Web Site Tools to Make Your Site Interesting
Once you have a website built and you begin to market it, you start to wonder if you should expand that website to make it more interesting for your users. Many websites use simple tools and techniques to expand the interactivity of their users' experience. If used correctly, these additions can be a great boost to traffic and return visitors.
Free Tools Galore
For a huge menagerie of free (and cheap) webmaster tools to ad simple things like polls, hit counters, and more to your website, Hits For Me is a great place to start. Don't have CGI access? They host most of these scripts too! This is the best way to get started on your road to site interactivity:
(http://www.hits4me.com/)
Bulletin Board/Message Board Systems
Have you ever been to About.com, Yahoo!, or another message system and wondered if you could put one of those on your website? If you have enough traffic to support one, a bulletin board (message board) system is a great addition to any site. Although fairly time-consuming to set up on a site, they can be well worth it once visitors begin talking and coming back regularly to keep talking! They are a lot of fun and a great resource for return visitors. I recommend vBulletin as the system of choice because it is scalable, robust, and easily fits into a current website's design:
(http://www.vbulletin.com/)
Branded Screensavers
Screensavers, while not really a website tool, are a great way to "brand" your business, website address, etc. and can be given away for free from your website. This allows users to install it on their system and see your business every time their screensaver kicks in. A great place to make your own screensaver at a very decent price is See You Again Screensaver:
(http://www.seeyouagainscreensaver.com/screensaver/)
Interactive Photo Albums
For many, interactive photo albumsare a big draw for their site. If you have a community of users, an interactive gallery is a great amount of fun. Large galleries of photos are also hard to manage. For tools to manage these types of problems, I usually use and recommend PhotoPost:
(http://www.photopost.com/)
Animated Graphics
Do you have a fun or children-oriented website? Animated graphics are a great way to ad a splash to those sites! Warning: too many of these or inappropriate use of them can make a good site ugly. That said, they are a lot of fun! There are a lot of free animated graphics to be found online. One of my favorite places to start is the Animation Factory:
(http://www.animationfactory.com/)
Site Search
Do you have a lot of information on your website and want to ad one of those search tools that searches only your website? There are a lot of free tools out there to do this, but most are ad-driven and post a lot of ads in front of your users. I recommend Fusion Bot as the best site search tool for regular websites and best of all, their basic search tool is FREE! Try them out:
(http://www.fusionbot.com/)
Links Management
A link exchange is a fun way to create visibility and link-recognition for your website (getting you higher ranks in search engines to boot). I rarely recommend a full reciprocal-link system as they tend to look ugly on websites and rarely garner quality links as they usually degenerate into free-for-all madhouses. It's always better to do them "by hand" and get better links to sites that are complimentary to your own. Setting up, checking, and managing those links is a lot of work, though, so I recommend Links Manager as a good tool to automate some of the more tedious aspects of it:
(http://www.linksmanager.com/)
Traffic Analysis
Read Craig's article below if you have access to your web logs. If you don't have access to them or you want more comprehensive, real-time statistics, you will need an online solution for analyzing your website's traffic. I recommend Index Tools for that:
(http://www.indextools.com/)
So start planning on your site's expansion today! Well-used and thought out interactivity is a great way to make a website fun for its users and, more importantly for you, more heavily visited!
How Non-technical Webmasters Are Harnessing the Power of RSS...
Copyright 2005 Ron Hutton
The opportunity to quickly and easily implement and harness the power of RSS is quite real and new programs become available every week that allow non-technical marketers and webmasters to capitalize on the effective use of RSS.
Jim Edwards spoke of this trend in the recent "For a Greater Cause" teleseminar. Media-rich blogs and content sites are stickier and keep visitors on site longer.
Consider delivering audio content via the internet by setting up a blog and incorporating streaming audio. By doing so, your media-rich message creates a relationship with visitors that cannot be achieved with text alone.
If you'd like to take this one step further, start using video content. It's the difference between reading a flyer versus listening to the radio versus watching television. Why do people gravitate to the TV when every home has a radio? When presented with the option, we prefer the satisfaction of both the auditory and visual senses.
The real power of blogs, audio and video is that you can invite your visitors to participate and interact with you by allowing them to post comments. Your blog becomes a community event and we all love a party.
If you'll be using the strategy of blogging with audio and video, there are three things that you should do.
First, as mentioned above, allow your visitors to post comments to your blog.
Second, always give visitors the opportunity to sign up for your newsletter or ezine directly from your blog.
Third, for those who prefer to receive news via RSS feeds, post your RSS feed on every page of your blog.
Recorded interviews with industry experts fed via podcast can raise your credibility simply by association. Arrange for a phone interview with an expert in your market area, get permission to record the call and post it to your blog. If you're offering publicity and exposure for the interviewee, it should be simple to find willing and eager parties.
RSS offers you the ability to provide high frequency content updates. It can be daily or hourly. Deliver important messages, news and other content on demand rather that waiting for your regularly scheduled e-zine.
What's next?...
Here's where things get fun for the online marketer and webmaster. One area in particular where you can really start to take advantage of RSS technology is to build sticky content on your sites and monetize it with programs like Google's Adsense.
RSS feeds are available in abundance that provide product news, press releases and updates. Sites such as PRWeb (http://www.prweb.com) want you to use their news feeds on your site. So why not? Build your site's content with news and information feeds that deliver steady streams of traffic.
Do a bit of searching and you'll find programs and scripts that make the addition of RSS feeds to your website very simple and fast.
RSS gives you an edge over your competition by allowing you to create a sense of community, offer interaction and provide the latest news and information nearly on autopilot.
About the Author
Ron Hutton is a 20 year sales and marketing veteran with a passion for coaching and training. To watch a free video tutorial on how RSS was used in one little experiment to generate an extra $100 in Adsense income in 2 weeks (10 days actually), go here now... http://www.gothrive.com/auto-news-video.htm
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