Promoting Your Web Site
Creating a successful Internet presence involves much more than designing a great web site or having the "perfect" product. Listing your web site with the Search Engines is your first step; however, you must not solely rely on the Search Engines to bring you traffic.
You must design a complete promotional strategy and work it every day. If you're launching a new web site, your first step will be to submit your site to the Search Engines and Directories.
Although there are many auto-submission software programs available on the Internet, make sure you manually submit your site to the main Search Engines and Directories: Google http://www.google.com/addurl.html (Although you can submit your site map to Google, you will receive a higher ranking by allowing their robots to find your pages on their own.)
The Open Directory Project http://dmoz.org/add.html
AltaVista http://www.altavista.com/addurl Lycos http://www.lycos.com/addasite.html Hotbot http://hotbot.lycos.com/addurl.asp
Once you've manually submitted your main pages, visit SelfPromotion.com http://www.selfpromotion.com to automatically submit your pages to a number of additional Search Engines and Directories.
A good way to organize your promotions is to set up a web page, for your personal use, that will contain your complete strategy. This page should be stored on your hard drive and not uploaded to your server. Your page should contain four sections.
1. Daily Promotions
2. Weekly Promotions
3. Monthly Promotions
4. Miscellaneous Promotions
Each of these four sections should contain the appropriate information for each of your promotional resources, such as web site name, user ID, password (if applicable) and hyperlinked web addresses for each web site you plan to use for your promotions. This will enable you to open your web page each day and visit the sites you have listed.
Daily Promotion
Discussion Boards
Visit some popular discussion boards and share your expertise. Although you may not advertise on discussion boards, you can include your signature file with your post. Before you begin posting to discussion boards, make sure you lurk a while and see exactly how the board functions.
Visit http://www.web-source.net/web/Discussion_Forums/ for a complete listing of some of the top discussion boards.
Weekly Promotion
Ezine Advertising / Ad Swaps
Your weekly promotions should consist of placing a paid ezine advertisement and/or arranging ad swaps with fellow publishers.
Visit the Directory of Ezines for a complete listing of hundreds of publishers and contact information for advertising. http://www.directoryofezines.com
To organize your ad placements and swaps, place the publication names, publisher names, ad dates and hyperlinked web addresses within your weekly promotions list.
Monthly Promotion
Your monthly promotions should include writing an article in the area of your expertise, promotional exchanges with similar web sites, and offline promotions.
To organize your monthly promotions, place the names and hyperlinked web addresses for each of your promotional resources within your monthly promotions section.
Writing Articles
Writing articles that may be freely published with your bylines is one of the best promotional methods online. Your article may be published in hundreds of ezines, on web sites or even in magazines.
For further information on writing articles, visit: http://www.web-source.net/write.htm
Promotional Exchanges
Cross promoting is a powerful technique used by many Internet marketers to increase the exposure of their products, services or publications. You simply decide what type of promotional exchange you would be interested in and contact fellow marketers to discuss an exchange.
The most effective technique used in cross promotions is recommendations. By providing each other with a personal recommendation you can increase your response rates tremendously.
Here are some popular cross promoting techniques you can use to boost your business:
Link Exchanges
Exchange links with web sites similar to yours, but not in competition. Many Search Engines are now utilizing a system that tracks and ranks sites according to the number of quality links pointing to a particular web site. By exchanging links with similar web sites, you will not only increase your Search Engine ranking, but you will also increase your web site traffic.
Ezine Ad Swaps
Exchange subscription ads with other ezine publishers. Ezine advertising is one of the best forms of advertising on the Internet. By swapping ads with fellow ezine publishers, you can run your ad in other publications free of charge.
Subscription Exchanges
Exchange subscription information with fellow ezine publishers. Provide recommendations within your ezine's welcome message, thank you page and even on your multiple subscription ezine form.
Ezine Column
Partner with a similar publication and provide content for each other. This may be a weekly tips column, question and answer column or whatever you'd like.
Ebook Exchanges
Partner with fellow Internet marketers and create free ebooks to freely distribute. The ebook should mutually benefit and promote both of you, while providing valuable information for your visitors.
Ride Alongs
A ride along is any extra information (advertisements) sent along with a direct mailing. You can use this same technique with any ezine solo mailings you may run by including an exchange recommendation within your mailing. In addition, you can include recommendations within your thank you letters you send out when you deliver your products.
Up sells
An up sell is used when your customer is in the process of ordering your product. Another product is introduced, for a small additional cost, just as you're closing the sale. This technique is used with many infomercials when the customer calls in their order. The operator will introduce an additional product for a minimal extra charge. You can use this same technique on your order page by trading product recommendations with fellow marketers.
A quality recommendation will pull a much higher response rate than just a link or banner. Cross promote with individuals you truly respect and believe in, as your professional reputation is on the line.
Offline Promotion
Promoting your web site offline is another great way to increase your traffic. Below are several resources to assist you:
IDit Plates http://www.iditplates.net Put your web address on your vehicle. IDit Plates are a great way to continuously promote your web site. They're triple chrome plated and blend in well with your vehicle. I was impressed with the quality of this product and highly recommend it.
Visit iPrint http://www.iprint.com for your printing needs. From business print items to promotional items, iPrint has it all.
Place ads in newspapers, magazines, on the radio, or on TV. Visit these links for complete listings:
Gebbie Press http://www.gebbieinc.com
Newspapers Online http://www.newspapers.com
For even more promotional products, Promo City can add your logo to any one of over 500,000 items. http://www.promocity.com
Miscellaneous Promotion
Your miscellaneous promotions might include paying for traffic, text and banner advertising.
Pay-Per-Click Advertising
If you're looking for a low-cost, yet highly effective means of advertising your products and services, then Google AdWords may be your answer.
Google AdWords provides a simple way to purchase highly targeted advertising, regardless of your budget. Unlike other sites selling banner ad space and pay-per- ranking, AdWords provides advertisers with highly effective text ads that are displayed with the search results. Studies have shown that highly targeted keyword advertising produces an average of four times the industry standard clickthrough rate.
Google, one of the premier Search Engines, receives over 29 million searches each day. Their popularity most likely stems from the speed and accuracy of their search results. Needless to say, placing your text ad with Google Adwords will be a highly effective way to advertise your products and services.
It is a well-known fact that text ads perform much better than banner ads. What better way to target your audience than through a popular Search Engine? Your potential customer is there for a reason -- they're looking for something. When a Google visitor types in their keywords, they are almost instantly presented with their search results. On the right side of the results are colored text boxes containing targeted advertisements that match their search terms.
When you place your ad with AdWords, you will have the ability to select a list of tightly targeted keywords including all of the following:
Keyword Matching - Shows your ad when a search includes your selected words.
Phrase Matching - Shows your ad when a search includes your selected phrases.
Exact Query Matching - Shows your ad when a search contains your exact keywords and no others.
Negative Keyword Matching - Will not show your ad if a search contains certain words you select.
This unique targeting technique will enable you to create a highly targeted ad campaign and test your ads with a high rate of accuracy. What's more, you can even target your ads to a specific country or language.
The great thing about advertising with Google AdWords is that you will have complete control over your ad and how much you'd like to spend. You can open an account with a credit card with no minimum deposit required. Once you place your ad, it can begin running almost immediately.
Their advertising rates are very reasonable. The amount you spend on your advertising campaign will depend on two factors: (1) the number of times your ad is displayed and (2) the position, one through eight, in which your ad appears. The advertising rates are as follows:
Position 1 - $15 per thousand ads shown Position 2 - $12 per thousand ads shown Position 3 - $10 per thousand ads shown Position 4 - 8 $8 per thousand ads shown
The position of an ad is determined by how well it is performing. Ads with a higher clickthrough rate will receive a higher position and in turn will cost more.
In order to increase your clickthrough rate and spend less money, try to select keywords and phrases that specifically target the product or service you're offering. Avoid using common words, as these will use up your ad displays very rapidly. Instead, select words that specifically target your product or service. For example, instead of using a general keyword like software, use a keyword that focuses on a specific software such as FrontPage 2002 -- or, a little less focused, web design software. In addition, make sure you use your keyword phrase (search term) as the title of your ad. This will increase your clickthrough rate considerably.
When you set up your account with Google, make sure you use a different ad for each search term. Not only will this increase your ad's relevance in the search results, but it will also increase your clickthrough rate.
Once you place your ad, you can easily track your ad's response rate and make adjustments instantly. This is a great, low-cost way to find out which ads are performing the best.
Google AdWords provides Internet marketers with a cost-effective alternative to banner advertising. If you want to increase your traffic and sales, give AdWord a try -- you'll be glad you did.
For further information, visit Google AdWords: http://adwords.google.com
Pay-Per-Click Search Engines
If you've been struggling with your web site traffic and your sales aren't what you had hoped for, then maybe it's time to start paying for traffic.
The most popular and probably most effective pay-per-click Search Engine is Overture http://www.overture.com. However, Overture.com no longer provides a cost-effective service for small businesses. Their minimum bid on targeted keywords is now .010 and their service is now targeting the larger businesses with big bank accounts. There are, however, several other companies that provide similar services.
Findwhat.com http://www.findwhat.com offers a Pay For Placement™ program that provides a unique and cost-effective way to drive highly targeted traffic to your site. By opening a bidding account, you can bid on keywords and keywords phrases within search results. You decide how much you want to spend, where you want to be found and when you want your program to be active. And, best of all, you only pay for actual traffic sent to your site.
The key to using this technique effectively is to focus on one specific product and select highly targeted keywords. This will help you to weed out all of the window shoppers and attract your specific target audience.
Viewing Search Terms
Most pay-per-click Search Engines will enable you to view exact "search terms" that have been used to perform searches. Use this to your advantage. You can find out exactly what "search terms" are being used for your target market and place your bids accordingly. Try to create a list of as many relevant keywords as possible. The more keywords you bid on, the more traffic you'll receive.
When bidding on keywords, keep in mind, in order to be successful, you don't have to be listed at the top. Although receiving a listing in the top three positions will produce major traffic through Overture, most of the time, you must have a large advertising budget to compete.
Before placing your bid, perform a search to find out how much your competitors are paying per click. Try to place your bid so that your listing will appear on the first page to increase your chance of success. By selecting highly targeted, less popular keywords, you'll not only attract a more targeted audience, but you'll also obtain a higher listing for less money.
Your Ad Copy
Your headline and ad copy are the most important part of your entire strategy. Your headline must grab your potential customers' attention and force him/her to read on. Your copy should tell them exactly what you have to offer and convince them to visit your site.
When writing your ad, make sure you don't mention free stuff, as you want to avoid attracting freebie hunters. By weeding out those potential visitors expecting to get something free, you will attract a more targeted audience of potential buyers. There is no need to pay for visitors that weren't interested in buying anything in the first place. When placing your link within your ad, make sure you direct your potential customer directly to your sales page. In other words, if your product isn't on your main page, then don't direct your potential customers to your main page and make them search for your product. Direct them to your product's page.
Reviewing Your Reports
Once your campaign begins, make sure you take the time to review the reports provided by the pay-per-click services. These reports will provide you with information in regard to how well each of your keywords are performing and enable you to adjust your keywords or change your bids accordingly.
To increase your traffic even further, don't just stop with one pay-per-click Search
Engine -- try several at time. The more streams of traffic flowing to your site, the better.
Here is a list of some of the top pay-per-click Search Engines:
- http://www.overture.com http://www.Findwhat.com http://www.Bay9.com
- http://www.Win4win.com
- http://www.7search.com
Visit http://www.payperclicksearchengines.com for a complete list of over sixty pay-per- click Search Engines, reviews and tips.
If you're serious about your business and you're ready to drive a stampede of targeted traffic to your web site, then give the pay-per-click Search Engines a try. They're well worth the small investment.
Once you've implemented your promotional strategy and continuously work it each day, you'll be amazed with the results of your efforts. Consistency will be the key to driving massive traffic to your site.
How to get bundles of traffic to your website…
In the first 5 issues I’ve talked about some of the more basic models for making money on the Internet and (hopefully) I’ve also helped you to get your new site up and running. Now it’s time to learn how to get traffic to your website - After all, it’s going to be pretty hard to make money if you don’t have any visitors!
Generating traffic is one of the most important elements of building a successful internet business - once you’ve worked out how you can drive quality visitors to your website you should be on the road to success (wherever that is!). By creating quality traffic cheaply, you can almost afford to be a little lackluster when it comes to other elements of the site (although this depends what sort of site you have and who your audience is).
In this issue of the Ecourse we aren’t going to cover each method in great detail as each method will take a whole issue to explain properly. For the moment, I’m providing an overview of the different techniques and options available for generating traffic:
Free Search Engine Traffic
Getting listed in search engines like Google is a great way to get free traffic (There are over 200 million people using the Google search engine each day!). If you can get to the top of Google for important and valuable keyword phrases then it’s possible to get loads of free traffic - a fantastic strategy, but one that is hard to master.
You have to be extremely dedicated and focused to succeed in this way- but it is possible (especially if you can find an area where there’s no too many people trying the same thing). Another consideration is that many search engines crowd their listings with paid ‘advertisements’ which makes it increasingly harder to stand out in the crowed.
Cost per click (CPC) advertising
CPC Advertising is the fastest (and easiest) method for getting traffic to your site. Another advantage is that you only pay for each click that you get to your site.
You can set up an account with Google Adwords and start getting traffic to your site within 10-20 minutes. The other major system that implements CPC advertising is Overture (who has relationships with Yahoo and MSN and other major search engines).
The difficulty is that there are also lots of other people who are going to be competing with you and driving up the cost per click. For example, if you want to bid on the keyword “mortgage” in Overture you are probably going to be paying several dollars for every person that clicks on your ad. The trick with CPC advertising is to find clicks that are much cheaper (in the range of 5-25 cents per click). For more information on cost per click advertising go to http://www.affiliated-business.com/promotion/Pay-Per-Click.html For information on how to get clicks at 5 cents when others are paying several dollars see below.
Viral traffic or referrals
This is probably the most powerful method of getting traffic to your site if you now how to make it work. If you can get other people to tell their friends about your website, there’s a good chance they will tell their friends as well. Such ‘viral advertising’ is terrific because it is totally free and comes packaged with a recommendation from a friend.
This is how Hotmail got started; at the end of each Hotmail email was a tag line which said “If you want to join Hotmail and get free email click here”, so any person who sent the email to another person was actually promoting Hotmail for free.
Writing articles for an ezine
You can get free publicity by writing articles for ezines who accept content from outside writers - another popular (and free) method to attract new visitors to your site.
Online forums or news groups
Generally most forums and news groups do not allow blatant advertising of your product or service. In fact, in doing so you would probably get yourself banned from a site. However, you can make ‘intelligent’ posts in a forum, some will even allow you to have a tag or signature line at the end of your post (if someone reads the post they might decide to click onto your tag line and visit your site, especially if you have provided some useful advice).
Advertising in Ezines – There are some ezines which accept advertisements – a great way to gain exposure with a targeted audience. However, you should be cautious; make sure the ezine really does have the readership that they are claiming.
Solo email advertisements – Instead of advertising in an ezine, you may be able to pay to send out a solo mailing to the readers of an ezine.
Online classifieds – There are a number of places where you can advertise in online classifieds, sometimes for free or sometimes you need to pay. I haven’t had any personal experience with this area, and I’m not sure that it is really that effective, but everything is worth a try!
Offline advertising – Some companies have had success in advertising in offline media such as newspapers and magazines. I wouldn’t focus on this area until you have exhausted all other online possibilities.
Banner advertising – If you have a product which is aimed at a general consumer market (and you have good conversion rates) then you can be quite successful with this method. However, you will generally need to spend a minimum of $5000 just to test and see if it is working (that’s if you advertise on any of the major banner networks).
I wouldn’t recommend banner advertising unless you have experience with Internet marketing and / or you have a really great product or offer.
Pop-ups – As you probably already know, untargeted pop-ups are generally quite ineffective (unless your aim is to have your visitors pull their own hair out!). Once again it can work but it is only for those who are experienced at the game. Targeted pop-ups can be a lot more effective but you need to make sure that they are really targeted – a lot of research is needed to make successful use of ‘pops’.
Guaranteed traffic 10,000 hits!!! – If you ever see any promotions for guaranteed hits, for example: “10,000 hits for $360” - stay away. Generally, companies making these offers will get you hits by using overpriced pop-up traffic.
Other online advertising methods – There are many other ways niche methods to advertise online and we can’t cover the all in this issue of the Ecourse, but they are all worth trying as long as it doesn’t cost you too much money.
Free links from other sites – A highly recommended way to boost traffic is to get links from other sites for free. To get quality traffic the site should have a similar subject to yours and the other site needs to give your site a great recommendation from a page that people visit on their site -not just a simple link from their links page- A link from their links page may increase your popularity with Google but it is unlikely to get you any visitors.
Affiliate links from other sites – An affiliate program is a great way to get visitors to your site to buy your product. This is obviously only appropriate if you have a product to sell which you can offer an affiliate commission on. If you are only selling other people’s products through their affiliate programs then you can’t really have an affiliate program of your own.
Other paid links from other sites – You can pay other sites to link to your site in an arrangement where you pay per month or other negotiated period.
Affiliate networks – If you have an affiliate program you can get your program onto an affiliate network which gives you instant access to a whole lot of new affiliates who can promote your program.
Joint Ventures – I have left this to last because it is one of the most effective methods. You can get a relationship with someone who has a site in your general topic area or an ezine in your topic area. The key to this method is to develop a relationship with that person. Then they can promote your product and get a commission from the sales that ensue.
Which method should I use?
There is no best method for getting traffic. Generating quality traffic requires some hard work and dedication – everyone will hit and miss using the methods described above. The most important thing is to test each method, look at the results and the overall trends in your sales and then decide which method is best for you.
There’ll be more on boosting traffic in other parts of the Ecourse.
How to get visitors for 5 cents in pay per click search engines when most people are paying 57 cents...
Pay per click search engines are a great way to generate traffic. The problem is that most of the good keywords cost 50 cents or more. Here's how you can get traffic for much less
If you want to get the maximum number of visitors, then you should implement all three strategies.
This page assumes that you understand the basics of how pay-per-click advertising works, and that you understand how Google and Overture work. If you need more information on the basics go to this page on pay per click search engines.
How to get 5 cent visitors from Google
Ok, so let's start with Google. Remember that the system for Google is totally different to Overture. We are dealing with Overture and Google on this page because they are the ones that are going to drive the majority of traffic for you. It is actually much easier to get clicks for 5 cents or even lower at other pay per click search engines, but it is difficult to get very many clicks. For more information on the other pay per click search engines click here.
So basically the secret for Google is to do proper research for your keywords and find every combination of keywords that you can think of. For more information on keyword research click here.
Let's say for example that you have a site that sells wine. At the time of writing, the minimum bid on Google for "wine shop" is 57 cents and the minimum bid for "buy wine" is 35 cents. And that's just the minimum which will likely put you at the bottom of the list of 8 advertisements and get you very few clicks.
Instead, have a look at these combinations of keywords:
wine sales
wine stores
wine sale
purchase wine
discount wine
wine price
wine cheap
wine shops
order wine
wine on line
wine prices
wine club
wine cheapest
All of the above keyword combinations are available for five cents. (Although they might not last long at that price if some wine sites are reading this article!)
It doesn't matter what business you are in, there are some keywords or keyword combinations that other people have missed. I have even managed to get clicks for web hosting traffic at 5 cents per click, which is probably the most difficult area to get web traffic for.
The secret is in coming up with lots of keywords and combinations of keywords. Here are a few more ideas:
Try the pleural versions of the keyword.
Try different verb forms - make, making etc.
Try combining two keywords into one word without
spaces, for example instead of buy car try buycar
Use misspelt words
Getting clicks for 5 cents on Overture
With Overture you need a slightly different system of getting the low cost per click keywords. Basically for Overture you can only use keyword phrases that appear in the search suggestion tool. (Click on the link Search Suggestion Tool).
For example if you have a site on Bonsai trees, when you put in the word Bonsai into the search suggestion tool, it give you the following results:
42453 bonsai
13770 bonsai tree
2823 bonsai kitten
2169 bonsai plant
1356 bonsai care
and so on ...
To get clicks for 5 cents, make sure that you bid for every phrase that applies to your site. That probably won't get you in the top 3 listings which is the best pace to be. However, even if the top bid is 60 cents, and you are listed as number 35 you will still get some clicks just from the Overture search engine itself. And for keyword phrases that are right down the list, you will often be able to get a number 1, 2 or 3 listing for 5 cents.
Regards,
- Daniel Russo
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