6 Little-Known Ways to Increase Web Traffic Starting Now!

by with 8 Comments Online Marketing

When you are seeking to market your business on the net, one thing you can be sure of is the abundance of tools and resources that will seek to help you make more sales. Most of these tools focus on writing better sales letters, optimizing for better conversions and a few other such things.

The truth however is, if you cannot drive the right type of traffic to your salespages those tricks and tactics will amount to nothing. So, if you really want to succeed with your online business you should focus on increasing web traffic to your offerings. Getting more web traffic can be the key to increasing your exposure, and increasing your sales as a result.

Now, you don’t just want any old traffic; what you want is targeted traffic. An audience who are actively looking for your product or service. Want to know how to get this kind of traffic? Let’s take a look at a few things you can do to increase your website traffic

User-Friendly Websites

Increase Your Website Using These Tips

1. Create Blogs and Vlogs

Blogs and vlogs are amazing tools for bringing more web traffic to your site. Posting them regularly at consistent times will keep people coming back for more. Not only that, you should get many shares too! The key is to ensure that your content is original, helpful, relevant, and humorous. Edit it well to ensure there are no mistakes, as this can make you look less professional. Blogs are great if you have a good writing style, and vlogs are good if you want to show off your personality. Both can be used in conjunction to get more exposure. Especially if you work with another good blogger or vlogger! However, you may need to establish yourself first before you can do that.

2. Get Active on Social Media

Start getting active on social media if you’re not already. Choose the platforms that suit your business and audience best, then make sure you post at the right times of day. Different platforms have different times. You don’t want to try to sell to your audience, you want to share relevant information with them. Information from other brands too. You should also try to engage by answering questions. Make sure you respond to comments made by your audience. It’s a good way to practice your customer service skills!

3. Use SEO and PPC

SEO and PPC is key to creating a strong online presence. You can use an online SEO checker to get an analysis of your website and work out what it needs. Without SEO and PPC, the people looking for your product or service won’t know you exist.

4. Focus on Creating Great Taglines and Titles

Taglines and titles are important because they’re going to play a part in whether people click on your site or not. Make sure they are enticing and accurate!

5. Use the Right Keywords

Using SEO and PPC is all well and good, but the right keywords are a must. If you don’t do your keyword research properly, you could end up wasting a lot of money and getting the wrong kind of traffic.

6. Monitor Your Results

Monitoring your results is important. Otherwise, how will you know which of your efforts have worked and which haven’t? You can then expand upon the efforts that have worked and do even better. You need to monitor your results constantly so you can improve all the time.

Conclusion

Getting more web traffic isn’t too difficult, but it does take time. It isn’t a job you can do once and watch the results roll in. you constantly need to work at it until, like a boulder rolling down a hill, it gathers momentum and then the results come rushing in. Use the above tips and you should notice a big improvement in no time.

So, what are your tips for increasing web traffic? Share with us in your comments below.

8 Social Media Rules Your Business Should Live By

by with No Comment Social Media

8 Social Media rules for online successimage credit: flickr

Is your business presently on social media?

Do you want to see more success with your social media marketing efforts?

To say that social media has revolutionized how we do business today is understatement. Right now many businesses have moved beyond considering social media as just a fad. Many now take social media marketing as an integral part of their marketing strategy.

For example, a recent report by SocialTimes indicated that social media marketing budgets were projected to double in the next five years. Also according to Social Media Today, 83% of B2B marketers now invest marketing budgets in social media to increase brand exposure; 69% to increase web traffic; and 65% to gain market insights!

But these stats are only indicative. Businesses who use social media need to make sure they’re using it properly, otherwise they might just be wasting their time.

If you will want to experience success in your social media marketing efforts it is important you stick to the rules outlined in this post:

Rule 1: Keep Your Brand Voice Consistent Throughout

Come up with an appropriate brand voice for yourself and keep it consistent throughout your posts and advertisements. It can be difficult to come up with one, but you need to ask yourself a few questions first. What relationship do you want your business to have with its customers? How do you want your audience to view you?

You can be funny, serious, motivating…you name it. Just keep it consistent and appropriate.

Rule 2: Post during Peak Times

To get the most from the things you post, you should always post during peak times. Different social networks have different peak times. In general, you can post between 10am-4pm and feel OK about it. However, networks like Instagram have a sweet spot at 6pm-8pm. Do your research and stick to the timings.

Rule 3: Respond in a Timely Manner

If your audience is engaging with you, that’s fantastic. But you should do your best to respond to them in a timely manner. If somebody inquires about something with you on a Friday, you can’t respond on Monday. You’ve left it too long. The quicker you can respond to your audience, the better.

Rule 4: Post Quality Content

The content you post should be high quality, and original. If you post half hearted content, people will feel it. Post quality content of your own and of other businesses/people if you find them relevant, just make sure you credit them. If you don’t think you can manage this, you should have a chat with a company like Ice Breaker.

Rule 5: Be Social and Engaging

You can’t expect to sell, sell, sell on social media and get a huge response. People don’t like that kind of thing. Be social and engaging; that’s the whole reason people sign into their social profiles, after all. Talk about things in the news, holidays, and topics you feel will get people talking. It’s always beneficial to talk about things everybody else is talking about, as you’ll get spotted by more people as they browse.

Rule 6: Follow the Rules of Each Platform

Each platform has a sort of ‘etiquette’ that you should try to stick to. For instance, you can pretty much post as much as like on Twitter. However, Facebook should be less frequent. Instagram can be tricky; don’t post enough and people will unfollow. Post too much and people will unfollow. Try to gauge the etiquette of each platform you’re using and stick to it.

Rule 7: Remain Positive

Positive posts are always better than negative posts. You don’t want to be associated with any negativity.

Rule 8: Watch What You Post

Be careful of what you post. Make sure it’s appropriate and that you aren’t going to offend anybody. The last thing you want is to be in the news for all the wrong reasons.

Live by these social media rules and you’ll find you get much better results!

Get Your Web Content Read With These 5 Brilliant Content Writing Tips!

by with No Comment Content MarketingYour Website

Get more people to read your content

So, content is king, right?

But how many times have you written that really powerful piece of web content but no one cared to read it talk less of sharing it!

Yes, content MAY be king, but the truth is, no one wants to labor on a piece of content and all it achieves is a few visits now and then. Such a situation is not only frustrating but demoralizing.

But, not to worry, there is help.

There are some very exciting findings about website reading patterns and usability which, if used well, can help you create content that people will be eager to read and share. In this article I want to draw your attention to these findings and how you can use them to up your game.

So, let’s begin by looking at…

How People Read Content Online

Back in 1997 Jakob Nielsen and John Morkes discovered through a study that 79% of people online will scan your web site while only 16% will care to read it word for word!

“They don’t. People rarely read Web pages word by word; instead, they scan the page, picking out individual words and sentences.”

Now, you say, that was 1997! But the truth is, that has not changed today. In fact, with more and more people using mobile devices to access the internet and with so much more taking people’s time, you can be sure that more and more people NOW scan rather than read your content.

And of course, the W3School agrees with this finding. In an article titled: “Web Site Design” they affirmed the fact that users scan rather than read through a web page:

“A typical visitor will NOT read the entire content of your Web page!

No matter how much useful information you put into a Web page, a visitor will only spend a few seconds scanning it before he/she decide whether to leave or to stay.

Be sure to make your point in the very first sentence of the page! After that, try to keep the user occupied with short paragraphs, and new headers down the page.”

From these and many other findings it is clear that that writing content is not enough of itself. Getting people to read that content must form a BIGGER part of your content writing plan.

Here are some suggestions on…

How to Get More People to Read Your Content

1.    Improve Your Website Load Speed

It is interesting to know that while websites’ load speed has increased significantly in recent times at about 7.72 seconds on average, website users on the other hand expects your website to load within the first 2 seconds!

To prove how important this is, Amazon and Walmart did separate tests and the results were instructive. While Amazon reportedly increased revenue by 1% for every 100 milliseconds improvement to their site speed Walmart increased conversion by 2% for every 1 second of improvement on their site!

It doesn’t matter whether you are blogger or ecommerce site you need to take a cue from these two online giants. Use the suggestions on Yahoo! Yslow and Google Page Speed to improve your site load speed if you want more people to read your content.

Also hosting your website on a CDN webhosting platform can also be of great help when it comes to improving site load speed.

Besides, you should use a small number of quality, optimized graphics, and keep your page content down to two, or at the most three MS Word pages.

2.    Write In Inverted Pyramid Style

What is the inverted pyramid style of writing? It is simply a turning around of the usual writing style where you start with an introduction, background information, findings and then finally presenting your conclusion or recommendations last.

When you write your web content with such a style it means your website visitors will need to read a lot of information before they reach your conclusion and recommendations – a BIG reason for them to abandon your content in a matter of seconds!

It is advisable however, to turn this around and write your summary first, and then add the details. Doing this will help in getting their attention quite early and will be able to convince them to scroll for more of your content.

3.    Write Scannable Text

This is the suggestion of both Jakob Nielsen and John Morkes and the W3School. If 79% of online users will only scan your web content then that is what you should give them.  A simple way to do this to write in short sentences and paragraphs, and break up excess information into different pages.

Here’s what Jakob Nielsen and John Morkes recommends:

•    Highlighted words
•    Meaningful sub-headings
•    Bulleted lists
•    One idea per paragraph

4.    Be Less Promotional And Subjective

The tone and style of your writing has a lot of influence on how people will read and use the content. When Nielsen and Morkes measured the effect of different styles of writing on five versions of the same website the following versions had the following improvement in per cent according to their test readers:
.
•    Concise version with about half the word count as the control: 58%
•    Scannable layout with the same text as the control but easily scanned: 47%
•    Objective language using neutral rather than subjective, boastful or exaggerated language: 27%
•    Combined version using all three: 124%

From the above it is clear that planning your content and approaching it from the angle of a “helper” rather than someone peddling some goods will greatly improve the readership.

5.    The Eyes Have It!

Another finding that should interest you here is the findings of a study called Eyetrack III carried out in 2003 and 2004 by Eyetrack. Though the study was for news-type sites, but the findings are also applicable to bloggers and small business web site.

From the study it was discovered that online users followed our left-to-right Western Culture writing style. The study found that the eye pauses and reads the first few words of a dominant headline first, especially when that headline is in the upper left and sometimes the upper right.

Readers will usually stop reading at five headlines regardless of the number used, but an unusual keyword will often get people to pause.  Curiously, they also found that smaller type encourages reading while larger type encourages scanning.

All of these points to the fact that you should put your most important content (graphics, logo, company name, texts images, etc.) at the top left quadrant.

Besides, a headline in the top left quadrant could be of great help in keeping your reader on your page for longer than a minute.  You should also know that the first three words of your opening headline are the most important therefore, put them to the best of use.

6.    How Credible Are You?

Another thing that Nielsen and Morkes uncovered in their study is the fact that people are looking for credibility when they browse through web content. Some of the things that will raise your credibility are high-quality graphics, good writing and using outbound links.

Your website visitors want to get straight facts and not some exaggerated claims. Please if you are not a good writer the best route to take is getting a professional web content writer to write your web pages for you.

Conclusion

Getting more people to read your content is more about writing concise content that is scannable. Your content should be written in an objective style that is straightforward and friendly. Beyond being useful your content should be accurate and should be heavy on both breadth and depth.  Aim to be a voice indeed instead of another noise on the net.

Over to you: How are you getting more people to read your web content? Share with us in the comments below.

Driving Targeted Traffic: How to Put Your Traffic Generation on Steriods in Five Easy Steps!

by with 14 Comments Growth Strategies

So, you need more targeted traffic, right?

Yes, driving targeted traffic to your site is important but you need a definite guide that works. If you go about web traffic generation in a mediocre way, you’re going to attract a bunch of unqualified traffic that eats up your bandwidth. Doing business online costs money and time, if you must enjoy the fruit of your labor, you need “targeted traffic” that love your offers.

What’s the need of sending traffic to your site, when it won’t convert, subscribe or simply click a tiny Google AdSense Ad – you’ve got to think again on how this all works to bring you money. I’m in business to make profit – I don’t know about you but if you agree with that, let me show you the five important steps required to drive targeted traffic.

Driving targeted traffic

 

1. Have A Goal in Paper

Don’t have a goal in mind, have it in paper! Does this look like a step? Absolutely, it’s the innate step that changes everything. If you don’t set goals on how much traffic you need, the quality of that traffic and how to take action, you’re heading for failure. Once you map out your goal, you must make it realistic. I see a lot of beginners to internet marketing claim they receive over 1000 visitors weekly.

Well, if an expert made that claim, maybe I can give it the benefit of doubt. I know that affiliates can send much more than that – but for beginners, you must set your goals realistically. If you were to explain your traffic generation goals to a 2-year old, would he understand and agree with you?

Ask that question and write down your answer. Now, let’s move on to the next important step.

2. Research Your Key phrases Deeply

Success online, especially with search engines, is not via keywords. Keywords don’t send you traffic, but keyphrases does. I can’t remember the last time I searched on Google for the word “traffic.” I usually type a long tail phrase like “how to improve my traffic.” These are terms you should target if Google is to send you hot targeted traffic everyday.

So, instead of researching keywords, research terms that are longer, terms that make sense and have a decent search volume monthly. Although, Google keyword tools is recommended but it does have its flops. Don’t totally believe the stats, simply target terms that have decent local searches, and remember to check your “exact” section.

It’s better to be 9% right than being 98% wrong. Bear that in mind!

3. Make Your Web Pages Google Friendly

I prefer driving traffic from the search engines. My reason is simple, people who search for information via Google and other search engines are targeted. It’s quite different when a visitor comes via referral sites. They may not be targeted at all.

Ask yourself, when you’ve a problem that needs solution, where do you go first? I bet it’s Google. That tells you that the real responsive prospects you need on your site are busy searching and visiting web pages from Google. You need to position your web pages so that it would be found and rewarded. If you fail in optimizing your web pages, none of your content is going to get viewed.

That’s why on-page SEO is crucial. On your blog posts, link back to your old posts to make them strong, Google loves this knowing fully well that you’ve not neglected your old posts. If you don’t neglect them, Google won’t.

4. Write Quality Contents That is Natural

There are so many quality contents online, but few are written in a natural state. What does it mean to write naturally? Well, I will tell you. Let’s take this instance: If I’m your friend and you were writing a letter to me, how do you write?

I’m sure you’re going to write so natural as if I’m with you. You call me sweet names (nick name), tease me and even recommend what you saw the last time you visited the web. It’s the same thing, on the internet, Google spider expects you to write as though your “prospective customer” is standing next to you.

Don’t write your content with the mindset of publishing it later – getting Google to index before traffic comes. You won’t be natural no matter how great the content is. Just write and expect the person reading it to smile, link back to the content and expect more. That’s what marketing is all about – pleasing your customers and converting them into repeated buyers.

When writing for the web, don’t be overly keyword-oriented. Write as natural as you can. If the keywords needs to appear within your content, then insert it in a natural way. If it’s not ideal to include any keyphrase, especially the ones that are odd, stay clear.

5. Focus On Relevant Backlinks Only

After the recent Google panda updates, a lot of sites suffered and that’s a warning to unscrupulous content writers. The importance of backlinks to improving your ranking cannot be over-emphasized but you need to do it well.

Gone at the days when huge backlinks plays a vital role in raising your pagerank, today, what you need the most is relevant, quality backlinks from niche sites. Does that make any sense?

Relevant, Quality, Niche Sites.

Niche sites are those sites that share similar content like your site or blog. For instance, if you get a natural backlink from a gardening blog, assuming your blog is gardening tools and tips, that link carries a great weight. Even though the niche blog is PR 1 or less, it still counts as being relevant. So, stop wasting your time on building thousands of backlinks, focus your energy on quality, it’s the best route to tour.

All in all, with the above 5 important steps, your traffic generation endeavors would be on steroids, if you discipline yourself to abide by them. But remember, it’s action that makes the whole difference – Take Action today and enhance your online business.

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