Traffic Utilities – Marketing, SEO, Traffic Generation, News

Important Steps For Online Marketing

Following are Important steps to successfully marketing your product, service, and business online.

1. Have a professional, easy-to-navigate, quick-loading design. Hire a professional design firm or at least use a good site template.
2. Have lots of quality related content.
3. Build lots of links to your Web site.
4. Build credibility and rapport.
5. Start an e-mail newsletter with quality content and send it out at least once per month.
6. If you are selling a product, have an affiliate program.
7. Once you have an affiliate program, don’t forget to promote it.
8. Do whatever you can do profitably to attract large affiliates and form key strategic alliances.
9. Position yourself advantageously in the search engines.
10. Use cost-per-click (CPC) engines, but make sure you know the lifetime value (LTV) of your customers and that you do return-on-investment (ROI) checks often.
11. Supplement your affiliate advertising with both online and traditional advertising, but track results and always do ROI checks.
12. Advertise using CPM channels to build brand recognition, but put profitability before brand recognition.
13. Offer yourself as a resource to the media as an expert in your niche.
14. Hire a great publicity firm or bring an experienced publicist in-house.
15. Use autoresponders to maintain constant contact with prospective customers.
16. Remember that business is all about relationships and communication. Always work to build more relationships, and once they are built, make sure you are in continuous contact with your prospects, customers, strategic alliances, suppliers, investors, and the media.
17. Encourage word of mouth among your customers.
18. Have superior customer service and have staff to answer all incoming e-mails within 24 hours.
19. Send out periodic e-mail follow-ups making sure your customers are happy and asking them for feedback on your product and the service your company has provided.
20. Blog frequently with quality content.

Cost Effective Search Advertising & Marketing

Over the years, I have been selling search advertising/marketing and one of the ways necessary to better sell especially to businesses that are new to search is to prove that it is a far more cost effective way of advertising as compared to many other forms of advertising mediums. Not too long ago, I posted a short but important blog post on my company’s blog that search advertising is the most cost effective method of advertising. The study done shows that the cost per lead from the search engines is a fraction of the cost of email marketing, direct mail, online banners or yellow pages.

The Do It Yourself Guide On Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

No need to pay SEO agencies big money to optimise your website or keep searching the internet on how to do Search Engine Optimization (SEO) yourself. Google has now published its own SEO documentation which you can now Do It Yourself (DIY). What a better way to get a SEO documentation from Google instead of paying big bucks to SEO agencies where most of them give you the same kind of information/guidelines that are already widely available out on Google itself. I guess the money paid to agencies is at least they can project manage it for you and make sure that you are doing the right thing and you don’t have to worry. This is the same as paying migration consultants where most if not all migration information is on the internet or the immigration government site but yet you want to have the peace of mind paying the expert to do the right thing for you so you don’t have to worry about it. You can download Google’s search engine optimization starter guide here or directly from www.­google.­com/­webmasters/­docs/­search-­engine-­optimization-­starter-­guide.­pdf.

Are You Utilizing YouTube With Your Content As Much As You Could Be?

YouTube is a Huge Part of SEO

YouTube still claims to be the second largest search engine in the world. Just think about that for a minute. If you produce online video and it’s not on YouTube, you’re probably missing out on a great deal of potential viewers. If you’re not producing video at all, you’re missing out a lot of searches.

Do you consider YouTube important to search marketing? 

However, just uploading content to YouTube is not going to be enough. Like with any other form of search engine, content needs to be optimized to be found. At SXSW in Austin back in March, WebProNews spoke with Margaret Gould Stewart, who leads YouTube’s user experience team. She talked about some reasons a lot of content producers are missing out on some tremendous opportunities when they use the world’s most popular online video site.

“When you’re building a sustained audience, you have to continually create great content that connects with your audience,” says Stewart. “I think the secondary part is understanding your audience – understanding who you want to reach, and proactively cultivating a relationship with the people in your audience. And on YouTube that means not just creating great content and uploading it to the site, but actively building your subscriber base, so that you can be in direct and regular interaction and conversation with those people.”

“We find that video producers who are really active in the conversation, whether it’s comments or uploading ‘how this video was made’- you know, kind of the behind-the-scenes – people are really fascinated by that stuff, and we see some our most successful partners really having that, again, kind of ongoing conversation – not an arm’s length relationship to the audience, but very engaged,” she adds.

More WebProNews Videos”We sometimes see content producers not investing enough time in attaching great meta data to their content, because like I said, YouTube is the second largest search engine in the world, and we all know that for Google, it’s important to think seriously about search engine optimization, because you can have the great content, and ideally the cream will float to the top, but there’s definitely things you can do to help yourself along, right?”

“Good clear, direct titling of your content, putting the right kinds of tags…because the fact is initially when content goes viral, people may discover it through search engines, or embed it in blogs, but then it reaches that really exciting word-of-mouth status, where I just may mention it to you person-to-person, and then what most people do is just go to YouTube.com and they search for it,” she continues. “So if you’re not indexed well in the search engine because you haven’t attached great meta data to your content, you’re going to miss out on that audience.”

“The other thing that is really important is enabling embedding,” notes Stewart. “It’s probably the number one most important thing, because what we see in videos that become very popular, very quickly and take on that kind of life of its own, a lot of that initial traffic in the first 48 hours happens actually off-site.”

Note: This actually plays to a point I made about Twitter embeds as well.

If you want more success from your online video endeavors, read 35 Ways to Improve Your Online Video Performance, and Tips For Ranking Higher On and With YouTube, which features an interview with YouTube Product Manager Matt Liu. If real-time, live video is your thing, check out 8 Tips for Real-Time Video Blogging.

By the way, YouTube is renting movies now, and while it’s not exactly taking over Netflix at this point, I would expect this to grow significantly and get more people spending more time at YouTube, where there is a YouTube search box very close by, and relevant related video suggestions served to viewers constantly.

Is YouTube a significant part of your marketing strategy?

Yahoo Left Handed Users – Navigation Toolbar

Yahoo: We’ve Got a Left-Hand Navigation Bar Too Yahoo Says Navigation Features Increase Engagement, Click-throughs

It seems like Yahoo is reminding people that it is still a search company a lot lately. In what I’m guessing is a response to Google launching its new search features, Yahoo has once again reminded us of its own features.

“As you know, Search innovation continues to be a top priority at Yahoo! – that’s why we have been working hard behind the scenes to continuously evolve the search experience for our users,” Meagan Busath, Yahoo’s Director of Global Product Communications tells WebProNews.

“When we launched our New Yahoo! Search back in September 2009, we introduced a number of handy tools and a new interface that helps people find and explore what matters to them most through sites they know and love,” she says. “We’ve been steadily adding more filtering options and relevant search suggestions to our left-hand navigation bar since then, and have seen engagement and click-throughs for those features double over the past seven months.”

Features she refers to include:

·         Offering related suggestions modules, featuring thumbnail images for very relevant people, places or things related to the results you’re viewing – i.e. for entertainment searches, we show related people, movies, songs; for travel searches, we show related points of interest, etc.

·         Filtering results by favorite sites, for example if you enter the search term “how to make salsa,” we display filters for sites like eHow or Allrecipes.com on the left

·         Narrowing results by different types of structured data, i.e. for news searches you can filter by images, video, time

·         Links to “trending now” topics that highlight the most popular things people across the Web are searching for at any given time

·         Incorporating Yahoo!’s powerful SearchAssist technology for more generally related keywords – if you search for “digital camera,” you will also see links to related search results for Nikon, Canon, photography, etc.

As Yahoo often says, search is not just about “ten blue links” anymore. Really, it’s been that way for quite some time, but we continue to see different deliveries of results across all of the major search engines, and it makes the SEO game all the more interesting.

New Google Data Can Help Website Optimization

SEOs: Finally Some Data from Google We Can Use.

Google has just started sharing more detailed data for each individual search query in the Top search queries feature in Webmaster Tools.  Google used to just report the average position at which your site’s pages appeared in the search results for a particular query. Now users can click on a given search query to see a breakdown of the number of impressions (number of times your site’s pages appeared in the results for the query), as well as the amount of clickthrough (number of times searchers clicked on that query’s search results to visit a page from your site) for each position your site’s pages appeared at in the results associated with that query. Google also shows a list of your site’s pages that were linked to from the search results for that search query.

Is the new data being provided by Google of use to you? Tell us what you think.

How This New Data Can Help Site Owners

WebProNews spoke with industry veteran Jill Whalen of HighRankings about how this new data can help site owners. “In the past, I haven’t found the data in Webmaster Tools all that helpful other than the occasional finding of a crawl error,” she says. “Some of the information they provide isn’t quite accurate, such as when they say that certain Meta descriptions are duplicates when they actually aren’t. These inaccuracies cause people to wonder what they’re doing wrong and in some cases they even panic or waste time ‘fixing’ things that were not broken in the first place, just because they believe everything that comes out of Google.”

“This new data–assuming it’s accurate–provides a new layer of information beyond that which we can typically get elsewhere,” Whalen continues. “As far as I know, there’s no other way to know the actual number of times an organic listing in Google is shown to people for a given keyword phrase. That’s pretty interesting and important information!”

“Where I see some real value, however, would be in conversion optimization–trying to increase the clickthroughs for your existing organic listings. Just knowing what your clickthrough conversion rate actually is, is a whole new set of data that we never had before.”

Another industry veteran, Aaron Wall of SEOBook, tells me, “For years Google has provided some mystery meat data of marginal value and so I typically have not recommended registering with their webmaster tools. But this is the first tool they have offered which flips that recommendation on its head, as these stats give you new insights into how you are doing in search – data that is not easy to get anywhere else.” He’s got an interesting post up about it himself.

How Accurate is the Data?

Google’s addition of the new data has been met with a great deal of enthusiasm. Comments on Google’s announcement are overwhelmingly positive. That’s not to say, however, that there isn’t some amount of skepticism.

“As I said, this data will be very useful if it is indeed accurate. There’s been some Twitter buzz from other SEOs whose data doesn’t match up with their Google Analytics,” says Whalen. “For our High Rankings website, the clickthroughs for any given keyword phrase didn’t exactly match what my Google Analytics showed for the same keyword phrases, but it was fairly close. For instance, my top two Google organic keyword phrases showed 3,020 and 1,193 visits when using Google Analytics. Via Webmaster Tools, the same keyword phrases show 2900 and 1300, respectively. That’s pretty close. Perhaps they’re sort of just rounding off (in a strange kind of way!).  Other phrases had similar differences in the numbers.”

Regardless of how precise the information is, webmasters have some new numbers to sink their teeth into, and assuming that many more share similar views to Whalen’s this might make Webmaster Tools a great deal more useful to a lot of site owners. In fact, a lot more site owners may soon be using Webmaster Tools for the first time. Google also just announced a new deal that will insert Google Services for Websites into the latest version of the Plesk Panel, which is said to be used by millions of site owners. Webmaster Tools is part of that Services for Websites package.

Will you find this new data from Google useful?

New Google SERP`s Could Mean More Traffic For You

Google Gives Other Rankings More Visibility

Now that the masses have access to Google’s newly redesigned results pages, it’s time to consider this in an SEO light if you have not already been considering it.

How do Google’s New SERPs Affect SEO?

Google has had its search options available for about a year, but they have not been in the face of the user like the newly redesigned SERP is. With this new design, users don’t have any choice but to notice the options that are available. It’s not too different from Bing or Yahoo in that respect (Danny Sullivan notes that Ask pioneered this design). The difference is that way more people search with Google on a regular basis (in fact, last month Google reportedly dominated the search market by even more than usual).

SEO Strategies and Increased Engagement from Searchers

The new SERPs may shake up SEO efforts, simply because users will start going to the different options Google provides them, taking them to different sets of results. Now that the options are in the limelight, users are more likely to use them.

Yahoo tells us when they added features to their left-hand navigation bar, engagement increased. “We’ve been steadily adding more filtering options and relevant search suggestions to our left-hand navigation bar…and have seen engagement and click-throughs for those features double over the past seven months.” I can’t imagine why Google wouldn’t also see an engagement increase for certain features that are now more visible.

It’s going to come down to evaluating the different options for any given query that you wish to rank for, and focusing efforts upon those. I’ll refer back to the article I posted shortly after Google launched its search options in the first place you can find some tips in that. The same general thinking still applies, but it just got more important.

New SERPs Make Social Even More Important

The options in the left panel pull from “everything” – classic Google results (universal, organic, paid, etc.), blogs from Google Blog Search, Books from Google Books (which includes magazines), Images from Google Image Search, News from Google News, Maps from Google Maps, Shopping from Google Product Search, Videos from Google Video (which includes videos from YouTube and other sources), and Updates from Google’s real-time search.

That last one is of particular note, because before users generally only saw Google’s real-time search in action on select newsy queries unless they hunted them down. Real-time search for any query is now much more accessible, which makes real-time search a bigger deal for search marketing (here’s some tips for getting found in real-time search). Here’s how Google ranks tweets.

Social interactions are becoming more important. The new SERPs also place much more emphasis on social search results. The same goes for location. You’ll notice “nearby” is one of the options. Discussions is another option. Google appears to draw from a variety of sources for this one, but it stands to reason that engaging in conversation throughout the web has some value to Google’s results. There are definitely a lot of results from forums in these results – another reason forum participation can be a valuable use of your time. Forums and Q&A are actually a couple of sub-options, but I’ve seen blog posts in the discussions results too.
 
Emphasis on Diversification of Where You’re Ranking in Google

What it boils down to is that ranking in all of Google’s different search engines has become even more important for getting traffic from Google. Here are some tips for that. I expect traffic for sites listed in any of these to increase as a result of Google’s New SERP. Keep in mind that Google has been testing this for a significant amount of time. If you think Yahoo was seeing increased engagement, imagine what Google will attract.

I would watch for Google to add more options to the left-panel at any given time. Though they have already experimented a great deal with this layout, I expect we’ll see a lot more tweaking as time goes on.

Do you think Google’s new SERPs will increase your traffic?

Adding RSS Feeds Can Mean Increased Website Traffic

RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication.  An RSS feed is used to distribute your website content to other websites.  It contributes to targeted website traffic.  RSS is a really great way to automate getting your new and updated content from your web site out to the world particularly specific populations that you are trying to reach.

Your targeted population will use RSS feeds to get updated and new information sent to them automatically so that they don’t have to go out to every single one of their favorite sights to look for updates manually.

They can sign up for free accounts to get an RSS Reader which will alert them to new stuff that they indicate an interest in.    Two commonly used readers are Google and Yahoo.  It is very easy to set up a free account with either of those sites.

The RSS readers give your audience easy ways to subscribe to your new content from your website.  Then, when they see something that really grabs their interest, they end up visiting your website to read more about it.  This is how simple it is to generate web site traffic and why RSS feeds should definitely be added to your traffic generation arsenal.

Using Wordpress makes setting up RSS Feeds of your content extremely simple.  But, if you use a basic HTML based website you will have to take a few other steps to build an RSS feed.  There are a couple of websites that can help. Just do a quick search for HTML to RSS Feed and you will be presented with a number of different sites where you can easily set up a feed that delivers your content to others.

A great way to get the most out of the RSS feeds you create is to syndicate it on other websites.  This will just expand your reach even further.  It is very easy for someone to subscribe to your feed and even to unsubscribe if needed.

If you want people to subscribe to your RSS Feeds without having to visit your website try using feed directories.  There are directories specific to certain industries that pull in new information from other websites all with RSS.

There are directories specific to sports, news, medical stuff, and more.  You can manually submit your feed or use RSS feed submitter software to really have it take off.  Using software to automate tasks of this nature is usually a good option.  Creating and submitting RSS Feeds are the type of traffic generation tactics that are tedious and time consuming if you don’t outsource it or automate it.  
Click here for a good software tool that helps with RSS Feeds and Traffic Generation.

RSS software will expedite building up backlinks to your website which contributes to building page rank.  That leads to higher listings in search results for your targeted keyword phrases and naturally, much more traffic.

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Understanding Your Customer`s Requirements Before Driving Ecommerce Traffic

To drive ecommerce website traffic you must research your market.  Not only know exactly what you are selling but who is your ideal customer that will buy it?

It is a process to identifying your ideal customer.  You need to research how that customer would buy your products on the Internet.  How do they look for your product?  What keywords would they enter into the search engines?  Maybe they don’t use the search engines at all.  What if they only learn about your product through an industry specific publication?

Once you know who your ideal customer is and how they would search for and buy your products then you should make sure that each page of your website is completely optimized for the keywords that they would be looking for.  Optimizing each page of your site includes writing a good page title, description, proper use of H1 tags and bold font, and relevant content.

If you ecommerce website is only selling a couple of products than doing this on-page search engine optimization will much easier.  There are some very useful shopping cart scripts though that will help you insert keywords and descriptions into the Meta tags as you populate your website with products.

Now that you have each product page of your ecommerce website optimized for the search engines, decide on a traffic generation strategy.  This will take you back to the answers you came up with regarding who your ideal customer is and how they will search for and buy your product.

If you have the budget, consider using Pay Per Click advertising.  Make sure though that if you are doing it, you really know what you are doing.  If you hire someone to manage the campaign, make sure they are competent.  You must keep an eye on your return on your investment.  PPC can get pretty expensive without much in return if not done correctly.

Very good ways to jump start some traffic and interest in your ecommerce website is to write a press release.  It’s not free to submit a press release but it is a great way to generate qualified interest and traffic to your website.

If you can with your ecommerce website, try to offer free shipping coupons and discounts.  A lot of people get extremely excited about free shipping for their products.  Take Amazon for example, how many times have you tried to buy at least $25 worth of stuff just to get that free shipping option? Stating promotions of that sort in all of your traffic generating advertising is important.

The fact that you are building an eCommerce website and now working on driving traffic to it is a major step in the right direction.  Before you go, go to this post and take a look at this really cool video I found on YouTube.   It is a good motivator and I really like to share motivating things.  Anyone trying to build a business must find their motivation and maintain it. 

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Driving Niche Targeted Website Traffic To Your Website

Whether you’re an affiliate marketer, sell your own products and services, or MLM, there are certain internet marketing techniques that you can use to get more traffic to your site.

The most important element of marketing your site is to go where your customers are.  Just as you wouldn’t promote gambling on a gardening site, don’t promote stuff where it’s not welcome.

What I’m saying is, don’t just throw your product up anywhere.  That’s not how to get targeted website traffic.  To get the most focused and targeted traffic, you have to promote where others are looking for what you are offering. Targeted traffic is the key to higher website conversion and more sales.

Regardless of what you are promoting, these techniques will help you get more traffic to your site, and building site traffic is crucial to your success no matter what industry you are in.

Here are seven tactics I use to get more web site traffic:

1. Search engines.

Search engines are the easiest way I know of to be found online because just about everyone uses the search engines. Although I don’t recommend that you rely solely on search engines as a way for potential customers to find you, you should at least get your site indexed. People can’t find you if you aren’t there.

It’s very easy to get indexed.  Just bookmark your site at some of the common social bookmarking websites and wait just a couple of days.  To get the most free targeted website traffic though, you definitely need to put forth more effort with promotion.  Keep reading…

2. Build back links.

Reciprocal link exchanging is a waste of your precious time.  Sure, if you have a relationship with another site owner that can refer people to you then go for it.  But for search engine ranking purposes, forget about it.

Concentrate on building quality one way links into your site particularly from high PR websites.  DO NOT use link farms and stay away from spammy sites.  It will do you way more harm than good.

3. Affiliate programs.

An affiliate program is where you allow others to promote your website for a percentage of the profits of each sale. Although there are other ways to pay affiliates like per lead, pay per sale is the most common.

With an affiliate program, you give others an incentive for promoting your website, and this can also make it easier to get links back to your site.

When you have affiliates promoting your website, you are generating some extremely laser focused and targeted website traffic.

4. Writing articles.

Of all the internet marketing techniques I’ve tried, I’ve found this one to be the most effective. I’m sure it has something to with the fact that I like to write, and maybe it’s easier for me.

What articles will do for you is help you build backlinks to your site, establish you as an expert, and offer more value to your business. You are offering your potential customers something up front.  People will click your links in signature boxes to learn more.  That type of visitor is part of the best free targeted website visitor group because they want to know more about what you have to teach them.

TIP:  If the thought of writing articles makes you cringe, try writing tip sheets, lists, or a how to. People love these types of articles because they’re so easy to read.

5. Joint ventures.

Done correctly, a joint venture can be your ticket to fast cash in your business. By seeking out others who have complementary websites, and offering them incentives to sell your products, you can quickly increase your bottom line.

6. List building.

Although list building isn’t an internet marketing technique, it is an important part of building your business.  List building allows you to recycle your traffic, build relationships, and increase your conversion to make more sales.

No respectful website traffic and promotion plan should really go without some method of capturing information from your visitors so that you can build your list.

7. Know your market.

By knowing your market, you’ll know what kind of products and services potential customers are looking for. Although it won’t help you raise visibility for your site, it will help you increase your conversions, and you can more easily get to know your market by visiting forums on your topic, posting polls on your site, and studying other sites on your topic.

The most important thing to remember is to show your potential customers respect. Don’t spam them with offers. Build a relationship, and you’ll build traffic and make more sales.

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