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June 2007 - Vol. 1,
Issue 4 |
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Increasing your website’s traffic may be the number one
way to grow your company’s bottom line. The more people
that land on your site, the more sales you’re likely to
make. This is true whether your site is a brochure-style
site that simply promotes your products & services or an
Ecommerce shopping cart site that accepts payment
online.
Increased traffic equals increased sales. That’s
an easy concept to follow. What’s not so easy to grasp
is HOW to do it correctly so that you get the traffic
you need and that the volume of traffic you get is made up of
qualified leads -- those who are ready to buy, not just
random surfers.
This issue of our newsletter is devoted to helping you
understand various strategies and tools -- some of them
are already included for free in our site builders -- to
help you make educated decisions
and implement strategies for increasing your website’s
qualified traffic and its bottom line.
Hope you enjoy this issue. Best wishes for
growing your business,
Greg Owen-Boger, President
OwenProCo, Inc.
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Strategies for Increasing
Website Traffic and Sales |
There are lots of strategies and tools to boost the number of
visitors your site will get, but none is a
stand-alone solution. The best approach is to look at
several strategies that when implemented together will
increase qualified leads from multiple sources.
For the purposes of this article, I’ve broken it down
into four multi-part strategies starting with the most
basic (and FREE) moving toward more advanced options.
The four strategies are:
 I
should probably address the expense involved with
building website traffic. We’ve already agreed that more
qualified traffic leads to more sales. Therefore, the
money spent on building traffic ought to be thought of
as an investment. If at the end of the day you see a
return on that investment (ROI) you’ve probably made
good traffic-building decisions. We can address ways to
measure in a future issue. For now, let’s
focus just on getting qualified traffic to your site.
Read on to learn more about each strategy. Where
appropriate I’ve linked to more in-depth information on
our websites and in some cases we’ve linked to articles,
resources and websites written by other experts in the
field.
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Strategy #1 -
Build your website's marketing foundation |
Just like when building a
house, the quality of your website starts with the
foundation. Building a strong foundation gives you a
good platform on which the rest of your work can sit.
- Register a descriptive domain name that
makes it easy to identify what your company does &
sells. We nailed this concept when we developed
DoItYourselfSiteBuilder.com and
DoItYourselfStoreBuilder.com. There’s no doubt
in anyone’s mind what services these two websites
offer. However, we didn’t do so well with our parent
site
OwenProCo.com. Although OwenProCo is the name of
the parent company, it does nothing to help a
visitor understand what it is and what we do. We’ve
had to make up for this fault by spending a lot of
time and resources building up traffic to it. Lesson
learned!
- Write great content that visitors will
find relevant and will want to read. It goes without
saying that your site needs to be written well but
it’s amazing how many sites aren’t.
Read what our April
newsletter had to say about writing great content.
- Use a navigation structure that’s easy to
follow so that people can find what they’re
looking for. We
addressed navigation back in April’s issue. Not
only does good navigation help your visitors, it
also helps the search engines find all the pages
within your site.
- Add meta tags to every web page. I have a
lot to say about this that I’ll address more fully in the
future. For now, suffice it to say that your site
needs well-written and thoughtful meta tags to help
search engines and indexes understand how to
categorize and rank your site in the search results
pages. There are three tags that need to be written
specifically for each page and added to the
underlying code. They are (1) page title, (2)
keywords & phrases and (3) page description.
 You
can edit these tags by going to each
page of your site (in edit mode) and clicking on the
“internet marketing” tab. Once you’re there fill in
the form and click save. You can also learn more
about meta tags by clicking the question mark icon
on the “edit page” page.
- Create Domain-specific Email Accounts –
Create (and use) email accounts using your domain
name. Once upon a time it was considered OK to use a
free email account (from services like Yahoo!, AOL
and Gmail) for business use. This is no longer true;
your site’s legitimacy will be questioned if your
email address isn’t associated with your website
domain. All domain hosting accounts, including our
site builders, come with email accounts so be sure
to set them up and use them.
Go
to your admin panel and select "Tools" >> "E-mail
Setup" and follow the online instructions.
- Add your domain name to all of your printed
materials and your email signature.
Building a solid foundation for your website,
although time consuming, will pay off in the long run so
be sure to take time to do it right.
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Strategy #2 -
Take advantage of the robust traffic-building tools
included FREE in our site builders |
Our website builders include
several effective tools to continue building your site’s
marketing foundation. Learn more about each feature
below.
- FAQ Pages – Adding an FAQ page may seem
like a strange traffic-building tool but it’s not
once you think about all the keyword-rich content
the page would include. Search engines love FAQ
pages so be sure to develop one if it makes sense
for your site.
Using one of our site builders, simply add a page (in edit mode) and
select “Questions & Answers” to add one to your
website.
- Refer-a-Friend – Called “recommend
website” in our site builders, this tool allows
users to send a link to your website to a friend or
colleague. This is a great tool for getting qualified
leads because your visitors know what their friends
are looking for.
Simply add a page in your site builder account and
select “Recommend Website.”
- Articles – Write articles that show your
expertise in your industry. Be sure to include
keyword-rich content and links to pages within your
website. Articles should be posted on your website
as well as submitted to article publishing sites.
Read what SiteProNews has to say about the benefits
of writing & publishing articles.
- Newsletters and Mailing Lists – Start a
mailing list and build it by using every opportunity
to encourage visitors to sign up. Once you’ve got
your mailing list started, be sure to send out
relevant mailings that will entice your readers to
take action.
Use the newsletter and mailing list manager within
the site builder (simply add a page and select
“Mailing List / Newsletter”) or if you want a more
robust application, try
Constant Contact
 .
This newsletter is managed through Constant Contact
and we are very happy with the services they
provide.
One additional note about
newsletters and mailing lists: do not spam. Spam is
bad. We can all agree with that right?
- Table of Contents or Sitemaps – A sitemap is simply a page
on your website that lists, usually in outline
format, all the pages on your site. Sitemaps help
your visitors find what they’re looking for as well
as help search engines index all your pages.
You can quickly create one in the site builders by
adding a new page and selecting “Table of Contents.”
- Google Sitemaps – Much like the “Table of
Contents” page discussed above, Google Sitemaps are
specifically created to work with Google’s
spiders.
Setting one up for your site is pretty straight
forward; follow the instructions in “Manage Pages”
>> “Power Tools” tab to automatically create one
in the admin panel of your site builder account.
As you can see, the
DoItYourselfSiteBuilder.com and the
DoItYourselfStoreBuilder.com both have great tools
to help you build qualified traffic. Be sure to take
advantage of them as you continue building your site.
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Strategy #3 -
Utilize other FREE tools that you can do yourself |
I recognize that although
these strategies are free, they can take a lot of time
to implement and as a business owner your time is money.
However, think about the return on the investment of
your time. Over time, that
investment will pay off.
- Submit to Search Engines and Indexes.
There are lots of different tools that
will submit a site to a bunch of search engines &
indexes at once. We even include the option as part
of our site builder marketing tools. We’ve found
over time though that submitting by hand, one at a
time, will yield better results over the long term.
Am I saying don’t ever use an auto-submitter? No.
But if you’re serious about building quality traffic
it’s probably better to do it by hand one at a time.
To
submit by hand, simply go to each search engine and
find their submission page, usually called
“recommend site” or something of that nature. Follow
their instructions and if all goes well they’ll add
your site. Search engine submission is a mixture of
art and science. We’ll discuss the topic in
more detail in a future issue.
- Update your site’s content often. Search engines love new content. The more you add,
the more they’ll pay attention. Just be sure that
your new content is relevant and adds value to the
visitor. Some ideas like articles, newsletters and
FAQ pages have already been discussed. Additional
content could include updating time-sensitive
information, adding a message board, polls, news
releases, etc.
- Include a “bookmark this page” prompt so
that visitors can easily add your site to their
bookmarks. It requires javascript but isn’t too
difficult; all you have to do is copy the code below
and paste it into your site’s HTML.
To
do this in our site builders, edit the page you want
to allow users to bookmark and in the text editor
click the “source” icon. Paste the code below and
change the URL to the exact page within your site.
<a href="javascript:window.external.AddFavorite('http://www.yourwebsite.com/yourspecificpage.html')">Bookmark
This Page</a>
- Ask for inbound links. Asking other
webmasters to link their site to yours is called
inbound linking, a topic heavily debated among the
experts because it used to be understood that
inbound links were the be all and end all of getting
high rankings in search engine results pages.
Because of this unscrupulous webmasters came up with
all kinds of sneaky ways to make their sites look
really popular. As it turns out, this was a bad idea
because the search engines could spot the deceit
very easily. Inbound links still help you rate
higher in the search engines but only if they are
from relevant high-quality sites. Like with most
things, use your best judgment and you’ll be fine.
This group of strategies takes a little more
know-how, commitment and time. But think of the high
potential return on your investment: can you afford NOT
to implement these strategies?
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Strategy #4 -
Consider other advanced strategies for building website traffic |
| If
you’re really serious about using your website to grow
your business and you’ve taken advantage of the above
strategies, it might be time to think about some
advanced marketing techniques. Each of these is complex
and will require more than just a few paragraphs to
explain in full. Follow the links to read what industry
pros have to say about each.
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| Final
Thoughts |
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One last important point on building traffic to your website:
although there are legitimate companies working to build
qualified traffic for their clients, there are also scammers who will take advantage of your desire to increase traffic
to your site. These scammers will charge you lots of money and
most likely will not deliver what they promise, so please be
careful if you decide to outsource this very important piece of
your marketing strategy. If a company or consultant makes a
guarantee, run away.
Building traffic is an art, not a science, and no one, no
matter what they say or what their experience is, can deliver
that kind of promise over the long term. Why? Because search
engines do not operate the same way and each one changes its
algorithms regularly.
As business owners, growing our bottom line is important to
all of us and our time is precious. I hope you’ll take advantage
of the strategies outlined in this issue but keep in mind that
Rome wasn’t built overnight. Do what you can when you can
because over time you’ll begin to reap the rewards of your work
and begin to see a return on your investment.
I hope you enjoyed this issue. Please
let me know if there's anything you'd like me to address in
future issues.
Sincerely,
Greg Owen-Boger, President
OwenProCo, Inc.
OwenProCo.com |
DoItYourSelfSiteBuilder.com |
DoItYourselfSTOREbuilder.com
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