Help Stefan CampaignCeltnet WebInfo eZine
Tuesday, October 16, 2007
In This Issue
- Window on the Web
- Featured Article:
Keep your Pages Fresh for Visitors and Indexing Spiders - Classified Ad Board
- Comment
- Business Tip
Top Sponsor
Window on the Web
First, the Christmas run up... Remember this is the time of year where most poople do the majority of their spending. You should be thinking about Christmas now and beginning to plan for it. This means getting the appropriate banners for you site, possibly creating a Christmas-assoicated section for your site and featuring gifts and ideas for things that people can do or might want over the Christmas period. I'm definitely going to be redoubling my efforts in this area this year.
As I mentioned in a previous posting I'm going all-out on the internet marketing for my site. This has meant things like an almost complete overhaul of the site's 'look and feel'. This has led to a completely new CSS template for the site's look. You can see this in my completely new Affiliates Information section as well as in the new start page for the Celtnet Recipes introduction page. I hope you agree with me that the new look has a more professional feel. It also allows me to drive more content and advertising dynamically (see the article below to find-out more).
I'm also hoping that by the next edition of this eZine the newest page of the eZine will be dynamically created and will be using the new site design. Look out for the announcement of the latest version of this newsletter. This will be better for me as I'll only need to update a database to get the eZine published. But it will also be better for you as I can drive more content here and integrate that content better with the remainder of my site (so you get links to useful articles in my Reviews and Articles section. If you'r an advertiser then it will be even better for you as this eZine will be directly tied into my Affiliate Information section and any top and mid sponsor will get their ads rotated within the ads frames of the entire affiliates section of the site.
Dyfed
Editor/Publisher
Email me @ editor@celtnet.org.uk
To celebrate the launch of my Celtnet eBooks Sales Store and the new Affiliates Infromation and Database region of this site I'm offering this week's subscribers to this eZine a very special offer. Subscribe to the eZine and recieve 5 internet marketing eBook free. Each with full resell rights. Just sign-up to this newsletter and announcements below:
Mid Sponsor
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Feature Article
Keep your Pages Fresh for Visitors and Indexing Spiders
by Dyfed Lloyd Evans
Whatever else you may be doing with your website, one of the most important things you must do is to keep your content fresh. Adding new content or changing yor content keeps the indexing spiders coming back to index your site — which is good for you. But you also need to keep your content fresh for visitors. One of the easiest ways of doing this is to use somethign like an image rotator so that you have a different picture to view each time a visitor comes to your site (I tend to use rotating images and changing text, especially for article-driven areas of this site).
The truth is that all the people visiting your site are basically easily bored and driven away. They tend to come to your site via a search engine and only stick around long enough to view some of your site's content before flitting away once again. The measure of how long a person stays on your site is called the site's 'stickiness'. The better the stickiness then the longer a person will stay, not only on a single page, but also the number of pages that this person views and the time spent on each page. Note, however, what you're not trying to do is to force an user to remain on your site. This will only make them annoyed and ulitmately drive them away. Rather you want your visitors to stay on your pages of their own volition and then to come back again and again.
The first part of this equation is based on having good and useful content, of making the site as useful as possible (adding meaningful links, adding search functionality, and making your site basically look nice and welcoming (which means eliminating dead links and things that don't work, improving the language and spelling on your site). Of course, there's a fine line to be walked. You need your site to look professional but you don't want it to be too 'slick' as this can sometimes trigger warning signs for users maybe indicating that you're an organization rather than an individual.
The second part of the equation is more complex. How do you get people coming back to your site again and again? Part of this is obvious — grow your site. The more new and relevant content you have the more likely people are to return to your website. The other thing you can do is to refresh your content. One way of doing this is to add something like an image rotator for your site. These are frequently JavaScript based and are generally available FOR FREE! The other way is to rotate your content using a database. I do this with the Recipe eBooks that I'm presenting on the Recipes eBook page. Just refresh the page to see how the eBooks shown there change. All this is done with a MySQL database and about 40 lines of PHP code. It's not complex at all, but the effects are spectacular. Indeed, the whole page is driven from my eBooks sales site.
The other ways of gaining new and fresh content is to add a things like a Discussion Forum to your site (I use the freely-available phpBB2 system for this). You can also add a Reviews and Articles site. I use textpattern for this. It's not the easiest system to set up, but once you have it running it does pretty much everythign you need. This way you get your site's visitors and users to add new content. Both systems also have RSS/Atom feeds built into them so that you can syndicate your site's content and gain more back-links and visitors.
Keep on plugging away, keep on adding content, and eventually you will begin to reap the benefits that are rightly yours. Believe me, this stuff actually works!
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About the author:
Dyfed Lloyd Evans
Do you wirte eBooks? Do you market eBooks? Do you want your own eBook store? If you have answered 'yes' to any of these questions then you have to visit the Celtnet eBooks. Here you can get the code to set-up your own eBook store, you can market and publicize your eBooks and you can even get help to sell your eBooks. Every resource for eBook authors all in one site.
Classified Ad Board
Is your ad out yet? Subscriber and co-op ads are listed on the Classified Ad Board. The board is refreshed every issue with a new batch of ads.
Comment
Content is Still King
You need to add more content to your site, you need to make your site look nicer and navigate better. You need to make your site more attractive to your site's visitors. All these things are basically a must for any site — especially information-based sites.
The old adage 'Content is Still King' remains entirely true. The more contend (at least good quality , novel, content) you have the more likely your site is to be idexed. Also, the more content you have the more niches you fill and the more likely you are to rank well for at least some of those niches in the search engines. Here you're using the breadth of your content to make the most of an internet phenomenon known as the Long Tail where the rarer search terms and items, as long as you have enough of them, can actually bring you more traffic than aiming your site for highly-contested keyword.
Indeed, this is where, if you have a site with good depth of content you can run against what all the internet marketing gurus are trying to tell you. Forget marketing against highly-contested (and often highly-profitable) niches. Rather, spread you campaigns and go for breadth of coverage instead — you may be surprised at just how profitable this can be. The reason, well everyone and their granny is goin for the high-value niches but the small nieches are bing ignored and with a wide net of content you can scoop them up and dramatically increase your site's effectiveness.
Ignore the marketing 'gurus'. Instead, go with longer-term strategies that actually work. The truth is also that any idiot can gain top spot for various keywords in the search engines (I've done it myself with a number of keywords as an experiment). But it takes real skill to deliver a website that actually converts visits into income. You definitely need to drive visitors to yur site, but if you don't have any content on your site to attract visitors and make them stay and click on the products or ads you are offering then no amount of good search engine rankings will help you.
Good content means a good site and good sites make your sites' visitors feel at ease. This will make them more likely to trust all the content of your site (which is why I still get a nearly 2% click-through rate for my ads).
Business Tip
Fresh Content Means Returning Visitors
Yes, I know this sounds like I'm trying to cop-out of writing anything meaningful here by recycling what I've said above. Partly that's true, because I simply cannot stress enough how important producing fresh content is in terms of getting new visitors to your site and of securing returning visitors.
But, there are tricks you can use and these are based on how the human brain functions. We are very good at seeing things that have changed, especially if those things are colourful. A good way of changing your site is therefore to show rotating images to yur visitors. But, you can also use rotating ads on your pages to give the impression of change. If the placement of ads and the type of ads on your pages have changed then, at east in terms of your site's overall layout, it can seem to a returning visitor to your site that things have changed and they may take a little more time to view the page to see if there's anything new there.
This is a simple trick, as long as you have the technology to do it. You could use one of the JavaScript ad/image rotation software that are freely available. You could hold your ads and images (or at least links to the code) in a database and roll our own rotation code (not as difficult or as daunting as it sounds) or you could go for an image rotation solution, such as Openads (if you want to learn more about using free and open source software to build your site read my article on The Utility of Free Software.
That's it for this week, ladies and gentlemen. Check back next week for more from the world of CeltNet.
