How to Get Traffic to Your Site Without Paying Through the Nose!

Happy holidays! Can you believe I went to the store at 5:00 am to try and get the kids a Wii on Saturday? Well, I didn’t get one – I guess they’ll just have to play with the boxes their clothes came in!

We’re gearing up for some much needed time off coming up next week, and I for one am excited! We are closing for the week, but I imagine we’ll end up working some – we always do.

I know, I know… you clicked on this because you want to learn how to get traffic, not read about me and my holiday plans!

When we started our business, we had a tiny marketing budget and really couldn’t afford traditional advertising. How did we gain clients? We got them through website visitors. When we started out, we knew we needed to attract people to our website. More importantly, we needed to keep them on the site once they were there.

Here are the main ingredients we cooked up for our plan:

1. Keyword research. We decided which keywords we needed for our online business success and then we wrote keyword rich content for the site.
2. We named specific pages/url’s for those keywords
3. We wrote meta tag descriptions for those pages
4. We submitted our site to major search engines and directories
5. We installed Google analytics and signed up for a webmasters account
6. We added a sitemap to our website and one to the webmaster account
7. We wrote articles with subjects that included our keywords and updated our sitemap with each new article
8. We began passing out business cards and posting them whenever we could.
9. We printed bookmarks with our company information and placed them in libraries and bookstores in books relevant to “Starting Your Own Business”
10. We posted ads on free classified sites
11. We wrote press releases and distributed them to online wire services (hoping to get picked up, which they were)
12. Once we verified that Google had crawled and indexed our content, we began submitting our articles to article syndication sites.
13. We sent out emails to friends, family, and past business colleagues to let them know about our new business. We asked them to refer us to anyone in need of our services.
14. We created a MySpace page and began social networking (albeit slowly, as we were busy running our new business)
15. We joined the local chamber of commerce (well this wasn’t free, but it didn’t cost but a drop in the bucket)
16. We started a blog (again, we were really busy in the beginning and our blog posts were few and far between – we ended up trashing the first blog and starting over and have great hopes for our new blog)

I know that there are many other things we have done that were absolutely free, and I’m sure I’ll remember them tonight at 3:30 in the morning! If I do, I promise I’ll comment.

One of the greatest joys we have had is to watch our analytics and see where our traffic has been coming from. Nothing gives us a greater thrill than to see that an article we wrote about search engine marketing or TV and radio advertising has brought us visitors.

If you’re a steady blogger, you know that it takes time to cultivate relationships and read all there is out there to read. Sometimes you can get so caught up in it all that you look up and can’t believe the day is half over. It’s so much fun that it’s almost sinful that you’re getting paid to do it.

Sometimes there are days when you’re tired and don’t feel much like writing anything or commenting, but you fear if you don’t write something you’ll lose subscribers/visitors/fans. It’s best not to post if your heart isn’t in it. When we have those days, we’ve learned not to post anything. It keeps the blog fresh, informative and entertaining.

I hope the information I shared can help you if you’re just starting out and struggling to get things going. We’re here for support, if you want to comment – we’ll write you back. We’ve been there, and we “get it”.

Have a great night!

Joanne

Search Engine Marketing (SEM)

I know I promised to liven up this blog, but today's post is a really important part of your website success and I want you to benefit from it! I can always sing and dance for you later...

I wrote a new article titled "Learning Search Engine Marketing (SEM)" and placed it in our articles section. Below is the first portion of the article for you to view and decide if you want to venture on to read the rest:

Wikipedia defines Search Engine Marketing as a form of Internet marketing that seeks to promote websites by increasing their visibility in the Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs).

I could go into the technicalities of SEM, algorithms, robots, etc. However, if you’re reading this article, you probably aren’t interested in me stuffing a bunch of technical terms down your throat. You would rather learn about search engine marketing and how it can bring you more business.

I chose this topic today based on a couple of conversations I recently had with new clients.

One of our clients had embarked on a small ad campaign with Yahoo before coming to us. He mentioned that when he was spending the money on Yahoo, the traffic to his site was much higher. When I asked how many sales he garnered from the advertising, he replied that he didn’t know. Website traffic and conversions to sales are two completely different things, with the latter obviously being more important. It’s crucial to keep track of your ROI (Return on Investment), if you are going to invest in online advertising. Make sure that you have the tools within your company—whether it’s your own database for tracking sales, or another form of tracking system—before you spend your first marketing dollar.

Another conversation I had with a client involved a Google Adwords campaign. He was bidding using every keyword under the sun. He had a huge CTR (Click Through Rate), but again, nobody was buying. At the end of the day, his budget was gone and he didn’t have anything to show for it besides lots of traffic and an empty bank account. Until I explained to him that he was paying for people to come to his site and quickly leave, he didn’t “get it”. Having the right keywords in your campaign and your ad copy, that are relevant to your product or service, will get you qualified click through to your site. You don’t want people to click on your ad, only to find that your site doesn’t offer the information they were looking for, and leave immediately. That will cost you wasted dollars each and every time they do that.

More Learning Search Engine Marketing...

Joanne