There are basically two ways to get website traffic. You can buy it, or you can get it for free. I’ve tried both methods over the years, and although the easiest way to drive traffic to your site is to use Pay Per Click marketing, I don’t recommend it. That’s because if you’re not careful you can spend a fortune buying website traffic and end up with a bad website ROI. I mean why buy the cow when you can get the milk for free? However if you prefer the easy way and you have spare money check out…

15 free traffic generation techniques that work:

1. Submit your site to the major search engines (Google, Yahoo, Bing) and to as many other search engines as you can. Before you do this however ensure your site has been properly SEO’d with relevant keywords/phrases.

2. Write 1-2 articles each week for 8 weeks and submit them to the free article directories. Be sure to include a link to your site after each article in the bio box with a link containing the main keyword used for your site. Each article should be optimized with the keywords your site is using.

3. Submit those same articles to email newsletter publishers in your niche. Even if you only get one or two of your articles printed a tremendous amount of traffic can be generated.

4. Find blogs related to your topic and leave useful comments with a backlink to your site.

5. Answer questions related to your site’s topic at answers.yahoo.com. Be sure to put a link to your site in each of your answers.

6. Join a handful of the most popular forums that deal with your site’s topic and become an active poster. Include a link to your site in your signature.

7. Write a press release about your site and submit it to press release sites such as prweb.com. If you are not familiar with press releases, take some time to do a little research: a press release is not written like an article.

8. If you are happy with a product or service you have used, write an unbiased testimonial and trade it for a backlink to your site.

9. Start a blog using WordPress, provide links to your site from each post. Submit the blog to the hundreds of free blog directories. This will get you plenty of quality traffic as long as you keep the blog updated.

10. Post ads with a link to your site on all the free classified ad sites you can find (such as craigslist.org). The best ones will allow you to post a live link. But don’t neglect the other ones. If your ad is well written, people will go out of their way and type your url in their browser. Off course you must post in the appropriate category.

11. Write an interesting email signature that includes a link to your site, and use it with every outgoing business email you send.

12. Start a page on facebook.com and on any other popular social media site you can find, always provide a link so visitors can go to your site. Building a fan base on Twitter is another good way to promote your business and gain traffic. Be sure to offer useful information to your followers and avoid blatant sales. Remember these are for socializing not selling.

13. Submit a video with useful information to YouTube.com, Squidoo.com, etc. You don’t really need any video producing know-how as a simple PowerPoint slideshow with some background music will do the job. Even short videos (3 minutes or less are best) captured with your cell phone camera can be submitted.

14. Search your main keywords on Google and see if you can exchange reciprocal links with related websites that come up in the top results.

15. Write an ebook or a short report (say 10 to 20 pages), or find a product with giveaway rights that you can brand with a link to your site. Then submit it to all the free ebook directories you can find online.

While all this sounds like a full time job, remember, you don’t have to do this all at once. Just pick the traffic item you feel best with and take action. Invest an hour or two daily working that traffic item. Once finished with a traffic item move on to your next favorite technique. If you work diligently at this, over time you will increase the free traffic flow to your site that will dramatically boost your bottom line.

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Getting people to buy your products or service can be a challenge. Many good ideas, products, and or services have failed due to the lack of sales content or marketing materials that address the buyers needs. If you are experiencing slow or no sales perhaps you should take a look at your sales content. Sales content that does not address the reasons why people buy is a fault that will ultimately reduce sales or drive you out of business.

Here are 7 reasons why people buy:

1. Make Money
2. Save Money
3. Save Time
4. Save Effort
5. Improve Health
6. Increase pleasure
7. Eliminate pain

All successful marketing materials will appeal to one or more of these 7 reasons why people buy. To improve your sales success, make sure your content addresses as many of the buying reasons as possible.

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]]> http://blog.webhostinggoods.com/7-ways-to-increase-website-sales/feed 6 http://blog.webhostinggoods.com/article-marketing-tip http://blog.webhostinggoods.com/article-marketing-tip#comments Wed, 07 Oct 2009 00:11:32 +0000 admin http://blog.webhostinggoods.com/?p=220

Here’s a tip for article marketing. “Use the Resource Box to your advantage”. Most article posting sites will allow you to post 3 anchor text links within the resource box. A few only allow two links however. These anchor text links should be made up of the main keyword used for a given page of your site. Each text link should point to a different page on the site. This has two beneficial factors for your site.

1) A link to your page improves SEO and ultimately aids in boosting Page Rank for that page.

2) The link provides an instant direct link to your site for anyone reading the article.

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People go into business for themselves all the time for many different reasons. Some people get sick of being stuck in an office. Some people prefer to be their own boss. Some people are victims of a down turn in the economy and see it as the perfect opportunity to realize their dreams. While there are many reasons to have your own business, there are also many ways to start a business. One of the easiest and most popular ways is to own and operate a website. In fact, people in record numbers are creating products and offering services over the internet for the first time.

No matter your reason, when you start a website, the first and most important fact you will discover is your site has little to no traffic. It is generally thought by novice internet entrepreneurs that all you need is a good website with a good product or service and you’re on your way to instant riches. Well this is somewhat true but the other important ingredient you need for success is “traffic that converts to sales”. This is where reality of owning and operating a successful website begins.   

Web traffic (potential customers) is the key to your internet success, without targeted traffic your site will not become the financial success you hope for.  New websites begin their existence by hanging out at the back of some very long and dark corridors somewhere in cyberspace. No one knows your new site exists, and no matter how hard a cyber-pilot tries, your site will never be known until some extra effort is put forth to give your site a name and place. 

To bring your site into the light of cyberspace here are five Internet Marketing Strategies that you can use, must use, to get the valuable web traffic you’ll need to be successful.

On Page SEO
SEO is the art of designing a site in a fashion that gives the site an advantage for obtaining free and abundant traffic from search engines. The number one aspect of SEO is selecting keywords relevant to your site. The keywords you select should be based on high usage, low competition and relevancy to your topic. When your site is properly SEO’d you can expect a boost in organic (free) traffic to your site. However don’t expect complete success with On Page SEO alone.    

Off Page SEO
To complement On Page SEO, an activity that goes hand in hand, is Off Page SEO. This is basically an action to obtain links from other sites. This is a crucial factor for SEO. Links from other sites serve two purposes. 1. Quality links say to the search engines that others think your site is useful so the search engines in turn boost your page ranking, boosting your page ranking results in better free traffic flow to your site. 2. Each link that exists in cyberspace to your site is a direct path to your site. The more links you acquire the higher your traffic flow becomes.

PPC
PPC or “Pay Per Click” is a web marketing technique that can quickly and easily generate the flow of targeted traffic to your site. As the name implies (Pay Per Click) is a method that costs money. Most search engines offer PPC programs, the biggest and best respectively are Google, Yahoo and MSN Live Search. While there is a cost to a PPC program there is no better or quicker way to generate traffic. If your site is new, it is wise to begin a PPC program while other free methods of generating traffic are developed. Once other free methods begin to bear traffic, dependency on a PPC program can be reduced or eliminated.     

eMail Marketing
As the name implies this is a technique of marketing your site by means of sending emails to potential clients. Your foremost issue with email marketing is that of obtaining a legal and targeted list of email addresses belonging to interested persons. If your site is new you probably don’t have a list. No problem however, a list can be bought. Do your homework, make sure a purchased list has valid names and addresses and is targeted to people interested in your product or service.     

Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate marketing is a technique that involves others in the sale of your product or service. The concept is that you solicit other websites that are relevant to your web business to advertise and drive traffic to your site. Of course to get others to do this there has to be compensation. You will simply share your profit with affiliate sales sites for their effort of sending traffic to your site. While you may not like the idea of splitting your profit, Affiliate Marketing can make you much more successful.

The internet marketing strategies listed above fall way short of complete explanation and detail. For successful implementation of these strategies you are urged to educate yourself completely with each idea. The key to your success is to not stop marketing once your site is active. By continually applying internet marketing effort you will continue to improve the traffic flow to your site and make that dream of instant success a reality!

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