Help Stefan Campaign
Generate More Traffic to Your Site:
Tips and Tricks
If you're serious about making money from your website, the only way to be successful is to drive as much traffic to your site as possible. In general the economics work something like this: for every 100 non-specific visits to your site about 1 in every 100 click on your banners and buy something. However, if you have people coming to your site looking for a specific item or service then about 1 in 20 will buy something. The secret is to drive as much general traffic to your site as possible. However, you also want to increase the 'stickiness' of your site. You need to make it attractive enough that those who are truly interested in the information you're presenting or the service you're selling will keep on coming back again and again.
You site must be interesting, informative and/or useful. The more content you have the more likely your site is to be 'sticky'. It must also be good to look at and easily navigable. These, of course, are fairly standard web-design practices; though it's surprising how often they're contravened even by the sites of large companies. Always remember the golden rule of programming: KISS (Keep It Simple, Stupid).
A simple well-presented site will put your information in front of your users much more effectively than a cluttered 'busy' site. If you have lots of text, then break the text up with headings and sub-headings. Web-users tend to be impatient and many will simply skim through a page only looking at those sections of particular interest to them.
Page Map |
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| Increasing the 'stickiness' of your site | Bulletin Boards and Discussion Sites |
| Driving traffic to your site | Improve your Page Ranking |
| Advertising using RSS | Join the Mailing List |
Increasing the 'stickiness' of your site:
Interestingly, one of the best ways of driving traffic to your site, the use of news syndication by RSS (see below) is also a way of increasing the 'stickiness' of your site. There are a large number of news sites out there and if you have some programming skill these can be brought together or 'aggregated' on your website to provide a global newsfeed overview of a topic of interest for your audience. There are a number of such aggregators available (which run on your web-sever), examples being Gregarius (written in PERL/AJAX) and PLANET (written in python). To see a cross-section of the technologies available perform a search for 'RSS aggregator' on a technology site such as HOTSCRIPTS. Using such aggregator technology you can create a dynamic website that gives your users an ever-changing view of your topic of interest. Dynamic content being one of the main factors in making a site 'sticky'. Such content-rich pages will also help to improve your site's ranking in Google, driving more traffic to your site. I will shortly be publishing a 'how-to' on this very subject. Stay tuned...
Driving Traffic to your Site
You've tackled the appearance of your site, its navigability and you've made progress to making your site more 'sticky'. You now have a loyal fan-base, but your overall traffic remains poor. What can you do? The simple answer is... Advertise!
OK, I know the answer is obvious and you may be thinking 'I knew there was a catch... I'm going to have to pay for all that traffic and I simply can't afford it'. Well, you're right... You are going to have to pay to drive traffic to your site. However, the currency you'll be using will be time.
Advertising using RSS
You've already read about RSS. It's the latest 'boom' on the internet. Between news feeds and blogs (web logs) the generation and publishing of RSS feeds is a 'big thing'. RSS lets you publish information about your website, what's going on and what's changing very cheaply and if you're any good at it your RSS feed will be picked up by others. The following pages tell you the basics of generating and publishing your own RSS feed. If your feed gets syndicated then news about your website will be spread. It will become incorporated into other websites' news aggregates and your site's URL will be distributed around the internet, increasing the number of links pointing towards it and driving new people to your site.
Using Bulletin Boards and Discussion Sites
As a community, the web is so diverse that someone is discussing almost exactly what your particular website is about. Such sites can provide an excellent means of advertising. However, you have to work within the rules of such communities. Join as many of these sites as you can handle and join in with the discussions. Use the expertise you're demonstrating in your website to help and inform others. Then make sure you have a 'sig' or signature ready to append to your entry. This would be something like your site name or brand, your e-mail address and your website's URL.
Nemeton
yourname@yoursite.org
http://www.yoursite.org/
Not only will this get you and your website known to the specific audience you're targetting but these sites are also indexed by the major search engines and people will come across your site and its pages because of this. Also, it increases the number of external references to your own site improving the chances that it will be indexed properly by the search engines and may help improve your ranking in those selfsame search engines.
Remember, you only need to define the 'channel' heading once. All the <item> entries then follow one after the other. We're almost done, but not quite there yet. If you're familiar with HTML web pages you'll know that each page generally starts with a <DOCTYPE> definition stating what type of document the page is (HTML, XML etc). The same is true of an RSS feed. Except that you have two definitions.
Improve your Page Ranking:
Again, it may be an obvious statement, but the higher the ranking of your page in the internet search engines then the more likely you are go get traffic. Unfortunately, maximizing your page rankings means going through every page on your website and checking the <meta> within the <head> block of your HTML. Specifically, go through your list of keywords (these being the words that you'd expect people to use when searching for your site). Make sure that these relate to your page but that they include the likely words that someone would use to search for what you're offering. Also if you have a potential plural for a word like recipe and recipes always use the plural form as the singular is included in this.
Next, make maximal use of the content section in the <meta>. Use a meaningful title here and repeat this text for the <head> and main body <TITLE> blocks. If there are any keywords used here repeat them in the text of your web-page. The more times these words appear the more 'relevant' they will appear to the search engine and the higher your page will appear if anyone searches with these terms.
Use Article Sites
Much of the work in increasing the traffic to your site is involved in advertising your site. You need to let people know that your site exists and you need to increase the number of links that are coming into your site. One excellent way of doing this is to write articles and submit these to article sites. This way you can tell people about the kinds of information available on your site and you can also add links to your sites in these articles. As the articles are used and published by others this means that information about your sites and links to your site are disseminated rapidly. (if you would like a list of article sites have a look at my List of Article Directories page.)
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