SEMbyDesign

September 11, 2008

Your Domain Name – the keys to your (online) mansion

Filed under: Marketing Your Site,Traffic Building — Tags: — admin @ 10:50 am

I have talked in the past a bit about the importance of a good domain name, however, this post may even be a bit off subject for this blog. Keeping your domain name in your possession.

Recently, I have taken on 2 new clients who hired someone several years ago to build their site, and then let the site just sit there(a whole other blog post). Long story made short, we are looking at revamping their site, changing servers, etc, and they can’t get to their domain name to make the required changes.

One of the domains has page rank, has been around for a while and is getting very good traffic. We are looking to add ecommerce to it, and the current host can’t do what we need it to do. Getting in to the domain to change the name servers is proving to be a tricky task since the web guy who originally registered the domain for this client is difficult to get ahold of.

Business Owners, you should know that keeping track of your domain is very easy, and if you don’t have control over it, you should do so immediately. If someone besides you has control, you could have a difficult time getting to it the next time you need to, and think of all the items associated with the domain – your advertising, yellow pages, and most importantly, your email address. You don’t want to spend your time having to inform customers and associates of a new domain name – this could result in uncountable lost business.

August 11, 2008

Article Writing for the Small Business Owner

Filed under: Traffic Building — Tags: , — admin @ 7:03 pm

I have mentioned article writing in several past threads as a way to gain web traffic. I have put this to work for several clients, but many have objections for one reason or another to actually doing this. Common objections are: No time, can’t or won’t write, or disbelief that it will actually work.

Objection 1: No time. Now, we are all pressed for time, the least expensive way to do the article writing is to do it yourself, since, as the business owner you have the knowledge to write these articles. I as your technical consultant, could find resources, but they may not convey the thoughts about your business like you can.

Objection 2: Can’t or won’t write. Now…not everyone has the skills to write, but again, you have the knowledge of your subject that will make for a good article, and we are not talking about a Phd. thesis here. Just a quick 300-500 word article that we can link back to your website. You write the content and I will do the techie stuff, deal?

Objection3: Disbelief that article writing works. How do we know until we get a few articles out there and see if it helps. This is a very low cost solution to test.

Have fun! SEM

July 22, 2008

Squidoo For Traffic building

Filed under: Traffic Building — Tags: , , , — admin @ 10:50 am

Lets talk about social networking for a bit…I have played around with several different business models for driving traffic. Social networking was made popular with the advent of Myspace and facebook. There are several knock-offs to these, but they remain the predominant forces in social networking today. A couple of my other favorites are LinkedIn.com – a professional social networking model – you network with friends whom you have gone to school with, co-workers and contractors you have worked with. Kind of an on-line resume with lots of extras.

The one that really intrigues me, however, is Squidoo.com. This site has really taken off, and is getting a lot of recognition by top search engines because it is so full of content – quality content. 3 reasons I like the site: It’s free to place as many lenses(terminology for pages) as you wish, You get paid for the revenue your lens generates, and it can provide valuable traffic backlinks to your main website.

I will be testing some of the ways I can use this to my advantage and reporting on it in the coming weeks. If you have any thoughts or successes on squidoo or any other social networking platform, please comment!

Blogging For Dollars

Filed under: Traffic Building — Tags: , — admin @ 9:41 am

Today’s topic covers a couple of different ways to monetize a business. I have often said that there is a pretty straightforward formula for turning your website into a revenue stream – this being: Content = Traffic = Money. In that order. Content needs to be placed in order for search engines to get ahold of it, so that they can display the site for people who are searching. Simple concept in theory, and most site owners don’t get it. They expect the “if you build it they will come” theory to be true, (which can happen, but it’s like winning the lottery). You must have content, content, content. This will get you traffic naturally.

The other thing you really need is backlinks. Even more difficult than building content – this is where some of the other techniques come into play – forum posting, article submission, comment posting on blogs…all good ways to get backlinks.

Ok…kind of a scatterbrained post for today, but I have had 3 questions this morning about this very subject, so it may be more out of frustration than anything! Thanks!

July 18, 2008

Blog Commenting to drive traffic

Filed under: Traffic Building — Tags: , — admin @ 9:06 am

One way to drive traffic to your site or blog is to get on the web and find blogs that have similar content to your site or blog, and leave a few posts with relevant content. If your site has content on real estate loans, for instance, find a blog about real estate investing and leave a comment on a few key posts, with real, relevant information. This provides you with key backlinks to your site as well as links that users who are curious about your site and found your comments useful will follow.

It is not too difficult to find blogs related to your content – just go to blogcatalog.com or bloghub.com to find relevant blogs. Then find a few that you like, and post comments…bloggers appreciate feedback on their post anyway…this provides valuable content and interaction with the blogger. And, who knows, you may end up meeting someone you like and form a valuable business relationship with!
Happy Commenting!

July 1, 2008

Not-So-Conventional ways of driving traffic to your site

Filed under: Marketing Your Site,Traffic Building — Tags: , — admin @ 7:33 am

In past posts I have discussed conventional ways of driving traffic to your site, like article marketing and pure content. today I am going to list some of the ways I have found that are somewhat unconventional – the guerrilla marketing of the web, if you will. All are legal, some cost, and some are free. I will be writing on each one in more detail, but today, my goal is to just introduce you to a handful.

1. Link exchanges: These can be good for getting your site exposed with little or no cost. Do they work? The short answer is: maybe.

2. Traffic exchanges: Same as with link exchanges – your site is exposed to lots of people, if it is a busy exchange…I am involved in one that is really pretty nice – linkreferral.com that can and has provided me with quite a lot of traffic, and it has been very good traffic to boot. Sometimes the traffic you get from these is not so great. I have gotten some great reviews on several sites from this simple method. It is free for basic membership or $50 for a lifetime membership.

3. Forum posting: This can take time, but can result in some great returns. It is generally free to join a forum, but it takes time to establish some sort of credibility there. Once you have posted a few times you generally can put a link to your site or several sites in your posting signature to direct people to your information or sales page. The traffic you get is pretty targeted if you join a forum that pertains to your sites subject.

4. Start a blog: I usually lose my clients at this suggestion, but if you have information that you can diligently write about, this absolutely works. This one comes back to content. Also, you can go post comments on other peoples blogs to direct traffic back to yours. It takes time and patience to get traffic this way.

5. Social Networking/Facebook/Squidoo/Digg/Stumble: All of these have their merits, and as with forum or blog posting, while these are free, it takes time to work these to make them effective.

I will have a whole post on Social networking in a while.

June 30, 2008

Traffic generation challenge

Filed under: Traffic Building — Tags: — admin @ 6:11 am

I love finding solutions to problems. When I can’t find an answer or a solution to a given problem, I get very frustrated. I have spent a lot of time researching how people drive traffic to their site.

In traditional marketing, you have the phone book, city busses, newspaper, radio, tv and a whole slew of other types of print media. Traffic on the net poses a few other challenges. One challenge is just traffic, the second is how to get targeted traffic.

Trafficcan be difficult to get, take a long time to build, and be a very time consuming process. Targeted traffic can be the same, and if you pay for it, it can be expensive. So here are some proven ways to drive general traffic to your site, keeping in mind my standard equation Content = traffic = money.

  1. Article writing/submission. You must write unique content for this to work effectively. The premise is that you write the article and other people use it as content for their sites while maintaining a link to your site, which results in traffic.

  2. Backlinks. Links from relevent content to your site help with your ranking in the search engine. If your site is real estate related, see if you can get a real estate blog to mention it in their blog for a backlink.

  3. Adding content to your site and submitting it to be indexed to google via an xml sitemap. Submission to google via an xml sitemap is really quite easy, and lets google know that your site is legit. Most webmasters never take the time to do this, and it is time well spent.

These are just 3 basic things that will bring more traffic to your site. In a future post I will be discussing some of the paid traffic resources that are available.

June 24, 2008

Generate Organic Traffic With Backlinks

Filed under: Traffic Building — admin @ 9:01 pm

Most of my clients have no idea how to begin building traffic to their web sites. One of the first things I usually discuss with them is how links from other sites help them. Of course, I often see their eyes glaze over, and always they ask where to go to get links. A good example of a general link is a directory like www.lotsalinks.net. Directories like these are free or nominal charge. This type of directory gives your site a link. Search engines pick these links up and this helps to boost your site in the natural search.

The general link directory is good, but a link from a blog or directory that has related content is incredibly valuable. For instance for a Realtor to have a link directing traffic to their site from a blog about real estate investing would be a premium link for the Realtor. Sometimes you have to pay for these links, and sometimes you can contact the site owner and ask nicely.

The more inbound links you can get coming into your site, the better off you are. There is some discourse as to weather the page rank of the site that is providing the link comes into play. I think that this is another discussion.

As always, please provide comments if you find this interesting. I am always open to questions, comments, or critique!

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