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.

Free Subscription Online Newsletter

sugeng — Sun, 05 Apr 2009 06:25:53 +0000

In the beginning, free subscription online newsletter (also commonly known as e-zine: electronic maganize) used to be the main incentive for people to visit a website and to provide their email address. At that time, I was one of those who quickly sign up for newly launched online newsletter for the fact the number of available free newsletters was not very big. People were so hungry of online information that starting a newsletter was a no-brainer strategy to collect and to have the right to send advertising emails to the newsletter subscribers.

Nowadays, newsletter is still an important component of online marketing. However, free newsletter is not so much of an attraction used to persuade people to provide their email address. Newsletter has become a mandatory component of internet marketing with the main purpose of keeping in touch with your customer base or subscribers. It is also used to bring your business upfront so that your customers always remember your business so that they can buy from you should they need to buy products or services that you are also selling. Getting people to subscribe to your newsletter is also for you to acquire the license to send those people your advertising embedded in the newsletter. The advertisements can be your own or from third-party advertisers that you can solicit.

With the rapid growth of new newsletter being started every day, the internet users have been seeing more and more newsletter being offered in the cyberspace mostly for free. The trend now is for the newsletter publishers to get and entice people to sign up and hopefully for people to forward the newsletter to their friends as referral. It is more and more challenging to achieve this simple objective without doing anything. Therefore, it is very common now for subscriber to be offered many incentives like free downloads, free membership to an exclusive sites, and so on.

With growing complexity, starting and managing a newsletter has become more challenging. It is not simply starting it and hope everything will fall into its place. It requires proper planning. What niche? Which customer segment? What incentive? What frequency of delivery? What monetization mode?

A very good resource to start learning how to launch successful newsletter is available for free at http://www.ezineuniversity.com/courses/ founded by Kate Schultz.