If you are trying to figure out how to generate more traffic to your website, read this excerpt of my eBook, “Internet Marketing – The Big 5“, easy, effective marketing strategies for web entrepreneurs.
Eight years ago when I started building websites, I was one of many who foolishly believed that if you just ‘build it’ they WILL come. I know that’s such a cliché quote, but I believed it and perhaps you still believe it. Spending hours and hours adding cool flash animation, obsessing over my website’s color and design felt like hard work, but little did I know that the real work had just begun. Upon design completion I went to every site submission service I could find, only to quickly find that submitting my site to search engines was just a small piece of a bigger puzzle. Those first few years of course didn’t bring much traffic, but then again neither did I. Having invested little to no money into internet advertising or time into researching online marketing, it was no surprise that my site’s traffic was nowhere near what I wanted it to be. At the time I had no clue how to generate traffic, but rather than give up the dream of making a name for myself online I gave up the myth that if I just built a site, people would find it. I quickly came to the conclusion that if they couldn’t find me, I was going to figure out how to find them! Several years later, my websites get thousands of hits each month and I am now a work at home mom! I didn’t happen overnight, but with a determination to succeed and a willingness to do the work I learned what internet marketing is really all about.
Here are a few marketing strategies that you will find in this ebook:
1. Make the Most of Your HTML Meta Tags
Your webpage should include at the very least a title tag, and meta tags detailing your sites keywords and descriptions. Moreover, each page should have specific title tags that reflect the unique content on that page. These meta tags help to describe your site’s content to search engines. For example, consider two wedding sites, one has a title tag called ‘Home Page’ and one with a title tag ‘Wedding Planning Advice for Brides to Be’. If someone searches Google for ‘Wedding Planning + Brides’, the site with more keywords and textual detail will come up first in the search. I often come across web publishers with title tags that say ‘Home Page’, ‘Untitled’, or ‘Unknown’, all terms that decrease your site’s visibility. If you design your own site, make it appoint to familiarize yourself with how meta tags work. If you have a site design, request that your meta tag information is optimized for search engines.
2. Remember that Text is Good
Though you never want to create a website with large blocks of text, you also don’t want to create a site that is either made completely of Flash components or graphic images. Search Engines cannot search these sites as easy as they can text, which means the sites with more textual content tend to have greater visibility. Moreover, sites that are updated regularly with new content, also do better as far as page rank.
3. Create a Mailing List and send out weekly newsletters.
Mailing lists are great because you can stay connected to people who have visited your site or purchased your products/services. The very fact that they subscribe to your mailing list means they are interested in your business. It is for this reason that you want to put as much energy into communicating with your current customers as you do with finding new ones. Quiet as its kept, it’s actually easier to sell to old customers than it is to acquire new ones.
4. Make the most of your websites. Add Tell-a-Friends Scripts to your site so that viewers can share it with others. Turn your customer reviews or comments into promotional tools by adding them to your site for credibility. Create your own free e-Books with marketable information. In addition to more marketing tips, Internet Marketing – The Big 5 includes information on how to create your own eBooks, marketing to your niche, tips on banner promotion, and more.
Get a copy of Internet Marketing – The Big 5 today.
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Posted by: LHenry creator of the SistaSense eBussines Blog, a series of Web Business Howto Guides, BBWO Network for Professional Black Women and the Web Newbie Know How Coaching Program.
