Increasing Your Online Traffic

sugeng — Fri, 17 Apr 2009 14:25:55 +0000

This topic is always interesting and almost everyone will have his/her own theory. Regardless of all the noises, there are some very common things to do to increase your online visitors. Here are some methods to increase your online traffic.

1. Learn SEO techniques and apply them

There are many techniques you can learn and apply when it comes to SEO (search engine optimization). We are talking about how to make our website more appealing to search engine to index and more inviting to human visitors to leave their name and contact information.

2. Include web address in all your stationary and communications

It is a good practice to always include your web address everywhere, especially in all your stationary materials and communications. You need to present your URL in front of as many people as possible through all means. Printing the address on your name card is a good idea especially when you do a lot of name card exchanges with other people.

3. Create a blog to supplement the web presence

Having a blog to supplement your website is another way to increase traffic. The nature of blog is having regular postings. Search engines love sites perceived to be active and updated with fresh content regularly. Linking to your website from the blog will definitely increase your website ranking as they are seen to be related and relevant. With higher search engine ranking, you will definitely receive more visitors.

More information can be found here: What is Blogging , Blogging with Wordpress and Why Business Needs Blog.

4. Conduct online surveys and contests

You can also conduct online surveys and contest on your website. These are popular especially if the prizes are attractive. When people take part, they will tend to come back often just to see the progress and the result especially in contests. When your website design is attractive, your visitors will stay longer and explore more pages.

5. Provide online discount coupon download

For promotion purpose, your business will sometimes offer discount for products or services. Instead of using the normal way of discount, why don’t you use online discount coupon download? It will encourage people to visit your website and at the same time familiarize them with the site.

6. Provide special price for online order

Besides promotion, you can also provide special price for people ordering online. It will provide exactly similar effect to online discount coupon.

7. Start a regular newsletter with links back to your website

The much preferred way is to start a regular newsletter. By sending regular mailings, you will be perceived as expert in your topic and niche. By the time your readers are ready to buy, they will be more willing to purchase from you. Regular exposure will also encourage people to buy from you after about seven mailings. This is according to the statistics. Of course there are people who will buy earlier and there are some who will buy later.

8. Start a forum for your customers and visitors to interact with each other

Another method to gather people is to start a forum. People can join and interact with each other to familiarize with your products and services. For the forum to be successful, you need to moderate properly and correctly though. If not, it might turn into something you don’t really desire to have.

9. Get involved in social networking sites

From your involvement in social networking sites, you will also be able to increase traffic to your website. When you join the social networking sites, you will be given a profile page where you can enter your introduction and related websites. When people know you better, they will check your profile page. That is when they will click on your website and visit. Of course, when you are more or less known by other people, you can advertise indiscreetly. But, you have to remember not to do it too often as to flood the message stream with your advertisement. Example of social networking sites are Facebook, MySpace, etc.

10. Connect with microblogging

Microblogging is the trend now. Twitter is the trendsetter and its name is synonymous with microblogging. Similar to social networking site, you will be provided with profile page where you can put your web address. People will then look at your profile and visit your website.

11. Buy PPC

If you have the budget, you can also purchase PPC (pay-per-click). The popular and bigger network operators of PPC are Google Adwords, Yahoo! Search Marketing and Microsoft adCenter. All there operate under a bid-based model. It means you bid for higher position with higher value of money for the CPC (cost-per-click).

These are just some ideas. Of course there are many more methods not covered here. I will be adding as and when I come across some good ideas to increase traffic. Please feel free to add on the comment section your ideas as well.

Microblogging is Blogging

sugeng — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 01:00:58 +0000

Microblogging is simply blogging in micro size. It means blogging with brief texts with options to add photos or audi-clips. Due to its brevity, microblogging is very popular with mobile phone users and busy people who don’t have the time to write a bull-blown article for blog posting. Microblogging updates/postings can be anything as long as they are short and within the maximum words allowed. The contents can be on personal level as update of what someone is doing or on the business level with the latest update of products and services. Even news services also use microblogging to disseminate the information to the public (or followers as they are usually referred to).

In terms of content, there is really nothing different between “normal” blogging and microblogging. You can just write about anything and about what you want to write. Of course, in business, people will plan the content properly as to project corporate image. Since the content is brief, it is much easier for people to just write something on-the-fly. That is why people can update the microblogs very frequently in a day. The most common contents are update of what people are doing and thinking. Very frequently also people comment on each other’s postings.

Here is a list of my posts on Twitter.

Currently, the most popular microblogging is Twitter. Launched in July 2006, Twitter has become the most popular microblogging site and its name is almost synonymous to microblogging. Twitter ranked 287 in Alexa as of March 2009. Here are the other popular English microblogging sites (with Alexa ranking): Tumblr (2,551), Plurk (6,629), Jaiku (59,281), Kronologger (347,889) in Indonesia, Hictu (719,358), Pacmee (899,739) in Malaysia, MoodMill (964,712), I Rate My Day (1,066,114) and MySay (1,846,084).

Some social networking sites also provide their own microblogging feature better known as updates. As examples, they are Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, Xing and Bebo. There are many coming along as well.

With so many microblogging applications available, many people might want to maintain presence in more than one of these social networks. Services such as SocialThing and Profilatic come in handy in aggregating the updates from various microblogging sites. Another useful service is Ping.fm. Using the Ping.fm, you can send out your update to multiple social networks as it will be difficult if you want to send updates to all social networks that you belong to.

With this short introduction, I hope it has given a brief overview of what microblogging is all about.

Internet Business Toolbox» Microblogging

Increasing Your Online Traffic

Microblogging is Blogging