Archive for March, 2008

Mar 24

Traffic and Link Building Techniques

Here, I write some techniques for increasing website traffic . Its very useful for internet marketing and SEM people. Getting good traffic is not a problem. Its not give assure for conversions. Let we see the technique for increasing traffic.

Traffic Building Techniques:

  1. Write something great about your niche and email other bloggers to let them know – there’s a good chance they’ll link to you.
  2. Have a signature link in forums that points to your site.
  3. Post links to your pages to social bookmarking sites.
  4. Leave comments on other people’s blogs and link back to your site (tip: look in the Digg upcoming section for blog posts about to get a lot of traffic).
  5. Have the opposite opinion on everyone else on a popular topic. Everyone will link to you saying you’re wrong.
  6. Answer questions on Yahoo Answers or any other answers website.
  7. Post in Yahoo and Google Groups with a link to your site in your signature.
  8. Make a 404 page that redirects to your homepage – no point losing visitors.
  9. Have an opt-in form – trade links with someone else who has an opt-in form on your confirmation page.
  10. Review a product or company – if your review is positive email the company and ask to be featured in their press section. (this has worked really well for me).
  11. Write articles and submit them to article directories.
  12. Write a Press Release and submit it to PRWeb (make sure it is newsworthy)
  13. Use PayPerClick Traffic (e.g Adwords, MSN Adcenter, YSM).
  14. Add an RSS subscribe button/link in a high profile spot on your site.
  15. Add a mailing list subscribe form in a high profile spot on your site.
  16. Add a bookmark this site link in a high profile spot on your site.
  17. Use a Tell A Friend Script on your site so people can email their friend about an article on your website.
  18. Submit a blog to a blog directory.
  19. Submit you RSS feed to RSS feed directories.
  20. Mention your website in a post on Craigslist (don’t spam).
  21. Optimize the titles of your pages for keywords people will search for.
  22. Buy links to your site
  23. Buy reviews about your site on other people’s site.
  24. Buy banner space on other websites if you can get a good ROI
  25. Send articles to ezine publishers with a link back to your website
  26. Do a big viral push for a piece of link bait, post it in forums, social bookmarking sites like Digg, email bloggers, and get a few people to vote for you on social bookmarking sites – this little push could start a viral chain reaction!
  27. Have a link to your site on community sites like MySpace and FaceBook.
  28. Purchase misspellings of competitors domains and redirect your site (be careful of trademark infringement)
  29. Create a freebie product to give away (ebook, software, whitepaper etc.)
  30. Submit your site to the hundreds of free directories – use the viles-silencer directory list.
  31. Do a group feature where you get other website owners in your niche to participate – maybe asking them all to give their opinion on something topical.
  32. Hold a competition for the Top 50 websites in your niche – 1 month later post the results and watch lots of the sites featured link back to say what their position was.
  33. Pass out business cards when you go to industry events in your niche. You could be passing it onto someone who might talk about you on their own website.
  34. If you have a product start an affiliate program and start approaching affiliates
  35. Submit videos to video sharing sites like YouTube and Metacafe. Include a link in the description and within the actual video.
  36. If you have a product then ask other website owners in your niche to review it.
  37. Look at a big website within your niche and ask to write some guest posts for them for free, all you ask for is a link back to your site.
  38. Create pages with links to your site on places like Squidoo and Hubpages.
  39. Place classified Ads on eBay with a link to your website.
  40. Use an autoresponder on your mailing list to keep people coming back to your site
  41. Exchange links with a few related sites in your niche
  42. Network! Email other site owners, phone them up, go to industry events and get yourself known. If they know your face they will likely talk about you on their site if you do something interesting.
  43. Many forums have a place for you to advertise your site once – find those forums and post your ad.
  44. Purchase advertising in other people’s mailing lists and newsletters
  45. Create an Amazon profile and start submitting reviews
  46. Create profiles on MySpace and start networking in groups that are interested in your site’s niche.
  47. Conduct a survey and publish the results – make sure you let people know about it.
  48. Get your hand on a load of PLR content for your niche. Add a commentary to the top, create a unique title, and post them all to your site – lots of new content and lots of new traffic.
  49. Create a cartoon mascot for your site – then hold a competition for someone to create the best game for it – pay the winner a decent amount.
  50. Make sure you have a memorable domain name that is short and catchy. No-one will come back if they can’t remember the name of the site. Why do you think Google’s called Google, eBay’s called eBay and FaceBook is called FaceBook?
  51. Use a well-searched for keyword within your domain name to help rank for that keyword.
  52. If you sell a product ask someone else who sells a product to list your product with theirs, and you’ll do the same for them – split commissions on sales.
  53. When you write a new article on your site – link to as many blogs as possible – they will likely see your site in their pingbacks, website stats, or Technorati. They will visit your site and possibly subscribe to it and link back at a later date.
  54. Get your RSS feed syndicated to different sites like Zimbio and hubpages and Topix.
  55. If your site is popular and has quality unique content then apply to get listed in Google’s News search.
  56. Create a sitemap and submit it to Google (not great but might help)
  57. Use your robots.txt file to stop Google indexing certain directories and pages on your blog (such as archives) to avoid duplicate content issues).
  58. Create a couple of small 10 page sites related to your main site. Offer links on these smaller sites in return for links to your main site (this is triangular reciprocal linking).
  59. Post about celebrities current events if it relates to your niche – there’s always a lot of people looking up celebrity stuff.
  60. Write good headlines/titles – good titles get more clicks.

Mar 17

Move Aside Facebook, Kootali is Here

I have started to notice a small, but significant change in the way I am surfing the internet. It’s been growing since summer 2007, but it’s only recently I realized that my surfing habits have changed. Talking with other people my age (I’m 25 by the way) reveal that I’m certainly not alone.

So what is it? How have my surfing habits changed?

The answer may come as quite a surprise, but I’ve found that I’m visiting Facebook.com less and less. What used to be a daily ritual (I was sad enough to check multiple times a day) was reduced to every other day, which in turn has reduced over time to maybe once a week.

But this is not a phenomenon restricted to just me, lots of people are using Facebook less and less, just check out this graph:

pageview percentage for Facebook and other social network sites

It shows, as a percentage of all sites on the internet, how many page views it gets per day. As you can clearly see, MySpace has been on the wane since July 2007. Facebook continued to grow, probably as it took users away from MySpace, but since December 2007 we can see page views have declined.

So what’s the reason for this? Are social networks losing their value?

I think not. The biggest turnoff for me when it came to Facebook is the multitude of useless applications that flooded people’s profiles, turning it from a clean elegant way to keep in touch to a constant battle to reject or ignore dozens of application requests each day.

In effect, with the addition of outside applications, Facebook turned in to everything I hated about MySpace. What’s next for Facebook? Glitter text? How cheesy and tacky can Facebook go without losing it’s original users who joined because they didn’t like the gaudiness of MySpace.

I know I’m not alone in this, infact, ReadWriteWeb interviewed someone who was one of the original users of Facebook and asked her opinions on where she thinks it’s going, this is what she had to say…

When they started to add new features like the wall, photo albums, video capabilities, and groups, people became more interested. But then Facebook took it too far. Now I find Facebook to be a suffocating bombardment of useless applications and features. I prefer an older version of just the basics - messaging, walls, photos and groups.

15 Questions For an Early Facebook User - 7th January 2008, ReadWriteWeb.com

So, does this make me homeless in terms of social networking? Certainly not, I will keep using Facebook, although my usage grows less and less each day.

What I am on the look out for is a social network site that can offer the sophistication and decorum that Facebook offered in 2006, before they tried to go mainstream and convert the MySpace weenies.

Can you make a better Facebook using similar software? Check out our range of social networking scripts starting at $399 and make a better job than Facebook and MySpace!

Mar 14

Here’s Your Cheque For $850m…

Imagine being given a cheque for $850m. Seriously, think about it for a second. The interest alone would net you a cool $29,750,000 every year in the US. Not sure about you, but I think that’s a serious chunk of change.

Let’s take another figure, say $225m. OK, given the choice between $850m and $225m it’s obvious which one you’d take, but forgive me if I bite the hand off the person who offers me $225m for my website.

So, what on Earth am I talking about here? Believe it or not, these are the latest figures for corporate take overs of Bebo and Digg respectively.

Bebo is a large social networking site that claims to have over 40m users worldwide. It is the 3rd largest social network after MySpace and Facebook (both of which were bought for $580m and $280m).

But large buyouts of this kind are not confined to the big players, in 2007 a facebook clone (literally down to the last detail!) called Studivz was bought out by a single investor for $132m. The unique thing about Studivz was that it was aimed at a niche (albeit a fairly broad niche). The niche was a social network for German speaking people.

So, like Studivz, how can you jump on this bandwagon of massive buyouts (and lets face it, I think we’d all be quite happy with a paltry $10m)? First off, target a niche - whether it be by country, region, language, interest, cause or whatever. The days of being able to start large generic social networks are over. It is the time of the niche social network.

Define your niche properly before you start, and you too could get a knock at your door with someone trying to offer you millions for your little piece of the web.

Interested in finding out how you can set up your own turnkey social networking software? Want to run a face like YouTube? Think you can make a better job of Facebook (let’s be honest, with the countless thousands of ‘apps’ now available, it’s becoming more like MySpace everyday)?

Come and check out Agriya’s Social Networking software, with turnkey prices starting at just $399.

Mar 06

PHP 4 is Dinosaur Technology

Since it’s release over 3 years ago, PHP 5 has really failed to capture the hearts of programmers and development companies around the world. Who knows what it was, but there was a general reluctance amongst programmers, hosting companies and webmasters to embrace PHP 5.

It is only in the last 6 months when PHP.net announced that it would no longer support PHP 4 that we have seen a significant shift in hosting companies updating to run PHP 5. Why did it take so long to upgrade? Simply put, their clients were running OLD technology and if they upgraded the server to PHP 5 it was likely that a lot of their clients’ sites would break. The out come? Mass exodus from their servers.

But now, finally, it looks like the transition to PHP 5 is underway, but as foreseen by hosting companies refusing to upgrade to PHP 5, it is creating problems for people running PHP 4.

So, if your PHP 4 script is broken, or your PHP 4 site no longer works, come and talk to us about upgrading your software to PHP 5.

We can take on any kind of project, big or small, if your PHP 4 script has stopped working, we can help upgrade it from PHP 4 to PHP 5.

Get in touch with us: http://www.agriya.com/quote.php