7 Ways to Increase your Website Traffic

Internet. Business. Profit. To fully integrate all of these words into a successful merging you will need another word. Traffic. Every article you will find about making your site or company successful will always include the importance of generating traffic.

So, we all know that in the core of it all, qualified traffic is the most essential item to a successful internet based business company. Aside from ensuring that you have a great product to sell, and you have your company’s internal organization well taken core of, it would be time to get to the nitty gritty of things, generating traffic.

If you already have a site and you think that you’re not getting the traffic that you’re supposed to be getting, then its time to start reading and learning. If you are going to be competitive only, you should always be a step ahead of your competition, increasing your traffic flow should have started yesterday.

To help you out in generating more traffic for your site, here are some seven surefire ways to increase your traffic.

1) Invest in good advertising with search engines

Google’s Adwords provide great advertising schemes that are very popular and assures great traffic. Although with this surefire way to increase your traffic it will cost some money. While some would shy away from spending money to increase traffic, it is imperative in this case to do so because Adwords are the top surefire way to increase your traffic.

Also be sure to optimize your site for the organic search results. This way you will be sure to appear in both the paid and organic sections. The organic results will last longer and more people tend to click on these results.

2) Exchange or Trade Links with other sites

With exchanging links with other sites, both of you will benefit from the efforts both of you do to enhance your web sites traffic. When one site features another sites link, they could provide one another with the traffic one site generates. The efforts are doubly beneficial because it would seem like both of you are working to generate more traffic. The more links traded with more sites the more traffic could be expected.

3) Use Viral Marketing

Viral marketing allows you to spread the word about your company and product without any, or very low costs. This is a marketing method that can be quite sneaky; you can attach your company’s name, product or link to a certain media such as a funny video, entertaining game, an interesting article or a gossip or buzz. With this method, people get infected with the creativity and entertainment of the medium that they will pass it on to many people.

4) Search and use proper keywords or keyword phrases for your sites content

Search engines look for certain keywords that they would show in their results page. In doing so, having the right keyword and keyword phrase is a high requirement in ranking in high in search engine results. You could write your own content or you could hire someone to do it for you.

5) Write Articles that can lead traffic to your site

Submit articles to sites that would contain the same subject that your site deals in. If you sell car parts write press releases and articles about cars and car parts. Attach your sites description and services at the end of the article as well as the link.

6) Join forums and form online communities

Capture a market and show your expertise and credibility. When you have a good foundation for your site, people will trust you and your site and will pass on to many people their trust. Traffic will certainly increase because they know that you can provide what they need.

7) Lastly, Offer newsletters.

If many people know what you are about and your existence is shared with many others, you will find a loyal traffic that can provide you with more traffic by recommendation. If you arouse the curiosity of your customers they usually will help bring in traffic to your site through forwarding of the newsletter to other people or direct linking to the website from the newsletter.

About the Author
Chip Curle is the owner of Charles Curle Design, a North Georgia web designer that develops and manages web sites and drives companies to the top of internet search engines through search engine optimization. His work has earned Chip 14 ADDY (American Advertising Federation) awards including 8 Gold, 4 Silver, and 2 Best of Show.

Why Search Engine Optimization is a Great Investment For Any Company

How much money do you pay to have a sales person sell your services or products? How many hours does that sales person work each day/week/month? Did you know that your website is a sales person that works for you 24/7? Having an optimized website is the single most powerful marketing tool that every company should be aware of and implement into their business.

Here are 5 reasons why SEO should be implemented into your marketing strategy before your competition beats you out.

Absence of risk
Search engine optimization is free of any risk. In many cases, paid advertising (banner ads, pay-per-click) is subject to click fraud risk. There are people that that use software to click on their competitors ads, which cost you money each time it is clicked. Google AdWords has protection against this, but it isn’t 100%. Nothing can stop a competitor from clicking your link a few times, costing you money.

Reliability
Banner ads and pay-per-click campaigns work great until the marketing budget for these campaigns depletes for the month. When this happens, your website is no longer listed and customers can’t find you anymore. SEO obtains an organic listing and your company’s website will always be found by your customers. Consumers are more likely to purchase from a site ranked high in the search engine results rather than from a pay-per-click ad.

Brand Awareness
A website that is ranked high means that more people will see the name of your company and become familiar with it and it’s products or services, even if they haven’t made a purchase. Consumers recognize businesses ranked in the top 3 in search engine results compared to those appearing in banner ads. With so many people using pop-up blockers and banner blockers, many people don’t even see the banner ads that are being displayed.

Targeted Traffic
SEO brings those paying customers to you. When a consumer is looking for a specific product or service and you rank high, they will enter the key words/phrases that they are looking for. When they find your site, they are a target lead and more likely to purchase from you. How much money do you spend on sales people getting you targeted leads and sales?

Affordability
In comparison to banner ads and pay-per-click advertising, SEO is a much more affordable service. With banner ads and pay-per-click, you set a budget and when that budget is met, the ads are gone. This could happen a week into your campaign. This means you would go three weeks before your ads appear again. With SEO, your website will stay listed on the search engines and won’t drop off.

As you should be able to see, search engine optimization is vital to your business. If you have a website and people can’t find it when entering keywords of the products or services that you sell, then why did you pay all of that money to have the website built? Remember, your website is a sales person that works day and night and has a global territory. Can you afford to pay your sales person to work day and night?

Five Reasons to Start a Business Blog

Five Reasons to Start a Business Blog

In a competitive environment where businesses are hard-pressed for advertising dollars but anxious to reach and impact a finicky consumer base, savvy businesses have turned to blogs.

Five reasons businesses find blogging beneficial are

1. Economics
Dollar for dollar, blogs are less expensive to create and maintain than traditional ad campaigns. They are convenient to utilize and can generally be launched and maintained at a fraction of the cost and effort of yesteryear’s advertising venues.

2. Infinite Branding
Blogs are “tagged” with key words and “linked” back to a business’s social media and website to build a digital footprint that builds upon itself. While many traditional ad campaigns can fizzle out over time, a properly maintained blog will build momentum and gain “advertising speed.”

3. Intimate Exposure
Blogs are an ongoing journal that share a company’s history, value system, announcements, progress, and new products and services. Companies use blogs as a forum to collect readers’ opinions, invite feedback, and educate people about their products or services. Blogs are a strong tool in relationship-building and allow consumers to do business with people they can get to “know,” like, and trust without traditional face-to-face pressures.

4. Consumer Trust and Confidence
What if you could build a sales force of people who represented your company just the way you wanted them to, 24/7? That is in essence what a blog can do for you. You construct your message and it reaches people intact without being diluted by other factors.

5. Outlast the Competition
In the past five years alone, there has been a strong, (startling!), and measurable shift in the way companies reach their customers. While blogging has become an advertising triumph for those in the know, those who cannot or choose not to enter the digital media ring to compete will soon find themselves knocked out.

Questions? Contact ShellyKent@comcast.net

Attitude

The longer I live, the more I realize the impact of Attitude on life. Attitude, to me is more important than education, than money, than circumstances, than failures, than success, than what other people think or say or do. It is more important than appearance, giftedness or skill. It will make or break a company…a church…a home. The remarkable thing is we have a choice everyday regarding the Attitude we embrace for that day. We cannot change our past…we cannot change the fact that people act a certain way. We cannot change the inevitable. The only thing we can do is play the one string, we have, and that is our Attitude. I am convinced that life is 10% what happens to me and 90% how I react to it. And so it is with you…we are in charge of our ATTITUDES.

Author of “ATTITUDE” Chuck Swindoll

Reasons to Keep Your online photos up to date

Reasons to keep your online photo presence professional and up to date
Posted by photographeratl on December 17, 2009

Dec 1, 2009, Atlanta, GA—On Time Photos is pleased to announce an added convenience for its customers, on-site photography for corporate headshots.

This “Professional Picture Day” allows business people to update their head shots for their business cards, print materials, and website profiles. “The advantages,” says On Time Photos owner Jerry Morris, “are the overall cost savings for the individuals and less time away from work to update their portraits.”

Today, business photos are more necessary than ever due to business’s increasing utilization of social media and website advertising. “Businesses have burst onto online forums such as LinkedIn and Facebook. You simply cannot leave the online profile photo blank and be taken seriously,” Morris explains.

Indeed, studies indicate that consumers find a business person more trustworthy and likable when they see who is serving them, and out of touch or irrelevant in the competitive marketplace when their photo is severely dated.

To maintain a professional image, Morris suggests that professionals update their photos every three years or anytime they experience a noticeable change in appearance such as hair color or style.

The idea to hold “Professional Picture Day” for organizations came as one of necessity when individuals would pull Morris aside during companies’ group photo sessions and ask for individual photo sessions after the shoot.

Morris says there are certain things people should be mindful of in their business photo. “Keep styles basic and classic,” he says. “A head and shoulders shot is appropriate for business cards and printed materials, while a closer shot works well for an online profile photo.”

On Time Photos also offers a great solution for corporate gifting: gift certificates for a family portrait. Morris photographs family and corporate events, weddings, holidays, maternity poses, and tasteful intimate portraits to gift that special someone.

Networking Comfort Zones

The temptation in this atmosphere is to get very close to another person so they can hear you and you them. This can result in being too close to another person sometimes making them very uncomfortable. This discomfort is heightened when we have been consuming alcohol and the person we are talking to have not.

Each of us has our own comfort zone boundary. This is a space around us that when another person enters we begin to feel uncomfortable. A good way to relate to this is to remember if you have ever had an argument where someone got right up in your face and possibly even pointed their finger very near to it. Remember how that made you feel? In most cases it makes a person feel more angry.

In a networking environment it is important to maintain a distance from a person that you are talking to. This distance should be almost an arms length. Most peoples comfort boundary is about the length of their arm. If you find yourself getting very close to someone in conversation, imagine if you raised your arm and that is the distance that you should be from the other person. If they move closer to you in the course of conversation, it is acceptable to them to be closer. If it is acceptable to you then continue with the conversation at that distance.

You can sometimes tell if you are standing too close to someone if they seem to be moving back while you are talking to them. If they appear to be getting further away from you, do not move to be closer to them. They will stop when they reach the distance that they are comfortable with. If they turn and walk away of course it is time to find someone else to talk to.

To be most effective in your attempts to build relationships with others, it is most important to keep these things in mind. Remember that it makes no difference what you say to a person if they are not engaged in the conversation. Good observance of boundaries can give you the edge you need to make networking work.

Choices

Think about that. One choice, just one, can change your life forever. Simply put, your life today is what your choices have made it, but with new choices, you can change directions this very moment. For me, that idea alone is highly motivational because it offers tremendous hope, regardless of circumstances, for a better tomorrow.

Your life-changing choice may be to switch careers, to leave an abusive relationship, to go back to school, to stop drinking, to adopt a child, to start a business, to lose weight, to start a charity…to name a few. If you have the courage to do so, you could make any one of those choices, or others, today. And you would change your life.

Sometimes it’s a different kind of choice. It can be to not quit, to not giving up in the face of adversity. We’ve all been there.

Jack Canfield and Mark Victor Hansen received 77 rejections for their idea Chicken Soup for the Soul. They had to make a decision each time…should they throw in the towel and say enough is enough, or should they keep trying to pursue their dreams? You know the rest of the story. The 78th publisher said “Yes” and they went on to sell over 100 million books.

So never forget that you are only one choice away from changing your life. Do you have the courage to make it?

How long does it take to build good relationships

Have you ever heard that it takes at least seven points of contact before someone will consider doing business with you? I have heard this many times and I believe that it is true that it takes many points of contact, tho I am not sure that it has to be seven.

The fact is that usually we will not do business with someone we do not know. Of course the exceptions to this rule come in the form of shopping for personal or home items when we go to the mall, or we stop to get a burger for lunch. I am sure you do not really know the person that you bought your washer and dryer from , or do you?

Buying decisions for the most part are made up from collective experiences. We might decide to buy from a particular store because we have shopped there a lot and had a good experience with it. We might decide to visit that store on the recommendation of a friend. Sometimes just plain old advertising draws us in and out of curiosity we find a new favorite place to shop.

In most of the businesses we encounter in networking, we want to know more about the business before we make a buying decision. In particular, we want to know more about the person who is talking to us. We want to be able to trust this person before we buy from them. Why is this? In some cases the product or service that a person is selling does not cost much, yet we need to feel comfortable in making a buying decision.

In order for someone to trust you enough to buy from you, you have to be able to let them get to know you. You can accomplish this by making contact many times and being a real person when you do. If you frequent many meetings a month, you should always take the time to say hello to people whom with you have previously met. Ask them how things are going for them on a more personal level than just asking, “how’s it goin?”.

Show genuine concern for their answer by listening. Listening and responding will help develop a deeper relationship. Be more than a passing face in the crowd and you will build deeper more valuable relationships with people.

The biggest mistake that we can make in networking is to be superficial. If we do not let people know more about us than our name and what we do, we will never be as effective as we can be. As people get to know you, they can make a decision to buy from you or not. In this realm, price and features have no meaning. It is you that makes your product better.

They may say that seven points of contact are required to make the sale, but the quality of that contact determines the outcome. Be sure to be yourself when you are out there, be genuine, be concerned, be human, and most of all be comfortable with it. This will help you to generate success that you never thought was possible.

Using Blogs in Business: Establishing your Edge

Blogging Takes Web by Storm, Businesses Scramble to Catch Up

Written By: Shelly Kent

Gone are the days of idle teens and all night web-dwellers posting petty comments alongside relevant articles. Today, blogging is a sensation that businesses turn to as a method of smart, relevant, and budget-friendly advertising in a careful attempt to navigate their growth and survival. Today’s savvy business owners use blogging as a method of communicating carefully planned and enticing information that is designed to educate and connect with their customers.

Professionals use blogs to establish credibility or relevance with their consumer base. A shop may communicate a new product, a restaurant–live band night, a bookstore–book signings. A blog should be an ongoing portal of communication that builds information for your readers. Doctors may blog to communicate their medical opinions on debated issues such as vaccine and autism, or the HPV vaccine for young girls. They can also use blogging to disseminate important information quickly, such as symptoms that should prompt a medical visit during the Swine Flu outbreak.

Effective blogging takes time, a keen sense of business, and an intuitive approach to what customers need to hear. Using an informal tone and educating customers about your industry without directly pushing your product will make your blog one your audience will both watch for and value.

The benefits of maintaining a business blog are
• Search engines will rank you higher based upon your readership and how recently your content was updated. Higher rankings mean more visitors, resulting in more clients and more dollars.
• You can communicate instantly and effectively with your client base, many of whom will come to rely upon your blogs as their information source.
• Clients can reach you about topics relevant to them. They can provide you with consumer feedback or initiate a conversation any time of day or night.
• You establish credibility and create a connection with your consumers. Blogs are a personal conversation with your customers and demonstrate that there are astute and thoughtful individuals in your business versus a large, inaccessible corporation.
• The casual nature of blogging allows your company to gain recognition for things that are typically left out of mainstream advertising. (I.e., charity work, employee profiles, product reviews, industry advice.)
• Blogging communicates the culture of your organization and builds both trust and authority with your readership.
Blogs should always contain

Relevant Information
Accurate Communication
Timely News
Frequent Updates
Proper Grammar and Spelling (limited abbreviations)
Text that is Casual and Friendly in Tone

For more information, or for help maintaining your company’s blogs, please contact me at shellykent@comcast.net.

Until next time, Farewell and Blog-Luck!
~Shelly Kent
www.shellykent.com