This is, obviously not for a mini-site (created solely for the purpose of selling an ebook) although I have certainly taken a mini-site and grown it into a larger content site behind the sales letter in the past.

Building Value into Your Website

If you are redesigning your website, or growing it for search engine boost and traffic, don’t just add more content on the same topic. Spin off your topic to something closely related and incredibly useful to your visitor.

A few ideas are:

• Add a directory of free offers and products related to your topic. This still brings a a lot of traffic to niche sites. You can include pay-per-lead offers, or cookie-setting affiliate offers, or take it one step further and request a monthly fee from webmasters wanting to submit their free products to grab some of your traffic. You, of course, want to be very careful with what or who you’re linking to in this regard both for your reputation’s and your search engine rankings sake. Finally, to promote your ‘free offers’ page or directory take a few hours and find other free offer sites to trade links with.
• Add definitions and terms pages. Another traffic-puller. Since so many people are still surfing the web for knowledge and information, if your site has a page explaining in detail the terminology of your niche market you will get traffic. Recent experience shows me that just a few sentences per term is no longer enough. You need a few paragraphs of each to gain search engine traffic from this technique. The best part about this technique however is not the gain in search engine positioning, but the increase of value in your visitor’s mind. Your site is obviously the ‘expert’ site on this topic in their eyes.
• Another very important step when you’re growing your site is to take the time during this phase to check every affiliate link. After redesigning Smartzville last week I did this and found that 50% of my year old links to resources and associated merchants led to new offers (and not always related) or websites that were no longer available. Frustrating, but something you want to watch out for more often than annually when you have a high traffic website.
• While you’re checking your outbound links assess every one, once more. For instance if you’re linking out to an ebook (where you make money as an affiliate) and you realize that you’ve never made one sale of that product, dump it. Take time to test and review a new, related product that may convert better. Don’t waste your out-going links or promotions willy-nilly. Concentrate
  on finding the ones that sell and drop the ones that don’t.
• Add a section to your site that educates and informs your website visitors, priming them for the offer by training them to see the value of the coming offer. Then you can lead your educated prospects to your sales page. As an example, if you were selling investing tips one entire section of your website could be devoted to the subject “How and why to invest…”, that linked to the more advanced member’s area or ebook.
• Assess your navigation and traffic flow. You may want to get a friend to sit in front of your computer and watch how a new visitor experiences and navigates your site. When you are redesigning or adding new sections to your site consider also the ‘nofollow’ tag recently adopted by Google. (If you don’t know about this, run a Google search on it.) You don’t want to be leaking rank onto non-performing pages. Keep your rank on your sales pages and home page.
• Add interaction! Online games, quizzes, and reader polls make your visitor think that your site was created just for them! You can find a lot of these – although not specialized – free online to cut and paste into your web pages. If you don’t have a geek-ish mind you can find programmers who will be happy to create something for you relatively cheaply.

That’s my time for today! I do hope this brief article lends a few ideas to your marketing while you grow your website, increase search engine traffic and build a valuable resource for your visitors.

Laura Childs
www.makemoneywithyourideas.com

Find similar: Website Traffic

It’s time to tell the search engines your website exists. These numbers are not exact by any means, but depending on your market, 40-60% of all search engine traffic that is sent by any website will come from Google. Yahoo will send another 30-40% and MSN will follow closely behind Yahoo. There are a number of smaller search engines that both humans and the search engine robots use to create listings and links, but these are the big three.

Perhaps the easiest way to generate and ensure a steady stream of traffic is to create your content on a weblog (blog) that you add content to often and that generates an RSS Feed.

Your RSS Feed is your easy pass to search engine submissions. Once a search engine spider or robot knows about your feed, it will follow the links within to your full pages of content and any links from those pages as well.

Do this once and you need never worry about getting listed in the search engines again. (Of course one day you’ll want to learn about how to get higher positions on the big three, but for now let’s just get them to notice you.)

The easy way to alert Google, Yahoo and MSN of your site/feed is to visit each and create ’start’ pages on each of them. A Google homepage, an msn account and ‘my Yahoo’. This is all free and each one just takes a few minutes to set up. Even if you are ‘new’ this will take no longer than a few hours.

The trick is to add your own site’s rss feed url to each of the home, start, or account pages you’ve created. This forces the search engine spiders to follow the feed links. This is remarkably easy to do – once your page has been created, look for the tab that says something like ‘add content’, ’submit an RSS feed’, or ‘watch a site’. This is where you enter the url for your blog’s RSS feed.

Remember, the more you update/add content to your site, the more links will be created and therefore more visits from the spiders and bots.

Find similar: Website Traffic

If your site is new, set aside 20 minutes per week to submit to a few more directories. Most of the directories I’ll point you to are reviewed by actual humans so take care with your submissions and make sure your site is in top shape before you submit it. If you can afford the time and care, your website will see plenty of traffic for years to come.

If you’re short on time don’t buy into software to speed up the process of having your website listed in, and receive traffic from, directories. Although automated submission and software is at time something I suggest, I’d never suggest it to you for something as important as directory inclusion. Therefore, if you’re short on time but have a few dollars to spare, drop into manual directory submissions I have no affiliation with this company but I have researched enough information about paying for submission that I trust this resource to do the job right.

There are a few guidelines for successful inclusion into these directories. First of all your site must offer something of value to your visitors. Websites built solely for an advertising click, an affiliate commission, or that is a one page sales letter likely won’t be accepted. Your website should have the look and feel of an information based resource that includes contact information and a contact phone number.

The first step in submitting your website is to check Google’s Page Rank of the directory (more importantly the category page that your site will be included on). The more PR, the more effort you’ll want to make sure your site is on that page. Many directories carry a PR 5-9, some of which may be transferred to your own pages once included.

The largest and most well known search engine directory is found at dmoz.com. Not only are they the biggest, but they are also the oldest and the slowest. It may take you 6 months and as many attempts to have your site reviewed by a DMOZ editor but a listing on this site is worth it’s weight in gold.

To find a complete list of available directories and their current home page PR, check this resource:

http://www.seo2020.com/seo-tools/directories.html

Anything else you need to know? Yes, I’m not exactly certain why, but you will want to get your website indexed by google before you submit your site to a directory. Your submission will have more clout if you take care of that matter first. You don’t need PR or #1 spots, you just need to be in google’s index for the extra boost.

Not sure if google has indexed your website yet? Head over to google.com and type your domain name into the search box prefixed with site:// Google will show you exactly which pages it has crawled and added to it’s listings in the results.

Find similar: Website Traffic

For the next few weeks I’ll be talking about website traffic; getting qualified and targeted visitors to your online business and a few tricks to website promotion.

You know, whether you’re building your site for advertising revenue (you create content and your advertisers pay space to be ’seen’ on your content), you’re building your site for affiliate revenue (you promote other people’s products or services for a commission), or you’re building your site to make sales of your products directly, this same statement applies equally:

The greater number of targeted visitors, the greater your income.

With that said I won’t ever talk about getting any old traffic and I hope you never go down that route! Far too many people sign up for automated hits or traffic exchanges, pay for clicks to and on their website and find that even though their bandwidth went up, their incomes didn’t change one bit!

So what we’re after is highly qualified and targeted traffic. Real visitors who are truly interested in your content, recommendations, or products.

How effective you are at attracting that traffic will have a direct impact on the bottom line of your income.

I remember when I first started out designing website for a handful of corporate clients. Back then if you ran a search on yahoo.com there was a strong chance only 20-80 listings would even show up for your search term. Getting traffic was much easier – online surfers were happy to find a site that was at least close to their interests and it wasn’t hard getting and keeping top positions in the search engines.

Please remember, if you’re new to online business that just because you’ve built or bought a website, does not mean that the traffic will naturally flow to your pages and offers.

As any offline business, you can’t start something online, never promote the business and expect to earn an income.

No, website promotion needs to be conducted on many levels and I’ll be discussing each in turn over the coming weeks. Some article titles will be about using a blog to create traffic, using an RSS Feed to create traffic, marketing with articles to…you get the idea…

See you in a few days,

Laura

Find similar: Website Traffic

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