Helposter Blog

Establishing your own E-commerce site is not what it used to be. There are thousands of competitors that are competing for a bigger share of the market. Every method you can find to augment your sales will be beneficial.

Let’s face facts we are in this for the money. Altruism is not the primary motivation to put a website on the Internet to provide information for the world. Albeit there are some that provide information for the sake of providing free information to others. I have just started to provide free information sites on a variety of topics that are near and dear to me, just for the sake of providing information to others. There is no monetary gain. For the most part though the majority of my websites are commercial in nature and are profitable. The majority of sites though are out there to turn a profit. I don’t think that profit is a dirty word either.

It is common knowledge that without traffic we have no business. Like any business, without any customers you will not have any sales. No sales, no money and no site. Traffic represents all the people that get a chance to see what you have to offer. The more people who see your products the more people there are to buy them.

No one puts up an E-commerce site and doesn’t expect a profit. We have startup capital that needs to be recouped. With consistent traffic, we at least have a fighting chance to achieve that probability. Monetizing your traffic would optimize your chances of making the best out of it.

Traffic Types

The internet has proven to be a very reliable source in finding what was deemed to be non-existent. The internet has made the world a smaller place; you can advertise a product from Asia and find a buyer from North America in an instant. This has made the Internet the most desirable place to do business, in my opinion.

Generating traffic however is not an easy task on the Internet. You have to contend with a great number of sites to generate decent traffic flow. However, if done successfully this opens up a plethora of possibilities. Of course one of those benefits is monetizing your traffic flow.

Therefore, to get to the core of it the creating more traffic you need to understand the types of traffic available.

I break down traffic into two basic categories: Organic and Paid.

Organic traffic is homegrown so to speak. It’s the traffic that comes from non-paid sources. This is search engine traffic or link traffic from sites of which you have reciprocal links. Search engine traffic, although free, is a time consuming process for the patient and assiduous. Link traffic is an arduous task as well, but quite rewarding.

The best method of obtaining a good and constant flow of traffic is the organic method. The only issue is that it does take time to accomplish, but the rewards are great and of course inexpensive. The traffic itself is free, however the time and energy expended and perhaps software used may cost something. There are many different sources of organic traffic:

• Search engine listings

• Reciprocal links
• Writing and submitting articles
• Free classified ads.

• Self promotion

All of these sources take time but can be implemented for free.
Paid traffic comes in many forms. Pay per click being the most popular today, due to its instant results. Advertising takes on many forms and probably the best and most widely used is banner advertising. There are many that argue that banner advertising is a waste of time and money, as you will either pay for impressions( the number of times the banner is shown) or for clicks (the number of times someone clicks on your banner.)

Honestly, unless you have a good bankroll, don’t jump into advertising as a first method of getting traffic to your site and product.

The argument for pay per click advertising is you will find out quickly if your product has a market, and if it does, pay per click can be very rewarding. Do the math ahead of time by estimating your cost and the number of clicks on your ad and how many convert to sales. This is very important, as you may have a very decent click through rate but a poor conversion to sales rate. This equates to losing money over the long run.

The argument for organic traffic is strong but not instantly rewarding. It’s your call as how you will proceed.

Rick Carbone is the owner/webmaster of Home Business Research a web site devoted to starting and running a home based business. In adition to hundreds of articles and information on start up, management and business opportunities Home Business Research offers digital products for home businesses. Visit our site for tons of free information.

By now, you probably already have the theme of your website established, your keywords picked and your website ready to go live. You’re thinking that you’ll submit your site to the search engines, sit back and see how much traffic the search engines will send you, right?

STOP! There are many different avenues you can take to drive traffic to your site but they should only be taken after you make the search engines your first priority. The search engines should be your foundation. They’ll always send you a certain amount of traffic if you have a high page rank.

IMPORTANT!

Your website must be ’set up’ for a high page rank in the search engines and it’s important to do it ‘before’ you submit your site for the first time. Here’s the reason why:

Usually, after you submit your website to the search engines for the first time, your website will be ’spidered’ fairly quickly and hopefully your site will be listed on one of the top pages.

Your website may not get ’spidered’ again for months so if you make changes to optimize your site, you may not see your changes take effect for quite a while. You could be stuck on a back page, if any page at all, for a very long time.

Without getting into the mechanics of designing your website, here are the basics of setting up your website to be search engine friendly.

THE FIRST STEP is to establish the main keyword for your site. This is the word or phrase that you want people to type into the search engines to find your website. It’s important to have your site focused around your main keyword.

Let’s say you have a site dedicated to ‘building your own home’ so we’ll use ‘home building’ as our main keyword example.

THE NEXT STEP is to create a title for your website and to place it in the ‘title tag’ of your site. The ‘title tag’ should be the first tag in the ‘head’ of your site and it’s important because many search engines use the contents of the ‘title tag’ as the title of the listing. They also look for keywords in the title and your main keyword should be the first words in the title.

Generally, your title should be no more than 40 characters and, again, it should begin with your main keyword. Try to avoid using ’stop words’ in your title. Stop words are transition words such as – and, but, or, for, with, etc.

Here’s a possible title using our example main keyword ‘home building’ – Home Building – Home Construction Plans

Notice our main keyword is first, the title is less than 40 characters (39), there are no stop words and we managed to sneak in 3 secondary keywords – home construction, construction plans and home construction plans. Clever huh?

THE NEXT STEP is to create a ‘keywords meta tag’. This is where you list all the keywords you want to use for your website starting with your ‘main keyword’. A good rule of thumb is to use about 20 keywords and your main keyword should be contained in about half of them.

Using our example keyword ‘home building’ our keywords could be – home building, home construction, home building plans, home building cost, construction plans, etc.

Notice I didn’t use our main keyword ‘home building’ twice in a row. For example – home building, home building plans, etc. Search engines might see this as spam and it could hurt your ranking.

THE NEXT STEP is to create a ‘description meta tag’. This is where you describe your website and, again, you should start with your main keyword.

Keep your description to about 150 characters, use as few ’stop words’ as you can and sprinkle in as many secondary keywords as possible.
Make your description interesting because search engines often use the contents in your ‘description meta tag’ as the description of your website in the listing.

THE NEXT STEP is to use your keywords often in the body of your website. Make sure your ‘main keyword’ is somewhere in the beginning and at the end of the body of your page.

It’s a good idea to use your main keyword in an ‘h1′ tag and a few of your secondary keywords in an ‘h2′ tag. This tells the search engines that you put importance on your keywords.

It’s also a good idea to underline your main keyword no more than once and to use bold text for your main keyword no more than once.

Although there are other factors that determine your position in the search engines, having the basics of what search engines look for will give you a much better chance of making that illusive first page and driving consistent website traffic to your site.

For more website traffic ideas visit http://www.starttheprofits.com

Mike Burke is the author of numerous articles and has an affection for website marketing. Learn how to drive tons of targeted traffic to your site without spending a dime on advertising.
Visit us at http://www.starttheprofits.com

The key to success in any business is to know where you want to go and how to get there. Easily said but very hard to put into practice. Some of the very best of plans and programs go astray because we rely on gut feelings and instinct instead of actually acting in response to hard data concerning the effectiveness of what we are doing.

You work your tail off. Formulate business, promotional and advertising plans and do your level best to follow those plans. Unfortunately this is not enough. You must find a way to test the effectiveness of these plans and programs as you go along. To do this you must have a means to obtain feedback from consumers plus the means to test the effectiveness of your advertising.

A sad truth in advertising is that some ads appeal to some people and some to others. The same holds true for the advertising media selected to get your message out to the world. A killer ad for one segment of the market is a dud for another. That’s just the way it is. Big Corporations spend millions in the never ending quest to find what type of ad and what media is best for them.

Most of us do not possess the millions to waste money trying to find the ‘don’t miss’ ads and the proper media. We must proceed within the financial capabilities we have. We cannot afford to waste money on advertising which is not effective for our purpose. Small business people offline or online are faced with some tough problems in their advertising programs. There is never enough money available to do everything that needs to be done. This being the case we must be careful in what we do and when we do it.

We can help ourselves by learning the basics of writing good ads and doing some simple research to discover what specific media appears to be most effective, at the moment, for businesses like our own. The data is there it just takes a little time and research to discover it. OK, fine we have done our research and are satisfied that we can produce effective ads and know the media we wish to use. What now? Remember we don’t have a whole lot of money available so we want to get the biggest bang for the buck that we can.

Well, if it were me I would look for a program through which I could visibly see the results of my advertising. If I placed an ad, I would wish to be able to see what the exact response to that ad has been. I would want to know who saw the ad? When? How? Then I can measure the effectiveness of the ad by the actual response of the viewers. How many viewers actually asked for more information or purchased my product or service based on the ad they viewed? Pretty strong stuff is it not? This is exactly the type information you need to judge the effectiveness of your advertising.

Would you believe that programs exist on the net, now, which can actually do this for you? This is true for all online media. Just go to your browser and search for ‘Ad Trackers’.

What you must look for is a system which is fully automated, easy for the user to work, and one that in fact does furnish all the basic data you need to determine the effectiveness of you ads. Some systems are better than others and they all cost money. You must carefully examine the benefits you receive compared to the costs involved. You have more than likely spent money placing your ads and now you are spending money to track how well these ads are bringing in customers. You must make the judgment here. Only you can judge where these activities are taking you.

It makes sense that money considerations dictate that you start something like this on a small scale. One or two ads on one or two media so you may learn first hand what is working and what is not. We must throw away any pride of authorship regarding the ad copy we write. The only important criteria here is that the ad works or does not work. If it works you use it more widely and keep using it until it loses it’s effectiveness. You keep this process going on a constant basis, exploiting effective ads and replacing bad ads. And you do it based on the factual data you gain from whatever ad tracking system you employ.

For those of us who are really serious about making a success of our own business it makes a lot of sense to be able to know what our advertising is doing for us. Not only that but we need to identify the ever changing audience out there so we may change directions as we may need to. Tracking your ads is a key to this capability. None of us can afford the millions the large Corporations spend for this purpose but we have to dig in our pocket and somehow find the money to purchase one of these affordable ad tracking systems.

Such an action is critical if you are going to successfully compete for business on the Internet. Some would say that your survival counts on it.

Actually, the answer is yes……..and no. What is a reciprocal link? It is a link to a page that is linked back to ours. Of course, a non reciprocal link is a link from a page that we are not directly linked to.

Page rank is associated in some ways to linking. You see, the more links that point to our pages, the more important Google tm or other search engines think our page is. Non reciprocal links to our page (not on our page) add a lot more weight than reciprocal links. Search engines think that if a page is willing to link to ours and not get a link back, then our page must be important. They see it as a recommendation. But that’s not always true. The importance of the pages that link to ours is also accounted for. You can get 100 free hosting pages of your own and then link them to your special page with non reciprocal links and you wouldn’t get any change in rank; it is a “Zero * Zero = Zero” equation.

You have to get links from pages that rank well.
Then comes the other side of the question. Can I have any page link mine? And the answer is NO.
Search engines think of the web as a neighborhood. If you are linked to a good neighborhood then you must be good. If you are linked to a bad “hood” then you must be bad and they rank you.

So linking to pages with illegal content such as MP3’s, Warez, Hackers, etc. will soon get you a bad ranking. And probably your submission to the directories will not be accepted.

The other point of linking is ANCHOR TEXT.
Anchor text is the text of the hyperlink. Read this two examples:

Example 1

http://www.elmejorguia.com/Index_english.htm

Example 2
Free tools for webmasters

You inmediately see the difference. Although both links can point to the same page the way they are phrased is different. Not only does this make a difference in the way people read the link or the way the link gets their attention, but also when search engines “see” the link, they associate this words with your site and you climb ranks in those Keywords for any associated searchs.

Now you get the point?

Your links should have good anchor text that is related to the keywords that you want to exploit.

But search engines also see KEYWORD SPAM when they find too many links with the same phrasing beacuse it doesn’t seem natural They think that it is impossible that all webmasters would write the same words when linking your page. That means that you have to use slightly different phrases each time you get links to your page.

Last but not least, search engines do not see words inside pictures so image links and banners do not get you any ranking for any keyword.

Francisco Santander

Ski Bus Transfers provide professional, swift and custom ski airport transfers from your airport smoothly to the groups luxury ski chalet in Les Orres, Espace Killy, Chamonix and the surrounding Mont Blanc area.

Our group transfers to Chamonix friendly service includes ski transfers to Risoul, Le Tour, Samoens, Les Contamines-Montjoie, La Clusaz, Montgenevre and without forgetting Megeve and Bessans and supply luxry ski transfers to varying snowboarding resorts as arranged.

With the up to date fully equipped eight men fleet of minibuses and MINI, Ferrari, Pontiac, or Ford vehicles we will happily take as many as 17, or twenty + should you friends demand this. And our drivers are inordinately experienced in challenging icy conditions for your safety. Of course the driver is completely covered and licensed.

We on request organize mountain bike trips in Jun up until Dec and take clients to French ski resorts like our top ten: Courchevel, Val-d’sere, Gourette, La Mongie, Tignes, La Grave, Val Cenis, Les Gets, Hautacam, Serre Chevalier, La Chavanette, Les Arcs.

Getting to Chamonix Mont Blanc France, Portes du Soleil or Les Grands Montets from the airport has never been so easy. For luxury Geneva airport pick up and drop offs from your airport to your groups luxury chalet in Chamonix Mont Blanc call Ski Transfers from Geneva Airport today, afterwards chill out and relish in your snowboard holidays.

Geneva Airport Minibus Service propose comfortable, swift and custom ski bus transfers from Geneva quickly to your luxury catered chalet in Les Contamines-Montjoie, Flegere, Chamonix village and the nearby Mont Blanc area.

An affiliate marketer may have all the things needed for him to be able to succeed in a business such as affiliate marketing. He may have the necessary drive, diligence and perseverance to be able to understand how the system works. He may have all the tools necessary in maintaining the business, including a really unique and interesting website which could earn him a fortune if only the whole world could see it. However, all these would prove useless if he does not know how to drive traffic to his website. His business would sink into oblivion together with all the sales, fortune and dreams that he might have realized if he only knew how to do this particular task.

Getting people who matter to see one’s website is a difficult undertaking if he tries to consider the fact that there are rivals everywhere waiting to pin him down. The immensity of the internet as well as the affiliate marketing world has given birth to the fierce competition between affiliate marketers, each of whom has his own great product to offer. With all the websites piling on top of each other, how would one be able to stand out? The seven best ways to drive laser-targeted traffic to one’s own website would help those who are bent on sticking it out with this business wherever it is bound to take them.

The first step in driving traffic to one’s website is by relying on search engines and what they can do for the affiliate marketer concerned. Because they are popular for driving free targeted traffic, they should not be ignored by all means. Having top search engine rankings is vital in building popularity links, and the use of the right keywords is important in attaining this goal. Once a website is on top of the list, it is easily accessible to anyone who wants to see it for himself.

The second way in driving traffic to one’s website is by contacting other webmasters for a possible link exchange partnership. Locating websites that are related to one’s own website is the primary task. Once there, he should be able to establish communication by personalizing everything as much as possible. It is then possible to make reciprocal link exchanges between webmasters whichever way the affiliate marketer prefers.

The third way is through writing one’s own articles. This is an effective way in promoting a website, because good content that are appreciated by readers will lead them to visit the writer’s very own website out of sheer interest.

The fourth way is through joint venture marketing. This is one of the most effective ways of promoting a product or a service. Having a partner through ad swap or link exchange is beneficial to both parties as it allows them to reach a wide customer base in a short amount of time.

The fifth is through joining affiliate programs. Having affiliates to do the work means allowing them to bring tons of traffic to a website. Skyrocketing sales would be realized as a result, and both the affiliate and the website owner will benefit from the situation.

The sixth is by having a list of subscribers that one can refer to every so often, because they are those which would prove to be valuable assets for the marketer concerned. The use of autoresponders and personalized newsletters is one way of keeping track of them all, and holding on to them by letting them know about new products and services is an essential task that should be done by the affiliate marketer concerned.

The seventh is by knowing one’s market through and through. It is important for traffic to be targeted to those who might have a special interest in the theme or topic of one’s website. This way, a solid customer base is going to be created. Once a potential customer shows an interest in a particular website by paying it a visit, one must not waste time in trying to show him that his effort is worth it.

Traffic generating strategies are important in trying to make one’s affiliate marketing career inch forward. It is always advantageous to plan one’s moves in any business that he might undertake. This is particularly so in affiliate marketing. If one knows how to get people to see what he has to offer, then he is on the right track. Author is writter for sites such as Information Today