Increase Traffic

chk_red.gif (160 bytes) Use these ideas and watch repeat and new traffic soar !
 

These are  basic stages of planning to keep your site fresh and improve the overall  populous of traffic flowing.

 

1. Give away knowledge.

2. Analyze your site

3. Survey your visitors

4. Search Engine Registrations

5. Banner Advertising

6. Ezines

7. Newsgroups

8. On-line public relations

9. Directories

10. Free classified Ads

11. Chat rooms.

12. Your own ezine (or emailing list)

13. Direct email

14. Put a message in your email signature

 

 

1. Give away knowledge.

  • Every company has information they generate, collect or come across, as a result of their normal business activities, but which is valuable to their target customers. Make-up companies have expert information on how to apply makeup.
  • Put it up on your site - people will come to read it, and in the process, will learn about your other exciting offers. We have information about marketing and maintaining your website - people come here for the free information and later use our services. Obviously you will need to advertise that your site has this information in the search engines and other on-line media.

 

2. Analyze your site

  • Find out what are the most popular pages on your site, by analyzing your traffic reports.
  • Find out what makes them popular (a good guess should do) and then advertise that! It's sure to pull a better response than anything else - your research has proven that is what your visitors are interested in (use your research, which are generated in site logs and traffic software).

 

3. Survey your visitors

  • Do a research survey of your visitors. Email them the survey questionnaire and offer them something for filling it out (Maybe a sweepstake for one of your products).
  • Where do you get their email details, off your registration form? You should have a registration form on your site (and hopefully a sweepstakes offer to encourage people to fill it in - don't forget to advertise the offer on your site). The registrations will give you the profile of visitors and enable you to send them a regular email.

What to ask?

  • How they found your site - spend more time and money on the 20% of sources that produce 80% of visitors.
  • Why they came - this will help you increase the response to your advertising to no end.
  • What they liked, disliked - now you can make data based improvements rather than depending on your gut.
  • What they would like to see added/improved - I find customers the best source of new ideas.

This is just a sampler, define your own survey objective and develop questions related to your site that will enable you to achieve it.

 

4. Search Engine Registrations

Search engines are most people's launch pad into the web; some are free and will give you the highest return on time invested in internet advertising.

Here are the basics:

  • There are 6 search engines that account for 80% of all searches - focus 80% of your effort in registering in these and 20% of your effort in registering in the others.
    Top 6: Yahoo!, Excite, Altavista, Webcrawler, Lycos, Infoseek -- Not necessarily in that order
  • Search engines return tens of thousands of pages to any search criteria. Most people do not narrow down their search criteria. And most people only read the first 20 returns - if you are not in the top 20 you should not have bothered registering.
  • How to get into the top 20?

Every search engine is different and uses slightly different criteria, so this is kind of general and not every technique applies to every search engine equally.

  • Define the key words and/or phrases that customers looking for your site are most likely to use (If you're a computer retailer think modems, keyboards, software, etc.). If you're a regional company don't forget your town/locality is a key word people will search under. These are the words that you want to come out tops with.
  • Put these words in your meta tags, some search engines place your site higher if the search word is in your meta tag (some will not even read it).
  • Many search engines rate your site by frequency of the key word appearing in your page - though don't spam (i.e. keep repeating the same word), search engines look for this and some will not list your site.
  • Search engines also rate your site by location of the key words. The higher up in the page they appear the more relevant they believe that they are.
  • Some engines look at how many links are pointing to your site and decide that more popular sites are more relevant. So make sure you are out their getting people to put up reciprocal links.
  • Test each engine and see where you come - if you're not high enough change your approach and try again (tip; look at what the pages that are coming out top are doing).

 

5. Banner Advertising

The most important thing about banner advertising is test, test, test, test, test, and test.

Some banners will out pull others by a factor of 10!

What to test

  • Test your offer, i.e. the compelling message that will persuade people to click through, this says more than anything about your ad design, will influence the results.
  • Next test the words that you use to describe the offer.
  • Next test the pictures you use to visualize the offer.
  • Then test any other creative elements e.g. should it have a mouse arrow or click button? Look around at competitor banner ads and use your own   judgement - the first three items mentioned account for 90% of differences.
  • Keep the size below 10mb. In my experience this is the average size most banner programs accept but check with the banner program you are interested in, they will tell you how many mbs., length, width etc..

 

Where to place your banner advertisements.

  • Banner Exchanges

Unless you are selling banner advertisements on your site and you have sold all the space you have available, sign up to a banner exchange program (such as www.linkexchange.com or www.bannerexchange.com. They will arrange to have your banner published on other web sites and you will jointly publish other people's ads on your site.

Remember it is not an equal arrangement. For every two banners you put up your banner will go up only once (or up to 1.8 times if you can negotiate a good deal). The banner exchange program takes the balance.

  • Buying Space
  • Again the key idea here is testing - some sites will outperform others by up to 2 to 1. Also it's worth having some budget.
  • What results should you expect? 1% if you have a good offer and you communicate it well. 3% if you've got a great offer and communicate it in a fantastic way. Anything over 4% and you're a genius. Most people should come in between (but closer to 1% than 3%). Keep testing till you get your percentage as high above 1% as possible.
  • How much does media cost - depends on how you buy, by click through or by page impression (click through tends to be more expensive if your offer is anywhere good. However it's a safe way of testing if you can negotiate).
  • Costs range from $10 to $75 per thousand. Why the difference audience quality and targeting. With the mode about $20 (you should always negotiate off rate card, start at 65% off rate card - they may pretend to be insulted, but don't worry it's your money, sometimes they'll take it).
  • So there you have it $20/1,000 with 1% gives you $2 per click through. Don't forget click through's are just half the story, you should also monitor spending (if you're in ecommerce), how often they come back (if you are a publisher), or number of sales leads (and how much converts into new business).

It's worth noting with good copy and good media buying $1.00 to $0.50 per click through is achievable.

  • Where do you buy - where do we start. You want sites where your target customers visit. Look at the list of top 100 web sites, contact the media brokers (www.adventure.com, www.doubleclick.com, etc.), or try sites like adcentral.com. You can use as many as you like (but try testing a campaign with more than 20 sites - it is a full time job just speaking with them).

 

6. Ezines (Electronic Magazines, they use to be called electronic newsletters or eletters, but could you sell ad space in a letter? Positioning!)

  • Actually ezines are great value for money, some regularly get response rates of 0.5%, the ads are just text (no expensive graphics, pure creativity with just copy). Prices start from $1 per thousand for 3 lines and go up to $10 per thousand for 10 lines (in a more expensive publication). In most cases you have to take the whole circulation, but at those prices ($500 for a 50,000 circulation ezine) so what.
  • Where to find ezines. There are probably over 10,000 of them (though I don't know anyone with a full list). Check out http://www.ezine-news.com/.

 

7. Newsgroups

  • There are about 25,000 Newsgroups alive and active, they are also free.
  • Some groups take explicit advertising some discourage it. You'd better check before you post (or expect to be flamed, and earn a bad reputation for your company).
  • Search for the groups that are relevant to your target audience. Subscribe and check out the number of posts (are they busy or not, the busier they are the more likely they have traffic). Check out who's posting, are they the same people over and over again, or different people (this too gives an indication of how many people are using it).
  • Post your advert (if it is OK to post ads). When posting ads leave a space at the beginning of your subject line, that way your ad will come up at the top of most peoples newsreaders.
  • If the site doesn't take explicit advertising then contribute. Respond to relevant questions, giving your site as a place to go for further information (a bit more time consuming but often worth it).

 

8. On-line public relations

Don't forget to send your press release, on your new site (including why it is relevant) to the ezines and relevant web masters. For a list try: http://www.webcom.com/impulse/prlist.html.

 

9. Directories

A fair number of people do use directories (we get some traffic from them), but not much.It is not worth exerting a lot of time on these (at best update the popular ones yellowpages, etc, every quarter). Try yahoo.com companies/directories for the most comprehensive list.

 

10. Free classified Ads

Another waste of time! No one wants to spend their valuable time searching through endless mountains of dribble unless they have a lot of time on their hands.

 

11. Chat rooms

A good way to reach youth markets.

  • Choose a relevant chat room (the title of the room normally indicates)
  • Also choose a popular one - being real time they are time consuming and you don't want to spend your time posting to two teenagers in Colorado.
  • Better still, host your own chat room, with a topic that's relevant to the needs to your target audience.

 

12. Your own ezine (or emailing list)

  • This is another of those low cost, high return activities. Obviously to do it you need to collect the names and emailing addresses of the people who visit your site. You should be doing that anyway.
  • The secret is that people who visit your site once are more likely to visit again (since they have at least shown some interest in your proposition). What you are doing is reminding them to come back or reminding them to come more frequently. Response to your own emailing list is typically 5 to 10 times higher than response to any other media (yes I'm talking 5 to 30% here).
  • Does it matter that they're not first time visitors? No it doesn't, certainly not if you're selling off your site (old customers buy more than new ones do!), nor if you are a publication (advertisers pay the same amount per thousand).
  • What do you put in your newsletter?
  • News about your products, services and web site.
  • Useful industry related information on ways to cut expenses etc...
  • Make your newsletter into a teaser. Step one _____. Step two_____, click here (our web site) for steps three, four, and five. (It gets them every time, if it is interesting and revelent to them to follow through to read the rest: i.e Attract more traffic to your website by following these 5 steps).

 

13. Direct email

  • Yes, I have tried it, it does work (hold on to those flames) and I will keep on doing it.
  • Direct email need not be spamming. Spamming is junk email. The difference between, junk/spam is email that you do not want.
  • The difference is in the list. If you buy a list of people who registered to IPO (initial public offerings) Central, saying that they're interested in further information about IPO's and you want to promote your brokerage that specializes in IPOs then you're unlikely to offend anyone. Even if you are selling software for investors you should be OK. However if you send the same information to the entire base of CompuServe - you should have all your IP addresses disconnected.
  • If you do want to venture into direct email, take the following steps.
  • Make sure your email has instructions for people who don't want to mailed.
  • Keep a database of anyone who replies that they don't want to be mailed and run all your mailing lists against it.
  • Get in touch with _______ and add their database of people who don't want to be mailed to yours.
  • Check out the lists that you buy (many vendors don't provide what they promise).
  • Ask them the source
  • Check out their answers (many list sellers lie)
  • Test the list. Go 5,000 wait 24 hrs, 20,000 wait 24 hrs, 50,000, etc. Don't be in a hurry. After each test monitor non-deliveries, complaints and responses.
  • What's an acceptable level of complaints - depends  for some email lists 0.01% may be too high, a good email list more than 0.1% (and if you get more than 0.5% you're list broker has conned you).
  • Is it worth the risk/hassle?
  • Response rates of up to 0.5% (good list well matched to your proposition), more likely to be 0.1%. You do the math on a 500,000 mailing (anyone doing a 5 million mailings is a pure spammer - unless your market is really broad you won't get 5 million good targets). If you have the right product (i.e. can get good lists that are relevant to you your product) then it can be very lucrative. 2,500 responses to 500,000 emails is not bad for $200. If you're on a budget look into reputable email list companies, check and then double check !

 

14. Always

Put an ad at the bottom of your email (in your signature file). It's free. I regularly do a quantity of emails per day. It adds up.

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