the same IP address in an attempt to game the algorithm of the sites.

When looking for a bookmarking service you should look for a company that has experience in either search engine optimization or submission services and find out if they have evolved their offerings to allow their clients to gain a competitive advantage through leveraging social bookmarking sites. Because social bookmarking is such a new and fast moving space; companies specializing specifically in social bookmarking sites have yet to gain any traction in the marketplace. Those that have thus far have attempted to use software to increase margins, however have done so at the detriment of their offerings.

About the author

Internet investigator Guna Seelan offer spam free manual social bookmarking service to high PR sites and provide you one way links at the lowest rates with screenshot confirmation. More works by the writer on the subject of social bookmarking can be found on http://www.submitinme.com.

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Increase quality targeted traffic through writing articles.

29 November, 2007 (20:45) | Increasing Traffic | By: clive

Quality Targeted Traffic Through Writing Articles

By Jon Murray [ 16/11/2007 ]

You’ve seen the promises, you’ve visited the blogs and message boards and forums. There is always somebody willing to give you the ultimate answer to building Internet traffic. More often than not you’ll find that someone who is suggesting something easy and radical will have an affiliate link in his/her signature.

Let me give you an example of this misdirected guidance. Recently I’ve been looking for ways to broaden my base of advertising on my web sites, it isn’t that I’m unhappy with my current advertisers, but as many people are, I’m always looking to improve my click-through-rate and payment per click. I found a thread on just such a subject on a well respected SEO forum. Almost every poster was gushing about a new ad agency, promising better ads, higher payouts, etc. I bought right into the hype , signed up (earning the person who’s link I signed up through a $25 referral fee) and over the first 3 days made a whopping 34 cents.

A little disappointed, I went back to the forum and looked at that thread again. 95% of the posters who were touting this service as the second coming also had links to the referral program in their signature. They say there is a sucker born every minute, on that day I was the sucker. I’ve been doing this for two years now and for the most part think I’m getting things figured out, but for every good piece of advice there are twenty people trying to sell you a dream.

So, what have I found that works for building Internet traffic. I’ll give you a hint, it’s something you’ve heard about before, but something that is tried and true and works. Article Marketing is one of the very few techniques that truly builds traffic and it does it the right way, slowly, consistently and over the long term. I know you are looking for that quick and dirty solution. I know you are thinking maybe if you throw some money at it things will happen. I know you think you’re smarter than all the other web masters and your “trick” will work. In the end, you’ll likely end up spending a bunch of time and money on something worthless, or worse yet, do something against Google’s TOS and end up indexed at page 500.

Get into the right frame of mind and write and article. Make sure your article is easy to read, make sure it is targeted. Realize that your final goal is not just to get your article submitted to the article directories, but to have web masters put your article on their web site. Quality is important, focus is important. Use relevant keywords and please, please check your spelling. A good quality article will pay dividends in two ways, first by the article directory itself and then again when publishers pick up your article and put it on one of their pages.

Let me give you an example of the second link kickback. Last year I wrote a Christmas article about sleigh rides. Okay, honesty time here, my wife wrote the article about sleigh rides. Anyway, I submitted the article to a few article sites and then didn’t think about it again. What I did notice was that about two months later I had a big increase in traffic and wondered why. I did a search in Google on my domain name and found that my article was on the front page of a page rank 5 blog. Do you have any idea what a link from a high profile blog like that is worth in traffic? Of course you do, if you didn’t you wouldn’t be here reading this article.

I don’t need to tell you that article marketing is a solid, proven technique for driving traffic to your web site and building up a wealth of quality back links to your site, you already know that. What I do need to do is tell you that it takes time, hard work and patience, but it will pay dividends. Sometimes it takes 4 or 5 months for an article you’ve written to start paying those dividends, but it will. I see you need another example.

I started an account on a popular article site more than a year ago and started submitting articles. I was recently doing a search and one of my articles on that site came up in the research results and I decided to take a peek, for old times sake. To my surprise the page that my article was on was a page rank 2 page. So page rank 2 isn’t a big deal, but the face that I got three links in my article from a page rank 2 site and didn’t pay a cent for it is a big deal. So I looked at the rest of my articles on that site, all of the older ones had a similar page rank. Then I looked at some other, older articles. Some of them had a page rank even higher! So, even if your article doesn’t get picked up, it’s value appreciates over time on the article site, the high page rank that the site enjoys is passed along to the hard working article authors pages.

Start writing articles today. I am being honest with you here, the article you write today will not generate huge traffic for you in 24 hours, but six months from now that article will be generating traffic and improving your search engine rankings. The good news is that the longer your article is out there in the web-sphere, the more it is worth to your web site. As the links pointing back to your site get older, your importance in Google’s ranking algorithm gets higher. Article marketing is the one true, proven way to increase traffic to your web site.

About the author:
For over 50,000 Quality Articles visit Article Chimp. For niche articles about software, visit http://www.open-source-depot.com

Article Source: http://www.Free-Articles-Zone.com

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Driving traffic to your website. How to get more traffic and increase profits.

28 November, 2007 (12:24) | Advertising, Google | By: clive

Take the Wheel – Drive Customers to your Website
by: Lori Quaranta

So you own a small business and you have made the decision to build a simple website to gain internet exposure. Or maybe you already have a website that no one visits? You can be the proud owner of the slickest website you have ever seen, but if you aren?t getting any traffic because it?s not properly optimized you have wasted a good chunk of change and a lot of your valuable time. Weather you are building a site from scratch or tweaking one that already exists, consider these web hosting and marketing tips to help drive traffic to your website:

For Web Hosting:

1) Start with keywords – Think about terms potential customers would use to find you in a search engine. What would you type in if you were looking for your business?

2) Use a keyword selector tool – Type your keywords into a keyword selector tool to see how many people have searched on the term in the last 30 days. Look for terms in the 2k-10k range that are relevant to your site.

3) Use domain names which match your keywords ? My client advertises products that are geared toward leadership skills development. In addition to leadingonedge.com he also has leadership-skills.info and a handful of others.

4) Use keywords throughout your web pages – Put your keywords in the title, description, keywords, graphics, and written text.

5) Use a keyword density analyzer – Check your website against a keyword density analyzer to see how frequently a specific keyword is used. Shoot for 3-15% density.

6) Slick and sexy doesn’t get you traffic – Don’t waste your money on slick graphics or things that fly across your screen. Most visitors find them annoying and search engines don’t care for them.

7) Use Google AdSense on your website – Whenever someone clicks on a Google ad in your website, you get revenue. And the ads are relevant to your content. My websites now pay for themselves with ad revenue alone.

8 ) Advertise Amazon books and products on your website – Set up an Amazon Associates account and put relevant books and products on your website. When someone buys a product you get referral revenue.

9) Consider using a website starter package – If going it on your own, think about using a website starter package which can have you up and running quickly.

10) Decide where you want to spend your time – In any business, time is money! Small business web hosting is very doable, but it does take time. Decide if you want to do it yourself or have a professional help you.

For Marketing:

1) Get an automated eCommerce system – These can be really good, very comprehensive and very inexpensive. The good ones can do everything from customer base management to product management to shopping cart to newsletter broadcasts.

2) Get a cheap and reliable merchant account provider – You can get merchant account providers that do both the merchant account and internet gateway for you.

3) Put a link back to your website in your email autosignature – This doesn’t need to be obnoxious, just a simple link that email recipients can click on to reference your website.

4) Do selective link trading – Link trade, but make sure the content on the other websites is similar to your own. Don’t touch “link farms” with a ten-foot pole; search engines hate them.

5) Write articles and include your website address ? Every business owner has something to say that someone would love to read about! There are a number of article databases out there that are researched for website content. Find some article databases which house content similar to yours and write a few articles. You’d be amazed at where your articles show up!

6) Write newsletters – Allow for customers and visitors to subscribe to a newsletter to get regular visibility to you and your company. This is also a great way to compile a customer email data base for your business.

7) Consider using a search engine submission services – These services submit your site to multiple search engines & directories. This can be helpful particularly if your website is new.

8 ) Set up an affiliates program – Allow for others to promote your products on a commission basis. Again a good eCommerce system should already have this built in.

9) Download the Google Toolbar ? I am a Google toolbar fanatic! The Google Toolbar has a nifty feature which shows you the page rank (0-10 scale) of every site you visit; the higher your page ranking the higher your placement in search engines.

10) Set up multiple websites – Got three services you perform? Set up three different websites with domain names that match your keywords. Super cheap to do and can be very effective.

Lori Quaranta
consetta.com
consettapr

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