| |
Posts Tagged ‘traffic’
Wednesday, November 16th, 2011
Newsletters have been great business communication tools for years. In fact, the 20th century has seen a proliferation of newspapers of various sorts. When desktop publishing became fashionable in the 1990s, everyone soon had a newsletter. It became possible for small businesses to have their very own newsletter at an affordable price – as long as they had the time to do it themselves.
Then the Internet took off. Many people were reluctant at first to go online. But the few entrepreneurs who did go online for business started e-mail newsletters. And they had great results.
Today, e-mail newsletters are as common as print newsletters were in the 1990s. However, they are much more affordable to outsource than print newsletters were. That’s because you do not have to pay for the high cost of paper. The fact that you can deliver a company newsletter for your small business means that you can have a regular newsletter for a price that is more affordable than ever before. Even if you outsource it!
A newsletter has historically been the best traffic tool for anyone with a website. You have a captured audience! And you have their permission to contact them over and over again.
Learn how to get your own digital newsletter today.
Tags: e-mail newsletter, newsletters, traffic
Posted in E-mail Marketing for Small Business | 3 Comments »
Saturday, September 3rd, 2011
There’s been so much written about social media that you might think my question – What’s the point? – a little absurd. Actually, there is a point to my asking. It isn’t whether or not social media has a point. We all know that it does. The question, rather, is, What exactly is the point to social media?
Let’s rephrase it: What benefit is the most important benefit to social media? Is it reputation management? Is it audience engagement? Is it SEO? Traffic? All of the above?
It’s important question because without the proper answer you might develop a social media campaign with no direction. You could get lost trying to be found.
Social media actually has many points. That is, it has many points of entry and just as many exits. The real question is, How effective are you in using them?
Your use of social media should make the most of all your opportunities. It is for reputation management. It is for audience engagement. It does have SEO benefits if you do it correctly. And it can, and will, drive traffic to your website. But you have to have a strategy that covers each of those points.
Strategy. It’s the beginning of success. Are you ready to talk about your social media strategy?
Tags: Reputation Management, SEO, Social Media, traffic
Posted in Social Media | 11 Comments »
Wednesday, May 18th, 2011
Props to David Jackson for his article “10 Biggest Internet Marketing Myths Exposed.” These 5 Internet marketing myths come from his list, but I could just as well have created them from scratch. These are myths you’ve probably heard over and over again (and may have even bought into yourself). I’ll tell you why they’re myths.
- Anyone can succeed at Internet marketing. Just like anyone can succeed at rocket science. Every profession has a set of skills that are necessary to become successful in that career. If you don’t possess those skills, and in some cases you need specialized knowledge, then you won’t succeed. Internet marketing is a skill. If you don’t have it, hire someone who does.
- You can get rich quick on the Internet. I’ve never met anyone who has gotten rich quick at anything. Ignore the hype. The reality is, online marketing is hard work.
- All traffic is good traffic. This one is a doozy. Try paying for traffic from a traffic exchange and see if you come away with the same idea. Targeted traffic is good. Slush traffic is not.
- E-mail marketing is dead. Really? I’ve had some of my best sales through e-mail marketing. It’s not dead. It’s still very effective and if you do it right, then you’ll get a lot of good business from it.
- Article marketing is not as effective as it used to be. Yes it is. You might have to change how you do it a little bit, but article marketing is still effective.
These 5 Internet marketing myths are often repeated, especially within the context of small business marketing. They’re not true because many small business marketers use these tactics every day – to great effect. You can too.
Tags: article marketing, e-mail marketing, internet marketing, small business, Small Business Internet Marketing, traffic
Posted in Small Business Internet Marketing | No Comments »
Monday, March 14th, 2011
Do you have a healthy website? Does it do what it was meant to do?
Every small business website has a function. The job is to sell your services and attract new business. Of course, there are different methods and strategies for accomplishing this goal. But the bottom line is, your website must perform, and if it is a healthy website, then it will perform its necessary functions in a healthy manner.
Small Business Mavericks offers a website check up as a part of our regular service. During our check up, we look for specific things that tell us whether or not your website is healthy. These include:
- Does your website target the right keywords?
- Are you attracting good links or bad links?
- Are you beating your competition?
- Are you maximizing all of your traffic sources?
- Is your SEO localized enough?
- Is your website getting crawled often enough?
- Is your website attractive or is it turning customers away?
This is just a smattering of the things we look at when we conduct a small business website check up. We perform a full top-to-bottom check up to see if there are missed opportunities in your marketing and, if so, we’ll tell you what they are and how to fix it.
There’s no reason you can’t have a healthy small business website. How about a check up today?
Tags: inbound links, keywords, small business, traffic, website
Posted in website development | 1 Comment »
Monday, November 22nd, 2010
Of course, I’ve been saying for a long time now that social media helps with your search engine optimization and drives traffic to your website. Now, I have the validation.
The interesting thing about this report is that Hitwise puts a number on it. 25% of web page views are from Facebook. Not bad.
That’s actually a big number. It used to be that most websites reported 80% of their traffic came from search engines. But get this:
Overall, Facebook is now delivering more visits than any other website, about 10.28%, ahead of Google (7.21%) and YouTube (3.19%).
Facebook delivers more traffic than Google. Have we entered the age of social media dominance? Not bad for a phenomenon that started “as a trend.” Pardon me for secretly laughing, but that’s what a lot of A-list SEOs said about social media when it first started taking off in the early 2000s. I bet they’re not saying that now.
And neither am I. This is more than just a trend. And I think it could be a long time – if ever – before Google ever hits that top spot again.
To further drive the knife in, Hitwise also reports that Facebook delivers 61% of the social media traffic. And where is Myspace? 4%. YouTube is at 20%. No mention of Twitter.
Remember this, Facebook is still growing. It’s the third most visited site in Argentina, behind Microsoft and Google. It could end up being No. 1. At any rate, you can expect Facebook to be a major source of traffic for some time to come.
Tags: facebook, google, Social Media, traffic
Posted in Social Media | 2 Comments »
Tuesday, October 26th, 2010
One of the things that webmasters, and small business owners in particular, can get better at is embedded video. There seems to be a lot of missed opportunities in using video as a marketing tool for small businesses.
We could pontificate about how this is the case, but I’d rather just get right to the quick and tell you how embedded video can increase the traffic to your website.
No. 1, if the video you embed is on YouTube then you can leave a comment on the video after you’ve embedded it on your site and say something to the effect:
Come hear what we’re saying about this video at xxxxxxx.com.
Change the xxxxxxx.com to your domain name (I don’t mean to demean your intelligence, but I thought I’d state the obvious.  )
Next, after posting the video to your site, bookmark it somewhere. Try to bookmark that video at the most popular social bookmarking sites and be sure to give it a well-written, enticing summary.
If you do those two things alone then you’ll see an increase of traffic to your site. But there is another way embedded video can lead to more traffic.
Let’s say you want to add video to your site. Make the video then upload it to YouTube or another one of the video directories online (Note: YouTube is the most popular one). Next, embed that video on your website. If you do that often enough and use YouTube like a social networking site – making friends, commenting on their videos, favoriting the videos you like, etc. – then you’ll develop a following on YouTube and soon you will see that all of your videos are being watched by a lot of people. If you filled out your profile correctly then you put a link to your website on your YouTube profile. A certain percentage of your video watchers will visit your website through that link.
And that’s about it. It’s pretty simple. Videos have a lot of potential for reputation management, SEO, and website traffic.
Tags: traffic, Video Marketing
Posted in Video Marketing | 3 Comments »
Thursday, July 15th, 2010
If you are new to online marketing and new to social media marketing then you might be wondering just what the benefits are to marketing your business through social media channels. It’s a legitimate question. Here are 5 ways that marketing your small business through social media can benefit you.
- Increased Traffic – Social media can send you more traffic to your website. That’s not say you’ll automatically see an increase in sales, but if your website is optimized for conversions then you should see your sales go up as well. Using social media like Facebook pages, Twitter, social bookmarking and LinkIn can help you drive new traffic to your website and if it doesn’t increase your sales then you need to rewrite your sales pages.
- Establish New Relationships – You can often forge new relationships by engaging people through social media. Not only can you gain new clients for your business, but you’ll find that you’ve made new friends.
- Branding – Social media branding is a new method of online marketing that involves using the social media channels at your disposal to create and strengthen your brand.
- More Sales – Yes, many social media marketers have increased their sales through social media. You can too.
- Broader Reach – Through social media you can expand your company’s presence further and wider than you’ve ever imagined.
- Reputation Management – With social media you have greater control of your reputation online. You can monitor what other people are saying about you and your brand and respond much more quickly to potential problems. You can also control your talking points so that your audience knows what you stand for.
There are more benefits to social media marketing, but these 6 benefits are basic and within anyone’s reach. I highly recommend that you start using social media to market your small business today.
Tags: Branding, online marketing, Reputation Management, sales, Social Media, traffic
Posted in Social Media | 4 Comments »
Thursday, June 10th, 2010
One of the most important things you will ever do as a small business website owner is play the traffic game. It’s not really a game, but the idea is to drive traffic to your website. So how do you do that?
First, you should understand that it’s about more than just search engine optimization. Yes, search engines are one way to get traffic and it’s an important way, but it’s not the only way. You need to learn how to drive traffic to your website without the search engines.
There are online traffic generation sources and off line traffic generation sources. You should use them both, especially if you are a small business operating locally. The following list represents some ways you can drive traffic to your small business website:
- Social media (Facebook, Twitter, etc.)
- Pay per click advertising
- Display advertising on related websites
- Video marketing
- Link building
- Forums
- Billboards in your community
- Local Meetups
- Host or sponsor an event in your town
- Radio or TV advertising
- Press releases
This is just a small list, but as you can see there are some traditional marketing methods mentioned. You should incorporate those into your overall marketing plan. Just because you are doing business online or engaging in Internet marketing doesn’t mean that you should abandon the traditional methods of marketing that work. Many businesses succeed in driving traffic to their websites through TV and radio. You can too.
Have you tried a certain method of driving traffic to your site that worked? Share with us what you’ve tried successfully.
Tags: traffic, website
Posted in Small Business Internet Marketing | 4 Comments »
Friday, March 19th, 2010
One of the drawbacks to social media marketing is that it is difficult to measure results. Difficult, but not impossible.
For example, let’s say you have 2,000 Twitter followers. You know that your click through rate on links to your website from Twitter is 10%. That is, for every link you post to Twitter that leads back to your website, you see 200 clicks or visitors to your website from Twitter via that link. There are several problems with this number.
First, not all 200 of those clicks are necessarily your followers. If 10% of your followers retweeted your link, some of those visitors to your website could be followers of followers or even followers of your followers’ followers. But that’s not all.
Once those visitors land on your website, how do you know that purchases made are directly related to your link on Twitter? Unless you have a dedicated landing page – one that can only be accessed via Twitter – you don’t. Most analytics programs will give you outstanding reports on visitors, unique visitors, traffic sources and conversions. The problem is, you can’t always tell whether a particular conversion is from a specific traffic source or from another traffic source. And that’ what makes makes social media metrics difficult.
So what’s the solution? Should you abandon or give up on social media because you can’t measure results with pinpoint accuracy? No, that would be a grave error. But you should take all measurements with a grain of salt and test as much as you can. Don’t take anything for granted. Social media can produce results even if you cannot accurately measure them every step of the way.
Tags: metrics, Social Media, traffic
Posted in Social Media | 2 Comments »
Saturday, February 20th, 2010
A lot has been said in the last couple of years about duplicate content. Some people think you’ll be penalized if you get caught with it. Others know that you just don’t get credit for content that appears multiple times across various websites. But is it always a bad thing to have duplicate content?
While I wouldn’t encourage webmasters to just go out and start adding the same article to every website they own, the truth is you can make money from duplicate content.
There is one instance where duplicate content can benefit you. If you have an affiliate program and a tried and tested sales page that you know works, you can offer your sales page for use to all of your affiliates. That sales page would sit on each affiliate’s website and all traffic each page sends to you will be tracked with an affiliate code so that you can pass the proper credit to each affiliate.
So how does this benefit you and your affiliates? Obviously, it won’t benefit your affiliates as far as SEO is concerned. That sales page’s first publication – on your website – will be the one indexed. And now you’re asking, “Won’t that discourage your affiliates?” No, not really.
Most of your affiliates are going to drive traffic to their sales page with PPC ads, blogs and articles. SEO won’t matter to them. If the sales page converts traffic to customers then it will do its job no matter how the affiliates drive traffic to it. They won’t be so much concerned with SEO for that page as they will conversions.
In that case, duplicate content would be good. But don’t tell that to the SEOs who just repeat the same mantra they heard someone else say.
Tags: affiliates, sales page, traffic
Posted in SEO for Small Business | No Comments »
|
|
|
|
| |
|
