Search Engine Optimisation

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Step 4.3 – Where’s The Traffic?

Saturday, December 4th, 2010

Step 4.3 – Where’s The Traffic?

Summary:

You’ve already spent a lot of time in getting all your ducks lined up so that your first website will be a real winner. Did you forget something? Maybe yes – and here are some items that are critical to making sure that your new website is a success. Critical, as in “how do I get people to come look at my website?” I’d call that critical, wouldn’t you?

This, of course, is the crux of the matter in Internet marketing. Rather than get into a detailed discussion of how Internet marketing works (or doesn’t work!), we’re just going to cover how you can find some of the tools in this section. There will be more about Internet marketing in future posts.

Autoresponders

An autoresponder is like a semi-intelligent answering machine. What is does is to receive input (for example, signups from a website or capture page), place the input into the data base that stores your client’s information (name, first name, user name, address, email address, phone number(s), birthday, sex, age, last purchase, contact date, etc. – whatever you want to collect that the client give you). Then it responds automatically (therefore “auto-responder”) by delivering specific pre-written emails (or even postal mails or telephone messages) on specified dates after the initial contact – for example, mail 1 is immediately after the signup, mail 2 is the next day, mail 3 is on day 2 after signup, mail 4 is three days after mail 3, etc. The reason for this type of activity is that it is a widely acknowledged statistic that a prospect will buy a product only after he has seen it at least 7 times. Autoresponders can be programmed for an infinite number of emails (assuming you can write them!). The systems are also designed to provide records for single or double opt-ins in case there is an accusation of spam. We use two autoresponder systems, for various reasons, one is AWeber, which is the most well known and most respected autoresponder company in the business. There are – of course – many others. The ones we have the most respet for are Traffic Wave where a free autoresponder is only a part of the Internet advertising business provided by the site, and Get Response, which is similar to AWeber. All of these have a free option, but if you are serious about your business, the services of the free offers just won’t be sufficient; you will need to upgrade.

Search Engine Optimisation and Traffic.

These are the subjects of countless courses, e-books, lectures, websites, etc. There are some free sources of information, but you need to be careful – a lot of the stuff that is free is sadly out-of-date. That means what you’re doing was correct two or three years ago, but could be exactly the wrong thing today! The main thing you need to do is get your site advertised. There are many free ways to advertise – things like traffic exchanges (you read splash pages or capture pages to get points so that others do the same thing with your site) and safe lists (listings are mailed to members who must accept them, and the members get to reciprocate) and many other things. Want the lowdown on the best current TE’s and safelists? Look over Traffic Hoopla, where you can find the best-rated traffic exchanges and safe lists. Traffic Hoopla you can join for free!

Free Traffic.

From our point of view, the best traffic comes from the search engines without having to advertise. How can you do that? “Simply” by writing well enough and getting your article entries placed well enough in the search engines that the traffic (i.e. the people who are searching for something in Google, Yahoo, Bing, etc.) find your entry and click on it to go directly to your website. The second best is something called article marketing (more on this also later on), and this you can do by writing unique articles with your links embedded in the article and in the author signature block (this depends on the rules of the individual article marketers), giving them to article distributing companies, and then people who are interested click on your link and come to your website. There are lots of twists to this, and we will cover the items in more detail either here, or in a separate website. If you think you would like to use some articles like these, take a look at the website of our partner, Sue Fleckenstein, at http://freelancearticlewriting.org/ – she writes custom articles, she has pre-written articles, and she also has articles from various article marketing operations available on her site.

Stay tuned for the next part of this series – Step 4.4 – Extra Attractions For Your Website.

Step 4.3 – Where’s The Traffic?