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How To Boost Your Traffic

By Kirsten Hendrich in Featured

Setting up a website is hard work, but many people don’t realise that the really hard bit, and sometimes most expensive, is getting traffic to visit your site. To get the most out of your website you must put time in, and continually develop and market your website to the online world. Below are a few things that you can do to help you get on your way. They can all be done completley free, they just require some time and effort.

Through experience, I have found that the most effective way to use the following tactics is to sync them all up. With minimal effort your facebook fans, twitter followers, and blog readers can be fed the same information. This will also help any SEO and or link building work that is being done for your website.

Videos

Putting together a successful video campaign can result in a very high amount of traffic and exposure for your website. Video blogs and promotional videos are easy to put together and with websites such as Youtube; publishing your videos has never been easier. The biggest decision to make is whether to host, or post your videos. I would advise that a mixture of both techniques is the best way. Hosting a good quality, informative video on your website will make it more useful, and should attract links, whilst posting a video on Youtube is a great way to increase traffic. I would advise that you put the full video on your website, and a shorter ‘promo’ version on Youtube. The idea is that, anyone who see’s your video on Youtube is given a reason to look at your website.

Twitter/Facebook

Using both twitter and facebook gives you the opportunity to reach an extremely wide audience. Both can be synced up together feeding the same information out to your online friends and fans, with each site adding momentum to the other. Popular activities on these sites include fan competitions, publishing company news, promoting new content and generally growing an ‘online community’. If your content is always of a high quality, and interesting and useful to the user, your groups should grow naturally and also gain links and traffic back to your site. The most important thing is that they are updated regularly with good content; it’s not enough to just set up some profiles and hope for the best!

Blogs

Having a regularly updated, useful and interesting blog can really help your website grow with regards to returning traffic. A well composed blog can attract a following of it’s own, thus giving you traffic that you would never have otherwise benefited from. Popular ideas for blog entries could include; top ten lists, product reviews; tips; industry news or company news. Once you have published a new blog post, make sure you promote via your facebook page and your twitter account.

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Kirsten Hendrich – Do you want to increase your traffic? Let Go Search Marketing help you. Visit their website for more details.

Top Ten Ways to Use Twitter for Marketing

By Jason O Connor in Featured

Twitter is a micro-blogging site that asks you a basic question, “What are you doing?” It allows anyone with an account to write up to 140 characters in a text field as a means to update, comment, promote or communicate to others who are “following” you. When people follow you, they see what you’ve recently contributed when they login. They see your “tweets”, which are the messages you leave.

And of course you can follow others who tweet about the things that interest you. As an Internet marketer you may want to follow other Internet marketers, for example.

Like anything, and this is especially true of working with social media, the more you give, the more you get. In other words, the more often you tweet the more activity you’ll generate. Some suggest that you tweet a few times a day, every day. Not every tweet needs to be profound. But they should all be useful.

It’s important that you don’t abuse Twitter for marketing and promoting your products, services or affiliate links. Most of your tweets ought to be about offering your followers useful and valuable information. Only once in a while should you try to use Twitter to promote something. Otherwise you’ll be perceived as a spammer, and no one wants that tag.

Imagine if you had a large number of people following your tweets? Some people have tens of thousands following them. If you had something to promote and you had a large following, you could quickly and efficiently alert a lot of people of your promotion. It acts sort of like an opt-in mass emailing blast to your house email list, but it’s a heck of a lot easier and faster. This is the power of Twitter.

One thing that I’ve noticed with Twitter is that it can seem overwhelming at times. The sheer information on Twitter, the ‘how-to’s', tutorials and all the other ubiquitous advice on how to use and take advantage of it can seem hard to understand and implement. So here’s an easy-to-understand list of the top ten ways in which you can use Twitter to market yourself, your business and your website.

The Top 10 Ways To Use Twitter for Marketing:

1. Use it to promote new pieces of content you or your company create to drive traffic to your site. From online articles to blog posts or from videos to webinars, each time you add something to the Web that is of value, tweet about it and include a link. (Most people on Twitter use www.TinyURL.com to take a long URL and make it short.)
2. Use it for learning new marketing ideas, strategies and techniques. If you follow the right people, and you have to be picky about who you follow, you’ll get pointed to a good amount of useful tutorials, videos, e-zines and other things that teach you about marketing.
3. Use it to get new customers. Use Twitter’s search to find people who may be interested in your product or service. There are many ingenious ways to search for people on Twitter. For example, if you sell red widgets you could go to http://search.twitter.com and find people who have tweeted specifically looking for red widgets. To do this, type the following into the search box: red widgets?
   1. You’ll notice a lot of the results will be of others selling red widgets. These ones will all obviously have links in them to direct people to the site they’re selling red widgets on. To weed these people/tweets out, use the negative sign like this: -http red widgets?
   2. Since every link has ‘http’ in it, using the negative sign in front of it will cause your search results to not include any tweets with links in them.
4. Use it to build your email list. Use Twitter’s search to find people who may be interested in the monthly newsletter you send out to your opt-in house email list. Invite these people to join.
5. Utilize Twitter plugins or add-ons such as TweetMyBlog or The Twitter Updater, which both automatically make tweets of every new blog post you publish. Also check out TwitThis. When visitors to your website click on the TwitThis button or link, it takes the URL of the Web page and creates a shorter URL using TinyURL. Then visitors can send this shortened URL and a description of the web page to all of their followers on Twitter. Finally, look at TweetLater, a service that allows you to write lots of tweets at once and then schedule them to go out over time.
6. Use it to build buzz about an upcoming product or website launch.
7. Use it to better brand yourself or your business. Remember, when someone wants to learn more about you or your company, they are increasingly using sites like Twitter for research. You could easily use Twitter to establish yourself as an authority in your field.
8. Use it to update followers on breaking news regarding your company. If your company is mentioned in a new article, tweet about it and include a link to the article. Or if you’re at a conference or trade show, you could tweet what you’re doing and invite people to visit you in person.
9. Use it for business networking, master-mind groups (see Napoleon Hill), and getting yourself seen by high-profile people in your industry.
10. Use it as an instant messaging system to keep your and your team on the same page during projects. This is especially useful for those who work with teams spread out in different cities or countries.

You should note that this top 10 list is not in order of importance or in any particular order. I suggest that you give Twitter a try if you haven’t already. See if you can apply a few of these techniques and tactics to help you take advantage of Twitter as a marketing tool.

And one more important thing to remember is that there is no silver bullet in marketing. You should always be trying and implementing numerous tactics when marketing your business. Don’t only rely on Twitter or any other one thing. Instead, use Twitter (or any other Web 2.0 site) as simply one more tool in your entire social media and marketing toolbox.

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Jason OConnor is an Web consultant, writes for The Net Gazette, a Web marketing newsletter, and owns Oak Web Works, LLC, a Web design and marketing company at http://www.oakwebworks.com/

Etiquette for Social Media Sites and Blogs

By Enzo F. Cesario in Featured

Social media is social. Social, an adjective that one definition gives as pertaining to, devoted to, or characterized by friendly companionship or relations: a social club. That’s what social network sites are – social clubs. Where people with the same interests get together and learn, teach, grow, and bond.

Hopefully you were taught social etiquette while you were growing up. You remember, elbows off the table, shake hands when you meet someone, send thank you notes, say please and thank you. Just as there are proper ways to behave in the world, there are proper ways to behave online. Here are a few ways to make your online experience a pleasure for everyone else.

Be Nice

This is the big one. Everything after this is icing on the cake. There is nothing wrong with being nice; it doesn’t mean that you’re weak. Making enemies on social sites gets you nowhere, so drop your hatred and e-rants. It’s okay to have an opinion, even an extremely opposite opinion from everyone else. What’s not okay is to call other people names. If you’re trying to make a persuasive argument, use persuasive language and prove your point. It doesn’t help your cause to call someone an idiot. And, if you use the Internet to rant and rave, people eventually tune you out.

Just like in real life and business, we get what we want by knowing people, networking and building quality relationships. It’s the same for online relationships. And, as the old saying goes, “you can catch more flies with honey…”
You should value relationships over transactions. Gaining links from commenting on blogs should not be your main objective. Blog comments are just that – you are commenting to join the conversation. And you are joining the conversation to build a relationship.

Be Accountable

Just because you sit at your computer, anonymous, doesn’t mean you are not accountable for your actions and words. Don’t believe that there are no rules to social media. Don’t believe that you can do or say whatever you want without consequences just because you can hide behind your computer. People are smart and if you are a shameless, self-promoting jerk, they’ll figure it out and you’ll be done. By being accountable for your words, people will respect you, whether they agree with you or not.

Be Respectful of the Community

You are there to add value to the community you join, not to push your agenda and make sales pitches. The thing that will bring you relationships is making sure that when you add to the community, it’s with quality content. You may want to sit back and just listen for a while to learn about a community you’ve joined instead of just jumping in, maybe being ineffective and wasting everyone’s time. Before you submit anything to a social site, ask yourself if it will add value to the community. If not, don’t.

If you are commenting on someone else’s blog, don’t just promote yourself. If you have a post that refers to that conversation, then it’s okay to post that link in your comment. However, if you do it too often, you’ll get ignored or thought of as just a spammer.

Be a Listener

Yeah, sure, you think you know everything, but, if you listen to what others are saying, you might learn something. Listen to people that comment on your blog and see if you can understand where they are coming from. Your first reaction does not need to be a rant telling them how wrong they are.

Be a Giver

You know this one – you scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours. This saying applies to online relationships as well. If you want attention, you have to be willing to give it first. Do the people who burst onto your site or group and think that they should be at the top immediately annoy you? And how about the ones that constantly ask for your help by commenting on their blogs or always push their content on you. We all try to avoid “users.” Don’t be like them – you have to earn respect by giving more than you receive and by making sure that what you give is useful.

Remember to link to posts that you find interesting or informative. Chances are that if you’ve found it interesting and related to your group, someone else will too. This is a great way to get involved in social networking sites.

Be Nice

I know, this was the first suggestion, but it’s important so it bears repeating. You can’t get away from it, The Golden Rule concept can be found in cultures and religions all over the world. That’s probably why it’s the “golden” rule. And if we all lived by it, in real life as well as online, we’d all be a little better off.

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Enzo F. Cesario is a Copywriter and co-founder of Brandsplat, the only online marketing and advertising company employing Brandcasting, the most effective way to brand your company on the web. Brandcasting uses informative content and state-of-the-art internet distribution and optimization to build links and drive the right kind of traffic to your website. The approach is simple, highly effective and affordable. Learn more at: http://www.Brandsplat.com/

Article Marketing: A Great Strategy To Promote Your Business

By Enzo F. Cesario in Featured

Promotion is an important part of any business; you need to let potential customers know about you and your product. Article marketing is a strategy that will increase your exposure to the people who will want to buy your product or service. Articles written about your industry will help to establish you, the author, as an expert in your field, and can be published in print media and online.

Customers have a preference for doing business with someone they are familiar with, and article marketing is an ideal way of getting your name out there. The content of your articles needs to be useful and relevant to your target market. Articles that are informative, interesting and provide solutions to your readers are tremendously helpful.

If writing is your thing, then do your own articles. If not, there are several sites online where you can connect with writers, eager for work. Choose someone who uses good grammar and spelling skills, and who can write in an informal and conversational style that is easy to read. Your name will appear as the author on these outsourced articles, promoting you as the expert.

These articles are meant to inform and add value to you and your product; they are not blatant sales letters. Online publishing sites wouldn’t publish sales letters anyway, and print media would avoid them as well. To establish your credibility, you need to give something to your readers, not blast them with sales talk. Don’t ever forget, the reason they are reading your articles is for the information.

Web and ezine writing is very different than writing for other off-line publications. Brief is better. Be concise and write in short paragraphs. Your main purpose is to capture their attention and to get them to visit your website. If your article is long with every piece of information, they won’t see the value in clicking the link to your site.

You should always check for spelling and grammatical errors before submitting your articles to directories. These kinds of errors will reflect badly on your reputation and credibility as a quality information provider. Try to avoid technical language, but provide an explanation of terms if they need to be included.

Put the major benefit to the reader in your title. The title will determine whether or not the reader will click to read the article and possibly click to visit your site. If they aren’t compelled to read the article, they will never get to see your link, or see your website.

Article directories are the sites where you submit articles for online publication. They check your articles to make sure they comply with their guidelines before they publish them. And though we won’t go into it here, print media, like newspapers and magazines, are also always looking for fresh copy, so you can also submit your interesting articles to them for publication.

Make good use of the resource box under the article; this is where you can promote your product and supply contact information. What you include here should encourage readers to click to your website. The best resource box describes your website or yourself in a short sentence and includes at least one link that points back to your website or blog. When the reader clicks on the link to your site, your website visibility will increase.

Remember, a brilliant article with a bad resource box is a waste of time and money. Carefully review the rules for resource box information for each directory you submit to and try to get in as much information about yourself as you can.

If you can, place links to other articles you’ve written in a new article you’re writing. Sometimes, if the advice is helpful, the ezines will let you do this. This cross-referencing will get you more bang for your buck. Before publishing them elsewhere, you should always add your articles to your website or your newsletter. This helps to identify you as the source of the information and is another good way to get your name out there to build relationships with potential customers.

Articles for online publication need to be written with search engines in mind. You need to use the most popular keywords that online users type into their search engine when looking for information about your topic. Use the keywords in your article, but do not saturate it with them. This ruins the readability of the article and will not add to your credibility at all.

Set up a blog to keep in contact with customers and interested contacts. You can upload your articles to your blog to give your readers a continual supply of interesting, informative articles about your area of expertise. Add new content frequently to keep the search engines interested in your articles. Use your blog as another means of promoting your product and yourself as trustworthy and interested in your customers.

Article marketing is probably one of the easiest and most effective ways of driving targeted traffic to your website and boosting your exposure on the Internet. These guidelines will help you get started in article marketing. Use them to promote your product or service and to establish yourself as an expert in your field, then watch your sales increase.

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Enzo F. Cesario is a Copywriter and co-founder of Brandsplat, the only online marketing and advertising company employing Brandcasting, the most effective way to brand your company on the web. Brandcasting uses informative content and state-of-the-art internet distribution and optimization to build links and drive the right kind of traffic to your website. The approach is simple, highly effective and affordable. Learn more at: http://www.Brandsplat.com

Read more articles written by: Enzo F. Cesario

Balancing SEO Against The Needs of Your Article’s Audience

By Hunter Waterhouse in Featured

Article marketing continues to be a proven method for generating traffic to our websites and developing good search placement, even after all of these years. I have been reading articles online since 1995, and I continue to read a few dozen articles per week on subjects that are dear to my heart.

Some Claim That Article Marketing Does Not Work

Now and again, I will read a thread in a forum somewhere where somebody claims that article marketing does not work.

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