Web Success Secret #2) Without Traffic- What’s the Point?

Part 1 of this series really got down and dirty about content.  Content’s main focus is twofold- make your visitors happy and make search engines happy.  This article is all about making you happy!  Think of this as your starter guide to increasing traffic and building a profitable business.

Traffic can be summed up in 2 words- free and paid.  I consider all PPC (pay-per-click), ezine advertising, offline advertising, and paid directory submissions a form of paying for your traffic.  I also consider any project that takes up your time to be paid advertising.  After all in the business world time is money.  Paid advertising is not bad.  It just means that you are paying to receive traffic.

Free traffic is harder to attract, but it costs you absolutely no money.  Almost all free traffic is the result of surfers finding your site on the search engines.  We talked about using content as your ultimate search engine ranking booster in the last article.

Here are several ways to increase traffic.  Some are paid advertising options and others are totally free.

- Write articles and submit them to several niche websites.  Manually submitting articles to many websites can take a long time.  I use a submission service to do all my hard work.

- Post in forums.  Many forums will not allow you to market your product or services.  That’s totally understandable.  What I recommend doing is finding a really great forum that you can participant in.  When people have questions, provide top notch and comprehensive answers.  No selling.  Almost all forums allow you to post your website in your sig file.  Take advantage of that.

- Submit each page of your website to all major search engines.  Also submit each page to all major search engines whenever you make a change on that page.  Be careful with this one.  Each engine has very specific directions and rules about submission rules.  Be sure you do not spam!  Submit pages according to each engine’s guidelines.  I also use a submission service that does this for me at no additional cost.

- Create joint ventures with non-competing websites.  Work with a company that compliments your product or service.  Also be sure the joint venture is a win-win-win for you, the other company and your customers.  Joint ventures can be a pain to set up and complete, but well worth it if done correctly.

- Look into ezine advertising, web advertising and/or PPC.  Each method takes an initial investment and some time to learn, but can bring back traffic.  Personally I do not prefer this method to increase traffic because it’s “iffy” at best.

- Print your website name on all business correspondences.  This is a simple task, but one that is simple to do.  Add it to your email sig line, forum sig lines, letterhead and business cards.

- Create an atmosphere of amazing customer service.  This always leads to referrals from current clients.  The more referrals the more traffic!

The bottom line is without traffic your site is floating in a sea of doom.  No one is seeing your content or services.  Traffic is the lifeline of any business, and the rule of thumb is more traffic means more income.

This brings me to my last and final point about traffic.  Once you develop a nice flow of visitors you need to know specifics.  Where did those visitors come from?  How did they find you?  What pages are the most popular on your site?  What page did they enter into your site?  What page did they leave your site?  What keywords did they use to find you?  You must know your visitor inside and out!

As I mentioned earlier, it is best to work smarter and not harder.  Traffic analysis and search engine submissions can be very time consuming, but your hosting company should be providing most of these services to you free of charge. There are a small few that do this, but it is well worth the investigation.

Previous parts:
4 Secrets to Turn Any Business Into a Successful Web Business – Part 1

Click Here And Learn The Best Traffic Techniques For Your Web Site…

PHP is a programming language that allows your website to go beyond a basic HTML document, and create an interactive experience. Open source means that the source code is available to someone with proper access to the site, so that they can easily make changes. When the Internet was first getting started, most of the pages on websites were basic HTML documents. Meaning that when you visited a page (about.html, for example), you downloaded all of the content of the page into your browser.

How Do I Know if I have a PHP Site?

If you are visiting a site, and you see that the page name ends with .html, this means that the page is most likely a plain old HTML page. If the page name ends in .php, then the site is a php based site. Other dynamic programming languages include .jsp (Java Server Pages) or .asp (.NET or Active Server Pages). Occasionally you’ll see sites that end in .html that have dynamic code embedded in them, but this requires some tricks to accomplish on the server.

We have several sites that use static HTML pages and have great results. There are some pages that have dynamic content, but most of the pages are built in straight HTML. It’s great for search engine optimization, as some of those pages have been active for years. However, as the number of pages grow, it becomes increasingly difficult to update menu or navigation items, because it means you have to open each page, one at a time, and modify the contents.

Advantages of using PHP

PHP works a little differently. Instead of downloading the entire page (with the navigation, content and everything in one file), php allows you to embed programming code that isn’t displayed to the end user. This programming code allows you to tell the page, “Insert the top navigation here.” Or, “put the content for the page over there.”

PHP allows you to personalize a page, for example, or automatically detect that a user is coming into the site from a mobile device and display a different version of the site that is optimized for their Blackberry or iPhone. PHP keeps most of the code for the site “behind the scenes” so that the page that is displayed to the end user loads quickly and doesn’t require the browser to do processing work — the work is handled instead by the server.

PHP Is Ideal For Working With Databases

One of the biggest advantages of a programming language like PHP is that it allows you to easily interact with a database. If you’re unfamiliar with databases, think of a database as a souped-up form of an Excel spreadsheet. You have columns (i.e. page name, content, title) and rows. Rows typically would hold information that is organized by column headings.

PHP makes it easy to read information from a database, and then display information onto a web page. So, if you’ve ever used a site where you type in your zip code to find a store location near you, the system likely is taking your zip code, performing a database query (i.e. find all stores within 10 miles of the 80303 zip code) and display the results so that you can find your way. In order to do this, we have a geolocation database that allows us to tell the approximate distance between two zip codes.

You could do the same thing by building out a series of web pages that has each location. And while this is fine for three or four locations, as the number of locations increases, PHP allows you to automate the process.

Keep Content Organized

One of the ways we’ve been able to streamline the process of building websites is that we’ve standardized our process using our PageDirector content management system. There are many, many ways to build websites. Each designer seems to have a slightly different way of putting a site together. We are frequently asked to work on sites that other people have created, and in order to make simple changes to the content or navigation, we often have to dig around in the code to find where things are located. This takes time and isn’t very efficient. The PageDirector system, however, keeps all of the content for the site neatly organized in a database table. So that anyone can easily find the content and make changes quickly and easily. One of our clients said to me in an email to me yesterday, “It’s really efficient and a simple tool to use PageDirector. It makes my life easier being able to update the website fast.”

How Does It Work?

When someone clicks on a link to go to a page, the system pulls the right content from the database, grabs the menu items from another location, and on-the-fly creates the page for a person.

Summary

PHP is a server-based programming language that allows you to create an interactive experience for your site visitors, and keep content and other information organized within a database.

Next, Discover Here More Tips On How To Build Websites

The global financial downturn is driving millions of people to try to earn extra income from the Internet, without losing what little they have.

Many thousands of internet entrepreneurs have succeeded and attained financial security. So what is their secret? How do they get a steady stream of visitors to their website and how do they persuade them to click the “Buy Now” button? By far the majority of marketers use a combination of Google Adwords and Search Engine Optimization.

Google Adwords carry millions of small ads every day, for every conceivable product or subject imaginable. So it must be the way to go, right? Sure, many people are making a good living from Adwords and a few can make a fortune at it. But, if you’ve tried it, then you’ll know it the true difficulties involved.

Being potentially very profitable, this market is very difficult to break into. First, you have to learn how this thing works, then you have to constantly improve your ads and you will need to spend money before you find the best performing keywords and the most profitable ads. You can set a daily limit to your spending but just twenty dollars a day will mop up 600 bucks in the first month.

Most popular keywords cost anywhere from 50 cents to 2/3 dollars per click, so twenty dollars won’t buy many clicks and, at a click-through rate of two or three percent, you will not get many visitors per day.

There are only about eight slots for ads on each page of Google, so the competition for these slots, particularly on the first page of results, is very fierce and often very sneaky. Each of the eight “tenants” of those valuable places on Page 1 are striving to get to position one, which, on average, gets over 70% of the traffic on that page and the only way to do that is to push the others down. All the Adwords users on the second and third pages are also fighting to climb up the greasy pole.

It is now possible to buy software that will allow you to spy on details of competitors’ campaigns and to see what keywords they are using and even what they are paying for each keyword, so you can potentially bid slightly higher and gain a higher position. If you do get your ad on Page One or Two, someone will be sniping at you with this type of software. Even if you have gained a comfortable position on Page 1 of Google, it is a constant struggle to maintain that position.

There is an alternative approach to running a successful Google Adwords campaign. You can employ a specialist team of experts, with the experience and the time to do the whole thing for you. The problem is, they won’t be interested unless you’re going to be a big spender on Adwords. That’s why I say that Google Adwords may be one of the most difficult ways to make money on line, certainly for a newcomer with little money to risk.

So how about Option Two? Search Engine Optimization. Surely this is the ultimate solution!

You learn how to design and build a web page which meets all Google’s guidelines (and I’ll tell you what they are) and then you get on Page One, with a page which costs nothing to be there and wait for the money to roll in. How cool is that?

This is all you need to do. Find a suitable keyword phrase (preferably 4 or 5 phrases) which gets at least 100 searches a day and which does not have many heavy hitters in the competition. 1,000 searches a day is obviously much better but is likely to have strong, well-established competition.

Then you need to get a domain name which incorporates the main keyword or phrase and build your web page so that it includes the keywords in the Title of the page; in the Description of the page; in the URL of the page; in the Headline of the page and in the Anchor Text of all links to other websites. That’s not too difficult, is it?

Then, to convince Google that yours is an “Authority” site, you need to get multiple links to your page, from other related sites, dealing with the same subject, whether it is Health, or Family, or whatever. The more important these other sites are, the more weight Google gives to these links. I can tell you, getting these links is hard work.

Here’s a real example. My website is on Page One of Google, for the phrase “Stop Arthritis Pain”, out of 2.1 million results. Last time I looked, it was at position 6, on Page One, and has been there for months. The same search phrase is on Page One of Yahoo (at position 2), out of 21.7 million results. Impressive eh?

I’ll bet you’re thinking “that page must be pulling in a ton of money”. Well, it isn’t. The reason is, that keyword phrase is not a popular search term and only gets about 20 visitors a day, so it makes a few dollars a day but nothing significant. Think about those other twenty million pages, who are getting even less traffic than those on page one.

So, if you can get onto Page One of the big search engines, you may make a lot of money but 99.9% of the pages up there are having no impact at all, in terms of making money for their owners. In many cases, it’s a lot of time and effort for no reward.

A well established method, used by High Street businesses for many years, is gaining credibility in online marketing. Make money by giving stuff away for FREE! We’ve all heard of BOGOF – “Buy One, Get One Free!” How about, “Get this valuable stuff, without buying anything”? Many internet marketers, smarter than I, claim to be making excellent earnings with this method and without the aid of Google Adwords or the Search Engines.

This is a quote from an expert, who has many profitable websites from using these methods -

“There is no more powerful way to sell your product than by ‘preselling’ it with free and useful information, typically with a free ebook.”

Next, Learn Here More About Google Adwords … And Then Watch This FREE 26 Step-By-Step VIDEO Course

With all the changes in Google AdWords and the increased competition these days, organic SEO looks more and more attractive to most of us.

The key is for your website optimization to out-perform your competition, without over spending with an online marketing consultant (or without taking up too much of your time if you’re going the do-it-yourself route).

Remember, affordable Search Engine Optimization is about increasing quality traffic, then

• converting
• that traffic to a sale or a sales lead.

If you miss these points I describe below, your SEO goals of increased conversions will tank, even if you have a Number 1 Google Ranking.

I often notice these missed areas when I’m Coaching a business owner about their Web site and their need to increase sales and sales leads.

So, here are 3 points for you to review that I hope will help your SEO goals of increased conversions.

What’s Above the Fold Counts Most, so Consider Monitor Resolutions

Living in the world of TV remote controls and browser back buttons, we have to capture our website visitors’ attention ASAP. Our visitors aren’t going to give us much time before making a decision to stay or to leave our website.

As much as this subject is discussed these days, it’s amazing the number of sites I review that have critical information missing from “above the fold”, in that area visible before your visitors scroll down.

This is the area to briefly summarize what people can do on your site and make your best case for your guests staying on your website and not clicking away. This may also be the area to place your contact information.

Keep in mind that what’s above the fold on your monitor will likely be different from what’s above the fold on the monitor for someone visiting your website. Browser resolution is set differently for various computers.

For instance, on my website, I know the top resolution of my visitors is 1280 by 1024 (53%) and the second most popular resolution is 1024 by 768 (37%). I get this information from my site’s analytics script, although not all analytics programs provide this critical information.

Since I make sure my site looks great for these 90% of my visitors and make sure I communicate reasons to stay on my site above the fold (my value proposition), I draw more people into my site, encouraging them to scroll down.

Remember to cross test your site with recent versions of the most popular Web browsers: Firefox, Internet Explorer, Safari and maybe even Google’s new Chrome.

These steps raise my conversion rate and they will raise yours, too. And increasing traffic and conversions is the whole point of affordable search engine optimization, whether using an online marketing consultant or d-i-y, right?

So, don’t miss this important step.

Carefully Select Your Type Size and Font and Remember that White Space is Your Friend

I’m astounded by the improper text choices made by so many website owners today. Is there really any good reason to make people squint at your website, struggling to get the information they need?

Consider reviewing The Easy to Read Standard at Information Architects (you can Google it). I would encourage you to review the size of your text, the white space between your letters and words and between your paragraphs and headings.

Designers often believe whitespace is your enemy; if you want people to understand your message and stay on your website, whitespace is in fact your friend.

Also consider that fonts with serifs are easier to read than fonts without serifs.

If you want to successfully convey your message to as many of your site visitors as possible, then make it as easy for them as you can. When we’re talking about increasing conversions, it’s all about the numbers and appealing to the largest number of people possible.

Use Opt-in Email or Blog Postings to Maximize Your Sales

All website owners would like for people to buy from their website the first time they visit. But is that realistic?

Consider these statics from the National Sales Executive Association:

• 2% of sales are made on the 1st contact;
• 3% of sales are made on the 2nd contact;
• 5% of sales are made on the 3rd contact;
• 10% of sales are made on the 4th contact (and)
• 80% of sales are made on the 5th – 12th contact.

For most businesses, if you don’t offer an opt-in contact, like a regular email newsletter or blog postings, you’re missing out on most of your potential sales!

When setting up an opt-in Internet marketing campaign, you should offer incentives to subscribe. To entice people to opt-in, you can offer:

• special pricing for email list members
• a first look at new products
• ability for customer to select subjects and emails they receive (controlling the frequency of contact by choosing which of your lists to be on)
• promise not to share email or other personal info with other companies

Using opt-in contact allows you to significantly increase conversions by introducing yourself over time to your potential customers, in a soft-sell manner.

Website optimization is important; the goal is increased Internet traffic, sales and sales leads. But whether you’ve hired an online marketing consultant or you’re doing the process yourself, Affordable search engine optimization by itself doesn’t accomplish those last points of increased sales and sales leads.

You’ve got to remember to design your website to alleviate visitors natural apprehensions and make buying from you as easy as possible.

Properly mapping out the above the fold area of your Web pages, using appropriate size text, using adequate whitespace and offering an opt-in process to nurture your buyers will all help you accomplish the real goals you have with SEO and website optimization: increased sales and more sales leads.

Next, Discover Here More Tips On How To Make Money Online …
… And Then Watch This FREE 26 Step-By-Step VIDEO Course