Web and Business articles

It is hard to drive free traffic to your website. Webmaster have developed many new techniques over the past year to increase website traffic. Not all ideas have had much success but lets take a look at what has.

The best type of marketing is one that is completely free. This free marketing comes at the cost of your customers. Viral Marketing. Viral marketing is basically considered word of mouth. It is the best type of advertising because it builds credibility, trust and most of all free.

Scenario 1:

Joe tells Sheryl about widgets. Sheryl trust Joe about the widgets and buys them.

Scenario 2:

Sheryl see’s an ad on T.V. Turns on Young and the restless and forgets about widgets.

Everyone trusts his or her good buddies about anything. Think to the last time how much your friends had an influence on your decision making?

Go ahead tell a Freind

Most websites over look this script to generate viral marketing. Webmasters think their visitors will call their friends and have a slumber party about the product/service. But here is the catch. That is too much work for your visitors to do.

So make it easy for them. Implement a “tell a friend” script instead. This is a simple program that allows your visitors to fill out a form and send your offers to your friend. Placement of these scripts should be on your product offering page or sales page.

New scenario:
Sheryl gets an email from Joe about widgets. Her attention is caught and she click the link in the email that points to your products. That increases your chances of closing a sale.

It might be a slow start but “telling a friend” can go a long way for your web business.

Many webmaster’s start a website and within couple of weeks loose momentum. The website goes to a tropical wasteland “it could have been this, or could have been that”. The main reason for this death, is the lack of planning.

If you fail to plan, you are planning to fail
- Some Smart man

When you start a website keep in mind what exactly you want to accomplish. Write down all the ideas that pop in your head and organize them into sections. Take each section and turn that into a category where you will update it.

Optimize your website

The next step to this process is optimizing for revenue. First, take a look at what is offered. The most popular revenue generator is adsense developed by Google. Google adsense places small text link ads on your site or banner ads. The ads are customized to your liking and can vary. After you have created your ad, you can place the code in each category of your website. Google will then cater proper ads in regard to your content.

The internet is growing rapidly and is outperforming magazine and newspaper ads. So this mean there is a lot of untapped resources and websites that can benefit from the heavy ad investment.

Most websites, if not all, depend on traffic. Not just any traffic but loyal traffic. This loyal traffic is key for you’re the success of your online sales effort. The returning visitors are aware of your offerings and familiar with your online shopping process. Familiarity increases trust. Hence increasing your websites credibility. So here are some tips to implement in your website design.

Interact with website users: i.e. forums

A forum is a great avenue for your visitors to share opinions on many different matters. When web users start to share their opinion, each of the users develops a community feeling and a sense of belonging. Either it be your product or service, your website customers know their voices are being heard.

Curiosity for your visitors

It is the hot new sensation on the internet. It gets everyone wired up and become addicted to it. I am referring to a web Blog. Creating a blog can be very beneficial as it will give your website a human touch. It will allow them to see the person behind the company and allow them to connect with the product or service.  If you are selling a product you are able to release updates and talk about hurdles. This way the customer is always kept in the loop and can see the dire efforts done by your online web business.

Feedback: polls or surveys

Polls and surveys are one of the most overlooked factors on any website but yet they provide the most crucial information. A lot of business owners feel that it deters visitors by asking so many questions. It does, but only if you make the questionnaire long and boring. Make your surveys short and straight to the point. I always follow the rule of KISS(Keep it Simple Stupid). Moreover, provide incentives for visitors to join the survey. Every response could direct you towards a successful future.